“ What disturbed us was that in renouncing judgment we had the impression of depriving ourselves of any means of distinguishing between existing beings, between modes of existence, as if everything were now of equal value. But is it not rather judgment that presupposes preexisting criteria (higher values), criteria that preexist for all time (to the infinity of time), so that it can neither apprehend what is new in an existing being, nor even sense the creation of a mode of existence? Such a mode is created vitally, through combat, in the insomnia of sleep, and not without a certain cruelty toward itself: nothing of all this is the result of judgment. Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence. For the latter creates itself through its own forces, that is, through the forces it is able to harness, and is valid in and of itself inasmuch as it brings the new combination into existence. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge.
— Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical
common notions archive 
Thu, July 15. 2010
Tue, July 13. 2010
“ The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles. A composition of speeds and slownesses on a plane of immanence. In the same way, a musical form will depend on a complex relation between speeds and slownesses of sound particles. It is not just a matter of music but of how to live: it is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms.
— deleuze
Thu, July 1. 2010
“ This question of speed is important and also very complex. It doesn’t mean the first in the race: you can be late through speed. It doesn’t mean changing either: you can be invariable and constant through speed. Speed is to be caught in a becoming - which is not a development or an evolution. One must be like a taxi, queue, line of flight, traffic jam, bottleneck, green and red lights, slightly paranoid, brushes with the police.
— deleuze
“ Capture is always a double-capture, theft a double-theft, and it is that which creates not something mutual, but an asymmetrical block, an a-parallel evolution, nuptials, always ‘outside’ and ‘between’. So this is what it would be, a conversation.
— deleuze
“ Experimentation is involute, the opposite of the overdose. It is also true of writing; to reach this sobriety, this simplicity which is neither the end nor the beginning of something.
— deleuze
Thu, December 24. 2009
“ …we don’t laugh simply to mark and ‘correct’ a linguistic fault or deficiency, we laugh at the ‘miraculous’ occurrence of the surplus-sense that was produced from that very failure or nonsense. We don’t laugh because spirit or thought failed to be expressed, or didn’t get through correctly, we laugh because a thought or spirit did emerge, materialize ‘out of nothing’ (but words).
— Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy
“ In the contemporary ideological climate it has become imperative that we perceive all the terrible things that happen to us as ultimately something positive—say as a precious experience that will bear fruit in our future life. Negativity, lack, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, are perceived more and more as moral faults—worse, as a corruption at the level of our very being or bare life. There is a spectacular rise of what we might call bio-morality (as well as morality of feelings and emotions), which promotes the following fundamental axiom: a person who feels good (and is happy) is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person. It is this short circuit between the immediate feelings/sensations and the moral value that gives its specific color to the contemporary ideological rhetoric of happiness….The bio-morality…is replacing the classical notion of responsibility with the notion of a damaged, corrupt being: the unhappy and the unsuccessful are somehow corrupt already on the level of their bare life, and all their erroneous actions or nonactions follow from there with an inexorable necessity. In other words, the problem is not simply that success and efficiency have become the supreme values of our late capitalist society (as we often hear from critics of this society)—there is nothing particularly new in this; social promotion of success (defined in different ways) has existed since time immemorial. The problem is, rather, that success is becoming almost a biological notion, and thus the foundation of a genuine racism of successfulness. The poorest and most miserable are not longer perceived as a socioeconomic class, but almost as a race of their own, as a special form of life….we are no longer dealing with racism in its traditional sense of hatred toward other races, but also and above all with a production of (new) races based on economic, political, and class differences and factors, as well as with the segregation based on these differences.
— Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy
“ Kafka gives to humor and irony their full modern significance in agreement with the transformed character of the law. Max Brod recalls that when Kafka gave a reading of The Trial, everyone present, including Kafka himself, was overcome by laughter—as mysterious a phenomenon as the laughter that greeted the death of Socrates. A spurious sense of tragedy dulls our intelligence; how many authors are distorted by placing a childishly tragic construction on what is more often the expression of an aggressively comic force! The comic is the only possible mode of conceiving the law, in a peculiar combination of irony and humor.
In modern thought irony and humor take on a new form: they are now directed at a subversion of the law. — Gilles Deleuze, Masochism
In modern thought irony and humor take on a new form: they are now directed at a subversion of the law. — Gilles Deleuze, Masochism
Wed, October 28. 2009
“ The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.
— Deleuze, logic of sense
Wed, August 26. 2009
“ In their book on old age, written while they were aging themselves, they ask what philosophy is about, and they answer that philosophy is friendship, and (to use Buddhist language) the Great Compassion: it is the capacity to walk together along the abyss of meaning gaping under our feet. In that last book the two schizo philosophers talk about old age and schizo pain, and the too quick quickening of signs and ideas running away without ever getting caught.
— Franco Berardi, Soul at Work
Fri, July 3. 2009
re Eliot quote below
Randomly stumbled across Silas Marner — an unread book in someone else’s bookcase — immediately drawn to the image of non-nomadic life, a rarity in today’s cultural vocabulary. Peddlers, knife-grinders, vanished figures among contemporary wanderers. The linking of specialized skill with wandering, both objects of villagers’ suspicion. Wandering meant something powerful then, a source of magic, superstition. Today we embrace the nomad but don’t always know what it means, reducing it to a well-heeled traveler, a global technocrat. The past may be a myth, but an anachronism is always timely.
Thu, July 2. 2009
“ In that far-off time superstition clung easily round every person or thing that was at all unwonted, or even intermittent and occasional merely, like the visits of the peddler or the knife-grinder. No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin; and how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?
— George Eliot, Silas Marner
