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To have a friend, to look at him, to follow him with your eyes, to admire him in friendship, is to know in a more intense way, already injured, always insistent, and more and more unforgettable, that one of the two of you will inevitably see the other die. One of us, each says to himself, the day will come when one of the two of us will see himself no longer seeing the other and so will carry the other within him a while longer, his eyes following without seeing, the world suspended by some unique tear, each time unique, through which everything from then on, through which the world itself–and this day will come–will come to be reflected quivering, reflecting disappearance itself: the world, the whole world, the world itself, for death takes from us not only some particular life within the world, some moment that belongs to us, but, each time, without limit, someone through whom the world, and first of all our own world, will have opened up in a both finite and infinite–mortally infinite–way. That is the blurred and transparent testimony bourne by this tear, this small, infinitely small, tear, which the mourning of friends passes through and endures even before death, and always singularly so, always irreplaceably.

–Jacques Derrida, “The Taste of Tears”

In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness, however, it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness: the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. He who cannot sink down on the threshold of the moment and forget all the past, who cannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growing dizzy and afraid, will never know what happiness is -- worse, he will never do anything to make others happy. Imagine the extremest possible example of a man who did not possess the power of forgetting at all and who was thus condemned to see everywhere a state of becoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowing asunder in moving points and would lose himself in the stream of becoming: like a true pupil of Heraclitus, he would in the end hardly dare to raise his finger. Forgetting is essential to action of any kind, just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of everything organic. A man who wanted to feel historically through and through would be like one forcibly deprived of sleep, or an animal that had to live only by rumination and ever repeated rumination. Thus: it is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting. Or, to express my theme even more simply: there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture.

--Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

Anyone know how Deleuze would respond to Nietzsche’s critique of pure becoming, as expressed here? My suspicion is that Deleuze would largely agree with Nietzsche’s insistence on the power of forgetting, although, of course, the Frenchman is the philosopher of ‘becoming-other’ par excellence. I suppose Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche would be a fine place to start looking.

The paragraph following the quote above, which considers the ‘plastic power’ of people and cultures, helps clarify Nietzsche’s notion of becoming. Nietzsche defines plastic power as: “...the capacity to develop out of oneself in one’s own way, to transform and incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to recreate broken moulds” (62). The understanding of becoming Nietzsche forwards above suggests the inevitable paralysis of an all-encompassing memory. The act of forgetting, in contrast to memory, allows for self-creation and self-transformation, forms of self-fashioning that constitutes a key mode of becoming for Deleuze. So, each philosopher employs the term ‘becoming’ in a different sense -- both of which allow room for self-cultivation.

It would be misguided to claim that Nietzsche and Deleuze share the same understanding of becoming, however. A key difference between each thinkers’ view of becoming is that Nietzsche insists on drawing boundary lines around the self to demarcate the self from the other: “A living thing can be healthy, strong and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon; it if is incapable of drawing a horizon around itself, and at the same time too self-centred to enclose its own view within that of another, it will pine away slowly or hasten to its timely end” (63). Deleuze only draws these boundaries of self “out of habit, purely out of habit” (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 3), instead opting to subvert and destroy any horizons of the self that give subjects the illusion of interiority or autonomy.

#Nietzsche #becoming #happiness #history #forgetting #Deleuze

syntheticphilosophy

Being” seems to be both “immediate” and simple, but reflection reveals that it itself is, in fact, only meaningful in opposition to another concept, “nothing.” In fact, the attempt to think “being” as immediate, and so as not mediated by its opposing concept “nothing,” has so deprived it of any determinacy or meaning at all that it effectively becomes nothing. That is, on reflection it is grasped as having passed over into its “negation.” Thus, while “being” and “nothing” seem both absolutely distinct and opposed, from another point of view they appear the same as no criterion can be invoked which differentiates them. The only way out of this paradox is to posit a third category, “becoming,” which seems to save thinking from paralysis because it accommodates both concepts: “becoming” contains “being” and “nothing” since when something “becomes” it passes, as it were, from nothingness to being. That is, when something becomes it seems to possess aspects of both being and nothingness, and it is in this sense that the third category of such triads can be understood as containing the first two as sublated “moments.

Paul Redding, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition) http://stanford.library.usyd.edu.au/archives/spr2010/entries/hegel/

anorganisch-deactivated20171123

Hegel was adamant – and Adorno would have entirely agreed with him – that in the possible and constant defeat of modern history, what is needed is not atonement or propitiation for sinfulness but more negation, that is, more thinking that refuses to accept its object for what it claims to be. And Adorno would also have again agreed with Hegel that this refusal would necessarily proceed immanently, as a process in which the object is so bound by its own words that by them alone it would be compelled to take the measure of itself, find itself inadequate to its own claims, and willingly shed its own persevering illusion. Only in its own words would it find the compelling resource to rebut them.

Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Unforgiving Art, Unforgivable Nations.” (via mir-nicht)

ystpublications

YST Publications Presents: Dada Night, Fall 2014

hazeofcapitalism

that’s me

...[I]t seemed to me that the powers of difference and repetition could be reached only by putting into question the traditional image of thought. By this I mean not only that we think according to a given method, but also that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think. For example, we suppose that thought possesses a good nature, and the thinker a good will (naturally to 'want' the true); we take as a model the process of recognition -- in other words, a common sense or employment of all the faculties on a supposed same object; we designate error, nothing but error, as the enemy to be fought; and we supposed that the true concerns solutions -- in other words, propositions capable of serving as answers. This is the classic image of thought, and as long as the critique has not been carried to the heart of that image it is difficult to conceive of thought as encompassing those problems which point beyond the propositional mode; or as involving encounters which escape all recognition; or as confronting its true enemies, which are quite different from thought; or as attaining that which tears thought from its natural torpor and notorious bad will, and forces us to think. A new image of thought -- or rather, a liberation of thought from those images which imprison it.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endless prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. . . . There is no erotic situation which, while insinuating and exciting, does not fail to indicate unmistakably that things can never go that far.

--Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

The now is and is not what it is. More precisely, it only ‘scarcely’ is what it is. Insofar as it has been, it no longer is.

— Aporias, Derrida

lumpenfag

Many draw back when faced with affinity. It is, in fact, a lot easier and less demanding to sign up for something, be it an organization, a permanent assembly or a scene, and take up and reproduce formal characteristics, rather than embarking upon a long and never-ending search for comrades with whom to share ideas, analysis and eventual projects. Because affinity is exactly this: a reciprocal knowledge between comrades, shared analysis that leads to prospects of action. Affinity is therefore directed, on one hand, toward theoretical deepening and, on the other, towards intervention in social conflictuality. Affinity is radically situated on the qualitative plane. It aspires to the sharing of ideas and methods, and it does not have infinite growth as its goal. For some comrades, on of the main, often camouflaged preoccupations still seems to be the number. How many are we? What should we do to be more? From the polarization on such a question and from the assessment that today we warren’s many, and given by the fact that may others do not share our ideas (no, also not unconsciously), derives the conclusion that we should, to grow numerically, avoid putting too big an emphasis on certain ideas. These days it is rare to still find those who will try to sell you a membership card to some revolutionary organization, destined to quantitatively grow and aspiring to represent always more exploited; but there are many who think that the best way to get to know others consists of organizing “consensual” activities such as self-organized bars, workshops, concerts, etc. Surely such activities can have their role, but when we face the topic of affinity we are talking about something else. Affinity is not the same thing as friendship. Of course the two are not mutually exclusive, but it is not because we share certain analysis that we sleep together, and vice versa. In the same way, just because we listen to the same music it doesn’t mean we want to struggle in the same way against domination. The search for affinity occurs on an interpersonal level. It is not a collective event, a group affair, where it is always easier to follow than to think for oneself. The deepening of affinity is clearly a matter of thought and action, but in the end affinity is not the result of carrying out an action together, but rather a starting point from which to then pass to action. OK, this is obvious, some might say, but then this would mean that I will not meet many people who could be good comrades, because in some way I would confine myself to affinity. It is true that the search and the deepening of affinity require a lot of time and energy, and that therefore it is not possible to generalize it to all comrades. The anarchic movement of a country, of a city or even a neighborhood cannot become one big affinity group. It is not about enlarging different affinity groups with more comrades, but to make possible the multiplication of autonomous affinity groups. The search, the elaboration and the deepening of affinity leads to small groups of comrades that know each other, share analysis and pass together to action.

