I agree with Wayne and Robbert: it is very naive to think that Badiou, Hallward or Zizek are critics of Deleuze, they are rather Deleuze detractors (there is a big difference between one and the other). I think that what Pierre is bringing here is not much of a critique but the ideological consequences of those who already had a fixated political position or standpoint and are paying service to it. It is clear that many of these groups need to confirm their ideals and of course that they would reject and react against any other position. But schizoanalysis does not mean a political program nor any party or established position, D&G made this very clear since the begining. We must not confound the magnolia with the magnesia.
I do not think that the ‘nature’ of critique is to serve ideological agendas, because that is to say that a certain pragmatism is justified, a pragmatism that prompts imposition and imposture. Anything can be said from it, even if it is not part of what is supposedly ‘criticised’. Critique is something that brings a creative crisis to the question, it is not an issue of which position one is taking per se. The idea is to release something else, something more vital, from that what is criticised: critique is always on the service of a broader affirmation, not of a particular enclosure of interests.
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- What is, in your view, the most substantial critique of Deleuze or Deleuze and Guattari?
- 2 dec 2014 8:24am
Conversation in Deleuze FB Group
I think the problem here is the way we are up to understand what is the value involved in the act of reading and what this value is for. On the one hand: yes, certainly, we can read all kind of things so as to know what is all about them. But this is most of the time just an arrogant, encyclopedic, self-enclosed and presumptuous way to embrace ‘knowledge’: what moves this presumption is a sort of personal depotentialization, a sort of never ending emptying, misleading, and disregarding of all that what we have already read before, a misguiding of a certain line of ideas and affective proximities with respect to what we already know, to a certain containment -and this is vital-: a containment that we must keep and nurture regards to the time we have invested so as to read this or that book which traces our own line of ideas, our own restlessness. The problem is that this presumption of ‘reading everything’ most of the times ends up to be a waste of time, because it is not moved by a necessity to read, but by a bourgeois unpractical selfish numbing. “Jack of all trades, master of none”. On the other hand, it is that reading is not only regarded to the reading of the specific content of the books. The idea concerned to choose which book to read implies all kind of signs that already work as a pre-condition to have an idea about what we are willing or not to read, or what are we deciding to read or not, and this all is thanks to such pre-conditions. This is already a hard-thick segmentarized way of reading: we are already reading a book if we consider this previous signs and pre-conditions: it is extremely unusual to open a book and to read its content as if we were like completely blinded about what we might find: we already start to read a book from its title, from its index, from its pagination, even from the kind of typography it has, in sum: all kinds of signs are involved. This is already giving us the clue to decide if a book is readable for us. This thick segmenatarization of the book is a way of reading it and precedes the thinner segmentarization which implies the specific reading of its contents. If we consider this implication, we can see why there are books that we better should not read at all, or that we must read, given these thick segmentarization. Whoever thinks that to read a book is only about reading its specific content, well, he is not only cheating himself but also going against all those signs and preconditions: so, there is the perfect case that one gets to read a book only because all these signs and pre-conditions are actually pointing out to avoid its reading. This is when one gets totally lost and falls into a sort of intellectual reactive stultitia. I personally do not find Wittgenstein worth to read at all, as for me all the signs say that he does not deserve any chance, that his work crawls lower in the antipodes of my own line of thought. Of course that I have had in my hands some of his books and after applying this thick segmentarized reading, I have dropped them immediately: all the signs that I have read from my own thick segmentarized reading have immediately pulled me out far from him: ‘back off, this guy has idiotized philosophy’. I have understood why I would not go to him, and each time this implication comes about it gets more and more joyful for me: ‘phew, fortunately, never read that stuff: my system remains unpolluted’. But, as all the paths tend to fork in time, I also have considered, only because of my good will, that there is a chance that he could come to me (however, as with many others, I see this chance farther from the threshold of my death LOL). Now, if I were to read him, I would not dismiss all those subtle warnings prompted by my own thick-segmentarized reading: I would attempt to read him only to see how is it that he idiotizes philosophy, for instance. That would be ‘how’ I might read his work in my case. So this is all to say that I am with Edward, Michael, and Verlain: to read out of necessity is stubborn to a certain degree. But I am also with Xcaro, Creston and Daniel: there is a way to read this guy, perhaps only to effectively drop him or maybe only to corroborate that what our own signs say about it.
