Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful.
gilles Deleuzequotes
1925 - 1995
One of the key figures for postmodern French philosophy, Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) referred to himself as a “transcendental empiricist.” Enraging some, inspiring others, his philosophies are decidedly original and his writing considered a bedrock for post-structuralism (How Do We Recognize Structuralism?).
If there is one pervasive Deleuzian concept, it is that of creation. He was a constructionist through and through, believing that philosophy is not the pursuit of universal truth and rationale, but rather the creation of concepts. He reasoned that individuals and the world were always in a state of becoming, not being.
His philosophy lectures at Paris VIII University never failed to pack the house. Students stole chairs from other classrooms to hear his over-the-top lectures and watch him chain smoke his way through class. If they were lucky, he’d get tired and play his musical saw.
He thought history was a map, not a narrative, and offered the metaphor of a rhizome as a better tool to explain not only culture, but philosophical thought; namely, a resistance to chronology and organization, and an embrace of nomadic and disordered growth (A Thousand Plateaus).
When he published Anti-Oedipus, co-authored with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, it was an instant hit in Paris. It took longer for the work to gain acclaim in the U.S., but when it did it became a mainstay in critical theory classrooms.
Struggling for years with respiratory problems due to tuberculosis in his younger years, along with other deteriorating health issues, a depressed Deleuze committed suicide in 1995.
It is no longer an organism that functions but a BwO that is constructed. No longer are there acts to explain, dreams or phantasies to interpret, childhood memories to recall, words to make signify; instead there are colors and sounds, becomings and intensities (and when you become-dog, don’t ask if the dog you are playing with is a dream or a reality, if it is ‘your goddam mother’ or something else entirely).
The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions. The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences of images and even each image, a single shot, are assimilated to propositions or rather oral utterances.
What does belief applied to the unconscious signify? What is an unconscious that no longer does anything but believe, rather than produce? What are the operations, the artifices that inject the unconscious with ‘beliefs’ that are not even rational, but on the contrary only too reasonable and consistent with the established order?
belief / order / unconscious
Drunkenness as a triumphant irruption of the plant in us.
A leftist government doesn’t exist because being on the left has nothing to do with governments.
Philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts.
Before being a mental state of the schizophrenic who has made himself into an artificial person through autism, schizophrenia is the process of the production of desire and desiring-machines.
Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevation the State to the level of de jure universality.
The administration of a great organized molar security has as its correlate a whole micro-management of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity, to the point that the motto of domestic policymakers might be: a macropolitics of society by and for the micropolitics of insecurity.
administration / macropolitics / micropolitics / policymakers