[Speaking of Reterritorialization]: The Scheme of Significant Regime

Scheme of Significant Regime

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. Continue reading

Lost in translation? A footnote to ‘The Zero Intensity’ quote previously posted…

…which is one of my favourites in Anti-Oedipus [here]. The thing is that, in the 1977 English translation of Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, precisely in this very passage of the first chapter, there seems to be NOT an errata but a sort of misinterpretation somehow unexplainable. In the French original version this passage starts as follows:

french quote schizo

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

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‘Zero Intensity’ & The New Celibate Machine [quoted in Anti-Oedipus]

Quote


“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.”

‘Close though-still-misguided’: three schizosophical impressions about Joshua Ramey’s introduction to The Hermetic Deleuze

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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.

nietzsche-and-philosophy -schizo

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