Weaponized Joy

Deleuze on The Negative Part I: Negation and Problems Deleuze is well known for his 'critique of the negative', but what really, is that critique? One way to answer this is through Deleuze's critique of Hegel, specifically in some passages of Difference and Repetition . There, the Deleuzian complaint is that Hegel mistakes a product for an origin - that product being 'the negative'. Insofar as the negative is the 'motor' of Hegelian dialectics, Deleuze's critique is that there needs to be an account of the genesis of the negative itself, and that this is something missing from Hegel: "The negative is always derived and represented, never original or present: the process of difference and of differenciation is primary in relation to that of the negative and opposition". ( D&R 207) To understand why this is the case, one needs to pay attention to the language of 'problematics' or 'problems' and 'solutions...

Deleuze’s Philosophy of Number This is the first of a two part post on Deleuze's philosophy of number. I'm still working on part II, but would still love any feedback, criticism, or requests for clarification in the meantime. I've tried to write this in a way that requires as little prior mathematical knowledge as possible. §1: Extensive and Intensive Number Here I want to explicate Deleuze’s philosophy of number. More specifically, I want to explicate his thesis about the genesis of extensive numbers. First, what are extensive numbers? Extensive numbers are simply numbers as we know them, for example: 1, 2, 3, etc. These are usually called the “natural numbers”, and are one class (type) of numbers among others (there are also the irrationals, the reals, the imaginary numbers and so on). What Deleuze calls ‘extensive numbers’ in fact covers all these kinds of numbers, but we’ll take our starting point from the naturals because they are simple and familiar. It...

I like to write small reviews - recapitulations, really - of some of the books I've read. Here's one for Jared Sexton's Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism :     In the closing chapter of Jared Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes , he cites a thought expressed by lawyer and scholar Mari Matsuda, aired at a conference on critical race theory, held back in 1997. I reproduce it here: “When we say we need to move beyond Black and white, this is what a whole lot of people say or feel or think: ‘Thank goodness we can get off that paradigm, because those Black people made me feel so uncomfortable. I know all about Blacks, but I really don’t know anything about Asians, and while we’re deconstructing that Black–white paradigm, we also need to reconsider the category of race altogether, since race, as you know, is a constructed category, and thank god I don’t have to take those angry black people seriously anymore.’” This is a book about that....