Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject.
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.
An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.
Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain, expect, etc. language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement.
The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.
Christianity taught us to see the eye of the lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.
The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.
Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things.
Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.
The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?
Shit on your whole mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater!