"Continental islands serve as a reminder that the sea is on top of the earth, taking advantage of the slightest sagging in the highest structures; oceanic islands, that the earth is still there, under the sea, gathering its strength to punch through to the surface. We can assume that these elements are in constant strife, displaying a repulsion for one another." Right from the opening of the text, Deleuze uses the dynamic of surface/depth that is explored throughout Difference & Repetition and The Logic of Sense and that emergence involves differential relations of forces exerting a kind of pressure, tension, or in this case, "constant strife". I only started to dig into the Desert Island text while exploring Deleuze's use of the "volcanic" as a notion of the subterranean or background rumblings of such energetic strife.
just arriving at your channel for the first time. amazing work, thank you so much for making this series! been meaning to refresh my knowledge of deleuze since uni and this has been super helpful :D
Thank you very much, Daniel! Of course you're more than welcome to ask any question, I'll do my best to answer ;) I always feel a bit torn between making things simple and not loosing too much of the technical "oomph" that make Deleuze's texts so fascinating. It's a bit of a gamble, but questions are quite useful to clarify things when needed, so don't hesitate if you have any!
I've only come across Deleuze's DR recently, and am now engaged in a heavy struggle. Your videos provide some sort of orientation, which I'd like to thank you for. Are the slides available for download anywhere?
Thank you, glad these vids are somewhat useful to your reading. I haven't uploaded the slides, but I'm planning to write a book (one with lots of images) on D&R!
@@alvesfabi I don't think it does necessarily. Deleuze speaks somewhere of the power of selection of molecules: an atom of carbon does not conflate an atom of oxygen with an atom of iron for example. This does not imply that carbon is sentient, but rather that sentience derives its own power of selection from basic elemental properties of matter (though this formulation is not rigorous, don't quote me on this). I'm sorry as I don't have the reference in mind, but I has to do with the theory of bodies developed by Deleuze in relation to Spinoza, so it may be in "Expressionism in philosophy".
so by subjectification (which essentially imposes a time buffer onto prehension) of an event we make it a representation and thus convert it into an eternal object?
It seems to me that the work of and with Pierre Bourdieu at college de france could have influenced Michel Foucault in his "impasse" about knowledge and power. That's just a personal view and sentiment that I couldn't prove but it seems logical to me
At 6:40, that's an assertion in literary style, not exactly a solution. So is it correct to view Deleuze's metaphyiscs as synthetic a prioris, as logically presupposed in acts of representation, and thus not themselves 'identities'? And if so, does it turn out to be coherent?
Really incredible to be able to learn the greater rhythms at which Deleuze thinks at by the various videos in this channel. Can definitely see the notes of Difference and Repetition in here. Can't wait for the series to progress!
I agree, there are many parallels with D&R! One of the big themes for future research on Deleuze will probably have to do with those. But I'm really glad you appreciate the channel, thanks a lot for watching!
I’m still at 11:16 … so maybe this is an immature comment. I just want to ask: Does Deleuze refer to Fractals in the book? Because I think what he is going for is the “imaginary numbers” and Riemann hypothesis here. Fractals are still in the same dimension of where their function is applied, cutting smaller and smaller, and so fitting to understand the crystallization described in ATP’s geology of morals plateau and Deleuze’s critique of One and Multiple in DR. The thing with imaginary numbers (or better lateral numbers) is that they open up the understanding of moving in dimensions. Their counterintuitive nature, that a number has a third dimension ( not just negative and positive, or just x or y axis) was the thing that Riemann used, and is crucial for the concept of multiplicity (in DR and Bergsonism) versus the philosophical One and multiple. This does not diverge from the point made in the video. Just wanted to ask if Deleuze himself referred to Fractals in this book.
Good question! No, he doesn't refer to fractals in the book, but he does so in the seminars (which he taught as he was writing the book). These are great points you're making, thanks for sharing. Deleuze doesn't speak about Riemann in the related seminars or in the book, but these are very interesting points nonetheless and I think you're correct about the importance of this theory in the context of multiplicity. However, it could be that the reference to fractals instead of Riemannian space could be due to the fact that Deleuze is not trying to make an ontological point with the diagram, but more so a practical and a functional one. Would be an interesting subject for a paper!
Also, this text seems particularly relevant with all the buzz about GenAI. Understanding painting and art not just as the product but the process that gets us to the art would reveal the fundamentally distinctive characteristics of human and machine made art.
That's a great point. GenAI seems to really ask the question of why we care about art at all. If art can be mechanised, can it really be an end in itself or does it condemn us on the contrary to always be on the lookout for "more", like some form of doom-scrolling? What happens to a concept like the Sublime, when avalanches become common place? These will be fascinating times.
I haven't mentioned it in the video but Turner would be one of the most important examples of evolution with regards to the predominance of the hand vs. the eye. Deleuze says that roughly, Turner after 1830 integrates the catastrophe in the very act of painting (that is, he integrates the dominance of the hand over the eye) and as such he may be one of the first great moderns.
While listening to the section on color theory I was thinking about how an analogy could be drawn for music as well. I like recording and mixing music. I imagine it as the blue as the bass and the yellow as the treble. What emerges at their limits on either side is the midrange, red. The white/black balance is the attenuation of any part of the spectrum, like using an EQ. If you pull all the midrange (red) out you get a green tone. And you can draw the analogy from there. That’s how I tend to think of music as I’m mixing it, but without the color analogy until now. In the spectrum there are three major parts with relations between them (blue, yellow and red; bass, treble and mid). That’s the best way I can describe it at least. In the record I just mixed, different instruments take priority in different areas on the spectrum. The kick drum has two areas of emphasis: the bass and the treble. I can now imagine it as a green tone. It’s needs lots of bass, the lowest in the mix; blue and deep purple tones. But it also needs lots of treble, with slight orange tones. Vocals can take up a parts of the whole: warm purples, ruby reds, soft orange, and bright yellows. Drums are a whole other story and I would have to think on it because the rhythmic aspect adds another dimension. Thanks for the video. I’m not a painter. I can’t imagine images in my head well. I can imagine music really clearly. When I imagine my past I tend to remember more of the feelings than anything, and the colors. It’s the sensation, as Deleuze describes. This really ties together quite a few things for me. I’m going to think on it more and try to write it some more of it out.
I just want to add that I can draw another analogy with soccer. I love soccer as well. It is perhaps too simplistic to say but the analogy goes: defense is blue, offense is yellow; midfield is red. As a tactician you may set up your team to focus their intensity on a certain aspect of those colors. Perhaps you want to focus on containing your side of the field with a defensive structure while striking out with quick offensive plays; very blue with dashes of yellow. You may want a more offensive structure with lots of hot yellows grounded by a deep and fiery reds. Park the bus or gengen press. Mourinho or Klopp. Pep Guardiola tries to color the field with a perfect and mathematical balance of all colors at perfect intensity. Ancelotti allows the players to determine their fate with minimal instruction, fielding a team he believes will paint a spontaneous masterpiece with their talent and personality. There are many tacticians with many different styles. To me, watching the tactics unfold on the pitch, in time, is a beautiful art.
@@kylerodd2342 Thanks a lot Kyle! It's quite interesting that you mention music because speaking of the problem of analogy, Deleuze makes a comparison with music as well. I left that passage out because of lack of space (and also because I'm not familiar with this technical terminology, which I'm guessing Deleuze got from Richard Pinhas) but he says this: "it is still difficult to explain what an analogical diagram is, as opposed to a digital or symbolic code. Today we can relate it to the sonorous example of synthesizers. Analogical synthesizers are 'modular': they establish an immediate connection between heterogeneous elements; they introduce a literally unlimited possibility of connection between these elements, on a field of presence or finite plane whose moments are all actual and sensible. Digital synthesizers, however, are 'integral': their operation passes through a codification, through a homogenization and binarization of the data, which is produced on a separate plane, infinite in principle, and whose sound will be produced only as the result of a conversion-translation. A second difference appears at the level of filters. The primary function of the filter is to modify the basic color of a sound, to constitute or vary its timbre. But digital filters proceed by an additive synthesis of elementary codified formants, whereas the analogical filter usually acts through the subtraction of frequencies ('high-pass', 'low-pass',...). What is added from one filter to the next are intensive subtractions, and it is thus an addition of subtractions that constitutes modulation and sensible movement as a fall. In short, it is perhaps the notion of modulation in general (and not similitude) that will enable us to understand the nature of analogical language or the diagram" (p.95) I don't know if that makes sense to a musician like you. Also I didn't realise it but it totally makes sense to attribute activity to the light (yellow) and passivity to darkness (dissolved into blue), with red being this realisation or intensification of the structure.
