1 - The Birth of Philosophy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
Summary
… to be present at the dawn of the world.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (280)See now a star is born | Looks just like a blood orange | Don't it just make you want to cry?
Conor Oberst, ‘Ladder Song’, The People's KeyAnd that's how the world was born. There is always a dark precursor that no one sees and then the lightning bolt that illuminates, and there is the world. Or that's also what thought must be, that's what philosophy must be. That's the great Zed, but that's also the wisdom of Zen. The sage is the dark precursor, and then the blow of the stick comes, since the Zen master is always distributing blows. The blow of the stick is the lightning that makes things visible.
Gilles Deleuze, Gilles Deleuze from A to ZBecoming Crystal
‘On Gilbert Simondon’ (1966)
IT IS SYMPTOMATIC of Deleuze's twofold thought that some scholars read his work as a celebration of deterritorialization and schizophrenia, while others consider it a celebration of a vitalist monism that relies on the overall oneness of all things. In the light of my introduction, both of these readings miss the point. What makes Deleuze's work singular is precisely that it aligns these two extremes in such a way that at a philosophical point-at-infinity, schizophrenia and monism become identical. How to think the paradox of this conceptual simultaneity?
My initial proposition is that Deleuze defines the subject of philosophy as a living entity – an assemblage of crystals or desiring-machines as the ‘molecular machines or micro-machines’ that denote the ‘non-organic system of the body’ (DI: 219) – that negotiates its life-course within two complementary multiplicities. One physical, the other metaphysical; one actual, the other virtual. This twofold vectorization is why Deleuzian philosophy addresses to an equal degree both physical and metaphysical registers. In terms of physics, Deleuze develops a philosophical theory of the crystallization and individuation of molar material aggregates from within the extensive multiplicity of an anonymous, informal life that he conceptualizes variously as atomic (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, What is Philosophy?), as molecular (Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus) or as photonic (Cinema 1 ' 2).
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- Gilles Deleuze's Luminous Philosophy , pp. 21 - 48Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020