I would be more interested to give less importance to the referred ‘Intellectual-Principle’ and to consider this ‘light’ as something ‘external’: so to broaden its implications to the body (and not only to the ‘eye’), so to talk less about an in-sight and more about an out-sight as a fact, ie, and even also to dissolve Plotinus’ mysticism and tackle the question in a more materialistic fashion.

I have not read Reid’s post but It is very obvious that the option 1) that he poses is not ‘a good one’ for a philosopher that aims realist thinking. Realism is not at all a philosophical problem. The very stake for the philosopher that aims realist thinking is to confront the fact implied in option 1) and extract and create from it ideas and conceptualizations of what philosophical activity -ie, thought, is actually transcendent to. We can think that it is precisely because it is not a comfortable philosophical position that option 1) must be taken without implying any distinctions. Afterwards is left to realize that option 2) was not really a plausible option after all, but the consequence of adopting the position implied by option 1).

Thanks for this, both John and Anthony I still truly think that there is no reason out of the academic frame that would give sense to the distinction between non-philosophy and philosophy. This distinction still reproduces the old scholastic categories as it gives certain predominance to philosophy as something exclusive of academic work. Out of this frame, philosophy does not support this distinction. Though, Laruelle’s take seems to be a good try, if we account John’s clarifications. Thus, this effectuated radicalism implied by Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’ does not go as far as it should be. Before being “a discipline that appropriates for itself the exclusive right to think at the highest levels of thought”, philosophy is the way of life that’s open to life itself as an experience immanence: as i have referred elsewhere: philosophy is not a school-game, it is rather something vital that can only be experienced by the affirmativeness of an event that breaks with history and that exposes the philosopher to the intensities that compounds his singularities and that appaer to put in risk his own sanity.

Thanks for your reply. I want to emphasize that my previous comment was more like indicating the problem of reification when we refer to ‘power’, that’s why I brought the importance of knowledge in Foucault’s work. I think that Foucault’s work should be considered retrospectively, say like implying the genealogical view -the one he implied himself to his own work-. So the first Foucault is fundamental, from the History of madness to his Nietzsche, Genealogy and History, including of course his other master pieces, mostly The Order of Things, Archaeology of Knowledge, and The Order of Discourse. In all this period, which endured more than 10 years, the idea of knowledge is his prime concern: these 5 oeuvres are Foucault’s vertebral column and show its own consistency and continuity. Though it was somehow a latent topic, it was not but until The History of Sexuality I (the will to knowledge), that he would theorize about power. But the things he actually did with the notion of knowledge are the base of all this further theorization.

What he did with the notion, methodologically and epistemologically speaking, is a bit more than what you have referred, so my present comment would try to complement and recall the importance of this aspect in that respect. In the Order of things, for instance, it is just admirable how he extracts the notion of ‘episteme’ by tracing a transversal line between linguistics, economy and biology, constituting the ‘knowledge of the epoch’ that he analyses etc. In this sense, the notion of ‘episteme’ means knowledge as a sedimentation in history, or in other words, a stratification. In Archeology of knowledge he extends all this implication in terms of discourse and the importance of enunciation, where ‘truth’ is just a vector allowed by the sedimented knowledge of determined epoch (the episteme) etc. In the Order of discourse he synthesizes systematically all these historical implications of knowledge etc, but it is until Surveiller et punir that he makes the analytical passage from ‘knowledge’ to ‘power’ -as he focus his research in the disciplinary mechanisms (institutional) that form and mold the bodies etc. It is not a discontinuity at all that his take on sexuality would imply power in a more specific way than knowledge, but then again, for him ‘knowledge is power’ (or to better put in terms of sexuality, ‘knowing’ is power’ etc). So, the notion of knowledge is the magma with which Foucault worked until the end of his days: is not the care of the self implying the knowledge of ourselves, the exercise of courage and frankness?

All this roughly put, of course, but with this regard, I truly think that the least we can do while we want to refer to ‘power’ in terms of Foucault, is to background it admittedly to all what he did with the notion of knowledge (and to have clear in which sense they are related or mutually implied): a notion which is not a bad parameter to account the trajectory of his thought within all his consistencies, continuities, fractures and crises: a measure that would avoid the reification of the word ‘power’ in our own politics-related theorizations.

