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BUMP*
well, perhaps I'm missing something but there doesn't seem to have been any sustained conversation about deleuze here despite some interest, so I'm adding my voice to the interest and bumping the thread in the meantime. when I was thinking about why there might not be any sustained conversation it came back, in part, to the difficulty of actually having a conversation about philosophy which is grounded on the fact that philosophical texts - in the 'continental' tradition at least, or perhaps, more accurately, in the tradition of the 'philosophy of difference' - are not about objects but operate as problematising constructs. thus if the problem isn't shared then the conversation rapidly reduces to an opinion exchange about the author or text, none of which is that interesting in the long term for anybody other than students deeply engaged in their attempts to incorporate a thinker into their own thought.
the suggestion then would be to try and draw out some sort of shared problem, perhaps one that is shared with deleuze if that is where the conversation is aimed. my own prejudice is to foreground the problem of a conversation but that is because it's part of my own personal obsession at the moment as I work on a text that is to a large extent a reading of deleuzian concepts in relation to other tactical situations, such as magic, communication, revolution and violence. such a prejudice, however, probably wouldn't get very far since it is related to my own dynamic of thought in the present moment. there are, however, a number of other areas that could be addressed.
anti-oedipus, for example, addresses the problem of ideology and revolution. difference and repetition the problem of genesis and determination. the problem of a thousand plateaus is the multiple, whist that of what is philosophy is the problem of thought. the logic of sense addresses the problem of genesis and meaning (hence it's very close relation to difference and repetition, the two should always be read in conjunction I think, with the expressionism book on spinoza a close companion - unsurpisingly really since these three texts were all part of an explicitly closely worked project of deleuze). of course, these big broad problem areas all need to be addressed through the concrete, deleuze would say, which in practice would mean a specific passage, concept or issue. given that the thread began with anti-oedipus and given that in anti-oedipus deleuze makes a break or move away from the earlier work that was focussed more on issues of determination and towards the overall dynamic of his later work which focussed more on practice, perhaps the interesting issue is the problem of schizophrenia or more accurately, as someone else mentioned, schizo-analysis.
In difference and repetition Deleuze at one point, when discussing the chink of light that Kant briefly opened with his concept of the intuition, claims that 'schizophrenia in principle...characterises the highest power of thought, and opens Being directly on to difference' (DR 58, athlone edition). the reaction to such claims usually comes down to a few rather knee-jerk reactions - how can you valorise such a terrible ordeal etc or, alternatively, if thought is really such a chaos then what use is it? if these reactions were not immediately accepted but put aside, and deleuze was given the benefit of a generous reading, what would prompt such a peculiar statement? |
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