“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.”
‘Zero Intensity’ & The New Celibate Machine [quoted in Anti-Oedipus]
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Madness is something that has to do with a great deception. But it is not the end: it can also be seen as an active liberation of thought. Madness happens as if thought would unravel and fly like a kite. In the end, madness only comes when one has lost its thread, when there is not more to unravel and when the kite goes vertically to the stratosphere. Whoever goes mad is the one who unhands more thread without giving sense to the singular reel that holds it: the one who releases it away to be lost. But is not the same to become mad than to be-a-crazy. One can be a happy madman and live with that, because sometimes the thread never ends to unstitch. Perhaps it is needed to live many lives to be a madman worthy of madness. As mad as one might be, nowadays it is enough to simply follow the “script” of normality that surround us ―while keeping on laughing intimately at it― so to remain unnoticed. Many have made history by doing that and that is why their names still shine. And yes, as Nietzsche puts it with Zarathustra: we dance between these two worlds. In fact, dancing is what best describes this coming and going of madness.