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- Should we read Wittgenstein? If yes, how?
- 3.51 am 10 nov 2014
Conversation in Deleuze FB Group
On my part, what it is needed to be said is that for Deleuze (just as Deleuze understands it, and just as Deleuze invites us to infer and understand): Conatus is active and not reactive. As I see it, Mr. Keith in-sists to put it as reactive on his own self-absorbed right, but while doing so, he is telling us to take what Deleuze inferred from Spinoza (and what Deleuze is offering us to understand from such inference) as something which has no literal anchoring in the Spinozian text and thus, which is susceptible to be dismissed (dismissed as something that it is not worth to be regarded to our own understanding: which is precisely what Deleuze is inviting us to infer and effectuate by our own, to learn not only and exclusively from the text: something that Deleuze always compelled us to do from the way he had to treat the authors he loved, from the way he exposed their views conceptually and disposed them as materials, not as cannonized texts). And then Keith proceeds to disregard Deleuze’s understanding of conatus as ‘old platitudes about human nature that you could get in any third-rate self-help book’. I cannot but find this assertion discriminative and fully out of taste (how curious, interestingly, I researched AAs self-help group interaction for a decade and of course that I studied closely all kind of third-rate self-help books). But, is it that the activeness which we can infer from conatus and from our own encounter with life and with ex-sistence, susceptible to be disregarded as a third-rate self-help book? Of course not, but this neither means that a third-rate self-help book should be disregarded. As I see it, by saying this Mr. Keith is not helping himself that much. If it is that he is not finding any help to infer about the activeness of conatus through Deleuze’s understanding of Spinoza well, maybe he should try then a third-rate self-help book.
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- Keith W. Faulkner [Post]
- 1 nov 2014 14.38
Conversation in Deleuze FB Group
- How curious, I thought it was rather me who was not willing to argue with Keith, who seems to react against what I have commented, however, I never suggested that for Deleuze’s understanding of Spinoza’s essence is not regarded to interiority, as Keith seems to understand: what I have said is that this interiority is regarded to the pars intima, which is always about the affect of essence: in Spinoza, God has no potestas but only potency which is identical to his essence. Essence is the identity of potency, and while it cannot be separated from its power to affect (thus, to increase the potency of action cannot be separated from the effort to reach out the maximum power to be affected), the affect of essence is not only a degree of potency but also consists and contains all degrees of potency (so parts intima is an interiorized essence only in terms of essence and not in terms of the extensive parts, for these parts there is only exteriority). The fact is that there is no interiority outside the activeness of the conatus (in this sense we can infer that the pars intima is somehow the interiority of the outside, as it is an affect of essence of God, which is identical to its potency). But Keith asserts that “Conatus is reactive (on Deleuze’s authority as a philosopher).” But for me this assertion is problematic moreover if we pay attention to Deleuze’s practical philosophy Ch4 (written in 1970, this is, after Nietzsche and Philosophy, Proust and Signs, Difference and repetition, and even Spinoza Expressionism) because it is Deleuze himself who invite us to see, confer, or compare “Conatus as Cf. Potency”. Is it that potency is reactive? I do not think so. There Deleuze says (direct quotes):
“Potency is act, active and actual (in act).”
“And the conatus is the effort to experience joy, to increase the power of acting, to imagine and find that which is a cause of joy, which maintains and furthers this cause; and also an effort to avert sadness, to imagine and find that which destroys the cause of sadness”.
