Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Treatise on Militarism
- 2 Vacuoles of Noncommunication: Minor Politics, Communist Style and the Multitude
- 3 1,000 Political Subjects …
- 4 The Becoming-Minoritarian of Europe
- 5 Borderlines
- 6 The Event of Colonisation
- 7 Deterritorialising the Holocaust
- 8 Becoming Israeli/Israeli Becomings
- 9 Affective Citizenship and the Death-State
- 10 Arresting the Flux of Images and Sounds: Free Indirect Discourse and the Dialectics of Political Cinema
- 11 Information and Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual and Cybernetics
- 12 The Joy of Philosophy
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
12 - The Joy of Philosophy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Treatise on Militarism
- 2 Vacuoles of Noncommunication: Minor Politics, Communist Style and the Multitude
- 3 1,000 Political Subjects …
- 4 The Becoming-Minoritarian of Europe
- 5 Borderlines
- 6 The Event of Colonisation
- 7 Deterritorialising the Holocaust
- 8 Becoming Israeli/Israeli Becomings
- 9 Affective Citizenship and the Death-State
- 10 Arresting the Flux of Images and Sounds: Free Indirect Discourse and the Dialectics of Political Cinema
- 11 Information and Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual and Cybernetics
- 12 The Joy of Philosophy
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
Why philosophise? Why think? What is the function, purpose or point of philosophy in a world directed more and more towards efficiency, outcomes and economy of effort? Why suspend action and life for the sake of an idea? It is possible to answer these questions, via Deleuze, with two mutually exclusive sets of answers. The first ‘Platonic’ path would stress the incompleteness of actual life. Existing life, the life of the organism that strives to maintain its own being (to remain as it already is), perceives and responds to a given world. However, that world can only be said to be, to be actualised, because there is some condition or logic beyond being. What exists beyond beings is the Idea: a thing can only exist as this or that actual being because it instantiates or actualises some form. For Plato such forms – the logic that is the truth and proper being of the world – require a turn away from the physical and sensible life that fluctuates through time, to those forms from which time unfolds. This Platonic logic has a curious status in contemporary continental philosophy. On the one hand, there is Heidegger's classic critique of this logical turn whereby Plato establishes a being which will become the proper object or paradigm for human self-development (Heidegger 1998: 166). This critique of a separate or higher being that is other than this world is anticipated by Nietzsche, who will diagnose the belief in a ‘higher world’ or ideal of man as a failure of life and will.
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- Information
- Deleuze and the Contemporary World , pp. 214 - 227Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2006