A Digression

It may be difficult, too, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development into supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization. The repressed instinct never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction, which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction. No substitutive or reactive formations and no sublimations will suffice to remove the repressed instinct’s persisting tension; and it is the difference in amount between the pleasure of satisfaction which is demanded and that which is actually achieved that provides the driving factor which will permit of no halting at any position attained, but, in the poet’s words, ‘ungebändigt immer vorwärts dringt’ [Presses ever forward unsubdued]. The backward path that leads to complete satisfaction is as a rule obstructed by the resistances which maintain the repressions. So there is no alternative but to advance in the direction in which growth is still free - though with no prospect of bringing the process to a conclusion or of being able to reach the goal. The processes involved in the formation of a neurotic phobia, which is nothing else than an attempt at flight from the satisfaction of an instinct, present us with a model of the manner of origin of this superstitious ‘instinct towards perfection’ - an instinct which cannot possibly be attributed to every human being. The dynamic conditions for its development are, indeed, universally present; but it is only in rare cases that the economic situation appears to favour the production of the phenomenon.

(Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle)

Nietzsche as precursor of deconstruction

We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language — in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere reason sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing." Everywhere "being" is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word.

Very much later, in a world which was in a thousand ways more enlightened, philosophers, to their great surprise, became aware of the sureness, the subjective certainty, in our handling of the categories of reason: they concluded that these categories could not be derived from anything empirical — for everything empirical plainly contradicted them. Whence, then, were they derived?

And in India, as in Greece, the same mistake was made: "We must once have been at home in a higher world (instead of a very much lower one, which would have been the truth); we must have been divine, because we have reason!" Indeed, nothing has yet possessed a more naive power of persuasion than the error concerning being, as it has been formulated by the Eleatics, for example. After all, every word and every sentence we say speak in its favor. Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. "Reason" in language — oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)

"A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction."

(Gilles Deleuze, Preface to Difference and Repetition)

"First, one has the difficulty of emancipation oneself from one's chains; and, ultimately, one has to emancipate oneself from this emancipation too! Each of us has to suffer, though in greatly different ways, from the chain sickness, even after he has broken the chains."

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked, science, speed and footwork as cold as a well digger's posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside his opponent's sense of time.

(Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man)

The tragic fantasy of all of today's sad young literary men is to write a book that no one could ever possibly fully understand with a title that anyone with his wits about him could easily quote.

A classic footnote from Capital

Proudhon begins by taking his ideal of Justice, of “justice éternelle,” from the juridical relations that correspond to the production of commodities: thereby, it may be noted, he proves, to the consolation of all good citizens, that the production of commodities is a form of production as everlasting as justice. Then he turns round and seeks to reform the actual production of commodities, and the actual legal system corresponding thereto, in accordance with this ideal. What opinion should we have of a chemist, who, instead of studying the actual laws of the molecular changes in the composition and decomposition of matter, and on that foundation solving definite problems, claimed to regulate the composition and decomposition of matter by means of the “eternal ideas,” of “naturalité” and “affinité”? Do we really know any more about “usury,” when we say it contradicts “justice éternelle,” équité éternelle “mutualité éternelle,” and other vérités éternelles than the fathers of the church did when they said it was incompatible with “grâce éternelle,” “foi éternelle,” and “la volonté éternelle de Dieu”

(Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1)

Essential Principles

The art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, caries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to every day life:

• Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
• Develop action, though, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
• Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western though has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
• Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.
• Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
• Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.
• Do not become enamored of power.

(Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Œdipus)

Deleuze on Israel and Palestinine (1978)

This piece written by Gilles Deleuze in 1978 is eerily relevant to the current crisis in Gaza. Indeed, I'd argue that the tactics on both sides have changed very little in 30 years.

How could the Palestinians be "genuine partners" in peace talks when they have no country? But how could they have a country when it was taken from them? The Palestinians were never given any choice other than unconditional surrender. All they were offered was death. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the actions of the Israelis are considered legitimate retaliation (even if their attacks do seem disproportionate), whereas the actions of the Palestinians are without fail treated as terrorist crimes. And the death of a Palestinian has neither the same interest nor the same impact as the death of an Israeli.

Since 1969, Israel has unrelentingly bombed and strafed Southern Lebanon. Israel has explicitly said that its recent invasion of Lebanon was not in retaliation for the terrorist attack on Tel-Aviv (eleven terrorists against thirty thousand soldiers); on the contrary, it represents the culmination of a plan, one in a whole series of operations to be initiated at Israel’s discretion. For a "final solution" to the Palestinian question, Israel can count on the almost unanimous complicity of other States (with various nuances and restrictions). A people without land, and without a State, the Palestinians are the spoilers of peace for everyone involved. If they have received economic and military aid from certain countries, it has been in vain. The Palestinians know what they are talking about when they say they are alone.

Palestinian militants are also saying that they have managed to pull off a kind of victory. Left behind in southern Lebanon were only resistance groups, which seem to have held up quite will under attack. The Israeli invasion, on the other hand, struck blindly at Palestinian refugees and Lebanese farmers, a poor population that lives off the land. Destruction of villages and cities, and the massacre of innocent civilians have been confirmed. Several sources indicate that cluster bombs were used. This population of Southern Lebanon, in perpetual exile, keeps leaving and coming back under Israeli military strikes that one is hard-pressed to distinguish from acts of terrorism. The latest hostilities have ousted more than 200,000 from their homes, now refugees wandering the roads. The State of Israel is using in southern Lebanon the method which proved so effective in Galilee and elsewhere in 1948: it is "Palestinizing" Southern Lebanon.

Palestinian militants for the most part come from this population of refugees. Israel thinks it will defeat the militants by creating more refugees, thereby surely creating more terrorists.

It is not merely because we have a relationship with Lebanon that we say: Israel is massacring a fragile and complex country. There is something else. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a model that will determine how problems of terrorism will be dealt with elsewhere, even in Europe. The worldwide cooperation of States, and the worldwide organization of police and criminal proceedings, will necessarily lead to a classification extending to more and more people who will be considered virtual "terrorists." This situation is analogous to the Spanish Civil War, when Spain sereved as an experimental laboratory for a far more terrible future.

Today Israel is conducitng an experiment. It has invented a model of repression that, once adapted, will profit other countries. There is great continuity in Israeli politics. Israel believes that the U.N. resolutions verbally condemning Israel in fact put it in the right. Israel has transformed the invitation to leave the occupied territories into the right to establish colonies there. It thinks sending an international peace-keeping force into Southern Lebanon is an excellent idea… provided that this force, in the place of Israeli forces, transforms the region into a police zone, a desert of security. This conflict is a curious kind of blackmail, from which the whole world will never escape unless we lobby for the Palestinians to be recognized for what they are: "genuine partners" in peace talks. They are indeed at war, in a war they did not choose.

(Gilles Deleuze, The text originally appeared in Le Monde, April 7, 1978, and is reprinted in Two Regimes of Madness [Semiotexte, 2006])

via http://lapointe.blogsome.com

"...by determining the relation which a philosophical work professes to have to other treatises on the same subject, an extraneous interest is introduced, and obscurity is thrown over the point at issue in the knowledge of the truth. The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety."

(Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit)

"The glorification of the splendid underdogs ends up in glorifying the splendid system which made them so."

(Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia)