I would like to engage politically and participate in social movements, but I feel that I would hate long meetings and manifestations, as my social battery tends to run out quickly (and I’m somewhat skeptical about the capacity of manifestation to drive change, at least in the current context). Lately, I’ve been reflecting on what I could contribute to socio-political transformation in a way that feels more sustainable and enjoyable for me.

As a PhD student researching Guattari's work, I’ve considered the idea of organizing a reading group with some friends, so people of my zone could assist. The focus would be on revolutionary, political, and queer texts, aiming to make these ideas accessible to people outside academia. The goal would be to help participants engage with these theories and apply them to their political activism.

What do you think? Could this be a helpful initiative? Or am I just making excuses to avoid fully committing to the demanding work of established movements?

Genuinely curious if I could use schizoanalysis on myself in any way like this

Can you guys justify how one can speak of "mistranslations" of D&G without appealing to a standard of representation?

I mean take the previous post concerning the quality of the English translation, and all I see are objections to how accurately certain ideas are communicated.

How can you talk about communication of ideas without it falling into representation?

Was just wondering about this

Has there been any issues raised with the English translation of "A Thousand Plateaus" from Massumi? I have been reading the original text in French and there are some significant gaps between the author's ideas and the ones conveyed in the translation. Some phrases are simplified, some mean entirely different things than (I reckon) what the author wanted to portray. Was just curious if anyone else pointed stuff out.

Hello. I'm reading AO for about a month. If I understood right they argue incest is impossible for the territorial machine. It's possible for despotic machine. They argue that voice and graphism is independent, appellation and body couldn't be enjoyed at the same time. Isn't it so phenomenological? I mean what's the point? A man can still sleep with his sister and that's the material reality. Does this act's unconscious correspondence, separeteness really matter? Do D&G mean if you sleep with your sister you already dont view her as your sister, if you did you wouldn't sleep with her at first place? So if you get a poor socialization you can't commit incest? How relevant is it?

I really want to understand their point. It took a long time for me to understand Oedipus Compex and Anti-Oedipus is not easier.

Do you think they align with Guattari's idea of molecular revolution/ecosophy?

So if desire is production and desire is not connected to lack than how would we explain the situation of my dad who when I asked where a towel was went to find his wife but couldn’t find her so he kind of had a many panic attack is due to the repeated lack throughout his life of people he cares about and that’s why he desired his wife really badly in that moment because he lacked the comfort of knowing where she was or is something else going on sorry I’m really curious this scenario sparked something in me (p.s ask me to explain it better if that didn’t makes sense it’s late where I’m at and I don’t know if I’m being coherent)

In the 27th series of The Logic of Sense, Deleuze says:

What the schizoid position opposes to bad partial

objects-introjected and projected, toxic and excremental, oral and anal-is not a good object, even it if were partial. What is opposed is rather an organism without parts, a body without organs, with neither mouth nor anus, having given up all introjection or projection, and being complete, at this price.

This seems to suggest to me that for Deleuze, at least initially, the BwO was a whole (or an "organism") without its parts. However, the definition of the BwO in AO and ATP seems to have changed. Would it be correct to say that the BwO is a whole without its parts (in the context of mereology, for example)?

Hi everyone, I believe I have a general understanding of D&Gs ontology of becoming, however I am having trouble exactly defining what they mean by alliance, or more specifically how it differs from contagion and unnatural participation. From the quote I referred in the title (atp, p. 247), am I right to understand that what they refer to as alliance is the machinic assemblage that ,for example, the wasp and the orchid forms through their symbiotic relationship? If that is the case, why do they refer to becoming-whale of captain ahab as an alliance? I get the general concept of alliance, demonic pact etc, I am simply having trouble with clearly defining their use of alliance. I would appreciate any help in this regard, thank you all c:

I remember seeing somewhere that Deleuze called himself a Marxist, and even wanted to write a book on Marx (my guess is that it would be something like his early monographs) but was tragically not able to due to his untimely suicide. that aside, i wanna ask yall on what Deleuze could have written on this? specifically on the heavy emphasis Marxist theory relies on Dialectical Materialism, i love both of these thinkers, but i sadly just cant find a way to see how Deleuze would have made a nonhegellian form of Marxism

Discussing Deleuze in his intro/guide to Difference & Repetition, James Williams refers to "representation defined in terms of an identity that we can conceive of, an analogy that we can judge, an opposition that we can imagine and a similarity that we can perceive."

