Examples of the body-without-organs (BwO) in A Thousand Plateaus (plateau 6), with some explanatory background. Brief discussion of the BwO in Anti-Oedipus Transcript available on: www.arasite.org/deltranscript4bwo.html
I love the irony of being a type 1 diabetic just beginning anti-oedipus; in essence being a body without pancreas, I feel almost there. Thank you for the videos!
Body with out organs reminds me of Nietzsche, at least, when he talks about the "child," or what comes after human. I wonder if one could do a Nietzschian reading of A Thousand Plateaus and find a vast amount of similarities. I partially think that A Thousand Plateaus is a more psychological approach than it is philosophical, though one tends to bleed into the other, for obvious reasons. I definitely think that Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and now Deluze and Guti, are all kind of updating the same idea for their time. The belief that we lump differences together, similar into same, is one thread of many threads that connects them all.
There is a lot of Nietzsche in Del;euze, of course. HIs book on Nietzsche picks out the bits he likes -- but leaves out a lot too. I have notes on my website if you want my views: www.arasite.org/delniet.html
@@DaveHarrisreDeleuze hmmm.. I wonder if Deluze's insistence on eternal recurrence being not a return to the same, has to do with the differences between the two's ontological views? Deluze believed that existence is a plane of becoming, a rhizome, and that this is but one expression of that; so, upon eternal return, that would necessitate a whole new expression according to Deluze. Now, this might just be Deluze doing what Nietzsche wanted, which is to go beyond him, to do something new. I think Deluze is merely attributing his going further with Nietzsche in this respect. I think Nietzsche believed a more cyclical nature to eternal recurrence, one where you cannot break from your loop with out radical acceptance of one's self that leads to the breaking of their habits, and a more self determinate mode. You don't have to look to far to see it in the language, herd, ascetic, etc... He doesn't believe people think and act for themselves, they're all learned behavior. Because there's not map out of this loop I think Deluze's philosophy is almost attempting to make a map it seems. A way to go and a guide to liberate the mind. But, I still have a lot of Deluze to understand to say this for certain.
I did a four-part reading of the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra using A Thousand Plateaus to help explain it that you may find interesting for those connections. The BwO and what they later call the “ambiguity of the Natal” is very similar to the child - the sacred Yes-sayer - in Nietzsche.
I have been reading this book for years now. Your exposition is really good, it would have saved me a lot of time. The references are also much appreciated. Thanks!
Dave Harris wow yeah! Sooo. The question... Did it take years because he was a bad teacher, or did it take years because you had so much to learn? Is there less here than in the original?
Quelle ace video. Will a biker Deleuze fan please write a new "Zen and the Art.............". Working title; "The Bike the Body the Haecceity the Rhizome and the Road".
I think as well at around 25:00 there's the tendency here to talk about children and infants as isolated autonomous individuals or miniature thinking adults who acquire what might be a 'problem' in their thinking. Rather than as a being creatively making sense of the world of affect that they aren't in control of, a world that is largely controlled for them by the responsiveness of their caregivers. If you consider that a significant part of the formation of personality is the culmination of the Parent's lived and felt history passed to the child by the nature of their care and the wider social realities of their time. Then reducing the possible responses to two 'realizations' of the infant seems to leave the infant in a strange internal world where it just figures stuff out rather than being affectedly (is that a word?) impacted by it's care givers tending/or not to it's distress. Infants have a primarily felt experience of the world and what happens to them. Clearly I should have quoted some people in all that but it's not my strong point. So just thanks to the sharing of ideas. Whoever they belong to.
Thanks so much! These videos have been really helpful as I've been using the quarantine to finally dive into A Thousand Plateaus properly. I've been reading it sporadically for the past year and I always felt like I had to acquire more background material to properly grasp the most important implications. I think that this time and with your help (along with being motivated by Deleuze and Guattari being mentioned all the time in my seminars on posthumanism.) I'll feel that I'm doing the text justice at least.
Glad to hear some good has come out of the lockdown!. Of course, there will be several different readings as well as mine, so puzzlement will persist no doubt. Interesting that D&G crop up in discussions of post-humanism. I think that is where they belong, (and,more important, so does DeLanda, one of my favourite commentators) but all sorts of qualitative researchers have seen them as into subjectivity and have turned to others for post-humanism. But I think you can see deleuzian concepts in Braidotti and even in Barad, and, to be honest, I slightly prefer D&G. Good luck.
Dave, I just sent u an fb friend req. only because that's where Project Rhizome currently resides. Also, the idea of using fb to subvert fb is just too delightful.
Thanks for your series on D&G, Dave. I'm from China. Would you please do one episode on Deleuze and literature? Looking forward to its production. I have read Proust and Signs (the Chinese translated edition) and Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (the English translated edition) and have ordered the book Deleuze on Literature online. I am eager to know about your understanding of Deleuze and Guattari's literary criticism. Thanks.
Hi Richard. Thanks for the support. I am not sure I can do any better than Bogue on Deleuze on literature, which is pretty comprehensive. I have notes on that book on my website you could read while you are waiting: www.arasite.org/boguelit.html Best of luck with it.
