complicatio, explicatio, implicatio
complicatie, explicatie, implicatie
Baroque
‘The Baroque artists know well that hallucination does not feign presence, but that precense is hallucinatory.’
Deleuze, The Fold p.125
body
‘The soul and the body can always be truly distinguished, but inseparability traces a coming and going between one level and the other. My unique monad has a body; the part of this body have crowds of monads; each of this monad has a body …’
Deleuze, The Fold p. 108
monad
‘We have seen that the world was an infinity of conversing series, capable of being extended into each other, around unique points. Thus every individual, every individual monad expresses the same world in its totality although it only clearly expresses a part of this world, a series or even a finite sequence.
Deleuze, The Fold p. 60
soul
‘Folds are in the soul and authentically exist only in the soul. That is already true for “innate ideas”: they are pure virtualities, pure powers whose act consists in habitus or arrangements (folds) in the soul, and whose completed acts consists of an inner action of the soul9 an internal deployment). But this is no less true for the world: the whole world is only a virtuality that currently exists only in the folds of the soul which convey it, the soul implementing inner pleats through which it endows itself with a representation of the enclosed world. We are moving from inflection to inclusion in a subject, as if from the virtual to the real, inflection defining the fold, but inclusion defining the soul or the subject, that is, what envelopes the fold, its final cause and it completed act.’
Deleuze, The Fold p. 23
The Fold
It started with the zigzag which I heard in L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. Then I recently came upon The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, the English translation from Le Pli and reading this felt really exiting because of the connection with my work. Which isn’t strange of course because it is inspired by reading Deleuze.
Nietzsche and philosophy
Nietzsches concept of force is therefore that of a force which is related to another force: in this form force is called will. The will (will to power) is the differential element of force. A new conception of the philosophy of the will follows from this. For the will is not exercised mysteriously on muscles and nerves, still less on “matter in general”, but is necessarily exercised on another will. p 7
What the wills in Hegel want is to have there power recognised, to represent their power. According to Nietzsche we have a wholly erroneous conception of the will to power and its nature. This is the slave’s conception, it is the image that the man of ressentiment has of power. The slave only conceives of power as the object of a recognition, the content of a representation, the stake in a competition, and therefore makes it depend, at the end of a fight, on a simple attribution of established values. p 10
The cyclical hypothesis is incapable of accounting for two thing – the diversity of co-existing cycles and, above all, the existence of diversity within the cycle. This is why we can only understand the eternal return as the expression of a principle which serves as an explanation of diversity and its reproduction, of difference and repetition. Nietzsche presents this principle as one of his most important philosophical discoveries. Het calls it will to power. By will to power “I express the characteristic that cannot be thought out of the mechanistic order without thinking away this order itself” p 49
The will to power alone is the one that wills, it does not let itself be delegated or alienated to another subject, ever to force. p 49
It must not be said that active force becomes reactive because reactive forces triumph; on the contrary, they triumph because, by separating active force what it can do, the betray it to the will of nothingness, to a becoming-reactive deeper than themselves. This is why the figures of triumph of reactive forces (ressentiment, bad conscience, and the acetic ideal) are primarily forms of nihilism. p 64
Becoming-active is affirming and affirmative, just as becoming-reactive is negating and nihilistic. p 68
In other words, life goes beyond the limits that knowledge fixes for it, but thought goes beyond the limits that life fixes for it. Thought ceases to be a ratio, life ceases to be a reaction. The Thinker thus expresses the noble affinity of thought and life: life making thought active, thought making life affirmative. In Nietzsche this general affinity is not only the pre-Socratic secret par excellence, but also the essence of art. p 101
Ressentiment is the triumph of the weak as weak, the revolt of the slaves and their victory as slaves. It is their victory that the slaves form a type. The type of the master (the active type) is defined of the faculty of forgetting and the power of acting reactions. The type of slave (the reactive type) is defined by a prodigious memory, by the power of ressentiment; p 117
Who feels pity? … Those who hate everything which is active in life, those who use life to deny and depreciate life, to oppose it to itself. p 150
Zarathustra asks as the sole and first one to do so: ‘How shall man be overcome?’
Gilles Deleuze: Nietzsche and Philosophy
De wil tot macht
zegt Nietzsche bestaat niet in een begeren, zelfs niet in een grijpen, maar in een scheppen, in een schenken. De Macht als wilt tot macht is niet wat de wil wil maar datgene wat wil in het willen.
De wil tot macht zorgt er immers voor dat de actieve krachten bevestigen, dat ze hun eigen verschil bevestigen: in hen is de bevestiging primair, de ontkenning is nooit meer dan een congruentie, een soort overmaat van genot.
Deleuze: Nietzsche, p. 31
The will to power only makes what is affirmed return: it is the will to power which both transforms the negative and reproduces affirmation.
Deleuze: Nietzsche and philosophy, p. 198
The difference between minorities and majorities isn’t their size.
A minority may be bigger than a majority. What defines the majority is a model you have to conform to: the average European adult male city-dweller for example … A minority on the other hand has no model, it’s a becoming, a precess. (p. 173)
We’re moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication. (p. 175)
Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money – and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communication.
Deleuze, Negotiations, 1990
Philosophers aren’t reflective, but creative
What we should in fact do, is stop allowing philosophers to reflect “on” things. The philosopher creates, he doesn’t reflect. (p. 122)
What I’m interested in are the relations between the arts, science and philosophy. There’s no order op priority among these disciplines. Each is creative. The true object op science is to create functions, the true object of art is to create sensory aggregates and the object of philosophy is to create concepts. (p. 123)
Take the most remarkable case, Spinoza: the absolute philosopher, whose Ethics is the foremost book on concepts. But this purest of philosophers also speaks to everyone: anyone can read the Ethics if they’re prepared to be swept up in the wind, its fire. (p. 140)
Deleuze, Negotiations, 1988
Ieder haar eigen Deleuze
Isabelle Stengers leest Deleuze & Guattari weer anders dan andere schrijvers in Deleuze Compendium. Abstracter. Zij denkt voort tijdens het lezen en schrijven en dat is ook wat Deleuze & Guattari beoogden. Zij bieden methoden, wegen, concepten om vanuit te denken. Denkend te leven. Leven is nooit af, leven is perse niet statisch. Of beter, leven is perse dynamisch, in ontwikkeling.
assemblage van mythen
Bij McKenzie Wark kwam ik Yves Citton tegen. Bij Citton Eric Kluitenberg die weer meewerkte aan tijdschrift open waarvan ik een aantal nummers heb. Vervolgens bestelde ik het nummer Hybrid Space waar Citton en Kluitenberg aan meewerkten.
open was/is een uitgave van SKOR, Stichting Kunst in de Openbare Ruimte. De openbare ruimte is dan ook het hoofdthema van het tijdschrift, waarbij telkens weer moet worden gedefinieerd wat openbare ruimte is, hoe dat ervaren kan worden. En ook hoe dat teruggewonnen kan worden want in het neo-liberale tijdperk is de openbare ruimte commerciële ruimte geworden, exploitatieruimte voor Big Money en Big Tech.
Het mooie van Citton is dat hij voortdenkt op Spinoza en Deleuze/Guattari. Met name Spinoza’s affectenleer. Zo schrijft hij o.a. dat we rechtse mythes (aka fake news) niet kunnen bestrijden met feiten maar wel met sociale mythen. En hier is natuurlijk een rol voor de kunsten, het vertellen van mooie onware verhalen aldus Oscar Wilde.
concept – percept – affect
‘I think concepts involve two other dimensions, percepts and affects. That’s what interests me, not images. Percepts aren’t perceptions, they’re packages of sensations and relations that live on independently of whoever experiences them. Affects aren’t feelings, they’re becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them’
Deleuze, 1988