...our 'higher schools' are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims. ... Everywhere an indecent haste prevails, as if something would be lost if the young man of twenty-three were not yet 'finished,' or if he did not yet know the answer to the "main question": which calling? A higher kind of human being, if I may say so, does not like "callings," precisely because he knows himself to be called. He has time, he takes time, he does not even think of 'finishing': at thirty one is, in the sense of high culture, a beginner, a child.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)

I want to say very quickly how I recognize a philosopher in his activity. One can only confront these activities as a function of what they create and of their mode of creation. One must ask, what does a woodworker create? What does a musician create? For me, a philosopher is someone who creates concepts. This implies many things: that the concept is something to be created, that the concept is the product of a creation. 

I see no possibility of defining science if one does not indicate something that is created by and in science. And, it happens that what is created by and in science, I'm not completely sure what it is, but not concepts properly speaking. The concept of creation has been much more linked to art than to science or to philosophy. What does a painter create? He creates lines and colors. That suggests that lines and colors are not givens, but are the product of a creation. What is given, quite possibly, one could always call a flow. It's flows that are given, and creation consists in dividing , organizing, connecting flows in such a way that a creation is drawn or made around certain singularities extracted from flows. 

A concept is not at all something that is a given. Moreover, a concept is not the same thing as thought: one can very well think without concepts, and everyone who does not do philosophy still thinks, I believe, but does not think through concepts. If you accept the idea of a concept as the product of an activity or an original creation. 

I would say that the concept is a system of singularities appropriated from a thought flow. A philosopher is someone who invents concepts. Is he an intellectual? No, in my opinion. For a concept as system of singularities appropriated from a thought flow... Imagine the universal thought flow as a kind of interior monologue, the interior monologue of everyone who thinks. Philosophy arises with the action that consists of creating concepts. For me, there are as many creations in the invention of a concept as in the creation by a great painter or musician. One can also conceive of a continuous acoustic flow (perhaps that is only an idea, but it matters little if this idea is justified) that traverses the world and that even encompasses silence. A musician is someone who appropriates something from this flow: notes? Aggregates of notes? No? What will we call the new sound from a musician? You sense then that it is not simply a question of the system of notes. It's the same thing for a philosopher, it is simply a question of creating concepts rather than sounds. It is not a question of defining philosophy by some sort of search for the truth, for a very simple reason: this is that truth is always subordinate to the system of concepts at one's disposal. What is the importance of philosophers for non-philosophers? It is that although non-philosophers don't know it, or pretend not to be interested, whether they like it or not they think through concepts which have proper names.

(Gilles Deleuze, Cours Vincennes - 15/04/1980)

Traversing the fantasy' thus does not mean that the subject somehow abandons its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a pragmatic 'reality,' but precisely the opposite: the subject is submitted to that effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality. To traverse the fantasy in the Lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the fantasy than ever, in the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core of the fantasy that transcends imaging.

(Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher)

When Willie Sutton was in prison, a priest who was trying to reform him asked him why he robbed banks. 'Well,' Sutton replied, 'that's where the money is.' There has been a failure to connect here, a failure of fit. Sutton and the priest are passing each other by ... Clearly there are different values and purposes shaping the question and answer. They take different things to be problematic or stand in need of explanation. For the priest, what stands in need of explanation is the decision to rob at all. He does not really care what. But for Sutton, that is the whole question. What is problematic is the choice of what to rob.

(Alan Garfinkel)

Despite the fact that questions and answers are, indeed, linguistic entities, "Why" questions involve as part of the conditions that make them answerable, or well-posed, a non-linguistic or extra-propositional aspect which is properly problematic: a distribution of the relevant and the irrelevant.

(Manuel De Landa)

The parts of an object put together in an assembly line are typically fully Euclidean, having rigid metric properties such as sizes, shapes and positions, a fact that limits the procedures that may be followed for their assembly. these procedures must include a rigidly channelled transport system (using conveyor belts or pipes to transport raw materials, and wires to transport energy and information) as well as sequences of rigid motions to correctly position the parts relative to one another. By contrast, the component parts used in biological assembly are defined less by rigid metric properties than by their topological connectivity: the specific shape of a cell's membrane is less important that its continuity and closure,and the specific length of a muscle less important than its attachment points. This allows component parts to be not inert but adaptive, so that muscle lengths can change to fit longer bones, and skin can grow and fold adaptively to cover both. It also permits transport processes not to be rigidly channeled, using simple diffusion through a fluid medium to bring the different parts together. Components may float around and randomly collide, using a lock-and-key mechanism to find matching patterns without the need for exact positioning.

