Reblogged from Deterritorial Investigations Unit:

• 
• 
• 
• 

Noir Realism has put up a thought-provoking post on Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, describing the work as a “Black Book of Riddles,” a “dreamwork” that doesn't so much offer a strict revolutionary praxis, but opts instead for an extended poetic science-fiction of a world existing only moments away where death's pale figure hovers, a chilled wind in the air. And it is a book of riddles indeed!

Read more… 2,521 more words

A couple of weeks ago Bill Vallicella, the ‘Maverick Philosopher’, posted a very interesting entry about the question concerned to the meaning of life [here] which I wanted to comment as it alluded to one very specific schizosophical concern: the fact that life is in itself meaningless. On that occasion I posted there my comment, and as I usually do with many of them, I published it at my Nwp comments-blog [here] despite it was still awaiting for moderation. The next day, as I usually do: I checked out if the comment was published but it was not, so I decided to wait another couple of days so to see if Bill would moderate it. As this neither happened, I posted it there again exactly with the same content and with no changes. But the next day I found again that the comment was not yet published, so I started to wonder what was wrong with it and wanted to contact Bill to ask him what was happening. I went to his about page [here] in order to get his email and speak more directly to him. There I learned that Bill allows comments only in some of his posts, just in the ‘technical’ ones, and that if one wants to have any kind of exchange and share any thoughts about the matters of his blog, one needs to email him the comment. According to Bill’s comments policy, the comments received will be pasted in the section of the respective post, or even considered in a separated one, but only if they merit any discussion. Despite all these filtering restrictions, I did want to communicate him my viewpoint on the question in a way to receive a retroactive response on his part. So I did follow the instructions and email him my comment, though this time including some references of my person as well, given the epistolary fashion of the exchange. This is what I commented:

“That what we ask when we are asking about the meaning of life is in fact that life’s matter, the matter of life which is life itself, is meaningless. Life itself has no existential meaning. This lack of meaning is the line from which to departure any philosophical thinking of life itself and its absoluteness. The ‘ultimate and objective point, purpose, end, or goal of human willing and striving’ is to experience this absolute meaninglessness of life, so to embody it as an absolute difference. Indeed, life itself can be experienced empirically as such through an existential meaningful event that would imply in a hit an absolute epistemological rupture of the self, its total death, leaving no room for any existential first persons any more, and thus, leaving to experience nothing to mean. This is the ‘ultimate and objective point’ that philosophers should be aimed to seek: a total break with their own always-meaningful-self, with their own individual existential meaning. And after experiencing this intensive event what comes as the very ‘dominating non-trivial purpose’ of our existential meaning, what drives this meaning of our existence, is not but life’s lack of meaning, is not but life itself as a full existential excess: a plan where to compose and recompose such existential meaning ethically (a plane of immanence, as Deleuze and Guattari puts it). While there is no transcendent meaning to mean this plane, being it immanent and thus full of meaningless, it permits us to mean and fill our existence through it. It is precisely because this purpose is non-trivial that the experience, while it is hard to achieve, it still is ‘achievable’. But this achievement is not on purpose, it has nothing to do with the process of achieving it: it happens in existence, no previous call, no sense of why, no relation with what we tended to think about our own life so to achieve it: it comes as a strike that breaks actively with all what we are habituated to mean about life and existence. So, it is true that ‘the question about the meaning of life is restricted to human life’ but this should not impede us to see that life itself is meaningless to human life, this does not impede us to conceptualize it objectively as such, in order to take this conceptualization as a point of departure to mean our existential life subjectively. The more subjectively meaningful is our existence, the more it will tend to induce objectively the event of life as an empirical experience.”