“We see no difficulty in reconciling the various definitions of the conatus: mechanical (preserve, maintain, persevere); dynamic (increase, promote); apparently dialectical (oppose that which opposes, deny that which denies). For everything depends on and derives from an affirmative conception of essence: the degree of power as an affirmation of essence in God; the conatus as an affirmation of essence in existence; the relation of motion and rest or the capacity for being affected as a maximum position and a minimum position; the variations of the power of acting or force of existing within these positive limits.”
“The conatus, like any state of power, is always active.”
“The conatus as a successful effort, or the power of acting as a possessed power (even if death puts an end to it), are called Virtue. This is why virtue is nothing other than the conatus, nothing other than power, as an efficient cause, under the conditions of realization that enable it to be possessed by the one who exercises it. And the adequate expression of the conatus is the effort to persevere in existing and to act under the guidance of Reason, that is, to acquire that which leads to knowledge, to adequate ideas and active feelings.”
So, while I accept that I have my own Spinoza inspired philosophy, it is not that I am far from the facts that anyone can openly read regards to Deleuze’s understanding of Spinoza. And it is not that I pretend to present myself as a great authority on Spinoza. Rather, it is that I am also a close reader of Deleuze, and also that I am frank enough so as to give myself some concessions in order to understand what I read without getting myself stuck into the text.
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- Keith W. Faulkner [Post]
- 8.40pm 31 oct 2014
Conversation in Deleuze FB Group
Conatus is an active encounter or collision of the forces of attraction/ repulsion which constitute the outside , and if the body is violently ‘immersed’ in conatus it is because its intensive and extensive parts are always exposed to such an outside, so, as its composites, they are all the way continuously forged by it, nonstop. This is ex-sistence. There is not really any interiority, nor any impulsive essence out of this collision. This fact is consistent with an ethological perspective, and this is why ‘what a body can do’ is regarded to the potency of the body, but this potency is adequately understood only when the body orients its passions and appetites to the outside, accordingly to this collutio, and to the plane of immanence, which is always active. For this active knowledge, if there is some activeness in the affections of essence is because of this orientation, which is ‘there’ by default but not by defect: the pars intima is always an active outside: the focal point of collutio itself. The other way around to see this, is when the body is not properly oriented to such forces but fixated into representation, and this brings desire as a reactive-passive-stratifying movement. This is not an affirmative ex-sistence but a negative in-sistence. But collutio is not a question of textual consensus, however most of the times academics end up to diminish these intensive encounters and ruptures: it is a pattern that comes as a retractile gesture for academic ‘grounding’ purposes: a passive understanding, a reactive knowledge. It is the outside itself this other active force which enacts conatus. From this perspective, the death instinct is always reactive: it is a feature that can only trigger the first death in a single hit, a fulmination of the intensive relations of the body and an aperture of it to zero intensity, but we have to see that in Deleuze there is a sort of inseparability of this first death with respect to the second death: both are in relation to the outside and one makes sense of the other always retro-actively: the former unleashes the body from its passive affections and the interiority of the soul, and the latter detaches the extensive parts from body’s mode of essence. In the sense of the inseparability of one death with respect to the other, de-stratification means the body as that which has opened itself to the forces of the outside, so its movement is always active. No territorial movement can be triggered from within as an impulse and never without the induction prompted by the forces of attraction and repulsion which constitute the outside.
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- Keith W. Faulkner [Post]
- 4.50pm 31 oct 2014
Conversation in Quora
Not at all. It is like many have said here: it is love what leads to knowledge, and this applies to everything. It is love the very matter with which one is able to get to know things: how to comprehend anything without one openning to it, without an unselfish movement, without an opened heart? And this goes in the broadest sense: one cannot simply know oneself if one is not opened to the world, and to be opened to the world one needs to love oneself, and one loves oneself only when one is opened to love and to be loved: it does not matter if that who you love or loves you is not even a person, the point is to be opened to it, opened to love and thus, to the world: the world itself can be the greatest source of love, and it is in this sense that one can get to know about it, including ourselves.
