Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression.
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.
Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that’s all.
art / philosophy / science
The morality of customs, the spirit of the laws, produces the man emancipated from the law.
A tyrant institutionalises stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.
According to Beckett’s or Kafka’s law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates.
Belief is necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective production.
To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.
The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.
Psychoanalysis was from the start, still is, and perhaps always will be a well-constituted church and a form of treatment based on a set of beliefs that only the very faithful could adhere to, i.e., those who believe in a security that amounts to being lost in the herd and defined in terms of common and external goals.
It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id.