@@deleuzephilosophy This passage makes a lot of sense to me, as far as I can tell. I think it’s an apt description of the difference between analog synthesizers and digital. I was thinking about synthesizers when listening to the video but instead used a whole song as an example instead. I remember watching this video on polyrhythms and in the beginning he described the difference between a rhythm and a tone is in terms of speed. If you take a steady beat, or a rhythm, and speed it up incredibly quickly you will get a single tone, like a synth. Our ears can no longer detect the gaps in between the beats and it then sounds like a ton. The key word is “sounds.” For our bodies there is a ratio of speed and beats that produces a difference in a rhythm and tone. Synths produce an electromagnetic “beat” which produces the tones we hear. The “beat” is just so fast we hear it as a tone. Digital synths just produce these tone by representing the data in terms of a computer code. It’s literal and figurative in which Deleuze speaks, I think. It’s not the electrical circuits that are being amplified but rather the circuits produce a code that represents what a synth’s hardware does and gets its effect from that. Very cool stuff. Love it.
@@kylerodd2342 Very cool indeed, and this idea of the beat which, accelerated, becomes a "single tone" from a bodily perspective is absolutely fascinating. It feels like a very rich subject (makes me dream of making a video about electronic music, anything from say Aphex Twin to D&B and all the other genres/artists). By the way if you have music to share, please do!
Hi! I find this channel interesting, but your analysis in this video seems incorrect and I am wondering if you have information I lack. In GS 341, the eternal recurrence is presented by the demon as follows: "This life, as you live it at present, and have lived it, you must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to you again, and all in the same series and sequence - and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and you with it, you speck of dust!" This seems to be quite explicitly recurrence of the same. Is there any passage you can point to which points in favour of difference? I'm concerned that you may be overwriting Nietzsche with Deleuze.
Hello! Yes this is a point that often comes up in discussions between Deleuzians and Nietzscheans (though Deleuze is a Nietzschean). The argument, in short, is that Nietzsche also calls the ER "his own concept", even though he certainly knew that it was an important concept in Antiquity. Why would he call it "his own" if it was the same as the Antique version? Secondly, it's not an ontological statement but a practical or ethical test, a heuristics of life: whatever you will, make it something you'd want to return forever. This is perhaps why it is a demon who's speaking. If you're interested in Deleuze's comment on it, it's part of the second aspect of eternal return, as an ethics and selection of thought (ch.2 §14 in "Nietzsche and Philosophy").
I've been doing some supplemental reading of Nietzsche Marx and Freud to begin reading Deleuze but I'm not sure in what order to approach his work. Is the list he made a good guide or can someone recommend a different order?
Could you provide me some examples of Nietzsche describing the eternal return as a repetition of difference? I'm quite new to Deleuze, and coming from a nietzschean context, I've always interpreted the eternal return as a device for will to power more than anything. Something to understand how life-affirming you are. The whole metaphysics of forces Deleuze introduces is pretty new to me and I find it to be as confusing as it is fascinating
I think Deleuze provides a few decisive examples of this in "Nietzsche and philosophy" and in particular "Difference and repetition". Deleuze's understanding of Will to Power is developed mostly in "Nietzsche and Philosophy", which as a Nietzschean you will probably enjoy a lot (I certainly did, also coming from Nietzsche). Give "Nietzsche and philosophy" a read before you go into D&R would be my advice. Even though the concept of difference is developed the most in D&R, in particular ch.2 titled "Repetition for itself" (I do have a video on it in my series on that book if you want to have a look), you'll have a good basis if you read NaP first, especially as it is one of Deleuze's first and most accessible books.
I'm sorry. I don't know what prerequisites I should have read/viewed before this, or what philosophy scholars are in the comments here, but I'm beyond lost. This video went too fast, very few of the terms were explicitly defined, the quotes which were mentioned seemed so dense and full of words whose meanings are, at best, vague and, at worst, reassigned altogether, that they're impenetrable. I've rewatched it three times and I'm nowhere. - So the "given" is... external stimuli? Qualia? Is Hume just saying that there is an objective reality outside of our subjective experience? - Why do you list the three types of relations without defining any of them or relying on them for subsequent explanations? Actually, nevermind. By the time we get to contrasting Kant and Hume's views on anything, I have too many questions to list in a youtube comment. I wish you success.
