“There is an actual consumption of the new machine, a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic: the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces. The question becomes: what does the celibate machine produce? what is produced by means of it? The answer would seem to be: intensive quantities. There is a schizophrenic experience of intensive quantities in their pure state, to a point that is almost unbearable –a celibate misery and glory experienced to the fullest, like a cry suspended between life and death, an intense feeling of transition, states of pure, naked intensity stripped of all shape and form. These are often described as hallucinations and delirium, but the basic phenomenon of hallucination (I see, I hear) and the basic phenomenon of delirium (I think…) presuppose an I feel at an even deeper level, which gives hallucinations their object and thought delirium its content –an “I feel that I am becoming a woman,” “that I am becoming a god,” and so on, which is neither delirious nor hallucinatory, but will project the hallucination or internalize the delirium. Delirium and hallucination are secondary in relation to the really primary emotion, which in the beginning only experiences intensities, becomings, transitions. Where do these pure intensities come from? They come from the two preceding forces, repulsion and attraction, and from the opposition of these two forces. It must not be thought that the intensities themselves are in opposition to one another, arriving at a state of balance around a neutral state. On the contrary, they are all positive in relationship to the zero intensity that designates the full body without organs. And they undergo relative rises or falls depending on the complex relationship between them and the variations in the relative strength of attraction and repulsion as determining factors. In a word, the opposition of the forces of attraction and repulsion produces an open series of intensive elements, all of them positive, that are never an expression of the final equilibrium of a system, but consist, rather, of an unlimited number of stationary, metastable states through which a subject passes. The Kantian theory according to which intensive quantities fill up, to varying degrees, matter that has no empty spaces, is profoundly schizoid.”
Category Archives: immanence
‘Close though-still-misguided’: three schizosophical impressions about Joshua Ramey’s introduction to The Hermetic Deleuze
Deleuze Abecedaire Playlist (Complete with English subtitles)
Video
The Leap into Immanence: a post-Deleuzian Epistemological Distinction between Philosophy and Schizosophy
Terence Blake at his AGENT SWARM has posted a discussion we had last Saturday in Facebook –with the special apparition of John Mullarkey–, that was launched by a critique I made regarding non-philosophy as a fad of false radicality –i.e, the same old critique I wielded last year in another discussion I had with John [here]–. I do not want to write and repeat again all what I have said about the question, because I do have made myself clear with respect to my position and objections, and I am happy to see that this is also reflected in Terence’s response to John, which not only considered my arguments but also introduced the important theme of experiencing/experimenting with intensities as a philosophical condition to think life and its immanence. In his response, Terence asked John two very interesting and extremely well posed questions as to invite him to go further with the discussion in a more Deleuzian even schizoanalytical fashion:
“(1) when an academic philosopher thinks he is making the leap into immanence (remembering Deleuze’s expression of “making the movement” or staying in reflection) is he deluding himself or is this, as both Deleuze and Guattari suggest, a real possibility. Is being critical and temporalising and democratic enough to make the leap? (2) when a non-academic thinker thinks he has made the leap, is he being over-confident in his intensities, or is he expressing and incarnating an important part of the immanental process?” Continue reading
The Revolution of Thought: an Ethical ‘Take of Consistency’

The revolution of thought can only happen from the small revolutions or changes that occur both at the level of the symbolic structures that feed the representation of the world, and at the level of the ethical experience of those who signify and are signified by such structures. It is then the philosopher who is forced to break with the epistemological subject that history has granted him by default and that is meant by these structures, in order to construct an ethical subject that would be no less epistemological regards to life and the experience of living it. While experimentation is a line that escapes from all what these structures signify, and while it involves a sort of change or transformation, this change or transformation cannot happen without the affirmativity of an event that allows the philosopher to effectuate a rupture within his existence so to reveal himself before the gravity of history. Philosophy is an event susceptible to happen in the life of the philosopher despite of his existence: it is something that materially happens in life, something unobjectable that impacts and threatens it in order to break with all its transcendencies and to connect the experience of living it, the experience of life, with its immanence: the immanence of life. Continue reading
Immanence: A Life…
This is the title of the last article Deleuze wrote before his death, published in Philosophie No.47 on September 1.1995 [here]. The text is inspiring for many reasons, but mostly for its beauty and for its frank philosophical exegesis. Short but forceful, it is a text in which Deleuze reveals us his thought of the immanence. Richard Pinhas, who at that time held an intimate communication with Deleuze, tells us what the atmosphere of Paris was, and shows us how important was for Deleuze his last text:
Immanence: A Life… a height text that makes resonate in every word a proximity that announces life. Deleuze writes about it:
Continue readingDeleuze: philosophe fondateur du plan
‘Birding’ on a plane of immanence
The words that follow serve also as a tribute in memoriam to Deleuze. They come from a site whose intimacy warns the joy of a ‘birding’ that precedes the jump off to the void. We know nothing about them, we do not know who is its author. But certainly they open us to a ontological valuation that makes the deleuzian line of flight resonate, right on the figure of who jumps to the conquest of thought, of who is thrown into his own event:
Bateson’s analogical language [according to Deleuze]
“Second hypothesis: The analogy or analogical language by or as a language of relations. It’s Bateson’s hypothesis, who is also a very interesting author. The analogical language would be a language of relations in opposition to what? In opposition to the conventional language: the language of codes. What would be that? That would be, says Bateson ―who sticks to very simple things to try to make us understand something very curious―, a language of states of things. Continue reading
Addictive Loop
Bateson’s approach permits to understand that the addictive action implicates a logical contradiction given between the premises of the habit and the volitional action exerted by the human biological system. Continue reading