Qué agradable leerte, Santy. Y sí, ¿qué hace que nos preguntemos por lo que nos queda, cuando lo que nos queda no puede ser más que la vida, así, la vida desnudita, así, la vida frontal, sin promesas ni trascendencias? Reminiscencias de mala conciencia, incredulidad, desconfianza, y nihilismo. Pero es Nietzsche quien nos saca de ahí y nos eleva hasta ella afirmándola: es la pura vida lo que nos queda, y nada más: sí que sí !

un gran saludo, desde acá

Great post. I do want to share how it is useful to be concerned about language when we refer to ‘power’. We know that for Foucault ‘power’ was just one aspect of his genealogical/epistemological investigations: his theory of it was though just a temporal bridge between his work on discoursiveness and on what he finally developed in terms of modes of subjection, the care of the self etc. If there were several ‘Foucaults’ (there are at least 3, Foucault the genealogist, Foucault the theorist of power, and Foucault the parrhesist ) it’s not easy to refer to one of them without bringing one or both of the others. Foucault was pretty aware that theorizing about power would always mean a certain reification/substantialization of the word: and in this sense, there is no way to refer to ‘power’ in foucaultian terms without ascribing its relation with knowledge. To this point, when we talk about power we actually are talking of knowledge as its primal form, and this is crucial for understanding Foucault’s philosophy. For instance -though it is clear that it is just a way to put it: to say ‘disciplinary power’, is not to say ‘knowledge’, at the end of the day? For Foucault ‘power’ is exercised by and among bodies, and this means certain knowledge of which relation can be embodied or not, depending on how power is exercised and situated. Is not great how Foucualt refers to the ‘exam’ as a disciplinary mechanism that would covert knowledge in power? The relation between power and knowledge cannot be left without mention, if we want to advance a broader view of Foucault’s philosophical/political preoccupations.

Tim,

This anti-nihilism death ray sounds too familiar to me though, i really don’t see how you would engage it with ‘Hyperobjects’ (not that i already know what the hell a ‘Hyperobject’ is, neither that am really keen to know, honestly). But i just wanted to share that negating nihilism would not double down on it. There is no really way to tunnel it (what ever that might mean). Negating nihilism can only lead to one thing (not an object, please).

I leave this as homework for you to think rather to run your ‘Hyperobjects’. Just take notice in which sense the aritmetics of your lived-experience are failing here. Why?

cheers

Oh but this is definitive: ‘agencement’ and ‘dispositif’ should be considered as the same sourced conceptualization: Deleuze admiration of Foucault archeological viewpoint says a lot in this regard: while the notion of ‘agencement’ was firstly coined by Guattari, Deleuze complemented and matched it with Foucault’s original ideas about ‘discoursive sockets’ (there is even an early 1970′s article where Deleuze suggest this similarity between Guattari and Foucault). But it is interesting to see how Deleuze and Guattari initially developed the notion in terms of ‘dispositif’ in their 1975 book about Kafka, chapter 9, entitled ‘What is a dispositif?’. Then we see that later, in ATP, they would finally use the same ideas and almost the same words to define it, but now expressed in terms of ‘agencement’. Perhaps this leads to the break of Foucault and Deleuze friendship: Deleuze considered that the term ‘dispositif’ would still have some significant residues that would connotate ‘pleasure’ above ‘desire’, thus he dismissed the term and kept the guattarian notion ‘agencement’. In ATP, the word ‘dispositif’ is just simply inexistent.

To this point, despite Deleuze and Guattari developed the term ‘agencement’ in many respects, the basic notion of ‘collective agencement of enunciation’ could not but be ascribed to Foucault’s ‘discoursive sockets’. Can we say then that Deleuze took Foucault’s original ideas without his permission? Was this part of the reason why Deleuze went silently hostile to him? Could this explain why Foucault felt intimidated by Deleuze conceptual obsessions? The fact is that, after Foucault`s death, Deleuze was pretty obfuscated, he knew he was in debt with Foucault not only in terms of friendship but also in terms of his conceptual project and particularly with respect to the notion of ‘agencement’, which became very important. Feeling a lot of regret, we can see how Deleuze yielded tribute to Foucault by writing the most incisive and exponential book about him, and later -in the 1988 homage to Foucault organized by Canguilhem where he participated-, by writing an exalted lecture also entitled ‘what is a dispositif?’. The fact that the chapter 9 on Kafka’s and his 1988 lectured tribute would share the same title also says a lot: it is clear that Deleuze retrieved Foucault the credit he deserved regards to the notion of ‘agencement’, in a way to reframe all its foucaultian conceptual potency in terms of ‘dispositif’.

