Is there any merit to Deleuze?

Foucault was somewhat explicit about it, Deleuze clearly dabbled with them but he still always wanted to present himself as a straight-edge thinker.

Sartre dabbled with mescaline, and his objective perception of reality (to see a chair as an object, and not a chair) is basically ego death. Also he had hallucinations for years after his mescaline experiments, so it is fair to assume that he did a fuckload of it.

Not experiencing ego death is really pleb tier

>experience ego death
>read Kant and Hegel
>it's all bullshit now

I'm pretty sure Nietzsche and Schopenhauer had ego deaths on opium and chloral hydrate and could not stand any sort of idealism afterwards. Foucault said a similar thing about about re-reading the French rationalists in the late years of his life.

Go to bed Girardbro, those quotes are not counterarguments despite being rather accurate (except for the desire being [strictly] unconscious and repressed part, that's Freud and Lacan rather than D&G).

> it amounts to nothing

Anyone familiar with concepts such as assemblage(s), bodies without organs, planes of immanence, planes of consistency, intensive differences, etc. should strongly disagree with that. These concepts are quite immediate and practical and the only ones saying that D&G are without solutions are those wanting microfascist or cryptofascist formulas while skipping the necessary and immediate framework that ties desire production to ontology. Hell, even the soviets were concerned on how to change human nature (or whatever term you'd prefer) fundamentally in order to create an ontological socialist man.

Can you give me some examples?

talk to me about bodies without organs.

How is it practical?

That's not me. I'm a big fan of Deleuze. Huge.

has anyone watched alcebedaire? or does anyone know more shit like it?

>Anyone familiar with concepts such as assemblage(s), bodies without organs, planes of immanence, planes of consistency, intensive differences, etc. should strongly disagree with that. These concepts are quite immediate and practical and the only ones saying that D&G are without solutions are those wanting microfascist or cryptofascist formulas while skipping the necessary and immediate framework that ties desire production to ontology. Hell, even the soviets were concerned on how to change human nature (or whatever term you'd prefer) fundamentally in order to create an ontological socialist man.

You have this exactly right, by the way. 100%.

>Nietzsche
nope

he falsely accuses nietzsche of being antidialetic and uses false sources such as "the will to power", which nietzsche never wrote and only his sister randomly edited.

I still can see really mild fractals if I focus on a carpet or anything with that kind of texture and I just did acid once. I think it has a name but I forgot it.

>"the will to power", which nietzsche never wrote
You mean which your mom never wrote

savage

UNATCO?

If you want to ruin Deleuze and Guattari for yourself just read their biographies, they were pathetic losers that were scummy salespeople.

Well there's a lot to say, but basically Deleuze took Nietzsche's plurality of the will as will to power (the self as a plurality of selves, unconscious forces that result in drives that seek to differentiate themselves and thus actualize themselves as potentially conflicting desires and interpretations of the world) and developed these relations of subject-object combinations under the term desiring assemblage (or just assemblage in short) as a critique of the language heavy focus of psychoanalysis and the reductive approach of the behaviorism of his day. In Anti-Oedipus these were desiring machines, in A Thousand Plateaus they are assemblages as to not sound like they glorify the machinic. Assemblages desire their own flow first of all, their 'object' is secondary so don't let the term desire fool you.

The body without organs is basically the empty distance (the desert as D&G put it) between the organizations of organs. That is to say it is an empty space that becomes inhabited. The most basic example is that our skin is covered in erogenous zones that activate with sexual arousal despite sexuality being 'intuitively' organized around genital organs. D&G insist that there are at least several bodies without organs and many to be discovered. Their examples (the masochist's body, the drug user's body, the fallen-in-love's body) are only extreme examples of what we take for granted everyday and these things are possible due to assemblages that are constantly in becoming because becoming is always in-between and brings forth the new: the masochist is between pain and sex for example, in a new connection that does away with past organizations. Language constantly does this: every sentence is caught in intensive assemblages that transcend language and make it possible at the same time. Assemblages create their own intensive meaning this way: I can say the words "I love you" in a million ways with very different emotions and thus very different meanings.

