Let us proceed in a summary fashion: we will consider a field of experience taken as a real world no longer in relation to a self but to a simple ‘there is.’ There is, at some moment, a calm and restful world. Suddenly a frightened face looms up that looks at something out of the field. The other person appears here as neither subject nor object but as something that is very different: a possible world, the possibility of a frightening world. This possible world is not real, or not yet, but it exists nonetheless: it is an expressed that exists only in its expression—the face, or an equivalent of the face.

Affirmation has no object other than itself. To be precise it is being insofar as it is its own object to itself. Affirmation as object of affirmation—this is being. In itself and as primary affirmation, it is becoming. But it is being insofar as it is the object of another affirmation which raises becoming to being or which extracts the being of becoming. This is why affirmation in all its power is double: affirmation is affirmed. It is primary affirmation (becoming) which is being, but only as the object of the second affirmation. The two affirmations constitute the power of affirming as a whole.

Values and their value no longer derive from the negative, but from affirmation as such. In place of a depreciated life we have life which is affirmed—and the expression ‘in place of’ is still incorrect. It is the place itself which changes, there is no longer any place for another world. The element of values changes place and nature, the value of values changes its principle and the whole of evaluation changes character.

We know very well where lack– and its subjective correlative –come from. Lack (manque: lack/need in the psychological sense, want/privation/scarcity in the economic sense) is created, planned, and organized in and through social production. It is counterproduced as a result of the pressure of antiproduction; the latter falls back on the forces of production and appropriates them. It is never primary; and production is never organized on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack. It is lack that infiltrates itself, creates empty spaces or vacuoles, and propogates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production. The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy.

Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter. What are wrongly called “dendrites” do not assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system (“the uncertain nervous system”). Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. “The axon and dendrite twist around each other like bindweed around brambles, with synapses at each of the thorns.

Affect, as presented in art, disrupts the everyday and opinionated links we make between words and experience. We have already seen the way in which, for Deleuze, everyday opinions generalise and reduce concepts to their already known forms. Everyday opinion is also limiting, Deleuze argues, because it assumes that there simply is a common world, there to be shared through language as information and communication. Opinion not only assumes a present and shared world; it also assumes a common sense whereby thinking takes the same ‘upright’ form distributed among rational perceivers. Opinion or doxa makes a direct link between affect and concept, between what we see and what we say, or between the sensible and the intelligible. Opinion speaks as though the world were easily translatable into a common language and experience that we all share… In opinion we pass all too easily between affects on the one
hand and concepts on the other. It is as though we have already determined the limits and locations of, say, fear or boredom.

I don’t think that people on the Right are deluded, they’re no more stupid than anyone else, but their method is to oppose movement. It’s the same as the opposition to Bergson in philosophy, it’s all the same thing. Embracing movement, or blocking it: politically, two completely different methods of negotiation. For the Left, this means a new way of talking. It’s not so much a matter of winning arguments as of being open about things. Being open is setting out the ‘facts,’ not only of a situation but of a problem. Making visible things that would otherwise remain hidden. On the Caledonian problem we’re told that from a certain point onward the territory was regarded as a settler colony, so the Kanaks became a minority in their own territory. When did this start? How did it develop? Who was responsible? The Right refuses these questions. If they’re valid questions, then by establishing the facts we state a problem that the Right wants to hide. Because once the problem has been set out, we can no longer get away from it, and the Right itself has to talk in a different way. So the job of the Left, whether in or out of power, is to uncover the sort of problem that the Right wants at all costs to hide.