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- Does “love yourself” lead to “know yourself”?
- 29 oct 2014 3:40pm
Conversation In Quora
I honestly do not think that one can experience ego death as such, say, as a full and absolute empirical blown of the ego, without any psychedelic substances. But the use of these substances does not guarantee such experience either. The full and absolute blown of the ego that means its death is the experience of death, it is death itself, the death of the self, and this means that one dies in fact and as a fact, so after it there remains no person, no individual, no perceptual carrier i.e, no self. This means also a full epistemological and phenomenological rupture with the being and with the world: the ego death as such does not imply any residual “I”: there is no “I feel”, no “I experiment”, no “I meditate”, no “I perceive”, no “I hallucinate”, anymore. This is why, on the one hand: the kind of hallucinatory experiences provided by psychedelics and DMT, no matter how intense or depersonalizing might be, do not mean this full blown of the ego, because there remains a meaningful “I”: the “I” hallucinate, “I” experiment. In the other hand, the same goes with the kind of meditation practices like Buddhism: the prominence of the self gets dissipated but the “I” remains as an interiority. The full blown of the ego implies an absolute aperture to the outside of the world, it does not stand any interiority anymore: it is rather a break which only happens in the instant of a single hit. As long as the experience remains meaningful it would imply a residue of the self, the “I” and the ego: the persistance of an interiority. This means that this full blown death of the ego is really meaningless when one experiments it, because it implies an absolute break with meaning. While it is that we are absolutely incapable to comprehend such kind of absolute meaninglessness, when we experience this full ego death as such kind of absolute meaninglessness, we cannot be but torn apart, absolutely shattered. However, this break means such incapacity as absolutely meaningful: that is what is called “enlightenment”. Now, the question regarding to how psychedelics can prompt empirically this full blown death of the ego as a fact of our body, well, that is just another issue that has nothing to do with their specific effect.
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- Enlightenment: How can I experience an ego death without psychedelic substances?
- 2.30pm 21 october 2014
Conversation in The Tragic Community
Yes I think we agree. Nietzsche is a magmatic reference in AO which revitalizes Marx but also that gives Nietzscheanism a broader perspective to consider. I think that what is underneath such perspective is still an unformed sort of Nietzschean communism -which needs further development so as to be uncovered-. I personally see that becoming is always active, always regarded to the will to power, while the will to nothingness speaks rather about a sort of reactive fixation, a sedimented pointview in which nothing really moves. But still I see the idea that there are different kinds of becoming is interesting and indeed helpful as a provisional way to differentiate and specify such activeness. In this sense I do not ascribe to the idea that there is nothing outside to capital: D&G’s aim was not to make a renewed reading of Marx, as I see it, but rather of Nietzsche with regards to becoming and to the economic movement. It is not Nietzsche who is subordinated here to the reading of Marx, but Marx who is subordinating to the reading of Nietzsche. As I see it, this reading is what makes us see how D&G bring about the flow of the schizo as that which is in relation to the intensive space of the outside, what they call the BwO: while they take this flow as a schizo-analytical model, the very way to think capital in relation to the immanence prompted by this intensive space, they make very clear that capitalism entangles a territorializing relation with such intensive space, a relation in which capital is abstracted as absolute and where money comes to be the BwO of the socius: a distributive space of inscription and codification. However, the schizo-flow is what escapes from capitalism precisely because such a flow is with respect to this intensive space, not in relation with money. I think that, from this perspective, we are able to see in which sense the creative deeds of capital are also relative to the deterritorialized flow of the schizo, to the production of such a flow as the unproductive, something that is always leaking out of the realm of capital.
- Comentado por Naxos en:
- Nietzsche: The Accelerationist Heresy
- September 30, 2014 8:30 am
