About Deleuze - Lecture 1 and 2_1 

love the first scene, two guys with shaved heads and glasses. A practical lesson in 'difference and repetition'

1:17:20 Difference & Identity 2:05:13 Traditional notions of "Difference" (Aristotle, Nietzche, Hegel, Plato) 2:14:42 Hegel 2:31:30 Nietzche 2:45:00 active vs reactive (negativity) thinking

It’s like two clones of Foucault talking about Deleuze

This is good part of youtube

Starts at 11:45.

this guy is chill, would defiantly blaze with this brother

Thank you so much for this. I recently got into Deleuze and fell in love with his affirmation of reality and his affirmation of the continuation of philosophy (as opposed to thinkers like Heidegger, Rorty, and Wittgenstein, who insisted that philosophy should come to an end). I read May's book on Deleuze and am currently reading Deleuze's works on Bergson, Spinoza, and Nietzsche. The whole time I've been thinking "Dear God, what am I going to do when I get to Difference and Repetition. How will I wrap my mind around it." It was super comforting to hear him say that he had to take it 4 pages at a time. Again, thank you so much.

Todd May is one of my favourite Professors. His patience of dealing with his students and his introductory writings of Deleuze and Foucault are both scintillating.

I am so grateful for this! I'm researching for my PhD and am hundreds of miles away from my university city - not the greatest time to attempt Difference & Repetition, but this is so helpful to guide me through my first go at it!

Wow, I have traveled to the far corners of RU-vid listening to lectures and or talks/podcasts on Deleuze and in my earlier "studies" -- the quotation marks because I am not an academic, and like Todd May, I left psychology because of post structuralism, though I was in my first semester of getting my Bachelors at the age of 29. Perhaps my "identity" is a result of maximum entropy production rather than épistémè . With that being said, I was drawn to Foucault after my intoxication with Deleuze ....not faded, but rather...multiplied. Call it a line of flight. I must say that this is by far one of the most comprehensive and pleasurable lectures I have ever listened to on Deleuze and Foucault.

Professor May's ability to teach is extraordinary. I have never come across someone with such a perfect tempo and lucid language throughout my philosophy education so far.

I know I commented a while ago, but I got to mention again how much I appreciate y'all hosting this video. It's a treasure.

If these are histories and not essential qualities, then they can be changed. Things don't have to be the way that they are. That was pretty eye opening for me. 47:07

Todd may is such a good lecturer. I love this series before I read D&R. I read anti oedipus and got most of it but there were a lot of terms like different synthesis that are all referencing D&R

Thanks a lot for sharing what was clearly a private teaching session. Very generous. May is a good speaker/teacher and an even better writer. I would recommend this to non-experts interested in finding out more about Delezue, one of the most interesting philosophers of the last century.

Foucault doing a lecture on Deleuze, interesting.

The typing in the background soothes me. Like raindrops.This one and Nathan Widders intros to Deleuze on RU-vid are gold.

These videos have been really valuable to me. I'm working on my own thing, and this has helped contribute very much. I've been taking notes as I follow each video. So, thank you!

Listening to audio, sounds like Jerry Seinfeld giving a lecture on Deleuze

Thank you a lot for your free course

Here is the exact PDF of 'Difference and Repetition' that they are referring to, for those who want to read along: altexploit.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/gilles-deleuze-difference-and-repetition-columbia-university-press-1995.pdf

I can hear everyone furiously typing away as they make notes and I'm wondering how they managed to do so without being able to stop the video and rewind every few minutes as I'm doing!

I always thought that when Deleuze says that repetition is always repetition of difference, he means that repetition simply can't be anything but repetition of difference. Repetition of sameness would not be repetition, because for something to repeat there has to be difference in the very fact of repetition

Deleuze and Foucault didn't fall out, according to Deleuze! In an interview given by him, some time after Foucault's death, he said that they had just lost touch with each other, that life's circumstances had just taken them in different directions, although, he did have tears in his eyes when he spoke those words!

May looks just like Foucault.

Wow, thanks so much for sharing this!

Really curious what kinds of students he is delivering to? Are they grad students? Seems like a psych (-ology/-iatry) program? So impressive how fast he ramps up to sophisticated ideas, even given their seemingly very mixed level of knowledge coming in...

Sartre actually died at 74 and was in poor health for a number of years prior to that. This is perhaps why the lecturer made him a bit older.

Thinking of different as primary and identification as secondary could mean a baby is born as different but must identify with a caretaker to survive and then as the baby grows, they differentiate to their original difference and more. So in essence, if I get it right, difference is primary and identification is secondary but in psychology, the baby is born blank and must identify with a caretaker to become different. So Deleuze is basically opposite of the foundation of psychology. is this analogy ringing a bell?

Love Professor May's energy..

Awesome... thanks a lot

This video is awesome, thanks! But the audio could be a bit louder.

Any chance that the reading sections for each lecture could be made available?

hi, there is one thing i'd like to ask with regards to aristotle's subordination of difference to identity (his conceptualizaion of difference as opposition): can this subordination be said to take place in the mode of potentiality, or only in the mode of actuality? for example, aristo writes (in metaphysics theta 1046) that all potentiality is impotentiality of the same and with respect to the same (dynamis, adynamia). agamben writes on this in potentialities, and i'm trying to see how this idea can be thought together with the one mentioned in the lecture (difference as opposition, for aristo). thanks!

This is GREAT! Thanks for uploading :)

"You can continue to here if you like in your graduate education but you're going to be paying for all of it, uh, because we don't like your kind." How Deleuzian.

Great class! Thank you so much for sharing this ❤

im still confused about the relation structuralism and post structuralism have to identity as both seem to explain them using structures be it socioeconomic standing for example for structuralism and history for example for post structuralism

thank you so much for sharing free knowledge

This is good stuff

this has little to do with deleuze, but i still cant grasp the fact that this man was in his 60s when he was giving this lecture. i thought he was still 43!

I'm jealous of the students... there are birds singing outside the building and we only see a reflection of it on the whiteboard....

cheers guest reckoned the toilet wasent flushing on level three watched this in the elevator, got down there adjusted the valve height, easy

You can't make difference primary, and Nietzsche already explained fully why this is. Pure difference is always (forcibly) synecdochic with regard to our web of intelligibility. It can't be otherwise. Thinking and speaking pure difference or negativity is already a metaphoric endeavor, always-already produced as a 'thing' at the behest of the tyranny of communicative acts, but in this instance, its thingness is constituted not by its content, but by its radical lack of any content, and therefore by form alone. Just like how when we attempt to experience self-consciousness grasping at an omnipotent, omnipresent God, such a concept is delimited precisely by our inability to think it. But, crucially, we are not thinking pure difference here; as I said difference is synecdochic with regard to unity, a knowable or perceptible whole. So we get an equation like 1-X, where the -X cannot gain significance without always already existing within a constellation of stability, unity, identity, and so on, as a subtraction against a constant. This must be observed for communication to be presupposed. Difference only has meaning when it is a synecdoche of a preestablished unity. If we think we are thinking and speaking pure difference, it is because we have forgotten the fundamentally metaphorical nature of perception and consciousness (according to Nietzsche), (and operating with full awareness of the necessarily metaphoric nature of communication, thought, etc.) because we forget that many of our metonymic substitutions are automatic (as a result of forgetting, as a result of morality, of communication, etc.). Nietzsche's work during Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense is effectively asking the question, 'can we think or speak of difference as anything other than a synecdoche?'. Why does Nietzsche think this? Because 'life has already been decisive' in privileging the capacity for assimilation of likeness through sacrificing difference. "the intellects' aversion to chaos". The justification for the belief in a constant lies in the belief in the 'unity' of willing, and as a result, a metaphorical schema is established that constitutes an ensuing unity beneath every concept. When the pre-socratics say 'what is thinkable and speakable, is', Nietzsche claims that they say such things with observance to the nature of communication (and of human life!). Hence difference is a metaphorical synecdoche wherein we think and speak absence, lack, or exception relationally, and not directly. To speak of it directly, to speak of pure difference, would be impossible without also thinking and speaking of them as things, as beings, and in this case as possing the unitary form of non-being or non-thing. Deleuze makes Nietzsche more complicated than is necessary, and misses the value Nietzsche placed on the genealogy of identity and unity as necessarily metaphorical. Nietzsche problematizes the forgetting of the origin of perception and understanding. Overlaying affirmation and ressentiment on top of forces IS NOT A METAPHYSICAL COMMENTARY, but a METAPHORICAL ONE.

When the video first started I freaked out because of the clones

Slow but unfortunately x1.5 speed makes for uncomfortable listening.

Foucault is also a style icon apparently.

I see a pattern of bald headed intellectuals with glasses

This is excellent!

Michel Focault convention

Just chill vibes.

Thank you very much!

Is it possible to get the list of what was to read for each lesson?

