Toekomst en verleden hebben niet veel zin, wat telt is het tegenwoordig worden: de geografie en niet de geschiedenis, het midden en niet het begin noch het einde, het gras dat in het midden is en dat vanuit het midden groeit, en niet de bomen die een kruin en wortels hebben.
Claire Parnet in gesprek met Gilles Deleuze
als de linguïstiek en de informatica tegenwoordig zo gemakkelijk de rol van repressor spelen, dan komt dat omdat zijzelf functioneren als binaire machines binnen die machtsapparaten, en eerder een totale formalisering van wachtwoorden vormen dan een zuivere wetenschap van linguïstieke eenheden en abstracte informatieve inhouden.
Claire Parnet in gesprek met Gilles Deleuze
DIALOGEN van Gilles Deleuze en Claire Parnet uit 1977 is in 1991 in het Nederlands vertaald door Monique Scheepers. Ik vermoed dat ik het niet lang daarna aangeschaft heb. Nu is het voor de zoveelste keer herlees geniet ik evenzeer als toen.
Ik leerde Deleuze kennen door de expositie Rhizome in het Gemeentemuseum Den-Haag in 1991. Nadat ik eerst de catalogus van die expositie kocht met daarin fragmenten uit Mille Plateaux kocht ik DIALOGEN. Deleuze laat zich niet opsluiten in de academische filosofie maar voert vrijheidsstrijd door denken. Het is een heerlijke steun in het beweeglijke, zich verhoudende, leven.
Hij kan geen school maken, noch deel uitmaken van en school. Er bestaat slechts zwart werk, en clandestien. Niet bewolkt door dromen, fantasma’s of plannen, maar door ontmoetingen.
Gilles Deleuze in gesprek met Claire Parnet
Een goed filosofisch probleem behoeft volgens Deleuze helemaal geen oplossing, het gaat erom dat het je denken voedt en niet sust.
Sarah Posman over Gilles Deleuze in Deleuze Compendium
For his part, Deleuze preferred to refer to a time that he called ‘stratigraphic.’ It is certainly important that philosophies succeed one another in time. Nevertheless, these philosophies are virtually coexistent. Every philosophy is virtually contemporary with every other, even if certain logics creep into those that preceded them, and certain concepts are reclaimed in their original form. Thus, in the present, every system of ethics rivals every other, since, in reality, all logics are in non-dialectical conflict with each other.
More precisely, according to Deleuze, any philosopher worthy of the name – that is to say, any philosopher-creator – traces out a plane within chaos. For concepts are born of thought’s confrontation with chaos. Or, in other words: concepts must be created. They are dated and signed, even if later philosophers must divert them from their original function, hijacking their components and their flows. This means that every new plane, if it is to inaugurate a truly new philosophy, even if it should have originated from an anterior plane, must distinguish itself from and find its own autonomy from the latter. But how? Most fundamentally, it is through assuming his own problematics – even if these problematics are not explicitly thematized – that the philosopher has a chance of tracing such a plane. And, on this plane, a new consistency may be given to chaos, by means of the singular creation of the arsenal of connected concepts that populate it. For Deleuze, the style is the philosopher.
Thoma Duzer – in Memorian: Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) in Collapse III
The common notions are more biological than mathematical.
De common notions (algemene begrippen) zijn het gezichtspunt waaruit de Ethica geschreven is. De common notions vormen de overgang van de tweede naar de derde soort van kennis, we gaan voorbij het verstand en komen in het intuïtieve intellekt als systeem van essentiële waarheden of bewustzijn.
We ervaren de essentie.
One may pass from one body to another, however different, simply by changing the relation between its ultimate parts. For its is only relations that change in the universe as a whole, whose parts remain the same.
Gilles Deleuze – Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza
We may suppose, then, that the discovery of the common notions occurs precisely at the end of the edited part of the Treatise, and at the beginning of the writing of the Ethics: in about 1661 – 1662. But why would this discovery have forced Spinoza to abandon the already-existing version of the Treatise? The explanation is that the common notions emerge at a time when they cannot fulfil their functions or develop their consequences. They are discovered too late relative to the text of the Treatise. They would have to establish a new point of departure for philosophy; but the point of departure has already ben set in geometric ideas.
They would have to determine an adequate mode of knowledge of what exists, and show how one passes from this mode of knowledge to the ultimate mode, knowledge of essences. But because the modes of knowledge have already been defined in the Treatise, there is no place left for the common notions or for the series of fixed and eternal things, which are thus shifted over to the ultimate mode of knowledge, with the knowledge of essences. In short, in order to give the common notions their place and function, it would have been necessary for Spinoza to rewrite the entire Treatise. It is not only that they invalidate the finished part, but they would have modified it. Spinoza prefers to write the Ethics form the perspective of the common notions, although it means postponing a new treatise that would have focussed on the practical problems that are merely outlined at the end of the Ethics, concerning the origin, the formation, and the series of these common notions, along with the corresponding experiment.
Deleuze – Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 120 – 121
the art of the Ethics itself: organizing good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting.
Deleuze – Spinoza Practical Philosophy, p. 119
Let us consider, then, the way in which one passes from the second kind [of knowledge] to the third. In the Ethics, everything becomes clear in this regard: the second and third kind of knowledge are systems of adequate ideas, but very different from one another. Ideas of the third kind are ideas of essences, inner essences of substance constituted by the attributes, and singular essences of modes involved in the attributes; and the third kind goes from essence to essence.
Deleuze – Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 117
The common notions are more biological than mathematical.
De common notions (algemene begrippen) zijn het gezichtspunt waaruit de Ethica geschreven is. De common notions vormen de overgang van de tweede naar de derde soort van kennis, we gaan voorbij het verstand en komen in het intuïtieve intellekt als systeem van essentiële waarheden of bewustzijn.
We ervaren de essentie.
It is by the will to power that a force commands, but is also by the will to power that a force obeys. To these two types or qualities of forces there correspond two faces, two qualia, of the will to power, which are ultimate and fluent, deeper than the forces that derive from theme, for the will to power makes it that active forces affirm, and affirm their difference: in them affirmation is first, and negation is never but a consequence, a sort of surplus of pleasure. What characterizes reactive forces, on the other hand, is their opposition to what they are not, their tendency to limit the other: in theme, negation comes first; through negation, they arrive at a semblance of affirmation. Affirmation and negation are thus the qualia of the will to power, just as action and reaction are the qualities of forces. And just as interpretation finds the principles of meaning in forces, evaluation finds the principles of values in the will to power. Given the preceding terminological precisions, we can avoid reducing Nietzsche’s thought to a simple dualism, for, as we shall seen affirmation is itself essentially multiple and pluralist, whereas negation is always one, or heavily monist.
Yet history presents us with a most peculiar phenomenon: the reactive forces triumph; negation wins the will to power! This is the case not only in the history of man, but in the history of life and the earth. at least on the face it inhabited by man. Everywhere we see the victory of No over Yes, of reaction over action. Life becomes adaptive and regulative, reduced to its secondary forms; we no longer understand what it means to act. Even the forces of the earth become exhausted on this desolate face. Nietzsche calls this joint victory of reactive forces an the will to negate “nihilism” – or the triumph of the slaves.
– Gilles Deleuze, Pure immanence, chapter 3 Nietzsche, p 74/75 –
