Weaponized Joy

Merry Christmas! My present is this utterly unmotivated post on Deleuze's three syntheses of time, meant to give the general gist of what's going on, without being too technical about it. This is anything but exhaustive. If I pull this off right, this might be the shortest exposition of the syntheses that have otherwise filled entire monographs! So here we go:  The cover illustration on one of the editions of Borges' Labyrinths. The 2nd Synthesis   The 3 syntheses (elaborated in chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition ) are easily among the toughest although most important bits of Deleuze's writing. But they can be rendered digestible by starting with a simple example: the example of déjà vu. It's not an original example, and in fact, it was Bergson himself who furnished it in his own essay on the "Memory of the Present and False Recognition". We're more or less going to crib from it to make Deleuze a little clearer (hopefully). Speaking very roughly,...

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....

[This is a copy-paste of something I wrote years ago. But I'm posting this to share with a friend, and it's a line of thought that I'm still actively playing with. It's very much a draft and more of an exploration of terrain than something I am committed to right now]: I want to explore an idea I'm only just beginning to work through, but might make for some interesting takes. Basically the idea is that if you really want to understand the nature of language, two seemingly marginal areas need to be investigated: math and gesture. My intuition is that all three terms - gesture, language, and math - all stand on a continuum of increasing abstraction, and that to understand each, we need to understand the other(s). Or to put it differently, gesture and math stand at opposite ends of a line on which language occupies the centre: they are the limit-points though which language must be understood.   Gesture : gesture is primarily a matter of specific movement in  space an...