We can even say that, in what concerns to Deleuze, Ramey’s misguided interpretation of Deleuze seems to take this:
Caduceus
…as this:
Rod of Asclepius
In more graphical terms….
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Category Archives: Spinoza
‘Close though-still-misguided’: three schizosophical impressions about Joshua Ramey’s introduction to The Hermetic Deleuze
How to Begin Reading Deleuze? A Query, a Challenge, & a Response: Nietzsche and Philosophy !
How to begin reading Deleuze –with no question marks– is the title of a post published last year by John Protevi [here] that was pretty echoed in the philosophical blogosphere [here, here, here, here, here, and here], and that he wrote in response to a query that took place in Facebook [here]. The query clearly posed a crucial issue that is still worth to retake for the sake of any possible consensus among those who already have achieved a broader panorama about Deleuze’s work. So, how to begin reading Deleuze? The question mainly refers about which book would serve as the best entry to get into Deleuze’s philosophy, presupposing that the beginner is also willing to read more of his books so to achieve this broader panorama as well, in a non-repellent way, and to meet Deleuze conceptually without getting truncated or blocked in the process. While the enthusiasm showed in FB can only be taken in terms of individual and isolated opinions, say, due to a rare Facebook compartimentalization 
, the query also deserves to be responded beyond any personal considerations, without underestimating the beginner’s philosophical restlessness, and without wielding any user-friendly academic recipes: the query deserves to be responded by putting some historical facts on the table with respect to Deleuze’s work, and by taking them as objective criteria in order to discern which book is finally the best material for beginners to draw for themselves a heuristically well-oriented conceptual portrait of Deleuze. It is precisely because the beginner deserves to set a direct treat with the very body of Deleuze’s oeuvre –which is also what the question is finally about– that responding to the query implies a challenge for those who already have a broader panorama about Deleuze’s work: a challenge concerned not to a personal perspective but to a genealogical retrospective to be abstracted with respect to the whole of his oeuvre.
And it is in this very sense that, on my part, I recommend Nietzsche and Philosophy as the best entry to get into Deleuze’s philosophy: not because I consider it my favourite, but because I understand the importance it has in the whole of Deleuze’s work: an importance concerned to the way Deleuze wanted his work to be known and to be introduced in history (and with this regard, in the comments section of Protevi’s post, Terence Blake confirms it as a one main epistemological entry as well). Continue reading
Intensive Immunity: Keeping fidelity or betraying Deleuze
Just a few days ago Steven Craig from Noir Realism blogged an interesting post [here] about keeping fidelity or betraying Deleuze, which I still want to comment as I think it refers to one important aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy: his intensive reading [*,*,*,*]. Following Eleanor Kaufman’s new book on Deleuze, Steven does not consider with her that Badiou, Zizek and Hallward would escape from being traitors-explicators of Deleuze: they would also be falling into their own trap in their attempts of betrayal. In the first quote that Steven shares in his post, Kaufman suggests that keeping fidelity to Deleuze is an imperative that means a trap in which many of his disciples tend to fall, and that the dialectic of fidelity and betrayal is ‘arguably removed from Deleuze’s thought’. But while the dialectic of fidelity and betrayal is just another variant of the Master and Slave dialectic –therefore, it has no room in Deleuze’s thought–, it is worth to remember that, with respect to the History of Philosophy, Deleuze was not indifferent about the constrictive effects of this dialectic, on the contrary: he used it on his favour so to keep fidelity to those authors he loved and to betray those that would only mortify life with their philosophies. We know that in this sense he was very proud to take the ‘role of traitor’ with respect to Hegel, though, we also know that this was not much against Hegel but against the History of Philosophy, as his betrayal was an act of consistency regarded to the philosophers he loved and that affirmed life with their philosophies. 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
Line of Flight
KEZIZ! Zizek Gets It Backwards [at AGENT SWARM]
In the same vein of the latest series of posts just recently blogged here at Schizosophy, Terence Blake has shared his own critical part at AGENT SWARM, by posting two incisive and suggestive entries on Zizek’s misreading of Deleuze’s intensive reading ―particularly of Deleuze’s ‘Letter To A Harsh Severe Critic’ and specifically of Deleuze’s famous ‘ass fuck’ ‘buggery’ quote―: KEZIZ!, Zizek Gets It Backwards I & II: Deleuze’s “buggery” quote retranslated, and The Immaculate Conception is not The Virgin Birth. Continue reading
