Weaponized Joy

The following is written in memory of Jonathan Lear, whose writings live on as a remainder of his own life, come to an end a week before this. This is a small book with themes writ large. At just under a 170 pages of main text, the title alone gives a good idea of what’s in store, although it’s worth taking a moment to pause and really sit with the grouping: happiness, death, and life (the remainder of). Is this not the range of philosophy itself? And I want to say: it is, and Lear covers it all, making good on the promise of what what it means to ask: what is it to live? And where, if anywhere, is the promise of happiness among this thing we call living? Taking as his loadstars the writings of Aristotle and Freud - the inaugural philosopher and the inaugural psychoanalyst - Lear explores how each, in their adventures to trace the shape of human life, stumbled upon a certain remainder that they never were quite able to square with their quest for principles, a reminder in whose excess ...

I wrote this some time ago as a kind of primer to Deleuze's understanding of immanence. I'm still pretty happy with it, although I'd add two things. First, I'd suggest reading this together with the pieces on univocity  and ' non-ontology ', both of which I wrote some time after this. Together, I think they form a nice triptych of Deleuze's philosophy as trying, fundamentally, to get at the same thing in a few different ways. An 'overthrowing' of ontology in favor of a thinking of 'life', the stakes of which, beyond mere labels, have to do with a primacy of ethics. Univocity in particular is that which 'cashes out' the promise of immanence: to think Being under the demand of immanence transforms it into a thinking of Life. Second, I wish I qualified a little better the 'comologizing of thought' I mention in Part II, which risks a strong pan-psychic reading of Deleuze. I think this ought to be avoided, but a proper eng...