Hey there, sorry if this video gives you a feeling of being lost, it's quite the opposite of what it purports to do! It's true that there is a certain philosophical background that's needed to approach Deleuze, and sometimes I go fast on certain points because there is so much to say. But to address your questions and to understand this text, I think what matters here is to bear in mind the two philosophies that are at play (empiricism and rationalism), and how the two perspectives that we naturally have on desert islands (as origins, new departures, but also as geographical facts or points in a structure that we call a "map") produce in the mind a fundamental process that Deleuze calls repetition. This process is informed by the senses (external stimuli), which give us the knowledge of proximal objects; we are also influenced by reason, in the sense that we naturally relate these objects with each other according to other relations: resemblance and causation (contiguity, resemblance and causation are the three fundamental relations in Humean empiricism). So what Deleuze describes in this early text (which I would advise you to read or re-read, if only for its aesthetic value) is how this dualism, this dual perspective, creates a tension between these many relations that can (or should) lead us to both enrich our objective perceptions, and objectivise the myths we create. The desert islands that are our singular minds tend to oscillate between these two poles, myth and rationality. This text is a very early attempt at a philosophy of immanence, it's quite moving in many ways. But again, I'm sorry if I couldn't make it clearer, I hope this comment helps a little.
@ephilosophy I appreciate your attempt to reply and clarify, genuinely. However, I feel there's still not enough information here for me to have a real understanding of what's going on. - What is an "origin" or a "new departure" in this context? - What is this fundamental process called "repetition"? What's actually involved in it? - How do you define "contiguity", "resemblance", and "causation" in this context? Is it actually necessary to understand these more deeply to understand the rest of what you're explaining, or are you just listing them to list them? It seems odd to bring them up without explaining precisely how they are each employed. - What are the diametrically opposed components of the dualism/dual perspective being proposed here? Origins & departures vs geographical facts on a map? Empiricism vs Rationalism? Resemblance vs Causation? Myth vs Rationality? There are many pairs to choose from in your short explanation there. To be clear, I'm coming to your channel as someone who is very much a beginner in Philosophy. I don't know if the purpose of your channel is to explain the texts to beginners like me, or merely to summarize them for those who are already well versed in the study (in which case, maybe you're doing a good job. I don't know.). I get that there is clearly so much to say, which is why you might feel you need to go fast through certain topics, and perhaps you can for people who have done this a while, but for myself, it seems like you're glossing entirely over the definitions for terms that are necessary to arrive at any kind of meaningful conclusion, especially when they're used in these unusual ways. I genuinely want to see your channel succeed, as I would want anyone's educational work to succeed. I think it would serve you better to be more patient with each topic and systematically go through them. I may go read the text, but within reason and with respect, I don't think you should be expecting everyone coming across your channel to have read that text before this video. At the very least, if you feel they should, maybe identify precisely which readings to go to. Many of them, like me, probably expect it to serve as a resource to translate these concepts more thoroughly. I hope this feedback helps.
@@Bennick323 I think that one way to go about these terms is to take them at face-value, in their most common-sensical aspect. -Origin or new departure would thus refer to the hopes and dreams we entertain, when thinking about desert islands. -Repetition, at the simplest, refers to the recurrent contents of the mind (why do I think about this or that again and again? Why does this happen to me again and again?) It also has an ontological value, it's what happens when two ways of thinking, myth and science, or empiricism and rationalism, encounter. -Contiguity, resemblance and causation are types of relations: two things can be related because they're contiguous (the apple and the phone are related because they're on the same table), or because there is a resemblance between them (the apple and the banana resemble each other insofar as they're fruits), or because there is a relation of causation between them (the movement transmitted from pool ball 1 to pool ball 2). -Dualisms occur in the course of creating these mental images, and indeed for philosophy that translates into the problem of empiricism vs. rationalism (sense-data and reason, if you will). “Let us extract opposites from things after understanding that we have introduced them there”, as Nietzsche says. I certainly appreciate the feedback. Also, I wanted to mention that nobody understands Deleuze fully, so don't be disappointed if some things remain unclear as you read him. There are moments of extreme clarity too. One way to read his texts (the way I did it at first) it by letting yourself be carried by the words. You'll see that sense will appear by itself, in time, you don't need to chase it especially if you're new to philosophy.
Thank you for such an outstanding channel, I want to commend you for the work and articulation of Deleuze, it has resurrected my interested in his work profoundly.
Thank you so much, that's one of the nicest comments I've ever received :) I'm really glad this channel reawakened you interest in this fantastic thinker!
I keep noticing on job applications when asked if someone wants to go to college... the three choices being yes, maybe, and never. It is an odd/suspected programmed choice. Good advice includes "never say never". I have noticed once I started "thinking before I speak" and began to avoid use of the word "never" that people who say it often end up returning to the thing they mean to avoid. What I came to understand is that it (the word never) blinds someone to the thing to which it refers in its use. Mark 11:24 in the Bible helps in a similar way... instead of quitting, just cut down.
A tremendously helpful video for making a coherent picture out of Deleuze’s thought. The links made to Empiricism and Subjectivity was very insightful. Cheers!