> accuses

You mean praises. And he's sort of right, there is pluralism in Nietzsche. Deleuze (along with Foucault) praised and popularized the Colli-Montinari complete edition of Nietzsche's works which undoes his sister's bad editing. Of course Deleuze never claimed he was writing an orthodox summary of any philosopher, he waa explicit about taking creative liberties and using them to build his own philosophy. He was still closer to Nietzsche than most.

Which ones do you mean? Because Francois Dosse makes Deleuze seem like a literal saint and Guattari as a deeply disturbed, but kind hearted weirdo.

>These concepts are quite immediate and practical and the only ones saying that D&G are without solutions are those wanting microfascist or cryptofascist formulas while skipping the necessary and immediate framework that ties desire production to ontology. Hell, even the soviets were concerned on how to change human nature (or whatever term you'd prefer) fundamentally in order to create an ontological socialist man.

delusional deleuzian

d&g have no influence outside of militaries using their philosophy to develop new ways to wage war

be a yuppie artist or bull doze through some homes in order to get at your enemy. that's deleuze & guattari

>The body without organs is basically the empty distance (the desert as D&G put it) between the organizations of organs. That is to say it is an empty space that becomes inhabited. The most basic example is that our skin is covered in erogenous zones that activate with sexual arousal despite sexuality being 'intuitively' organized around genital organs. D&G insist that there are at least several bodies without organs and many to be discovered. Their examples (the masochist's body, the drug user's body, the fallen-in-love's body) are only extreme examples of what we take for granted everyday and these things are possible due to assemblages that are constantly in becoming because becoming is always in-between and brings forth the new: the masochist is between pain and sex for example, in a new connection that does away with past organizations. Language constantly does this: every sentence is caught in intensive assemblages that transcend language and make it possible at the same time. Assemblages create their own intensive meaning this way: I can say the words "I love you" in a million ways with very different emotions and thus very different meanings.

literally, be a free spirit! wooo! just be weird lol!

Dosse's Intersecting lives? It made them seem like incompetent retards, the best part of the book is the reveal that Deleuze legitimately thought the socialists were winning in 68 and was surprised when they got trounced.

>Deleuze legitimately thought the socialists were winning in 68 and was surprised when they got trounced.

I am not fucking surprised at all.

When you read more about de Gaulle, you'll realize he's probably the best political leader of the 20th century. Him and Teddy Roosevelt.

68 tards got played hard and shot their country in the foot.

this

What did D&G ever do to you?

>Why don't you like the people who contributed to the demise of philosophy as a serious area of academic study
Not even OP btw

a big ass waste of time

seriously, watch this if you understand french
youtube.com/watch?v=uWwrNHpasY4

he's asked what he thinks about drugs, spends half the time saying "hmm we need to think about how this question is framed" then spends the rest of the time being like "dude weed, dude yoga, dude people being snowflakes, do you know theres people who get into trances while doing meditation?"

when you strip d&g of their intimidating terminology and references they make to other philosophers they have nothing to offer

To be fair (I'm ) nearly everybody recognizes that Guattari was both a terrible philosopher and psychologist and a negative influence on the quality of Deleuze's work.

Threadly reminder that their use of schizophrenia is disgusting for a number of reasons.

1. Deleuze personally couldn't stand being around them
2. Guattari in his later work makes it clear that actual schizophrenics are what he calls autists and autists are the enemy of his ontology. When Guattari says "schizophrenic" he means yuppie artist/free spirited upper middle class person.

I didn't get anything out of Difference and Repetition.

And I agree with others that Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche is stupid.

Deleuze's Masochism which he did solo is historically interesting, It's like a weird desperate attempt to defend his favourite author against reality itself.

what's a machine to Deleuze?

They're quite popular in academia and influenced numerous contemporary thinkers. To expect a deleuzian left in itself is retarded, it's like wabting to vote for the Nietzschean Democratic Party or something.

> here's a theoretical point about the body and language
> hurr you're just a hippie

Ok.

I don't recall that. Deleuze always said may 68 was a confused mess, he was just happy that something happened at all.

They made it less boring, yes. But that's about it.

Meh, I don't see Guattari as a bad influence since Deleuze was well on his way to the same area of inquiry (politics, psychopathology, etc.), but Guattari was a bit in denial (in the Freudian sense of denegation) concerning the Oedipus Complex (violently attacking it and giving into it at the same time) and died depressed after many bad and unhealthy life decisions.

That's wrong on both accounts though. Deleuze was as disturbed as anyone else by schizos and D&G mean something very precise by institutional autism.

D&R is a difficult and dense text, pretty much what should be read at the end, Deleuze later regretted the academic style it was written in. As for Nietzsche, for what it's worth, Blanchot came to the same conclusions about difference and repetition in Zarathustra's Eternal Return in the same period that Deleuze was writing D&R and without having read him.

>reality itself

What do you mean? Coldness & Cruelty was indedd a historical piece because it was an early text and written in a pseudo-psychoanalytical style fashinable at the time. Deleuze later said he was glad Guattari rescued him from that.

>What do you mean?
Deleuze's attempts to argue that Sacher-Masoch is a philosophical genius completely ignores Masoch's life; he was a incredible bore, his interest in masochism was basic bitch, didn't understand Women's sexuality and was a terrible husband, etc. none of this protoanarchofeminist Deleuze attempts to argue.

I don't know much about Masoch, but it sounds like you're saying he was bad at masochism which is hilarious even if it is true. In any case, are you familiar with the Body without Organs chapter in ATP? He comes back to masochism (not so much Masoch) there, in a way that's different from the art-representation-phantasm style of Coldness & Cruelty.

But I do agree with you, it sounds at the very least weird to describe Masoch as a hegelian or platonist dialectician as Deleuze tried there.

How does having ego death negate idealism

I'm really interested in his book about cinema. Do I need supplementary reading to tackle it?

for it it is, regarding rhe context, an accussation, because deleuze doenst get nietzsche

true, but not related

What didn't he get? What's Nietzsche's relation to dialectics and to Hegel then?

> They're quite popular in academia

Going nowhere. Lotta hot air and published papers that keeps academics from getting fired.

> hurr you're just a hippie

Hippies aren't Yuppies. Two big differences, although the former tends to lead to the other. D&G solutions are really just that though. Be different. Be unique. Use art to change you and other people's habits/lifestyles. It's insanely idealistic and naive.

> That's wrong on both accounts though. Deleuze was as disturbed as anyone else by schizos and D&G mean something very precise by institutional autism.

How does that disprove anything I said? Actual schizos correspond with what Guattari sees as autism, which he hates. They're taking something terrible, exploiting it and taking it out of context. It's like using Holocaust survivors in your philosophy but you're not actually referring to Holocaust survivors.

I think Postscript on the Societies of Control and C&S are well worth anyone's time.

Postscript is good and written in a non-meme way. Also, it's like 10 pages.

C&S are coffee table books for pseuds.

His interpretation of Nietzsche is fucking terrible though.

Practically every 20th century French post-modernist/structuralist hack tried (and failed) to whitewash Nietzsche of his proto-fascistic tendencies.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not using that to criticize Nietzsche. Those tendencies make him all the more interesting and compelling.

>proto-fascistic
Well Nietzsche was not a nationalist, nor did he in any of my reading seem to favor a military life. He was a romantic and for that the fascists depict him as a forefather, which isn't too far off; but I believe his works can easily be directed at fascism in the same way they are at Christianity. Nietzsche was more of the Jungerian "Anarch".

The loss of ego is only part of a bigger process, in which (either under the effect of drugs or through meditation) not only the idea of the self but every other idea appear as arbitrary and man-made as they truly are. One can still contemplate ideas, but the cultural and social references attached to them are now detatched from ideas themselves.

This is, by the way, how Nietzsche and Schopenhauer both percieved values, concepts and beliefs (reaching opposite conclusions, although their epistemologial root is the same).

>as man made as they truly are
As opposed to what? Animal made?

>me approximately five years ago

Stay away from poststructuralism, kids... mmmk?

Trascendent ideas.

"The biggest problem I find with this bullshit is that any insight derived from psychedelic experiences is still merely the interpretation of phenomena.

There is nothing a priori available in any drug based experience that is not available in any regular everyday experience. The best it can do is intuitively reveal certain phenomenological potentialities of the brain but these potentialities are either widely understand on a neurological level or simply imagination manipulations which while may be amusing on a personal psychological basis ultimately reveal nothing of substance. Certainly not of substance to the issues he's referring to.

In other words, junkies are full of shit.
All they manage to do is exclude the possibility of reasonable empathic judgement by rendering their personal experiences allegedly inaccessible to us muggles which gives them the unwarrented courage to propose any nonsense they wish based on vague anecdotal evidence without fear of scrutiny."

>nor did he in any of my reading seem to favor a military life

Wrong on this count.

He served quite proudly (albeit not nationalistically/patriotically) in the Prussian military when he was young, and in the Will to Power he states that you should basically enter into a period of military service in order to learn discipline of the self and of others (alongside the art of commanding and obeying).

>Nietzsche was more of the Jungerian "Anarch".

Not sure about that.

There are a couple of things about Nietzsche which lead to endless confusion, which are as follows:

1) He believed in the military and war, but not in the state - nor in nationalism/patriotism. In his own words (paraphrasing), he wanted wars - but wars fought on the basis of (competing) ideologies, rather than on behalf of nations/states.

2) Linking with #1, he believed in rank and hierarchy - which generally disqualifies him from anarchy. That said, he did not believe in the state - and moreover tended to hate it. THAT said, he nonetheless (to borrow from Marx) believed in the state insofar as it could "manage the affairs of the whole herd". He believed that 'Great' and higher men should not only be permitted to transcend the state, but moreover that they would probably do so irrespective of the state's wishes/actions/etc.

Nice copypasta. Not totally incorrect tho.

But what if phenomenological introspection leads to metaphysical insight? Many people make this argument regarding the benefits of meditation and it seems it could be applied to psychedelics too.

In any case, dismissing all junkies outta hand doesn't seem like exercising philosophical charity. I've not met a single psychedelic user that said their insights were infallible or inaccessible to others as your quote claims.

Well the anarch is to anarchist is what a monarch is to monarchists if that helps. I didn't know he served in the military; much less that he supported it as a way of learning servitude, but he is surprising in a lot of ways.

Also
>widely understood on a neurological level
(Citation needed)

> D&G solutions are really just that though. Be different. Be unique. Use art to change you and other people's habits/lifestyles. It's insanely idealistic and naive.

But that's simply not true. Difference in Deleuze's sense has nothing to do with being different from others, he even criticizes the 'beautiful soul' understanding of difference. And singularity has nothing to do with uniqueness if it is understood, along with differece, as pre-individual. And even art has little to do with artistic expression, instead being used as Nietzsche used it, as a domain of excess that transcends natural-cultural distinctions. It may be idealistic and naive, but it is by no means the vague feel good nonsense that you seem to be presenting it as.

> How does that disprove anything I said? Actual schizos correspond with what Guattari sees as autism, which he hates. They're taking something terrible, exploiting it and taking it out of context. It's like using Holocaust survivors in your philosophy but you're not actually referring to Holocaust survivors.

D&G said their favorite formula from AO was "we've never seen a schizophrenic". Now you could interpret this, as many did, saying that they are vague or misuse the term. Or you could actually try to understand that mental illness as a subjective state of a patient depends at least to some extent on the discourses and contexts which shape it. D&G's antipsychiatry was aimed at those creating lifelong patients with no chance of escape, forever a doomed alterity. Of course some cannot be helped due to their condition, but many are simply turned away from the world ("autistic") by institutions. D&G disliked those schizos who lived [through] psychoanalytic interpretations repeating every banality they heard said about them like it was the clearest truth available. And having met some psychotics (diagnosed and medicated outside of psychoanalysis) interested in Lacan, I can't say I blame D&G for disliking that.

You probably make some valid points (D&G admitted that they can't guarantee anything im advance and don't have world changing formulas in the way Marx did, for better or worse), but so far you are just repeating every already debunked banality ever spouted about them.

Yeah, Nietzsche was an armchair aristocrat. Not quite Junger's anarcho-botanism.

Georg Brandes referred to him as a 'radical aristocrat' in a letter, which Nietzsche regarded as "one of the shrewdest observations ever made about [me]" (paraphrasing)

That pretty much said it all to me.

you should familiarize yourself with most of the films/directors mentioned in the bibliography

Is there any flavor to snow?

Yellow snow?

Zappa is shit. No merit at all.