The readers of this blog would immediately recognize the same schizosophical argument about life wielded several times here and there in many of my posts. But I would not say that my comment had no fortune and that was not worth for Bill to merit any discussion –though he never published it and never got in contact with me at all–, because he did react and responded on this regard through a more interpellating modality, by posting two related entries concerned to the subjective aspects of the question [here and here] and a third one related to its aporetics [here]. It is clear for me that my comment resulted a nice stimuli for Bill to object it through and dig further into his own deductive disquisitions, and though it is a shame that such a comment would remain unreferenced despite he used it as a sort of raw malformed material to be pragmatically sterilized, I feel satisfied to have fed a bit of his view with it, suggesting him how such a question can be affirmatively responded beyond any dualistic scholastic remnant, and far from reproducing any bad non-recursive epistemology. While it is true that Bill has been writing on the subject for quite a time [here], it is also true that I can also apply the same interpellating modality, though with a bit more of courage and frankness of speech, in a way to use Bill’s disquisitions a sort of prude objectivistic textualization to be critically revitalized.

From the start, Bill is against what he calls ‘subjective existential meaning’, which he refers as the meaning of life that we give to our own life as individuals, meaning it as the very whole of our life’s sense and purpose. For Bill this meaning means that life has no meaning, because we are giving it its meaning as individuals, because our whole subjective existential meaning is giving all its meaning not only to the meaning of our own life as individuals, but also to the meaning of life as such, which is objectively meaningless. So we do not know as a matter of fact that life is itself meaningless, because we have already given to it the subjective existential meaning with which we are filling of sense and purpose our own life as individuals. Wrapped around his deductive knot, Bill suggests that subjective existential meaning is meaningless if it does not consider the implied fact that life is objectively meaningless. But Bill does not seem to take into account that out of his knot this also means that subjective existential meaning is not meaning anything about the meaning of life, that it fails this task as it is meant only by the meaning we give to our own life as individuals, which is subjective. So it is not pertinent to pose this subjective meaning as it would be related to the objective meaning of life, which is meaningless. Thus, subjective existential meaning might mean the meaning of our own life as individuals, but this meaning has nothing to do with the meaninglessness of life.

It is because Bill is wrapped around his deductive knot that he omits this implication, but out of such a knot he would find that there is no way to conclude in experience that life is meaningless, because the meaning of our own life as individuals would never lead its meaning to let us grasp empirically such a conclusion. This is to say that we can deduce that life is meaningless but we cannot actually know if life is meaningless only by deducing its meaninglessness by default through the meaning of our own life as individuals. More interestingly, it is only when this subjective meaning ceases to mean our own life, that we can be able to know in fact about the meaningless of life in a meaningful experienced way. However, deducing that life is meaningless does not mean to know if life is in fact meaningless. To know this in experience it is needed something else to mean our own life more than the meaning that already means it, something outside this subjective meaning that cannot be but the very meaninglessness of life, which has nothing objectively to do with the meaning with which we have filled the meaning of our own life. But Bill overflies the fact that what he deduces about the meaningless meaning that means life, is just another part of his subjective existential meaning: this could not be otherwise in his case, because he does not really know with evidence if life is meaningless as his deductions make him suppose. Bill overflies the fact that his deductive disquisitions are also part of the very subjective meaning which he claims to be against and that he still embodies. He does not seem to realize that out of his deductive knot he has no privileged objective position to speak against this subjective meaning, because inside the knot of his deductions, an unvented self-cheating remains objective, potentially latent, and ready to spring as a snake (*). This objective self-cheating in which life is just another subjective property of the self, is what Bill embraces most and what have leaded him to keep on formulating his deductive disquisitions, which anyhow will remain existentially subjective as they will never succeed to be less anthropocentric and scholastic, unless something unthinkable would happen in his life: to experience objectively the absolute meaninglessness of life.

Reblogged from Recollecting Philosophy:

Reblogged from Continental Drift:

The Articulation of Political Speech

Clockwise from upper right: Anonymous; Occupy;

Global Revolution TV; Critical Art Ensemble

“Every way in is a way out.”
– Öyvind Fahlström

Let’s start by defining things very simply. An event is a break in a normalized flow of experience. When you have to ask what’s happening, and why, and whether it’s dangerous or exciting or if it means something to you, then your day has been…

Read more… 4,423 more words

Scheme of Significant Regime

This is the famous ‘scheme of significant regime’ that Deleuze and Guattari expose in A Thousand Plateaus specifically in the chapter On several regimes of signs. For them, the regime of signs of a ‘significant semiotic’ is characterized by the fact that a sign always remits to another sign, making a signifying chain which net is not only infinite and circular, but it also expands in a spiral which ensures the feedback of the significant centre, the Signifier in person, the despotic face, but always in relation to the circles of entropic attraction that constantly overcode it. The scheme shows this point of significance that generates a field of priestly interpretosis which circles form a radiating body reterritorialized through a blocked line of flight, cancelling every point of individuation and singularization. Any point ‘more significant’ than the centre is taken as a scapegoat to be immediately thrown by the tangent and expelled from the system. In these two exceptional videos on YouTube, Deleuze appears with Guattari explaining and drawing this scheme with chalk in hand:

But in the English version, the same passage starts like this:

As it is clearly shown, “Il y a une consommation actuelle de la nouvelle machine,…” should be translated as ‘There is an actual consumption of the new machine,…” and not quite as “A genuine consummation is achieved by the new machine,…”. I cannot but think that this is NOT an errata, but a sort of misinterpretation, because it clearly changes the sense of what Deleuze and Guattari elaborate with respect to the new celibate machine and its emergency, which is actually referred in relation to what afterwards they imply about certain antipsychiatric practices concerned with the use of psychedelics, and with the schizophrenization of death. But this misinterpretation is unexplainable because just after the next sentence Deleuze and Guattari repeat the same phrasing, literally, with the same words: “Il y a une expérience schizophrénique des quantités intensives…” which in the same English version is perfectly translated as “There is a schizophrenic experience of intensive quantities…”. The only thing that would explain this misinterpretation is the premeditated hands of the translators, as this is more than just the usual betrayal already implied in the know-how of their practice, and while there is a certain sense of misleading of what it is originally said in the text, as I see it: a certain intentionality of the translators, who probably did not wanted to transmit the sense of the ‘actuality’ that Deleuze and Guattari emphasized regards to the emergency of the new celibate machine, making of its ‘consumption’, ‘a genuine consummation’ instead, i.e, already achieved by it. So according to this English version, it is not then that ‘there is an actual consumption’ of it, but that this consumption is no longer actual, that it is already achieved and somehow already consummated by it. The ‘genuine consummation’ is nothing actual but something already occurred ‘genuinely’ and already ‘achieved’ by the new machine. The sense of the ‘actuality’ that Deleuze and Guattari emphasized gets lost in translation.

Caduceus

…as this:

Rod of Asclepius

The first time I heard about Joshua Ramey and his book The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal, was because Ian Buchanan posted in his Facebook group [here], a link to Joshua’s new blog [here], but he did so despite it was not clear the pertinence that such a blog could have with the topic that it is shared in the group. Although in Joshua’s blog was posted only one single entry, there was no trace of any Deleuze there at all. So I asked Ian what the blog would had to do with Deleuze. In his reply he promptly posted a link to Joshua’s book at Amazon [here], explaining that Joshua wrote a “very nice book” on Deleuze, and that maybe his blog would probably have an interesting deleuzian slant. I immediately went to the Amazon page so to take a look and see what the book was all about: so far the title sounded very interesting, and indeed, just from reading the description it captured my attention the fact that Joshua’s interpretation of Deleuze was pretending to ascribe him as part of an esoteric hermetic tradition, that “Deleuze’s ethics, metaphysics, and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition”. I had to visit Wikipedia as well [here], so to read and learn a bit on Hermeticism, because I did not know anything about it, and because I was truly intrigued about the sort of discoursive frame that Joshua was putting into play to interpret Deleuze. However, my first impression on this regard was already appealing to some Spinozian/Nietzschean sense: it seemed to me that Joshua’s reading of Deleuze could not be as intensive as to properly track Deleuze’s magmatic excess, while this excess is in fact what informs, and through which can only be fully understood, precisely, Deleuze’s ethics, metaphysics, and politics. It seemed to me that Joshua did not go far enough in this very specific sense, but that he still carried on with his interpretation anyway, overcharging it as to impute Deleuze as a sort of hermetic character.