Thanks, Dave. I'm not a philosophy student, but I'm very interested in D&G and I want to employ their theory on literature in my own literary interpretation of an Asian American writer. However, a lot of their concepts are beyond me. I downloaded your notes on Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature but I did not notice you also have notes on Bogue's Deleuze on Literature. I have just downloaded them and I will read them carefully. Perhaps because philosophical concepts are too abstract or too difficult for me a layman, or perhaps you Westerners think totally differently from Easterners, I very often feel like I'm trapped in a desperate situation of understanding things. For example, I had to read each of the chapters of Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature at least twice and try to summarize what each chapter has said in Chinese, which usually costs me two days, and only when I had figured out the main points in each chapter did I seem to have grasped something. If you feel like doing an episode on D&G's literary criticism, I hope you will explain their literary criticism in easy English. I think you may have your own perspective added in your interpretation of their literary criticism or you only interpret it to help us to understand it. By the way, I can only read English and even when I am reading the English translated editions of their books, I come across a lot of new words. I will first read your notes on Kafka and Bogue's book. Thanks for your GREAT work on D&G.
20:50 Deleuze's ideas around signifiance and socialised use of language strike me as a good reason for his deep dislike for Wittgenstein (as I understand him).
Thanks abopfred. Your remarks prompted me to try and remember exactly where I came across a brief reference to Wittgenstein in D&G. I'm still searching. One of the great advantages of keeping notes on a website, of course, is that you can do electronic searches so I'll load the most likely suspects and hope I have noted the remarks adequately
I wonder what the Deleuzian response to libidinal/energy techniques such as Kundalini yoga and qi gong would be. In both cases, the work is as I understand it to achieve transcendence from striated conditioning towards becoming something like a cosmic egg- energy flows in communication with both local and non local energy fields...
Hi Jeremy Weate. I don't knbow, but I imagine any technique to produce thought about the body would be suitable. Deleuze is not happy with the term 'transcendence' though, just to be picky -- still implicated in subjectivity and idealism for him
I think the egg is akind of metaphor here, meaning a container of potentials rather than a description of an empirical shape. Remember the BWO is alsodefined as a 'spatium', roughly, a field of forces at different intensities
Motorbikes add an essential machinic componenet to subjectivity -- affects like fear and ekstasis and percepts like seeing the world from a 30 degree angle at speed on bends. The UK and other mostly Commonwealth nations sensibly drive on the left but others are more perverse -- you will have to ask them why
I'm still not sure. There is much more to discuss in Deleuze. I tend to respond to issues raised with me of for me,andone of them is subjectivity. I might well take the plunge with Guattari's cartography of subjectivity...
I sympathise, Ian Buchan. I have cheerfully vulgarised 'the socius' to mean 'a social system'. The bits that follow in the quote might be specifying different sorts of systems, spelled oiut a bit more in the Plateau on sign regimes (see video 13) -- 'the earth' means the 'almost natural' system of local and direct organization, and the despot and capital are more recent types. I think all the stuff about the BwO as the limit of the socius, as a fully deterritorialized and virtual socius is really designed to deny that any actual social organization is organized 'naturally' like a human body (a view popular with some Victorian philosophers, shading over into various naturalistic accounts of social life where human societies are just like troops of baboons or swarms of bees). It also illustrates their general philosophical approach of trying to find 'pure' definitions and cases, abstracted from all empirical content, so they can explain the actual cases are particular manifestations of the pure possibilities. I hope that doesn't make it worse
With age I find myself more and more sensitive to the ordering and commanding; ordering and structuring and ordering and putting you in your place in the scheme; of things that are imminent and emergent in so much language and especially body language. I wonder if a (mis) interpretation of these leads to racism and xenophobia?. I have just realised I have just said (written) something that would be ridiculed, dismissed, mocked and condemned by many of the main cultural outlooks in the UK. I have now joined the ranks of lefty, idiotic, unmanly waste of spaces that have been increasingly under attack for decades. Q.E.D
i like how you can titillate yourself with French deconstructive philosophy and then hysterically witter on about the apriori evils of racism and xenophobia. Classic boomer.
I must say I though tthat for ages, bun 197, but I finally started to see something in it, underneath all the scholastic displays and folderol It is still a struggle to winnow out the pearls from the ordure and to stay calm while doing it. It helped for me having retired and having nothing at stake but it must be very stressful if you have a deadline of some kind. Mind you, if you find D&G bullshitty, you should try Lacan! Don't give up!
not having a go at your video, it was very clear and well made. I just think a lot of 20th cent. french stuff makes very simple ideas needlessly complex as a way to sort of dress them up in fashionable philosophical dress. nick land and his ilk are very much the inheritors of it- basic concept about applying will to power to biological conditoning, but inventing 50 obscurant terms to make this sound artificially esoteric. maybe im just ignorant@@DaveHarrisreDeleuze
I didn't take it personally@@bun197 It is still my own starting point! I don't know the work you mention but I was going to say spraying bullshit is not just confined to the French -- I have dozed off in many an English-speaking presentation ,then looked at my notes and found I have reduced it all to a paragraph. Don't blame yourself -- 'proper' academics have to talk and write like this, Foucault once said, or no-one takes them seriously