Nothing is Finished, essays from anti-prison struggles in Belgium.

I now know that there exists another punctum (another "stigmatum") than the "detail." This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme ("that-has-been"), its pure representation.

In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate Secretary of State W.H. Seward. Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: this will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me to the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What points me, pricks me, is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe that has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

--Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

If we think of tactics as the art of assembling men and weapons in order to win battles, and of strategy as the art of assembling battles in order to win wars, then logistics could be defined as the art of assembling war and the agricultural, economic, and industrial resources that make it possible. If a war machine could be said to have a body, then tactics would represent the muscles and the strategy the brain, while logistics would be the machine's digestive and circulatory systems: the procurement and supply networks that distribute resources throughout an army's body.

--Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Do not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones.

--Walter Benjamin, Reflections

--Poulomi Desai, "I Am a Homosexual Also." From Poulomi Desai and Parminder Sekhon, Red Threads: The South Asian Queer Connection in Photographs. London: Diva Books, 2003.

#homosexual #Poulomi Desai #Parminder Sekhon #Muslim

The time is out of joint. The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts. Old age or youth--one no longer counts in that way. The world has more than one age. We lack the measure of the measure. We no longer realize the wear, we no longer take account of it as of a single age in the progress of history. Neither maturation, nor crisis, nor even agony. Something else. What is happening is happening to age itself, it strikes a blow at the teleological order of history. What is coming, in which the untimely appears, is happening to time but it does not happen in time. Contretemps. The time is out of joint.

--Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

One can no longer assume that war is fought according to the structures of friend/enemy, them/us. Instead, it is that the production of these categories (and the multiple sub-categories that populate them) which itself is internal to ‘war.’ In turn, this necessitates a change in the way in which we think about war, which becomes less associated with transcendent categories of power (good/evil, friend/enemy) such as are associated with a moment of sovereign decision, and more concerned with the immanent production of identities and lives: with what we might call a political economy whereby the production of life is itself the production of war. Economy thus becomes as great a concern in the analysis of contemporary war as the transcendent principles of law and sovereignty. Hence, whilst the ‘exceptional’ instances of transcendent sovereign domination are easy to find in the recent past—as with, for example, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib—these, Evans and Hardt suggest, may not be the essence of the current paradigm of war. Indeed, there is a potential danger for a politics of resistance or criticism in focusing exclusively on these dramatic examples of sovereign rule. This has the potential to conceal the ‘normalised’ ways in which power operates, through the juridical policing of humanity, through the production and organisation of life, through the regulation of flow and exchange in accordance with the predicates of the economising facets of global Liberal rule. It is to these that we must turn if we are to conceive a politics of resistance adequate to the task of confronting the multifaceted dimensions of war and the martial economy.

—Brad Evans and Laura Guillaume, “Deleuze and War: Introduction”

The process by which the war machine is captured by the state is not itself military, because the military is the outcome of this process. Rather, it is territorial and relates to the circulation of men and things within the state. In the current system, the state has lost control of the war machine, and thus the war machine no longer has war as its object, as this would have to be given by the state. Rather, it is through the political economy, and the interstices of society themselves, that the war machine operates, manifesting itself as a global security order rather than an exceptional moment of war. Although states of exception still present a challenge, the war machine becomes associated with the very fabric of normality as such which, no longer driven by the state, becomes disaggregated from politics: a technocracy of order which presents itself as being the very underlying conditions of life itself.

--Brad Evans and Laura Guillaume, "Deleuze and War: Introduction"

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Tsuenhisha Kimura, ‘The Origin of Illusions’, 1973-1975.

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