A Nietzschean reading of Foucaultian thinking is the proper way to read Foucault’s work: it has never been otherwise, no secret revealed for those that have been always close to Nietzsche. It is fully doubtable that any of Foucault’s detractors would really ‘seriously’ question Foucault’s epistemological departures at the end of the day: we should take their statements more like a way they have to defend their positioned academic parcel, at the time that they would always be tempted to say anything to dismiss Foucault’s work. Like Richard Rorty, who considered that Foucault’s contribution to philosophy was only regarded to the topic of homosexuality (!).

So it is better to make it clear more like an affirmation than just a simple suggestion: Foucault’s work was all too ascribed in terms of the Nietzschean investigations! and this is something that should be always affirmed rather than suggested. There should be no doubt about this fact. We even can easily see how Nietzsche’s prose in Genealogy of morals preludes Foucault’s investigative-writing style. Both styles have and were articulated with the same discoursive ‘effect’, so to speak We also can see how, in the last phase of his philosophical research and after knowing he had got the AIDS, Foucault turned his back to Nietzsche, or to better say: the event that Nietzschean philosophy meant for him was eclipsed by the event of he having AIDS. The ‘last Foucault’ overturned his own nietzschean investigation emphasizing an apology towards his life and in terms of the ‘care of the self’ etc, etc. But this ‘turn (to the subject)’ had anything to do with Nietzsche or against him: it had to do with Foucault recriminating himself about how he finally disposed his nietschean life.

I really want to thank @terence for his very thoughtful posts and for extending Jussi’s points and concerns in relation with my comment: just as him, I read Jussi’s initial post as a very honest and even timid but necessary call for attention to account certain methodological vigilance regards to the terminology of whatever ‘object’ we aim to treat and refer, and from which we also aim to make conclusions. Professor Jussi was just being frank, which is something very valuable: in no way he manifested his concerns as a critique, and he never addressed them to anyone. But this is not what happened for Graham Harman: his reaction and valuation of Jussi’s concerns is pretty dismissive and unfair: as Harman does not know who Jussi is ―and while he has never interacted with him online like many of us have done, for instance―, he just obfuscates himself in a defensive suspicion against him. ‘Being frank is not permitted: that is not how OOP works: you have to cheat to yourself in order to practice it: that is how it works: no objectification of our position as researchers is required, only the ability of self-cheating’.

Harman is also dismissive of those who have commented here, he disparages us as ‘people’: for him we are nobody and what we are able to say and criticize in our own right, not even existent. Harman discriminates us, but most of us have studies and have our own achievements, and mostly, we also have been here interacting since quite a time, have blogged for years (for example, Glenn is really a pioneer among philosophical blogosphere, even more than Levi and myself). So Harman has not big weight to call for anything more productive if he does not participate in a vis a vis interaction in the blogospheric online debates and shares, whether if it would be to defend his position or to extend explanations about it. Harman needs to expose himself if wants to be listened: if OOP is a blogospheric phenomenon with not more than a marginal position in academia, as Levi has said, it would not be a bad idea for Harman to descend from his cloud and participate a bit more: maybe then he would just gain truthfully all folks respect and admiration (just as Jussi and many other phd professors with which we interact online) oh but far from only posing it as if he would already deserve it, as if we should give it to him just because of his name. Here in the blogosphere, Harman is no better than anyone of us, and he can only respect this fact.

Oh well, however far from all this boring issues, I do want to take the chance to wish Jussi, Glenn, Terence and everyone here, so good and happy holidays

Hello Jussi

A good friend just recently asked me what I think of OOP, though, this is an old issue for me. My main critic is that OOP has erected itself as the result of exercising a set of scholastic vices where the ‘philosopher’ invents, contemplates and draws conclusions of the ‘object’, but from the overflying commodity of the laboratory: conclusions charged with all kind of inadvertent subjections that are taken for granted by them: conclusions which verification is self-validating for the OOPer, specially if checked by other OOP colleagues that unsurprisingly have the same scholastic views and therefore, the same ‘skills’ to reproduce the same addictive procedures, as long as they share the same ‘ways to do’ philosophy, ie, the same scholastic vision, the same academic habitus. It happens that this philosophical orientation towards objects is a kind of mirage that fulfills the dream of all philosophical nerds: the dream of having control over a philosophical object from which he could say whatever he pleases, including any neurotized fairy, or any paranoic rush. The OOP tendency would be nothing without Heidegger and without Latour: from the former it takes existence as a conditional limit that would ‘institutionalize’ any validation, giving it its ‘being’ and making it an artifact of school; from the latter it takes an imposture against the sociological determinations that are ascribed in the field of philosophical production, an imposture that discredits any radical exercise of objectification within the philosophical practice.

There’s an implicit trap the OOPs: though one does not take too long to see what all its matter is about, it does take a quite long time to believe that so much textualization contains so little at the end of the day: one simply takes a good while to realize how possible it is to make of our cynical office a grandiloquent ‘ontological’ craft: one temporarily enters in a kind of denial to save the own pride, and to not understand as feasible, the fact that this ‘philosophical’ approach is genuinely prejudgemental, discriminative, gotten out of any real political and social context: this selfish textualization is what brings all kind of questions as a consequence of the imposition it carries: OOP tendency ensnares the innocent and victimizes him with false objectual enchantments making him unknowingly part of a neoliberal fascist tendency, a rare kind of philosophical ‘group’ nerdification.

@Terence! Thanks for quoting my words :- ) I think I do agree with you: ‘reason’ and ‘nature’ are also epistemological masks, mostly if we consider them from the Nietzschean perspective where everything is regarded to forces and intensities, and where sense and values are meant to be embodied, experienced and thought. For Deleuze, following Nietzsche: reason represents our slavery and subjections as superiorities that makes us ‘reasonable beings’ who have interiorized established values as part of our experience. Beyond the masks of ‘reason’ and ‘nature’ there are intensities and forces of thought to be experienced, and in this sense, Nietzsche suggested that no one can be ‘reasonable’ enough. From this perspective, being irrational is not opposed to thought, on the contrary: irrationalism makes thought to intervene in experience: what opposes reason is thought itself. We see then that in the Nietzschean system it is not but thought what recovers its superiority against reason: what is opposed to ‘being reasonable’ is one ‘being a thinker’ because thought would unmask reason and ‘legislate’ against it. We see that it is not quite a question of elimination, not even a question of ‘draining’ or ‘dissolving’ reason from our body. With Nietzsche, it is a question of smashing the conventional sense and the historical values of established reason. This ‘hammering’ is indeed one epistemological stage to grasp sense and values in a more creative non-established and non-juridical way. So I agree: while we have always been in the realm of heuristics, it is not but the immanence of thought what turns against any univocal knowledge of causes and effects. We can see in which sense every epistemological rupture is the very first step to be effectuated as part of a methodology of experience and knowledge: established sense and values are needed as elements of this provisional step: they are useful to let their forms be broke and released from their historical sediments.

Sorry for the double posting!

Well, i guess i dont understand nor tolerate this ‘auteur film’ idea, there is not big heuristics there, and i truly think that the director should erase himself and exploit more textually and philosophically the script, elaborating a conceptual semiotics intimatedly related to the plot etc. I just dont believe nor trust in any ‘charm’ or ‘charisma’ of someone that considers him/herself as an film-auteur, that’s a lot of attribution to my mind with respect to the format, too despotic with respect to the actor/actress. It’s just too neurotic for my taste. However, anyone has insights at the end of the day, but Trier’s ways seem to aim more a visceral effect and organic reaction in the viewer as their prime goal than to tell a thoughtful and psychologically vented story. I just dont lend myself for this kind of stuff.
I may have a prejudmental pre-notion, but it also may be just an intrigue of predestination that i dont want to be part, as it happens that i always end to wonder: what is atractive about a film whose director exorcises his encysted traumas, and where the film invites the viewer to follow his subjective enclose? Once again, i’m just sharing my prenotions about his films, or my anticipated repulsion as bodily resistance, if you want.

Hey, but please dont take me wrong, i was just sharing and saluting

Tim, i do see in which sense schizonalyisis is intensely literary, yeah but precisely my point is that it’s not only that: there’s a very empirical way to appropriate the schizo-concepts regards to our experience,and this way has a lot to do with the prominence of event I have stressed in my post. It’s clear that I’m ascribing schizoanalysis to a kind of post-nihilistic affirmation of life, a pre-freudian, pre-lacanian, a plain nietzschean point of view. But if this affirmation of the event implies a broader-bios-epistemology it’s because it breaks with its past-literary-representational form. Schizoanalysis already means this broader (a more correct) epistemology: the pathos of literary form is still too ‘stratified’ in terms of the event that affirms life: needs anyhow to be overthrown to reach the great health of the planetary thought. This is when the literary form unfolds its last curl and reacts itself into its own de-interiorization: where the outside takes place and fractures self-conciousness, when everything gets open to experience.

Tim !