Where does this division of representation into 4 parts ultimately come from in the history of philosophy? Like, who started it, and in what text?

And if you wanna get really fancy, how do we know representation is made up of these 4 categories? Why not 7 categories or 536?

I sort of half-understand the desiring machinea nd how the body and all are machines, but how does the (3 staged) BwO have to do with ANYO OF THIS??!?! WHAT IS A SOLAR ANUS?!

Hi everyone, I just finished Anti-Oedipus and loved it. In a couple months, I will be writing a major essay for my final year of undergrad on critical theory. I want to write about Mark Fisher and Deleuze, particularly focusing on a non-nihilistic reading of Capitalist Realism and Societies of Control. It is very broad right now, but I will narrow it down.

However, I am going to need more sources for this essay, and I want to use Capitalism and Schizophrenia to inform my readings of both texts, since I got a lot out of Anti-Oedipus and the secondary sources I used to make it make sense.

I won't have time to read A Thousand Plateaus in its entirety before I start working on it, so I was wondering if any particular parts are more relevant to my project / Deleuze & Guattari's analysis of capitalism / Mark Fisher / Societies of Control? Thanks, appreciate it!

I've been re-reading the "Post-script on Societies of Control" lately.

The way I understand it Deleuze calls that particular post-disciplinary type of power " control", a more subtle and implicit form of power that acts on the "free" possibilities of actions by a body rather than the direct molding of the actions of that body through discipline. Foucault was also thinking about post-disciplinary societies in his time though and I've seen a lot of people say that his theories on biopolitics reflect that kind of post-disciplinary analysis.

I've had a lot more difficulty getting to understand biopolitics than I have societies of control and so I was wondering if the basic assertion that they talk about similar things is true and the potential diffrences the two have in regards to what they consider as coming after disciplinary societies.

Thanks y'all.

Am I wrong that Deleuze's criticism is the general, species and individual. I'd also like some explanation why Deleuze is justified in his criticism.

I'm focusing on an individual's desiring-machines for now, but I'll get to desire from a social perspective later. I'd also like to hear from you how the BwO relates to the way I've conceptualised desire. And then the Subject.

The mind is full of machines producing things. Emotions, thoughts, fantasies and so on. These things are all connected, always in a process of forming connections with each other. Linking up and spreading flows into each other, altering each other. Desire is not lack, therefore it has no destination in mind. The reception of flows into a machine is feedback of from the other machines. It then uses that to give feedback to the other machines.

There's also delinkage, of course, which is a part of the process. This is the breaking down. I'm not sure if continuous linkage and delinkage is the process of the connective synthesis or if delinkage is the job of the disjunctive. I'd like help with this.

Am I correct in associating linkage with reterritorialization and delinkage with deterritorialization? I'd like to understand what territories mean in this context.

To think about this socially, the machines connect to machines in its milieu. I use the word tendency here, because that's what I think best describes the concept. Desire tends towards forming new connections in the milieu. Desire tends to towards breaking free and have all the floodgates open. Liberation. The milieu (maybe more specifically the socius) tends towards restricting and organising the machines and their flows. Repression.

Am I wrong in the last question and is deterritorialization liberation and reterritorialization repression? Or is it more complicated than that? As before, I'd like to know how territories fit in here.

I kinda see the political implications of desire and understand D&G's unhappiness at seeing it socialised and disciplined. And I totally want to hook it up in a way that is interrupted in the social body, fucking liberate it. But I'd like to understand it better.

So? What have I got wrong?

I’m looking to do research on Deleuze’s writings on the disunified self / subject. I know he discusses this in many of his books, but do you guys have specific chapters that you’d recommend looking into? I’m planning on writing about this in relation to Beckett’s works - any recommendations welcome!

I want to deeply understand and develop a rhizomatic imageless non-representational style of thinking. I feel a bit silly asking this but is there any other books that could go deep into this rabbit hole. I already know about the dogmatic image of thought part of difference and repetition but I liked the ATP styles approach more.

Is there any literature to discuss Deleuze’s pro-propositions and anti-judgment?