To be fair, Deleuze is correct in stating that in Nietzsche there is a counter-cultural movement that can't be taken ovsr and institutinalized by power in the same way that it was possible with Marx and Freud, the other masters of suspicion according to Ricoeur. For every proto-fascist statement there's a statement that says you shouldn't blindly follow a formula set by a master and for every statement praising aristocracy there's another one about the contingency and arbitrarity (but also necessity in a sense) of one will over another. I'm not saying this makes Nietzsche some kind of liberal, he was all about discipline and mastery, but it does make him much more nuanced than simply a power hungry invalid worshipping warriors.

>For every proto-fascist statement there's a statement that says you shouldn't blindly follow a formula set by a master

Because he tends to advocate *being* the master.

>for every statement praising aristocracy there's another one about the contingency and arbitrarity (but also necessity in a sense) of one will over another

Not so sure about this. I can recall about 2 aphorisms where he mentions, in a Realpolitik vein, that the rich/powerful should not ride roughshod over the 'herd', but his aristocracy clearly increased with time - as you can tell when reading what he says about the socialists/rabble-rousers/etc.

>but it does make him much more nuanced than simply a power hungry invalid worshipping warriors.

It's clear from his nigh religious reverence of Goethe that his vision of the great and powerful extends to more than mere warriors, but even with this nuance in mind, it is still the great and powerful whom he admires most. Specifically Caesar/Napoleon/Frederick the Great/etc.

> Because he tends to advocate *being* the master.

True, but my point is that a society in which all are masters (maybe not in fact, but rather culturally) would be quite different from any aristocratic or fascist society so far, if it is even possible.

As for my second point, I wasn't precise enough. I did not mean individual will, but rather pre-individual forces constituting will(s). Of course Nietzsche was against hedonism (the dominion of plurality of appetites) and for mastery and hierarchy of wills, but he understood that there is something contingent about which will or drive came to dominate, hence will to power as a play and conflict of unconscious forces. Point being, any society that takes such things into calculation should be quite different from one which brutally represses some wills over others, even if decadence is aknowledged.

Well, I kind of am, reading through it. The thing is, my literary knowledge comes from art analysis and critique and art itself and I'm afraid I'll be ramsacked without some base.

If you go into it understanding that it is still a philosophical work, and a very difficult one at that, you shouldn't have to worry too much and just take Deleuze's advice to skim over what you don't understand and hope that the dots will connect eventually.

Aight, thanks.

deleuze is the fucking shit yo i'm obsessed w/ his philosophy now
he's the anti-hegel!

He was an ambulance coach driver. Still military I suppose...

spinozism is diabolical

thanks for the tip, dumbo

That's what makes it so delicious

"We" (I'm using this in the somewhat edgy and projective sense of the enlightened people of Western civilization, the stuff we're taught in grade school, the cliches that dominate public thought, etc.) say that it's good to look at things from different viewpoints, to not be limited to one mindset. We're astonished at polymaths and Renaissance men, and, theoretically, are willing to admit that being able to look at the world from various disciplines such as philosophically, scientifically (and within science from the point of view as such things as physics, biology, neurology, chemistry, botany, etc.), mathematically, etc., would be a great vantage-point and reveal to us more about the world, and that looking at things from different viewpoints is a sign of intelligence and can lead to new discoveries.

We're even able to admit that Kekule came up with the structure of the benzene molecule in a daydream and Watson the structure of DNA in a dream. We're able to say the unconscious mind holds great potentials for solving new problems, and that it's good to let our subconscious go over certain ideas, since it can see things our conscious mind can't. We're able to admit that some things it's better to ponder from a completely calm and relaxed standpoints, and we're also able to admit that sometimes the experience of being healthier and more energetic can also change a person's worldview entirely and make them see and think of new things.

The trope of the writer drinking so he can write more emotionally and sincerely, even have the ability to write, is accepted as a trope; and smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee as stimulants for a mental boosts while doing hard mental work is also not stigmatized, and we're ready to admit that maybe some scientists and thinkers couldn't have done all they did without cigarettes and coffee.

Yet, there is still the idea that the energetic boost of cocaine or amphetamines, the relaxing depressant effects of opium, the variously disorienting and euphoric effect of marijuana, and all the host of almost indescribable emotional and mental changes induced by psychedelics/dissociatives/hallucinogens all are worthless mindsets from which one can gain nothing.