『Dark Deleuze』 Ctrl+V

Jun 12, 2024

These everyday behaviors show that the seemingly modern world of commodities has not stolen our sense of wonder—we are as divinely moved by media as we once were by angels. Marx, who, in Artaud’s phrase, has “done away with the judgment of God,” shows that this mystical character of the commodity is capitalism and also its most popular trick.

……“Dark Deleuze’s immediate target is connectivity, the name given to the growing integration of people and things through digital technology.

Instead of drawing out the romance, Dark Deleuze demands that we kill our idols. The first task is negative, as in Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, a “complete currettage”—overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place (AO, 311). Put more modestly, the first step is to acknowledge that the unbridled optimism for connection has failed.

……The material consequences of connectivism are clear: the terror of exposure, the diffusion of power, and the oversaturation of information.

……As a project, it instead follows Deleuze’s advice to create untimely “vacuoles of non-communication” that break circuits rather than extend them (D, 175). The point is not to get out of this place but to cannibalize it—we may be of this world, but we are certainly not for it. Such out-of-jointedness is a distance. And distance is what begins the dark plunge into the many worlds eclipsed by the old.

relink with the world as a matter of faith, to believe in something even as transient as the fleeting sensations of cinema (C2, 169–173).”

So start with a similar becoming-active that links up with the forces that autoproduce the real. But instead of simply appreciating the forces that produce the World, Dark Deleuze intervenes in them to destroy it. At one time, such an intervention would have been called the Death of God, or more recently, the Death of Man. What is called for today is the Death of this World, and to do so requires cultivating a hatred for it.

……Deleuze would have hated today’s images of creativity—there is a great violence in comparing the fabrication of concepts to any happy means of construction; concepts are friends only to thought, as they break consensus (WP, 4–6, 99). Concepts are not discovered but the result of a catastrophe, Deleuze and Guattari say, from turning away, tiredness, distress, and distrust (6–7). True thought is rare, painful, and usually forced on us by the brutality of an event so terrible that it cannot be resolved without the difficulty of thought. As such, we must quit treating concepts as some “wonderful dowry from some wonderland” to understand the hard, rigorous work that goes into their creation (5).

……the only future we have comes when we stop reproducing the conditions of the present (Edelman, No Future). So let us stop romanticizing life and wish a happy death on calcified political forms, no-good solutions, and bad ways of thinking.

……Barbarian…… does not follow from a science of judgment. In fact, it is what is left after having done away with judgment (of God, of Man, and even of the World). Hatred is the ambivalent complement to love and, as such, can easily evade a decline into ressentiment.

for ages there have been places where what is seen is inside: a cell, a sacristy, a crypt, a church, a theater, a study, or a print room” (L, 27–28). So beyond the association of crypts with rot and death, it is a projection of subterranean architectural power.