deleuzenotes

There is no event, no phenomenon, word or thought which does not have a multiple sense. […] The pluralist idea that a thing has many senses, the idea that there are many things and one thing can be seen as "this and then that" is philosophy's greatest achievement, the conquest of the true concept, its maturity and not its renunciation or infancy. For the evaluation of this and that, the delicate weighing of each thing and its sense, the estimation of the forces which define the aspects of a thing and its relations with others at every instant – all this (or all that) depends on philosophy's highest art – that of interpretation.

“There is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor. To hate all languages of masters.”

"That is why 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?" How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: "More taxes! Less bread!"? As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for."

There are, you see, two ways of reading a book, each grounded in a different image of thought. In the first, the book is treated as a vessel of representation—an object containing a signified essence, to be deciphered and interpreted in accordance with a logic of recognition. This is the reading of mediation, where concepts are extracted, one after another, as if each were a determination subordinated to the generality of meaning. The book becomes a nesting doll of other books, each enfolded within or enclosing the last. Annotation, commentary, exegesis—all fall under this regime, governed by the law of the Same and the model of resemblance. This is reading as infinite deferral within the dogmatic image of thought. But there is another way, an intensive reading that operates transversally, machinically. Here, the book is no longer a container but an intensive multiplicity, a divergent series, a system of singularities in flux. One no longer asks what does it mean? but how does it function?—how does it connect, what circuits does it form, what thresholds does it cross? The book works or it doesn’t, like an experiment that either produces a singular event or fails to effect any difference. In this mode, reading is no longer representational but productive, diagrammatic. It ceases to be a hermeneutic act and becomes an act of involution, of folding and unfolding between heterogeneous series. This is reading as encounter, as becoming: where the book is torn from itself and forced into conjunction with other machines—bodily, political, material, affective. And in this tearing, this love of proximity and experimentation, reading becomes an ethics of immanence: not interpretation, but participation.

"It's like a hole in my life, an eight-year hole. That's what I find interesting in people's lives, the holes, the gaps, sometimes dramatic, but sometimes not dramatic at all. There are catalepsies, or a kind of sleepwalking through a number of years, in most lives. Maybe it's in these holes that movement takes place."

“Images also have an inside or certain images have an inside and are experienced from inside. They’re subjects. And there’s a gap between actions upon these images and the reactions they produce. It’s this gap that enables them to store up other images, that is to perceive. But what they store is only what interests them in other images: perceiving is subtracting from an image what doesn’t interest us, there’s always less in our perception. We’re so full of images we no longer see those outside us for what they are.”

“Becoming is an antimemory.”

“My wound existed before me…”

“Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.”

pacogonzalez: