Into Philosophy

Nah, biggest flex is when he wrote "To my sweetheart Marie Dähnhardt" and then followed it up with,

If I embrace and cherish you, because I have love for you, because my heart finds nourishment, and my need satisfaction, in you, it is not for the sake of the higher essence whose sanctified body you are, thus not because I see a ghost, i.e., an appearing spirit, in you, but out of egoistic pleasure: you yourself, with your essence, are of value to me, because your essence is not a higher one, not higher and more general than you; it is unique like you yourself, because it is you.

[..] But I love them with the awareness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because love is natural to me, it pleases me. I know no “commandment of love.” I have  fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments me, their refreshment refreshes me too.

[..] If I see the beloved suffering, I suffer with him, and I find no rest until I’ve tried everything to comfort and cheer him; if I see him joyful, I too become joyful over his joy. It doesn’t follow from this that the same thing causes suffering or joy in me, as that which brings about these effects in him, as any bodily pain sufficiently proves, since I don’t feel it as he does; his tooth gives him pain, but his pain gives me pain.

But because I cannot bear the sorrowful crease on the beloved forehead, therefore, then for my sake, I kiss it away. If I didn’t love this person, he could go right on creasing his forehead, that wouldn’t trouble me; I’m only driving away my troubles.

Nah, biggest flex is when he wrote "To my sweetheart Marie Dähnhardt" and then followed it up with,

If I embrace and cherish you, because I have love for you, because my heart finds nourishment, and my need satisfaction, in you, it is not for the sake of the higher essence whose sanctified body you are, thus not because I see a ghost, i.e., an appearing spirit, in you, but out of egoistic pleasure: you yourself, with your essence, are of value to me, because your essence is not a higher one, not higher and more general than you; it is unique like you yourself, because it is you.

[..] But I love them with the awareness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because love is natural to me, it pleases me. I know no “commandment of love.” I have  fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments me, their refreshment refreshes me too.

[..] If I see the beloved suffering, I suffer with him, and I find no rest until I’ve tried everything to comfort and cheer him; if I see him joyful, I too become joyful over his joy. It doesn’t follow from this that the same thing causes suffering or joy in me, as that which brings about these effects in him, as any bodily pain sufficiently proves, since I don’t feel it as he does; his tooth gives him pain, but his pain gives me pain.

But because I cannot bear the sorrowful crease on the beloved forehead, therefore, then for my sake, I kiss it away. If I didn’t love this person, he could go right on creasing his forehead, that wouldn’t trouble me; I’m only driving away my troubles.

Anti-Oedipus, An Introduction: Ab Initio

“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts.  It breathes, it heats, it eats.  It shits and fucks.” What is ‘it’? That’s the question. That’s the question to which, in the broadest sense, Anti-Oedipus is entirely dedicated. Everything is wrapped up in this basic question. Nietzschean transvaluation, Spinozan ethics, Humean empiricism, Bergsonian intuition: all the modes of thought Deleuze spent the 1960s exploring come together in the question, as do the two great domains of thought which dominated French intellectual life in the 1960s, but which Deleuze, notably, never really bothered with before: psychoanalysis and Marxism. For most of its history, Western philosophy asked, “What am I?” It explorations of being, of consciousness, of existence, all began with the thinking subject. But the 19th century destabilized the idea of the self’s supremacy: first Schopenhauer then Freud established unequivocally the existence of forces in the mind beyond and outside of consciousness; first Hegel then Marx insisted that consciousness is not a transhistorical given but a product of material and social existence; and Darwin’s theory of evolution formalized the radical notion, hinted at much earlier in Spinoza and Hume, that humanity is not a quality outside and beyond nature - after Darwin, it could no longer be doubted that man was fully in and of nature, and that both human existence and human consciousness are fully within and entirely bound by the principles that govern natural things. Deleuze & Guattari’s position is explicitly clear: “There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other.” Thus the formula of the Cartesian cogito - “I think, therefore I am” - in which subjectivity and existence are absolutely linked, was ruptured. Things exist beyond and before consciousness, before subjectivity and the self. What are these things? What underlies and underpins our ability to watch ourselves think and to say “I am”? This is the question to which inquiry now needed to address itself. To those relations and forces which affect and shape the individual mind but are outside individual consciousness Freud gave the name “das Es,” the German third-person neutral singular pronoun. “The id,” Freud’s English translators decided. IT. That…something. We say 'it’ because “that which acts but is not the individual consciousness” is kind of bulky. But Freud’s concept is not adequate. “What a mistake,” D&G write on the first page of Anti-Oedipus, “to have ever said *the* id.” It’s not the idea of unknown forces that bothers D&G, but the singularity, the definite article, the oneness - the idea that behind the subject is simply another, deeper subject, a second, hidden self. What kind of explanation would that be? Like a dictionary definition that includes the word being defined, THE id, the irreducible singularity of the individual unconscious, is inadequate to explain the substrate of the self, the materials and forces from which the subject is constructed and the process by which that construction takes place. And without a doubt, it is a process that we are in search of here, not a thing. A thing is not an explanation. “Machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines…Something is produced, not mere metaphors.” To ask what “it” *is* is to return to the other of subjectivity the position of a subject - centered, stable, observable. The question must be reconfigured if we are to get anywhere at all. Hence the emphasis on processes, on becomings and relations. There are two questions which will guide D&G’s entire exploration: “How does it work?” and “What does it do?” Or to put it slightly differently: “Given a certain effect, what machine is capable of producing it? And given a certain machine, what can it be used for?” It is thus never a question of truth. Truth is a correlate of being - the simplistic Platonic question that asks, “What is it?” It is always a question of action and activity, of processes and becoming.  To say that the schizophrenic “resists” the forces of capitalism and acts on their “actual” desires is to reinstate the stability of truth as the substrate of the subject, to suggest that beneath the subject constructed by capitalism is an unconscious that is nothing but a deeper, truer subject - a subject more truly the subject than the subject itself.  Does that sound absurdly complex and incoherent?  Yeah, that’s because it is.  The subject has “desires,” but beneath those desires are not more true, “actual” desires, but desire itself, not a desire for or a desire to but desire as the flow, as force, as the energy that connects machines together.  The schizophrenic’s desires are schizophrenic precisely because they are not the schizophrenic’s.  Desire never belongs to anybody - the schizophrenic is simply in a much better position to recognize that fact.  The subject is an operating system - it’s nothing but a thin, reasonably coherent interface designed to facilitate a user experience.  Beneath it are endless series of programs, connections, links, chips, nodes, processers.  We want to strip back the screen and watch the bits and bytes connect.  We want to figure out what makes the damn thing tick.  It will be a wild ride. An expansive, immense one, spanning the whole of history and the entire surface of the world, every cell and organelle in the body and the entire human race’s collective orgasms.  How could it be anything else when the root of the entire problem is the idea of discrete entities?  Here, again, the Cartesian cogito furnishes us with the best example - the mind that can only become certain of its own existence by denying the possible existence of everything around it.  Individuals, unique and irreducible, trapped inside their unique and irreducible flesh suits.  Fuck that.  “The real truth of the matter - the glaring sober truth that resides in delirium - is that there is no such thing as relatively independent spheres or circuits."  The analytic mode - breaking things down, separating them, examining things in antiseptic isolation - is not sufficient.  Everything relates to everything, everything connects with everything.  Any time we say that something is, the verb "to be” means the exact same thing.  All things are in the same way - this is the claim of substantial unity, the univocity of Scotus and Spinoza, that is the Deleuzian heart of Deleuze & Guattari.  Deleuze is the metaphysics; Guattari is the schizophrenia.  Everything is necessary.  It’s all a part of the same giant mess of quivering, stuttering connections and larval, productive flows. 

In Marx we find a history of social processes that never adequately explains interiority.  In Freud we find a history of interior processes that never adequately explains sociality.  The series of binaries that govern this separation - inside/outside, self/other, personal/social, private/public, mind/body - are the false divisions, the inadequate analytic distinctions that pry open the subject only to find…another, deeper subject.  More of the same.  This is the problem of hermeneutics, of interpretation.  Interpretation seeks to determine what a thing truly is.  In the Freudian concept of repression no less than in the Marxian concept of false consciousness, there is the supposition of the latent and the manifest, the visible surface which we see and the true thing hiding beneath it, the real meaning of the things we perceive.  But this is sleight of hand, because every hermeneutic in fact presupposes knowledge of the thing it supposedly sets out to discover.  D&G do not want interpretation.  They want schizoanalysis, an open-ended process of discovery the parameters and protocols of which are discovered as we go along.  Things will get messy.  But that’s OK.  Because things are messy.  Sometimes there will be tautologies and dead ends and circles, because life is a series of feedback loops, not a clearly sign-posted highway.  

Speaking of clearly sign-posted highways:  if interpretation and the lure of the hermeneutic is the first thing we reject, we equally reject teleology, the idea of a destination known in advance, of a future that emerges clearly and inevitably from a present that is taken for granted as fully understood.  No, no.  We sort of see the past.  We barely understand the present.  Who the fuck knows what the future will bring.  The inevitability with which Marxism, especially, claims to see the future unfold out of the present is an error, to Deleuze & Guattari.  The idea that “schizophrenia is capitalism’s annihilating angel,” as Peretti’s article suggests, is not what D&G suggest at all.  The inevitability of teleology as just as invalid is the certainty of interpretation - in both cases, there is a claim to know in advance what is yet to be discovered.  Nonsense.  Again, what we are interested in are processes - connections, shifts, movements, relations, changes.  Not beginnings and endings, not stages of dialectical development, not aims or truths or any of that knowing, presumptuous horseshit.  These are all things.  Processes do not have beginnings and endings, they only have magnitudes:  more, and less.  Changes are not conclusions or inevitabilities, but simply oscillations.  Faster and slower.  Bigger and smaller.  Stable and chaotic.  What goes up must come down.  What deterritorializes must reterritorialize.  What escapes coding in one place must be coded in another.  History isn’t a straight line, it’s an insane, stuttering doodle.  What was can be again - but different, because you can never piss in the same river twice.  Heraclitus said that.  Or maybe it was Patti Smith.  One of those growly old punk dudes, anyway. 

But if you asked, “Would you let the statue of liberty burn in order to save your child? your spouse? someone you loved a great deal?” the tune abruptly changes. At the very least, there’s a hesitation. Even if they deny it, I’m willing to bet that gun to their head, the answer would be “yes.”  

The basic problem here is that people have a hard time seeing outside their own sphere of influence, and empathizing beyond the few people who are right in front of them. You’ve got your immediate family, whom you love; your friends, your acquaintances, maybe to a certain degree the people who share a status with you (your religion, your race, etc.)–but beyond that? People aren’t real. They’re theoretical. 

But a national monument? That’s real. It stands for something. The value of a non-realized anonymous life that exists completely outside your sphere of influence is clearly worth less than something that represents freedom and prosperity to a whole nation, right?

People who think like this lack the compassion to realize that everyone is in someone’s immediate sphere of influence–that everyone is someone’s lover, or brother, or parent. Everyone means the world to someone. And it’s the absolute height of selfishness to assume that their lives don’t have value just because they don’t mean the world to you. 

an example: so, as the nazis began war against france, the staff of the louvre began crating up and shipping out the artworks. it was vital to them (for many reasons) that the nazis not get their hands on the collections, and hitler’s desire for them was known, so they dispersed the objects to the four winds; one of the curators personally traveled with la gioconda, mona lisa herself, in an unmarked crate, moving at least five times from location to location to avoid detection.

they even removed and hid the nike of samothrace, “winged victory,” which is both delicate, having been pieced back together from fragments, and incredibly heavy, weighing over three metric tons.

the curators who hid these artworks risked death to ensure that they wouldn’t fall into nazi hands. and yes, they are just paintings, just statues. but when i think about the idea of hitler capturing and standing smugly beside the nike of samothrace, a statue widely beloved as a symbol of liberty, i completely understand why someone would risk their life to prevent that. if my life was all that stood between a fascist dictator and a masterpiece that inspired millions, i would be willing to risk it. my belief in the power and necessity of art would demand i do so.

if, however, a nazi held a gun to some kid’s head (any kid!) and asked me which crate the mona lisa was in, they could have it in a heartbeat. no problem! i wouldn’t even have to think about it. being willing to risk my own life on principle doesn’t mean i’m willing to see others endangered for those same principles.

and that is exactly where the conservative hard-right falls right the fuck down. they are, typically, entirely willing to watch others suffer for their own principles. they are perfectly okay with seeing children in cages because of their supposed belief in law and order. they are perfectly willing to let women die from pregnancy complications because of their anti-abortion beliefs. they are alright with poverty and disease on general principle because they hold the free-market sacrosanct. and i guess from their own example they would save the statue of liberty and let human beings burn instead.

but speaking as a leftist (i’m more comfortable with socialist tbh), my principles are not abstract things that i hold aside from life, apart or above my place as a human being in a society. my beliefs arise from being a person amidst people. i don’t love art for art’s sake alone, actually! i don’t love objects because they are objects: i love them because they are artifacts of our humanity, because they communicate and connect us, because they embody love and curiosity and fear and feeling. i love art because i love people. i want universal health care because i want to see people universally cared for. i want universal basic income because people’s safety and dignity should not be determined by their economic productivity to an employer. i am anti-war and pro-choice for the same reason: i value people’s lives but also their autonomy and right to self-determination. my beliefs are not abstractions. i could never value a type of economic system that i saw hurting people, no matter how much “growth” it produced. i could never love “law and order” more than i love a child, any child, i saw trapped in a cage.

This is also why they think “get a job” is useful advice. In their heads they honestly do not understand why the NPCs who make up the majority of the human race can’t just flip a switch from “no job” to “job.” When they say “get a job” they’re filing a glitch report with God and they honestly think that’s all it takes.

Conservatives view social issues as universal constants that fundamentally are unable to be changed, like the weather. You can try to alter your own behavior to protect yourself (you can carry an umbrella), and you can commiserate about how bad the weather is, but you can’t stop it from raining. This is why conservatives blame victims of rape for dressing immodestly or for drinking or for going out at night: to them, those things are like going out without an umbrella when you know it’s going to rain. 

“But then why do conservatives try to stop things they dislike by making them illegal, like drug use or immigration or abortion?” And the answer is: they’re not. They know perfectly well that those things will continue. No amount of studies showing that their methods are ineffective will matter to them because effectiveness is not the point. The point is to punish people for doing bad things, because punishing people is how you show your disapproval of their actions; if you don’t punish them, then you’re condoning their behavior. 

This is why they will never support rehabilitative prisons, even though they reduce crime. This is why they will never support free birth control for everyone, even though that would reduce abortions. This is why they will never support just giving homeless people houses, even though it’s proven to be cheaper and more effective at stopping homelessness than halfway houses and shelters. It’s not about stopping evil, because you can’t; it’s about saying definitively what is Bad and what is Good, and we as a society do that by punishing the people we’ve decided are bad. 

“The BwO [body without organs] is the egg. But the egg is not regressive; on the contrary, it is perfectly contemporary, you always carry it with you as your own milieu of experimentation, your associated milieu. The egg is the milieu of pure intensity, spatium not extension, Zero intensity as principle of production. There is a fundamental convergence between science and myth, embryology and mythology, the biological egg and the psychic or cosmic egg: the egg always designates this intensive reality, which is not undifferentiated, but is where things and organs are distinguished solely by gradients, migrations, zones of proximity. The egg is the BwO. The BwO is not "before" the organism; it is adjacent to it and is continually in the process of constructing itself.”

—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Some egg theory for all u deleuzeheads out there itching for an omelette without organs, an omelette of pure potential…