I'm really not sure if your teaching a class of young foreigners or a class of old people who may or may not be foreign

Deleuze did compose that book schizophrenia!

1:32 identities and the brain. The difference in this example would be the neuron (brain cell)

difference: juxtaposition of quantum flavour in the place of essence?

Todd May sounds like a Philosopher version of Michael Pollan

I've gone down this rabbit hole, for better or for worse. I've just read some parts of Difference and Repetition, but it would take a long time to get through the whole thing. Immediately my reaction is that Deleuze is confusing different areas and that the attempt to conjure 'pure difference' relies on the Kantian intuitions of time and space as primary, in other words, even when trying to escape the idea that difference relies on 'difference from' and therefore 'identity', it still relies on the identity of time and space as prerequisites for trying to conjure the metaphysical notion of difference, and therefore of the identity of those. So in that sense it appears to me that it makes no sense to try and get away from the notion of identity being primary. Once time and space are presupposed as the realm in which difference does its thing, difference no longer seems like a metaphysical concept, but rather a way of describing the transitions of substance in space over time, and here we have a prerequisite of something along the lines of 'substance'.

Amazing lecture! I found some of the questions from the students frustrating but kudos to Todd for being so patient with them. They seemed very underprepared for Deleuze though

Wow I cant believe this guy mentions groundhog day. Ever since I first watched this movie I thought that the only way this films idea works is if every day is precisely NOT the same. Only if for one thing: Bill Murrays character must have the memory of the past repetitions if he wants to pull of the tricks he does, like impressing the girl. Otherwise every day would be like a film looped over and over again. You cant identify identity as long as there is no difference. Was thinking of this stuff and this guy makes that comment. Edit: I think my idea is more fundamental. Not only in the film does everything turn out to be, but for him, for Bill Murray to have an experience of sameness, it must be not the same, at the very least because in the recurrence of the same day there must be one different thing. The memory of this having happened before.That difference grounds the possibility of repetition

Why this guy keeps recording without a microphone?

Anyone know what the selected readings were?

I thought he was gonna open with "Hello, I'm Deleuze Lecture 2"

Thanks for this. Would you be able to share what the reading was for these students?

how is his "difference" any different from "potential"?

Was not the late Lacan at least moving away from a structuralist position of what you call 'reducibility' with his engagement with the Real and other concepts such as the Sinthome?

8 30 41 51 not inside or outsude ir yes n no in processes

Your set volume is too low. I can barely hear you

These page numbers are an issue...

Name of the University?

1:56:05

Can those 'smart' students stop interupting the lecture?

By narrative work he means the critique of grand narratives or what? Sorry im a noob

It's all about the cake.

book name?

Starts at 47 minutes in

Please make a video about Edouard Glissant

I hear a bit of Prof Anton here and there

50:46

He looks like Michel Foucault

I would like some cake too!

I'm so surprised how respected these philosophers are in academic philosophy, given that it is so obviously nonsense. There are many philosophers who DO consider it to be nonsense, but the surprise is the big big population of those who do not. I can't understand the part about alternate practices where the professor suddenly acts being a dunk Yiddish-speaking person. What's this about do not eat paper? And what's a Dakkr Hal Danish? Does someone have the transcript? I listened to it several times and I can't understand it.

Attack of the Foucault clones...

53

Our postmodernists and post structuralist the same?

And I could get a 75 on that one

Too much interaction, should be just plain lecture.

I found the Mel Brooks/Carl Reiner routine: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MzuNsWrF9LI.html

Very helpful (except his pronunciation of 'Deleuze' 😂 sorry 🤷🏼‍♂️)

Poutine is great leader, this shaved man is jealous. Long life to Poutine and Deleuze

These lectures are great as an explication of Deleuze, but philosophy is much more than merely explicating the thought of a supposedly great thinker. In these lectures, Prof. May might do a fine job of explicating a certain doctrine, but by not encouraging his students to question and doubt that doctrine, he fails to teach them how to think philosophically. Nowhere in these lectures is there any question as to whether what Deleuze is saying is true or not, or whether it is even meaningful. But that is the crux of philosophy: the questioning of all opinions and the pursuit of truth. On the surface at least, the notion that difference (logically, ontologically) precedes identity is patently absurd. But no one dares point that out, for fear of offending the Great Man. A further question needs to be asked: what motivates Deleuze in his philosophy? And what motivates us in studying it today? Because if it turns out to be false and meaningless, then the motivation is not the pursuit of truth, but perhaps something quite different, such as power, or a political agenda, etc.

1:31:00