I have not read any of the books you have mentioned, but they sound very interesting. I have to admit that i do have my issues regard to literary form, but still, i have learnt how to appreciate it, as stimulant as it is for thought. My point is precisely that there’s no big pathos/logos anymore when ‘planetary though’ comes into question: it’s indeed the ‘great health’ implied in Nietzsche -pointed out by Deleuze- what dissolves any pathological implication. Empirically speaking, the pathos/logos dichotomy that you mention (pathos/bios in nietzschean terms) find its dissolution with ‘planetary though’, but as i have stressed, there’s no way to grasp such though without the break-through of a wild destratification. It’s true that there’s a pathological literary relation that allows to think the limits of our experienced nihilistic existence, but this limit can be actually fractured in a single hit, as i have said, liberating the organs of the body from their organization: this is one of the main points of D&G’s schizoanalytical project.

Thank you Aidan. It’s very interesting indeed. It seems to be clear that Reza’s work is very stimulant for deleuzo-guattarian imagination. Though, we need to keep the eye in the ball, philosophically speaking: there’s no better way to learn and to reach out our own inferences than directly from D&G’s heuristics. It’s not merely a question of language or terminology, or not only literaly, but a question of concepts and their empirical experimentation. We see that D&G’s style (but mostly Deleuze’s) means a certain opacity that lets the reader deploy his/her own inferences from their thoughful concepts. But it strikes me that Reza’s inadvertent (deleuzian) style does what many anglo-americans tend to do regard to D&Gn tool box: to retraduce. D&G’s opacity is understood by them as a lack of clarity, but that’s just a poor scholastic interpretation. It strikes me that, as it happens with Delanda, Reza’s literary forms takes advantage of this misleading situation, offering very interesting deleuzo-guattarian-related insights. In this sense, it also strikes me that this happens because there’s a very unfounded idea that D&G’s style is ‘obscure’. While it’s not, such style allows us to exercise thought from our own experience and that’s very important as it means to overcome our stratified laziness. From these point of view , it is still interesting to see that Reza is doing his own inferences while he tries to grasp another conceptualization utilizing other related-terms. This is cool, but it’s always more desirable to compell people to precipitate their own inferences far from any literaly pleasent interiorization.

Hey Aidan, Tim

I have not read Negarestani’s book but I’m finding very interesting schizo-related assertions in this review that are worth to comment. Considering the quotes, it strikes me that Reza’s ideas come from a more lyrical appreciation of the deleuzo-guattarian concepts. I guess that there’s a kind of non-referenced usage of these concepts that allows Reza to narrate their meaningful implications with more writing liberties (widening them in terms of their own possible literary development etc) and for that matter he also seems to use some analogue-words as well. Though of course I don’t know to which degree Reza is inventing ‘cyclonopedia’ as a concept, it still makes me wonder: Why not to speak directly in terms of ‘strata’ bringing the schizoanalytical concepts implied? It strikes me that this would be the real challenge for anyone willing to dig about these planetary philosophical issues. On my part, the topic of a ‘planetary thought’ interests me in terms of the event it implies, so I got inspired and wrote a post with some thoughts on the question.

The Event of Planetary Thought

http://schizosophy.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/the-event-of-planetary-thought/

It’s great to have you guys back to the blog

cheers

hello Jan, what is this? Why are you critizing Terry’s review? Though I can see your point that it’s not worth for a Deleuzian, Guattarian, Spinozian, etc to give any attention or time to Zizek and Badiou, Terry is on his right to do so, just as Zizek and Badiou are on their right to freely reproduce their respective ideologems. Nobody is getting terrorized here, Terry does not need to practice schizoanalysis to speak against these guys, on the contrary, he seems to be quite fond and capable to do so and to react consequently to the impositions that Zizek and Badiou nurture with their views.

As a Deleuzian, Guattarian, Spinozian and Nietzschean, I see clearly how Zizek and Lacan are always very well disposed to say anything to imposture specifically against all what Deleuze, Guattari, Spinoza and Nietzsche have contributed to philosophy: if they are doing this is just in reaction to the philosophies that these thinkers overcame: if Zizek and Badiou do this systemically it is not only to inject a bit of life to their still obsolete views and departures, but also to mantain their bureaucratic position on the field (mostly in the case of Badiou). But this is not something personal of us: it’s precisely because Deleuze, Guattari, Spinoza and Nietzsche have succesfully overthrown Zizek and Badiou’s discoursive lineage, that i see Terry’s intervention as a natural response of someone who’s aware of this situation in the field and that makes his point against zizekian-badiouan ideological distortions. This is the same stand that someone like Alliez also mantains against them (though, for me i admit it’s still a waste of time).

So it’s not a question to be prude and to swallow uncritically Zizek and Badiou’s depotentialized insights: definitely not everyone needs to practice schizoanalysis to see the point and to have the credentials to dismiss psychoanalysis: there’s no fantasm behind what Terry is defending, that’s for sure, just the common sense of someone that’s not as naive as other Zizek and Badiou’s readers. This is neither only a question of taking party with respect to the lineages we are already ascribed, this is more like to be aware of what we are reading of and learning from, this is a question of moving forward so to remove ourselves as philosophers from any institutional flower-potting of our lives.

cheers

Dejan, am just coming by to say hello hope you doing fine! I admittedly dislike Lars Von Trier films, i do not lend myself to be part of his experimental insights, which as far as i know are very concentrated to derange the actor capacities. Did you saw this kind of reality -movie- documentary of Joaquin Phoenix where he gets totally deranged about his career and his identity? the film is totally pathetic, but gives material to think about how fucked up artists can get through their different schizo-processes with regard this industry. The tendency to compel the viewer to experiment the personal insights of the director is something that i find repulsive to participate. i have recently seen Herzog’s ‘my son my son what have you done’ and liked it a lot. what do you think about him?

cheers to you!

Thanks Ben! the issue has a lot aspects as you say, but i think the basic one is related to the way we appropriate the work of the philosophers we are interested in. The ars fuck method of Deleuze was just an expression used by Deleuze to say how monstrous it was the act of making the author speak things that he would not meant to say in first place, monstrous in the sense that it implies the sodomization of someone you already love (not only a lineal indifferenciated buggering with strangers, like Zizek has posed) and that therefore the product of that sodomization would be also a monster (zizekean-hegelian buggering would not even lead to a product). The expression is not emphatizing the act of buggering but the sodomization of someone loved, and in the deleuzian sense (includes the overview of his work) it emphatizes overall the engenderment of a concept, the incubation of a concept, an incubation that could only mean an intensive reading of love, and that is always creative in the sense that through such engenderment/incubation is possible to make an author speak the concepts that are meant to be traced through him, actually, but the sodomite is the one that would be engendering or incubating: he is not making the author a monster, the author is making a related-monster to the him. After sodomization, the sodomite would be able to speak about the authors and would permit others to see what he means philosophically through them in the same conceptual plane etc etc. But all this means a very intimate reading, and maybe this intimacy is what involves what is deleuzian and what is not. For rampant deleuzians like me, the thing said about the event is all too definitive to differenciate.

cheers

Michael, Thanks for the reply! your position is fair and sane enough… I`m not a professional philosopher neither, and i do not pretend to be one. But philosophy does not need these kind of philosophers, nor professional, nor institutional philosophers, so to my mind they are not even a good point of reference. For me, this is a question of frankness, so i`m not considering my no-professionalization as a free-way to say and to do whatever a text permits to do just to show up how brilliant things can be. There, i honestly think, you and Delanda are missing the point. While it can be understandable, am not suggesting that it cannot be respectable to certain point, but it would never be enough to convince those others that are competent in the field and that have put on it a bit more of their efforts to have a certain domain of the question beyond their own brilliantness.

Thanks for the reply, Ben. I guess that mutating is not to be taken as the same than appropriating, not genetically speaking, which is also the case for concepts. If you check out again Deleuze`s response to Cressole, taking his supposed ars-fuck method and following his argument until he points out about love, you`ll see the difference that is involved. Of course this is very intimate, or can be if so. However, the difference is the appropriation itself, as i have pointed out.

I can understand that we can take Delanda`s case pragmatically, in the sense you say, and yes, as i have already said, his is work is very interesting and now i have learnt to enjoy it, even though it`s still sometimes torturous the way he operates certain concepts (an more with such objectivistic posturing). As you can imagine, i`m only interested in his work to a certain point, because i`m more about D&G`s schizoanalytical project, not meaning am not sharing his intensive materialism, or any other.

With respect to his neo-assemblage theory, i have to say that it is certainly explicative and fits well, but this is also because the effect he gives to his view (as he maintains his posture as a sort of imposition that ends to be attractive to the target he means), but mostly because the translation of the term permits it. I truly think that Delanda departures from a sort of asylum ignorantiae regards to how the meaning of french ‘agencement’ is traduced etc etc. and this is why his heuristic procedures (the hunch to ‘skimm’ what is of Deleuze from what is of Guattari) end to be are all too mutating.

So then, why not we should give all the credit to him, if he is just cutting out Guattari (and everything that might sound ‘subjective’) and presenting a Deleuze that`s just its empty showcase, its pragmatic pretext to pose a totally unfounded view? But D&G`s concepts have their own gravity, as you might know (and as he knows) so the are really refractive to the sort of operations Delanda applies to them, thatps why he is always on the need to retraduce them constantly etc etc.

Michael, i have never suggested that Delanda was more or less deleuzian, but that he is just not deleuzian at all, which is very different. Delanda has declared about his deleuzian limits many times but that is just an euphemism on his part, just to not deal with Deleuze’s very constitutive influences. Delanda is great, i like his work a lot, but i had to get rid of the idea of taking him as deleuzian, and for a better and joyful reading i started to take his stuff as a sort of genetic mutation that i like to refer if so as pure ‘delandianism’. This is helpful also to avoid the imposture and the controversy that he prompts with his take and where he likes to ascribe his rampant objectivism. I have said a lot about this here and there, as there are a lot of reasons to not consider him a deleuzian, but am not digging into it anymore, at least not here and not this time, so i beg you not to take this only as a too opinative thing that comes from my good taste, oh no! there are a bunch of heuristical details concerning to the ‘let’s make Deleuze a user-friendly author for squared scientists’ presumption that Delanda likes to promote on his behalf, and there are a lot of things taken for granted on his part that allow us to think how lost he gets in his vaporous translations while he tries to dismiss the schizoanalytical components of the deleuzo-guattarian conceptual toolbox.

Ben,

There are some aspects about Deleuze regards to the way he took Nietzsche and Spinoza, to put an example. These aspects, among others, are what we shall take as deleuzian in him as they have to do with the intensive reading he made of their work. To this point, an intensive reading means the time, the love and the affects invested in the exchange with such authors (authors that are already loved and which work and contents are lovable in the sense they offer us the way to grasp thought by our own self, in Nietzsche Spinoza Deleuze, and Foucault, for instance, it is perfectly the case). But the goal of this intensive reading is not to a technical overfly of their texts, so to pose the reader into a comfortable and rather indifferent exteriorized point of view that can be pretty prolific if showcased academically -that would mean being more like a ‘deleuzianist’ instead. No, the goal of such an intensive reading is the embodiment of the contents that mean certain concepts as tools or incarnated schemes of thinking: this is not like only ‘knowing’ such concepts (not only like ‘let`s do something with them, let`s write something to please or tease the white-wigged academics’) no, this is more like ‘living’ them as tools and schemes to differenciate the drama they carry from what we have done already of our existence and from what we have already experienced about life.

Comes to my mind the idea of the nietzschean event in Deleuze. Such idea is most powerful and affirmative in him and it has nothing to do with the way Badiou misunderstand it in terms of a histrionic anti-philosophical ‘act’. Deleuze remarks in which sense the nietzschean event leads to an epistemological break instead, that opens our existance to what he calls the plane of immanence etc. This epistemological break is a very concrete experience meant by Deleuze, something to be lived and grasped, and also something that draws the threshold of all his philosophical view. For Deleuze, as we can see it at the end of his ABC`s, speaking about the letter ‘Z’, this experience is what means philosophy itself etc etc.. (With this respect, it is interesting that you have mentioned the dark precursor, because there Deleuze asserts that such ‘Z’ experience is the event itself which enlightenment is triggered by such precursor etc).

So, I truly and honestly think we can say that Deleuze was marked by the Z event and that his whole work is all too impressed by it, thus those that read him through this specific event in life and through this sense of epistemological rupture that means life`s own affirmativeness, those that conjugate their experience with respect to this event, whether if they have experienced it or not, are those that doing a ‘deleuzian’ (but also nietzschean spinozian foucaultian guattarian etc etc) reading of Deleuze. And while they identify with that experienced event, we can also say that they are ‘deleuzian’ or being ‘deleuzian’, in the sense that they are also able to see, through the event they share, the influences that populate Deleuze`s experience and that inhabit the heart of his philosophy etc).

Delanda a great deleuzian? you must be joking. To my mind, he is not even deleuzian and still, he uses deleuze to polish his anti-guattarian objectivistic view. I have some respect to Massumi, but as i have said once, he massumes too much

Deleuzians that go not far from the deleuzo-guattarian academic surface are those that seem to leave him while they find the love Deleuze prompted to his influences: Spinoza, Nietzsche, Foucault, Guattari, Bergson etc (or to his concepts) because of that love, they seem to be tempted to walk the deleuzian path, so they tend to trace and follow the discoursive traditions that influenced Deleuze etc etc.

To be deleuzian is needed to be nietzschean and spinozian, foucaultian and guattarian at the time, at least, because this are the mayor influences, they great friends of Deleuze. Of these there are only a few. But there are a lot of deleuzians that have not an idea of what they should do with those influences they have never read and that horrorize their prude unruptured views.