All of this has consequences for the capacity to evolve through mutation and selection which each of these two assembly processes may have. If putting together organisms followed an assembly-line pattern, random mutations would have to occur simultaneously in matching parts, channels and procedures, in order to yield a viable entity on which natural selection could operate. the occurence of such a large number of simultaneous mutations is of course, a highly improbable event. In biological assembly on the other hand, mutations do not have to be so coordinated and this greatly enhances the possibilities for evolutionary experimentation.

(Manuel De Landa, from Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy)

"A successful encounter, one that is not brief, but lasts, never guarantees that it will continue to last tomorrow rather than come undone. Just as it might have not taken place, it may no longer take place. . . . In other words, nothing ever guarantees that the reality of the accomplished fact is the guarantee of its durability. Quite the opposite is true: every accomplished fact . . . like all the necessity and reason we can derive from it, is only a provisional encounter, and since every encounter is provisional even when it lasts, there is no eternity in the “laws” of any world or any state. History here is nothing but the permanent revocation of the accomplished fact by another undecipherable fact to be accomplished, without our knowing in advance whether, or when, or how the event that revokes it will come about."

"...instead of thinking contingency as a modality of necessity, or an exception to it , we must think necessity as the becoming-necessary of the encounter of contingents."

(Louis Althusser, from Althusser's Late Thinking About Materialism)

"...the Whole itself is a product, produced as nothing more than a part alongside other parts, which it neither unifies nor totalizes, though it has an effect on these other parts simply because it establishes aberrant paths of communication between non communicating vessels, transverse unities between elements that retain all their differences within their own particular boundaries."

(Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, from Anti-Oedipus)

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)

Marx: Some Notes on Bourgeois Constitutionality

The inevitable general staff of the liberties of 1848, personal liberty, liberty of the press, of speech, of association, of assembly, of education and religion, etc., received a constitutional uniform which made them invulnerable. For each of these liberties is proclaimed as the absolute right of the French citoyen, but always with the marginal note that it is unlimited so far as it is not limited by the “equal rights of others and the public safety” or by “laws” which are intended to mediate just this harmony of the individual liberties with one another and with the public safety. For example:

“The citizens have the right of association, of peaceful and unarmed assembly, of petition and of expressing their opinions, whether in the press or in any other way. The enjoyment of these rights has no limit save the equal rights of others and the public safety.”

“Education is free. Freedom of education shall be enjoyed under the conditions fixed by law and under the supreme control of the state.”

“The home of every citizen is inviolable except in the forms prescribed by law.”

The constitution, therefore, constantly refers to future organic laws which are to put into affect those marginal notes and regulate the enjoyment of these unrestricted liberties in such manner that they will collide neither with one another nor with the public safety. And later these organic laws were brought into being by the friends of order and all those liberties regulated in such manner that the bourgeoisie in its enjoyment of them finds itself unhindered by the equal rights of the other classes. Where it forbids these liberties entirely to “the others,” or permits enjoyment of them under conditions that are just so many police traps, this always happens solely in the interest of “public safety” – that is, the safety of the bourgeoisie – as the constitution prescribes. In the sequel, both sides accordingly appeal with complete justice to the constitution: the friends of order, who abrogated all these liberties, as well as the democrats, who demanded all of them. For each paragraph of the constitution contains its own antithesis, its own upper and lower house, namely, liberty in the general phrase, abrogation of liberty in the marginal note. Thus so long as the name of freedom was respected and only its actual realization prevented, of course in a legal way, the constitutional existence of liberty remained intact, inviolate, however mortal the blows dealt to its existence in actual life.

