Deleuze’s Anti-Humanism

If there really is no shared human nature or essence, and if history really is decision and freedom, how can we justify any political movement? Most importantly, is there a way of thinking politics that does not rely ultimately on economic groups or classes? Can there be an inhuman politics that interrogates the ways in which the image of man as a political subject is produced from the very forces of life and desire? This would mean—and this was the general project of post-1968 philosophy in France—that we need to recognise the positive force of non-economic events. Art, culture, images and ‘affects’ produce, and do not just represent, the distinct forces and terms of cultural and political life. This means that politics is not about the relations between and among humans. For Deleuze, politics begins with the production of distinct human agents from forces and flows of life. And this raises the problem which Deleuze will articulate in different ways in nearly all that he writes: can thinking grasp the forces or differences that precede and produce it? Or, to use Deleuze’s own terminology, can there be a micropolitics? This would consider the ways in which our image of the ‘human’ is formed from events that lie outside human decision. Ian Buchanan has referred to this as ‘metacommentary’, and in doing so has placed Deleuze within the tradition of a far more radical Marxism. The task of thought is to perceive the forces that produce the political and cultural terrain, and not just to accept the already given terms of that terrain.

— Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze

“The key is in the window”

“The key / is in the window, the key is in the sunlight in the window — I have / the key — get married Allen don’t take drugs… . / Love, your mother.”

— Naomi Ginsberg, written from a mental hospital in a last letter to Allen Ginsberg, which arrived two days after her death.

The Thing Itself

[C]ontrary to what phenomenology–which is always a phenomenology of perception–has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.

– Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs

For the “(loved) other,” l’autre (aimé) must remain other, must be kept safe as other, and we must lay down our arms (rendre les armes) and surrender, and by sacrificing or giving up the assault of realism upon the world, to allow the thing itself to slip away — just in order to keep it safe and to show it our love.

– John D. Caputo, “For the Love of the Things Themselves: Derrida’s Hyper-Realism”

Writing of the Night

“In writing of the night, I really could not, I felt I could not, use words in their ordinary connections. Used that way they do not express how things are in the night, in the different stages—conscious, then semi-conscious, then unconscious.”

— James Joyce on Finnegans Wake

Words in [Finnegans Wake] are always overdetermined, signifying on many levels, even many languages, simultaneously. Language is also lapsus linguae, a slip of the tongue, for words in the Wake are constantly slipping away into other words and their associations. The extreme instability of the words makes it seem that the black and white of the written page changes places, as do day and night. Thus the experience of Joyce’s novel will “bright upon us” in a traditional illumination at the same time that it will “nightle.” That is, it will slide us on an iridescent slick of words toward an an unconscious that is, as Lacan asserts, structured as a language—so “plunging [us] to our plight.” Yet this is only a movement toward, one that does not thereby annihilate the daylight world. The letter’s agency does its work neither wholly in consciousness nor in the unconscious.

— Peter Schwenger, “Writing Hypnagogia,” At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature

Staffa, Fingal’s Cave — William Turner

via biblioklept.

 

Being-toward-death

One finds oneself always alone. Despite the heteronomy of existence—the plagiarisms and borrowings—one is incapable of absolute connection, incapable of seeing into the mind of another, and vice versa. Hence, the “one.” Perhaps the test of evolved consciousness is both this recognition and that of “the end,” an end which is ultimate and illimitable.  Until the self is seen as finite, mortal, and without hope of recitation or afterlife, one can only deny and pretend. To be “two” and “ever-present”: these are the ultimate desires, and those which most make a mockery of everyday’s elegy. How little can be said to those who evade with empty platitudes and consolations; to those who do not share in the acknowledgement of their own—our own—ending, who cannot be-toward-death. Everything worth saying begins only after this acceptance.

Language of the Imaginary

“Writing begins only when it is the approach to that point where nothing reveals itself, where, at the heart of dissimulation, speaking is still but the shadow of speech, a language which is still only its image, an imaginary language and a language of the imaginary, the one nobody speaks, the murmur of the incessant and interminable which one has to silence if one wants, at last, to be heard.”

— Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

On the Liminal

Above are some new acquisitions from Labyrinth Books in Princeton. They have a fully-stocked Western Philosophy, Literary Criticism section which houses most of the books I can never find elsewhere. Here’s a quote from the book by Peter Schwenger, At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature:

“ While reading, the mind moves in many directions simultaneously: remembering the text already read, anticipating the text to come, plumbing the implication of what is beneath the reader’s eye at the moment. At the same time, [the] mind is moving within itself to produce a rich flickering of associations and images. These arise not directly from the text but from a realm—notoriously difficult to define—that is more akin to dream than to waking processes of meaning making. To characterize the reading of a literary text as either a fully conscious and rational activity or an immersion into dream is at either extreme to distort the experience. Literature is liminal; and this is so for both the reader and the writer. “

A priori language

“Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never encounter a state where man is separated from language, which he then elaborates in order to “express” what is happening to him: it is language which teaches the definition of man, not the contrary.”

– Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language

Poem with a starting line by Denise Levertov

in this silvery now of living alone:
the floorboards and shutters
mere emblems of eyelids, sleeping
(like the child’s), the knowing

veins of leaves, veins of trees,
skin; cosmos and capillaries
made of stars sleeping, (the same)

without voice or intent, and closing
to world outside, the other
silvery now of being unalterably
(more light) alone (last words) alone,
goethe cioran rilke nietzsche you
me, all (alone).