A couple of days after that, Anthony Paul Smith was blogging [here] about the review that Dorothea Olkowski dedicated to Joshua’s book at NDPR [here], and also announcing the schedule for the upcoming reading event that he was organizing on the book. By that time I was immersed in another kind of readings, but as I always do when I find something interesting to scrutinize, I bookmarked the implicated urls in order to follow the discussions and to get some feed on the question. A week later, Anthony formerly opened his book-event on The Hermetic Deleuze [here], and formerly shared the pdf of Joshua’s introduction The Secrets of Immanence [here], which I downloaded and printed in order to read it. I started reading Joshua’s introduction with great curiosity, but after the very first paragraph, I just dropped it with great deception, because Joshua starts his introduction invoking the pale figure of Derrida, utilizing Derrida’s hypocritical article on Deleuze’s death, as to insert in the readers the idea that “there was something still secret in Deleuze’s thought, something not yet understood”, and in Derrida’s words, “something that no doubt still remains secret to us”. This intentionality, from the very first start, seemed to me not only dismissing but also very distasteful: Deleuze never left any secret to be solved after his death, on the contrary: as I have written about this issue [here], it is with his death that he could say it all about immanence: a life and nothing else. My second impression then was that Joshua did not seem to manage himself as to properly weight the whole of Deleuze’s oeuvre in terms of materials, and that he could only treat it in parts, with no big abstraction, merely in terms of text: otherwise he would not take Derrida’s unfortunate article as his starting point against Deleuze’s last article, which is precisely where Deleuze reveals his thought of the immanence.

A few days later, The Hermetic Deleuze book-event began with Dan Barber and Beatrice Marovich posting their respective critical pieces [here and here], which were both interesting enough as to encourage me to retake the reading of Joshua’s introduction, but this time with no big expectations. It drew my attention that in the very second paragraph, he continues to invoke Artaud and his idea of a body without organs, “a subtle body accessible at the extremes of experience, in suffering, delirium, synesthesia, and ecstatic states”, on his way to pose what seemed to be a crucial question that could not but be intimately related with the aim of his book: “What do such experiences [suffering, delirium, synesthesia, and ecstatic states] have to do with philosophy, and with Deleuze philosophy of immanence in particular, about which Derrida insisted something has continued to remain secret?” Ignoring the last symptomatic reference to Derrida, my third impression on this regard was that such important question seemed to be the key to understand how close though-still-misguided was Joshua’s interpretation of Deleuze’s philosophy, specifically in relation to what concerns to Deleuze’s intensive Spinozian/Nietzschean vein, in the sense that it is also through this vein that Deleuze implied a materialistic response to this question. The thing is that, from the point of view concerned to this intensive vein in Deleuze, there is no way to interpret what Joshua’s has interpreted about Deleuze’s philosophy, not in the mean to ascribe it as part of an esoteric tradition, unless this specific point of view is omitted and put into play as a textual blind spot: as a sort of false asylum for narrative purposes, or what it comes to be the same: as a ‘secret’. However, it is clear that Deleuze’s excess was never a secret, it was a magmatic reference which philosophical (ethical, metaphysical and political) implications were spread all over his oeuvre and spoken as such and literally by Deleuze in his own name: he omitted nothing about them, and it is in this very sense that there is not much to interpret beyond his words, at least not as much as Joshua’s seems to interpret, because Deleuze’s work is what speaks for him and not otherwise, because the whole of his philosophy stands by itself.

As I see it, what informs and through which can only be fully understood Deleuze’s ethics, metaphysics and politics, on the one hand, is the event of life: an event of full aperture that comes to experience as a lightning strike: ‘the point, the moment of transmutation’, ‘the decisive point of Dionysian philosophy’, which implies an excess of life, as it is clearly explained by Deleuze in his book on Nietzsche. This event has its special resonances with Deleuze’s work on Lucretius, Kant, and Bergson; the absolute affirmation that it implies, which is Deleuze’s famous excess, is a foundment that permitted him to formulate his philosophy of pure difference, which is also clearly manifested by him in his book Difference and Repetition; besides, its implications are profoundly explored and serialized in terms of a textual experimentation in his book Logic of sense; and more importantly, along with Guattari it became the very model of schizoanalysis in their book Anti-Oedipus, and some years later, the very vector of absolute deterritorialization (wild destratification) in their book A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze’s ethics, metaphysics and politics, on the other hand, are informed and can only be fully understood through life itself: life itself which is immanence itself, immanence taken as a plane of life: life taken as a common plane of immanence, a plane which conceptualization involves the whole of Deleuze’s work on Spinoza, intimately related with his idea of expressionism, and also clearly exposed in his affective little article Spinoza and Us. It is true that death is what plays a relation between the event of life as the very point of transmutation, and life itself as the plane of immanence: however, Deleuze was not more interested in death than he was interested in life, and these two concepts, the event and the plane, are the proof of that. So it is in this Spinozian/Nietzschean vein that the event and the plane constitute the concepts that draw Deleuze’s philosophical personae in history: his heuristic portrait. Never the event as death but always death as the event: while immanence is to be understood as a plane, the absolute plane of life, this plane is only to be empirically achieved by the event that life affirms in experience: in Deleuze’s case, death as a double realization of the event.

The very impression in which it seemed to me that Joshua’s interpretation of Deleuze was close though-still-misguided, was somehow reinforced while reading respectively the third and the fourth paragraphs of his introduction. For example, in the third paragraph Joshua seemed to be ‘close’ to Deleuze with respect to what he briefly exposes about immanence and its relation with thought, for instance, when he says in his words that “immanent thought, at the limit of cognitive capacity, discovers as-yet-unrealized potentials of the mind, and the body”, or when he infers about the Deleuze-Artaud relation, that “what matters for life, and for thought, is an encounter with imperceptible forces in sensations, affections, and conceptions, and that these forces truly generate the mind, challenging the coordination of the faculties by rending the self from its habits”. But this way to put things seemed to be only ‘close’: because in Deleuze it is not that ‘immanent thought discovers the potentials of the mind (a word that Deleuze barely used) and the body’: what it ‘discovers’ is life itself: its absolute potential experienced as a plane which is thought itself, which is immanence itself: it is the absolute potentiality of life itself, when is experienced, what liberates these potentials of the mind and the body as a consequence of the aperture implied by the event that brings it into experience. ‘Immanent thought’ does not come without experiencing this electrifying event in existence. However, it is true that what matters for life is an encounter with ‘imperceptible’ forces, but while this encounter is precisely the event that brings life itself into experience and which means the very plane of immanence, this ‘imperceptible’ forces become astonishingly perceptible in the fortune of an instant, when all the transcendencies that made any sense in the body get gone within its fulmination: what remains then is the perceptibility of the plane as an object of existence: a transcendental field of pure intensities, almost unbearable. And while it is also true that these forces challenge “the coordination of the faculties by rendering the self from its habits”, as Joshua puts it, then again this seemed to be only ‘close’: because in Deleuze the self is not only rendered from its habits: it is actively destroyed by the thunderbolt that strikes when the event of life is experienced. The event of life, in Deleuze, it is also the death of god as an event, and thus, the death of the self, of the ‘I’ and the ego.

Obviously, my reading of Joshua’s introduction was not going any good, because all these implications concerned to Deleuze’s intensive Spinozian/Nietzschean vein, were getting pretty consequent to suggest that Joshua’s interpretation was already misguided since the fourth paragraph of his introduction, which is where he announces the main argument of his book: “the power of thought, for Deleuze, consists in a kind of initiatory ordeal”. This argument seemed to be at least ‘misguided’ mostly in what it imputes to Deleuze, who better referred to thought itself than to its mere ‘power’; who better referred to the event of life and not to any of its historical (even transhistorical) initiatory rituals; and who better referred to the plane of immanence without suiting it as any sort of holy transcendent spirit, and without implying through it any kind of ‘ordeal’. In its terms, ‘the power of thought’ may consist in a kind of ‘initiatory ordeal’, but according to his Spinozian/Nietzschean vein, this has nothing to do with Deleuze’s philosophy, neither with his intensive excess. One thing is thought itself and another is ‘the power of thought’. What Joshua imputes to Deleuze seemed to be already ‘misguided’ because it is not that esoterisms, occultisms, or spirituality would conduce to the pure intensity that brings the event of life, but it is such intensity of life that what has been framed through history, precisely with all sorts of esoterisms, occult meanings, and fluffy spiritualities. This misguidement with respect to life itself and with its materiality, has nothing to do with Deleuze’s philosophy, on the contrary: it is precisely with Deleuze that the event of life can be understood within only life itself as a ‘frame’, so to speak, and thus, it is with Deleuze that the conceptualization of this event radically differenciates itself from all these reterritorializing tendencies. In sum, with his ‘misguided’ interpretation, Joshua seemed to be subjectively entangling a relation of opposition with the BwO, and it is known what Deleuze and Guattari say in their book Anti-Oedipus, about what happens when the desiring machine entangles a relation of opposition with the BwO: it becomes a paranoiac machine that repulses it, a machine which despotic inscription creates for itself a miraculating machine so to get attracted to it and reterritorialize it.

Although, it is another new machine, the celibate machine, that emerges as a point of reconciliation between the two precedent machines, succeeding over them, forming a new alliance with the BwO. But in order to let this machine emerge, the subject which the paranoiac machine produces, needs to give himself to the forces of repulsion and attraction implied by the two machines, otherwise he will remain produced as such through a sort of residual reconciliation. However, it is only when it emerges, that the celibate machine reveals the repulsion of the paranoiac machine which preceded it, and this revelation, that is also a point of transmutation in the subject, does not happen because of the attraction that mediates the miraculating machine, but because of the intensities that the celibate machine itself produces in relation with the BwO. To put it in raw schizoanalytical terms, Joshua seemed to be the subject produced by a paranoiac machine implied by the Hermetic tradition, a despotic machine that could only reconciliate him ‘residually’ through a miraculating process expressed by ‘initiatory rituals’, in a relation of opposition with the BwO which is taken as an ‘ordeal’, impeding the emergency of a celibate machine implied by thought itself, by its immanence rather than by its ‘power’. But still, to this point, with regard to this third impression: the crucial question posed in the third paragraph of Joshua’s introduction, so far remains unanswered: what does suffering, delirium, synesthesia, and ecstatic states have to do with philosophy, and with Deleuze philosophy of immanence? As I have said before, it is through his Spinozian/Nietzschean intensive vein that Deleuze implies a response to such a question: in a passage worth to entirely quote (which is by the way one of my favourites of Anti-Oedipus), Deleuze and Guattari implied a whole response precisely with respect to the celibate machine, referring particularly to its actual autoerotic emergency, and asserting the existence of a concrete experience of pure intensities: a experience which has nothing to do with hallucination or delirium, as such states still retain the residual ‘I’ of a remnant self to reterritorialize, but that instead it opens the body to a transcendental field of intensities, a full-filled intensive and positive space: the material space of ‘zero’ intensity:

“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.”

Rephrasing a bit what I just recently commented to Matt Lee in his blog regards to this passage [here and here]: the question concerned to what the celibate machine produces, formulated by Deleuze and Guattari, not only refers to intensive quantities but also to what it induces as such in experience: the event of life as the creative absolute aperture, the schizo-break as the very fact of experiencing intensity = 0. This state of intensity= 0 refers to a raw piece of ‘feeling’ previous to any designation of meaning, a non-organized piece of emotion in raw state (this is taken from Klossowski’s perspective of Nietzsche, posted already [here]) which leaves no trace of the self, nor of ‘I’ and the ego. What the celibate machine produces through the production of intensive quantities, what it induces, is this event to happen, and the raw ‘feeling’ is the aperture to the very non-organized flow of life itself, which is almost unbearably intense. When Deleuze and Guattari immediately refer that ‘there is a schizophrenic experience of intensive quantities in their pure state’, what they are literally saying is that there exists a very concrete empirical experience that breaks with everything: but when they refer about hallucinations and delirium, they are saying that in these two states there still exists a self, precisely, a reminiscence of the ‘I’ and the ego. This schizo-experience that they refer is what means an absolute aperture to the pure state of intensive quantities, the state of intensity = 0, which is also an aperture that comes literally from the outside. In the same sense, what Deleuze and Guattari refer as the celibate machine is also with respect to modern and autoerotic practices of eroticism: but when they refer to schizophrenizing death, they are criticizing certain anti-psychiatric practices, for instance, with psychedelics: where death can be experienced several times without implying in its production any break of the self, but that is potentially induced each time the subject is ‘reborn’. The very point that Deleuze and Guattari mean here is that this break into an absolute aperture precedes these states of hallucination and delirium, and that it is not but the very state of pure-raw-feeling, this mesh of positive spatialized intensities, where a real materialistic psychiatry should be founded and modeled. While the intensive quantities that they refer are outside any experience, with the celibate machine these intensive quantities can induce the event of life in different gradations, in their way to be experienced in their pure state.

Of course I continued reading Joshua’s introduction, but just because it was not really a large reading after all, and only to corroborate how he sticks to his hermetic misguidement, carrying on with his overcharged interpretation of Deleuze and his supposed hermetic esoteric influence. It seemed to me that this was something that became the constant ideologem of Joshua’s narrative since the fifth paragraph of his introduction. But as I have said from the beginning with respect to Deleuze’s philosophy (ethics, metaphysics and politics): there is no sense of ‘spiritual striving and esoteric reverie’ animating Deleuze’s thought, and while his philosophy might be premeditatedly taken as a ‘contemporary avatar’ of Western esoteric hermetic tradition, just as Joshua seems to do with his misguided interpretation: this fact has nothing to do with Deleuze, because he never insisted to take thought itself as any kind of ‘spiritual ordeal’; because the themes that he ‘constantly recapitulated’ were directly about the event of life and life itself, not about Hermeticism; because he was never interested specifically in such a tradition nor in its attributed themes, so he never had any take on it and never wrote a word about it: there are thus no contours of any Hermeticism in Deleuze’s ‘systematic’ thought, neither any kind of ‘hermetic impulse’ in his work, as he neither had any kind of ‘spiritual debts’ with respect to this or other traditions: in sum, Deleuze’s thought did not need any sort of tradition to be ‘fully comprehensive’, so there is no need to situate it within any sort of esoterism or spirituality, as it is already situated and well-oriented by its way, with respect to the own direction implied by life itself and its event. At the end of my reading it seemed to me that Joshua’s misguided interpretation of Deleuze, in its mean to serve and to be useful to the hermetic tradition, was moved by the lack of courage to take life itself as the intranscendent, meaningless, and intensive non-organized flow that it materially is. Being the hermetic character that he seems to be, Joshua did not even overcome his own oedipal triangulation: “So, that was it… ha!, gotcha Deleuze! You are hermetic, you have always been!”

Related articles

• The Hermetic Deleuze. Reviewed by Dorothea Olkowski
• Wikipedia Hermeticism
• The Hermetic Deleuze Book Event
• Immanence: a life…
• The Somnambulist and the Hermaphrodite: Deleuze and Johann de Montereggio and Occultism. By Christian Kerslake.
• Hermetic Pharmacology, Chemistry, and Therapeutics
• Mckenna reconsidered
• Wikipedia Caduceus
• Wikipedia Rod of Asclepius
• Deleuze as Hierophant: The Fate of Philosophy
• ALCHEMICAL EXTRACTION vs ACADEMIC INCLUSION: A belated reaction to the “hermetic deleuze” book event
• JOSHUA RAMEY’S ACADEMIC GNOSIS: Non-philosophy is the yoga of philosophy

Reblogged from Posthegemony:

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What is Philosophy? is in many ways quite a departure from their previous joint-signed books. I say “joint-signed,” rather than “joint-authored” because François Dosse in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (which I reviewed for H-Madness) makes it clear that the book “was manifestly written by Deleuze alone”; he included Guattari’s name “as a tribute to their exceptionally intense friendship” (456).

Read more… 962 more words