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

What micrology?

According to the definition set above, the word micrology comes from micros (small) and logos (treat or speech). It refers to the science that uses a microscope to study the smallest or minimal things existing in nature. To say of this definition, the word also applies to denominate a short and concise mode of speech, besides that disparagingly it serves to describe a frivolous discourse. If a micrology concerns to the study of small things of nature with the aid of a microscope, what would be the instrument to study the little things of life in society? What tool would be used by a social micrology? What shall be its microscope? To say of a possible answer, if one considers that the social is something that is significantly constructed, language would come to be such an instrument through which a social micrology would endorse to study the minimal but not the less significant things of society. However, while it gives sense to the social -being that it is what composes its minimal parts-, language would construct such an instrument without being canceled or dissolved as an object of study. Continue reading