The forms of ejection that you mention are meant to be as long as the readers are fond or not regards to deleuzian influences. This is not leaving him, this is just loving him from the spinozian way to knowledge.

Dejan!

I have finally seen the film and i liked it a lot as stressing as it is. I also have read your posts (interesting ranted contextualization, btw) and a bit of kdotdammit`s article. I agree with you about the desiring lacanian mechanism and the kind of border-liner-capitalism-realism the film expresses (and which presents itself pretty crude). Although I don`t really know if it is a deleuzean-reichian masterpiece, it certainly can be seen through the D&Gn shades (i did not find that lacanian, but you better know).

For example, it`s clear that what seemed to be like a sort molecular revolution -sexually aimed by the gang (the ‘guerrilla mission’ that is mentioned), and which meant initially a creative line of flight (as its said that with such an art the gang will ‘teach’ sex to the serbian people), that the creative line turns into an abolition line: it starts with the introduction of death through the snuff busyness proposal (a plus-value that recodificates the desire of the gang and its group subjectiveness), and it ends mostly after the collective rape they suffer. The creative line of the gang has turned against itself and has become and abolition line: after that, everything is the ‘ride’ each one of the gang effectuates of their own abolition line. The abolition line is also clear as the main character (the director) ends up committing suicide despite he frees himself through becoming-assissin. Nevertheless, there is also the idea of a kind of dystopian love, which is his BwO moved by the fulfillment of a ‘we will be always be together’ promise.

I liked very much the explicit sex and the brutal images combined with a lynchian-gilliam-nesques scenes (something alike but taking censorship into the next level) and i also noticed that, although most of those images were pretty shocking, there were presented with a certain degree of impact to the viewer`s eye (i.e the sheep sacrificed by the boy prepares the viewer to the bloody snuff scenes etc etc ).

I would said that the phrase ‘I dont plan to live that much anyway’ can be one of the mottos of the film. It has been great to see, Dejan.

thanks for the shout

and cheers

I`m not very aware of what`s going on here, but i just want to remind how Harman ascribes his enclosed navel-oriented-philosophy into the latourian laboratory practices: where the tendency is to bring self-verification as a way to valuate philosophical statements among colleagues and pairs that share the same enclosed point of view. Of course this is a way to negotiate friendship, and that`s why he brings the issue of ‘what kind of person is X’ as a way to discard who is not meant to be his logical ‘pair’ nor his ‘friend’. Unfortunately, this kind of practices are the result of a grandiloquent self-cheating vice that does not exclude idiocracy as a foundment to raise the most obsolete ‘philosophical treatises’.At the end of the day, this kind of practices of false radicality and academic terror only can dig their path to the most rampant ostracism.

Nótese que puede ser igual que cuando te cae encima un rayo: uno se da cuenta de que no hubo fondo al final de cuentas, toda la percepción de sí se polariza en una vuelta de calcetín, el mundo se petrifica como una bella catatónia: una constelación de intensidades.

I would like to try to give a relaxed unofficial answer to your not genuine question, without considering that the qualifier ‘obsession’ is just accurate in else sense than you suggest. I would say that this ‘orientation’ related to the subject has much to do with understanding that everything is embodied and that everything meant to mean and to be learnt shall be taken and considered as ’some-thing’ incarnated, begotten, i.e, in the ’same’ serial and differential processes that leads to its mere meaning and learning-ship. The issue has a lot to do with considering ourselves as part of the world not only in the mere act of experiencing it ‘objectively’ but also in the ’subjective’ experimentation of considering it also as a part of our ‘own’ intimate and singular ’selves’. The idea is that we cannot really think or speak about anything in its very substantive way if we don`t include it as such as a part of an unobjectionable ‘experimentation’ with ourselves and with the things of the world (including us).

I guess the ‘obsession’ to think and speak theoretically about the subject has to do with the way we shall have to overcome our own subjective condition which is by defect implied in such an act and through the intention concerned to its ‘thinking’ and its ’speaking’. If we don´t think speak or refer to some-thing considering ourselves as part of the enouncement of what we pretend to objectify (‘as it’), we are just overflying the question: this means that we are not really accessing to the-thing we meant to objectify (‘from it’): it is just ‘the effect’ of the margins and the distance we stepped out to avoid ourselves to be included as part of the pretended objective enouncement (‘of it’). I guess the continental ‘obsession’ related to the subject is just a way to suit all these implications ‘as a hat’ of whatever we think or speak about the things of world.

Thanks a lot for the early post, i am keen to read your further detailed opinion about this interesting conference

cheers!