This constitution, made inviolable in so ingenious a manner, was nevertheless, like Achilles, vulnerable in one point – not in the heel, but in the head, or rather in the two heads it wound up with: the Legislative Assembly on the one hand, the President on the other. Glance through the constitution and you will find that only the paragraphs in which the relationship of the President to the Legislative Assembly is defined are absolute, positive, noncontradictory, and cannot be distorted. For here it was a question of the bourgeois republicans safeguarding themselves. Articles 45-70 of the Constitution are so worded that the National Assembly can remove the President constitutionally, whereas the President can remove the National Assembly only unconstitutionally, only by setting aside the constitution itself. Here, therefore, it challenges its forcible destruction. It not only sanctifies the division of powers, like the Charter of 1830, it widens it into an intolerable contradiction. The play of the constitutional powers, as Guizot termed the parliamentary squabble between the legislative and executive power, is in the constitution of 1848 continually played va-banque [staking all]. On one side are seven hundred and fifty representatives of the people, elected by universal suffrage and eligible for re-election; they form an uncontrollable, indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National Assembly that enjoys legislative omnipotence, decides in the last instance on war, peace, and commercial treaties, alone possesses the right of amnesty, and, by its permanence, perpetually holds the front of the stage. On the other side is the President, with all the attributes of royal power, with authority to appoint and dismiss his ministers independently of the National Assembly, with all the resources of the executive power in his hands, bestowing all posts and disposing thereby in France of the livelihoods of at least a million and a half people, for so many depend on the five hundred thousand officials and officers of every rank. He has the whole of the armed forces behind him. He enjoys the privilege of pardoning individual criminals, of suspending National Guards, of discharging, with the concurrence of the Council of State, general, cantonal, and municipal councils elected by the citizens themselves. Initiative and direction are reserved to him in all treaties with foreign countries. While the Assembly constantly performs on the boards and is exposed to daily public criticism, he leads a secluded life in the Elysian Fields, and that with Article 45 of the constitution before his eyes and in his heart, crying to him daily: “Frere, il faut mourir!” [‘Brother, one must die!’]^[83] Your power ceases on the second Sunday of the lovely month of May in the fourth year after your election! Then your glory is at an end, the piece is not played twice, and if you have debts, look to it quickly that you pay them off with the 600,000 francs granted you by the constitution, unless, perchance, you prefer to go to Clichy^[84] on the second Monday of the lovely month of May! Thus, whereas the constitution assigns power to the President, it seeks to secure moral power for the National Assembly. Apart from the fact that it is impossible to create a moral power by paragraphs of law, the constitution here abrogates itself once more by having the President elected by all Frenchmen through direct suffrage. While the votes of France are split up among the seven hundred and fifty members of the National Assembly, they are here, on the contrary, concentrated on a single individual. While each separate representative of the people represents only this or that party, this or that town, this or that bridgehead, or even only the mere necessity of electing someone as the seven hundred and fiftieth, without examining too closely either the cause or the man, [the President] is the elect of the nation and the act of his election is the trump that the sovereign people plays once every four years. The elected National Assembly stands in a metaphysical relation, but the elected President in a personal relation, to the nation. The National Assembly, indeed, exhibits in its individual representatives the manifold aspects of the national spirit, but in the President this national spirit finds its incarnation. As against the Assembly, he possesses a sort of divine right; he is President by the grace of the people.

(Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon)

Primitive Accumulation

"The United States sold a record amount of debt to help fund its efforts to contain the financial crisis and Beijing's fifth rate cut since September failed to boost Chinese shares, as gloomy economic and corporate reports showed the world economy was stuck in a deep rut."

(Via Reuters, 12.23.2008)

"The system of public credit, i.e., of national debts, whose origin we discover in Genoa and Venice as early as the middle ages, took possession of Europe generally during the manufacturing period. The colonial system with its maritime trade and commercial wars served as a forcing-house for it. Thus it first took root in Holland. National debts, i.e., the alienation of the state-whether despotic, constitutional or republican-marked with its stamp the capitalistic era. The only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt. Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven."

"The public debt becomes one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation. As with the stroke of an enchanter's wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury. The state-creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard cash would. ... apart from the class of lazy annuitants thus created, and from the improvised wealth of the financiers, middlemen between the government and the nation-as also apart from the tax--farmers, merchants, private manufacturers, to whom a good part of every national loan renders the service of a capital fallen from heaven--the national debt has given rise to joint-stock companies, to dealings in negotiable effects of all kinds, and to agiotage, in a word, to stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy."

(Karl Marx, Chapter 31 of Capital Volume 1)