"the question is not: is it true? but: does it work? what new thoughts does it make it possible to think? what new emotions does it make it possible to feel? what new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?"

brian massumi, foreword to a thousand plateaus  (via rhizombie). i swoon a little when people tell me they don’t care about truth claims. 

she always knows just what to say to me

reading through my notes from deleuze class

“how can we rewrite the past so that it changes the present into a different future?” “the nobility of failures.” “how to think a politics that isn’t a critique.” “we speak, but luckily not all the time. we also act. speaking is acting, but boring acting.” “geography, not history. spatialization is more important than the movement of events…temporality, not chronology. how space, geography, terrain give rise to ideas, concepts.” “the body is a set of conflicting forces. each part of the body is an agent that wants what it wants…forces that clash are always productive.” “the text as a literary machine which produces external relations between objects. a work of art is essentially productive, produces truths.” “bergson: waiting as the proof that the world is not subjectively given.” “pain is creative…pleasure is boring, conformist.” “spinoza is interested in what i can do, not what i am…a great thinker of affects and ethics. what relations do i enter into that make me stronger? which make me weaker? what a body enables itself to do, how it grows larger than itself/actions. ‘i am what i do next.’” “a theory of desire that is not about lack.” “the subaltern can speak, but can i listen properly.” “foucault: the practice of truth and the care of the self.” “no origin, but linkages.” “art as an ally, not an object.” “how space can be deranged so bodies can act in different ways.” “interested in 2 things that can’t incorporate each other but follow each other in parallel.” “aphorisms…his texts meander…rhizomatic… never amends, no corrections, doesn’t change mind…concept, not argument.” “theory should be experimental—it should take risks, engender effects, produce things, make new objects of investigation. theory should be judged by what it enables us to do, not what it enables us to know.” “phenomenology is wrong. there are forces that never appear to us that we have to address.” “concepts are the condition of being otherwise. they are full of hope.” “topology.” “the outside is what occasions us to think and speak…not inside.” “nietzsche: the subject is a surface that acts as if it has a depth…the inside is produced by doubling/folding of outside…” “i define myself through acts—i make, i do, so a subject. to act and make is to free self.” “to be open to the future we have to forget the past even as we embody it.” “f produced an entire body of work based on judicious remembering and forgetting.” “desire makes and connects. sometimes pleasure interrupts desire.” “pleasure/desire is bodily force that can mobilize us in particular contexts—surprise—forces that act, not subjects who ask.” —thank you, liz grosz. (there is more on the way.) 

to be moved by joy

(deleuzenotes:sonofapritch) 

sadness, sad affects, are those which reduce our power to act. the established powers need our sadness to make us slaves. the tyrant, the priest, the captors of souls need to persuade us that life is hard and a burden. the powers that be need to repress us no less than to make us anxious or, as Virilio says, to administer and organize our intimate little fears[…]it is not easy to be a free man, to flee the plague, organize encounters, increase the power to act, to be moved by joy, to multiply the affects which express or encompass a maximum of affirmation. to make the body a power which is not reducible to the organism, to make thought a power which is not reducible to consciousness. spinoza’s famous first principle (a single substance for all attributes) depends on this assemblage and not vice versa.”—gilles deleuze, dialogues 

ah, remembering andre talk about sad affects. deleuze always cheers me up. 

(notational:bobbyjgeorge)

“the aim is not to answer questions, it’s to get out, to get out of it.”

"which way, which way? asks alice, sensing that it is always in both directions at the same time."

deleuze, the logic of sense. and this forever. 

deleuze explains my biggest problem in life

“in this sense, we can recognise a persistent intentionality in every stereotype, even in a schizophrenic grinding of the jaws. this amounts to investing the entirety of psychic life in a fragment, gesture, or word, in the absence of any other object of investment, these in turn becoming the elements of the other repetition: for example, the patient who turns ever more rapidly on one foot, the other leg extended in such a way as such to repel any person approaching from behind, thereby miming his horror of women and his fear of being approached by them. the properly pathological aspect lies in the fact that, on the one hand, the contraction no longer ensures a resonance between two or more levels, simultaneously ‘playable’ in differenciated manners, but rather crushes them all and compresses them into the stereotypical fragment. on the other hand, contraction no longer draws from the element a difference or modification which would permit repetition within a space and time organised by the will. on the contrary, it makes the modification itself the element to be repeated, taking itself as object in an acceleration which precisely renders impossible any bare repetition of elements. thus in these cares of iteration and stereotype we see not an independence of purely mechanical repetition, but rather a specific difficulty in the relation between the two repetitions, and in the process by which one is and remains the cause of the other.”

—deleuze, difference and repetition  

this is my favorite part. this explains everything. 

“the more theatrical and dramatic operation by which healing takes place—or does not take place—has a name: transference. now transference is still repetition: above all it is repetition. if repetition makes us ill, it also heals us; if it unchains and destroys us, it also frees us, testifying in both cases to its ‘demonic’ power. all cure is a voyage to the bottom of repetition.” 

—deleuze, difference and repetition 

"the difference between derrida and deleuze is simple and deep: it is the difference between no and yes."

gordon bearn, differentiating derrida and deleuze (qtd. in reynolds; via b o r d e r l a n d s e-journal)

omg. shots fired, kinda. 

“that is why it is so difficult to say how someone learns: there is an innate or practical familiarity with signs, which means that there is something amorous—but also something fatal—about all education. we learn nothing from those who say: ‘do as i do.’ our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me,’ and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce. in other words, there is no ideo-motivity, there is only sensory-motivity.”

—deleuze, difference and repetition