A man like Kant can explain the beautiful in terms of a pure disinterested pleasure — such a knotted definition is not in itself surprising, nor is the kind of cynicism about the potential and limitations of life which is quite effectively communicated thereby. What is curious is that he in fact means to enhance the importance of artistic creation by converting the unsettling power of the artist into a kind of channel to a […]
Flow. There are no words, only silence; no silences, only words. It’s not as bad as you think. It’s worse. There is no beginning which is not also an end. The fire rages on, infinitely. Beyond time. Above the waves. Can you hear them? Singing? So softly, like angels’ whispering secrets to us. In silence. A broken flaw in the scheme, the impossible number. Ten equals one million. One equals Zero. A flock of birds. […]
Events are volcanic. The event opens upon an outside, a beyond, a resonant and enigmatic depth. Events move the world, releasing free and untamed vibrations within and without us. They place being into relation with exteriority. But how does evental resonance work? When the new breaks free it is almost like it suddenly becomes “permitted” to us to learn to see all over again. Perhaps it would be better to say: we are allowed to […]
Aristotle and Light Contemplation, Activity and Happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics For while the whole life of the gods is blessed, and that of men too in so far as some likeness of such activity belongs to them, none of the other animals is happy, since they in no way share in contemplation. Happiness extends, then, just so far as contemplation does, and those to whom contemplation more fully belongs are more truly happy, not […]
“Regimes of signs are not based on language, and language alone does not constitute an abstract machine, whether structural or generative. The opposite is the case. It is language that is based on regimes of signs, and regimes of signs on abstract machines, diagrammatic functions and machinic assemblages that go beyond any system of semiology, linguistics or not. There is no universal propositional logic, nor is there grammaticality in itself, any more than there is […]
To see the universal and all-pervading spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life. That is why my devotion to truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion […]
[My translation follows. A particular difficulty of Deleuze’s unique expressions here is that a verbal form of ‘delirium’ is often used in the original French and in its Italian rendition. I have used the word ‘hallucinate’ to translate ‘delire’ and related words, but have tried to keep the word ‘delirium’ and ‘delirious’ whenever possible.’] Perhaps schizophrenia reveals something that comes to us in pieces, always transforming, constantly enough and everywhere. Don’t stop to be taken, […]
Reaching Out The will to power is not essentially political; it aims beyond politics towards a more subtle possession. The will to power is articulated as a higher expression of the will to live, as opposed to the will to survive. It is the will to exercise power. Its primary function is to be functional, that is: dynamic, active and creative. This kind of willing indicates not a static ideal will rather an energetic, even […]
Just as total war renders ethics derisory, consumer society annihiliates the horizons of authentic experience. God, the State, Father: abysses for the erasure of thought, until the only idea of which we are capable is a permitted one. The unconscious is a battlezone of images, brands, consumption algorithms. Ideology is repetition, a recording surface for lies which grows deeper and more complex with each iteration; the con, however, is always the same: alone we are […]
Wild Magic of the Unbeliever (Dave Makin) How much of our lives are caught up, inextricably, with the imaginary? A dangerous question only because it is silly, and stupid; why? Because it’s answer is both simple and impossible. For we know: none of it is imaginary, it is all real; and we also know: nothing is real, all of it is imaginary. A dangerous idea, a poisonous idea: there is contradiction at the origin. An […]
Reproductive knowledge is power itself. Self-organizing, libidinal desire is the only kind worth (re)producing. Sexual desire annuls systems of control, unties authority, opens the future itself to re-ordering. It unleashes a molecular intensity which vibrates across orders of scale, provokes spontaneous self-organization. Reproduction is entire, mystically whole in its transversal rejuvenation. Paternity is miraculous, the creation of the world. How to teach one’s children is also how to make children. We must close down mythologies, […]
If there were an exact center to the current political impasse, the short circuit of process, it would be this fact: that free discourse first demands a difference. It could be said that truth is always in conflict with destiny. An illegality, more universal than the universe, breaking the symmetry spontaneously and opening the way onto a new reality. In other words, beyond non-identity, there is yet a non-equality which goes deeper than a face-to-face […]
Back to philosophy. In my earlier post on Kant, I tried to make a distinction between intellectual intuiton and empirical sensation. Kant will say something like: we cannot have a pure intellectual intuition of the object because that would give us the thing-in-itself (also known as the transcendental object). What Kant means is something like: the “transcendental” part of the thing-in-itself means that it serves as the grounds for the possibility of experience. So, the […]
Fractal Ontology 