It’s clear that he doesn’t like judgement as a way to show the thought. And also clear that the proposition is the burden of sense/meaning.

My initial motivation is to find there is any literature to help us understand the distinction better?

Like, why can't judgment make a distinction between reference and sense? Does proposition inherently imply a distinction between them?

In modern common sense, propositions are the content of judgments, and judgments are propositions that are asserted to be true or false. That is all, but Deleuze's distinction of judgment and proposition should refer to the distinction between Frege's predicate/propositional logic and Aristotelian term logic.

In the 17th chapter of The Logic of Sense ("Seventeenth Series of the Static Logical Genesis"), Deleuze distinguishes between an individual and the person. While an individual is the particular concrete human being, the person is their context-dependent social role (perhaps somewhat similar to Jung's persona?). He goes on to associate the individual with denotation and the person with manifestation, which makes sense to me.

But then he goes on to say this:

"Finally, signification

presupposes the formation of a good sense which comes about with individuation, just as the formation of a common sense finds its source in the person."

Why is the individual tied to good sense and why is the person tied to common sense? Why not the other way around?

EDIT: I got them mixed in the title

A few years back there was a channel on Youtube named after the philosopher / biologist von Uexküll. On the channel there were HUNDREDS of hours of continental philosophy audiobooks and essays read text-to-speech in a cold and contemptuous male British robot voice. Posting here of course b/c books by Deleuze and Deleuzians were the core of the channel. They had posted all of Anti-Oedipus, Thousand Plateaus, Difference and Repetion, Logic of Sense, and Fanged Noumena by Nick Land I think I remember specifically, and definitely more... All gone now. Really miss Thousand Plateaus read in that voice especially, not sure I could have really absorbed it through repeated readings of particular chapters in any other way. Made reading Thousand Plateaus more like listening carefully to a good album of music for me. Relatively painless and harder to get lost in flow of the text. Downloaded all the chapters off youtube at one point and put it on a flashdrive, but I sadly lost the flashdrive! Has anyone here preserved it or could maybe remember what text-to-speech program was used? It was a pretty common free one, I think... it definitely could be made to read more cleanly w/ the AI technology now but that robot voice just was kinda perfect for Deleuze... Couldn't tell you why. If the von Uexküll channel creator is still out there and comes across this post, that would really be a blessing! Thanks!

anyone could explain the difference between the concept of affect and sensation

Seems like Origami is quite helpful with Geology of Morals?

Challenger is understood as an artist of "the fold" and Deleuze himself wrote a book titled The Fold.

Origami is all about Folds, and other elements like Biunivocal Relations and Binary Relations.

Paper in Origami undergoes Folding, it itself undergoes stratification.

The process of stratification breaks and shatters a matter that is continuous relative to it, which is to say it's not actually continuous but only behaves this way in relation to process of stratification.

In this sense the paper we start folding serves as a great example of a relatively continuous smooth matter plane.

Origami is not here a metaphor for stratification it is strictly speaking an example of it. An example of a physico chemical stratification: which is to Say Content and Expression are distinct but have a formal sense, as they correspond to two different kinds of organization but occuring in the same thing , the same piece of paper.

Origami as we know occurs when we fold a piece of paper, then fold it again and again until a finished figure comes about an animal or some other paper creature or object.

But the process of folding itself has two types of violence: the folding of the paper itself, we bring one end to meet the other, even as the paper is flexible and resists, and then the second violence of the pressing, of making the crease of the paper permanent. These are the two articulations, one depends on the other.

It is interesting that when we take apart a finished origami figure, unfolding it into its initial state as a piece of paper, we see a plane cross cut by lines. If we attempt to refold the paper into the origami figure, we will find it much easier in certain respects, as the paper no longer resists our attempts to mold it but at the same time certain figures will be impossible to recreate as the flexibility of the initial paper is necessary to perform certain foldings.

So to give a kind of accounting of the process of stratification involved in origami to maybe help illustrate how it fits into the vocabulary of stratoanalysis:

Substratum furnishing the materials for strata: Paper in its fibrous sense allowing for the elasticity and thinness of matter necessary for origami.

Matter plane: the smooth plane of the paper, relatively continuous in relation to the claws of the machine that stratifies it.

First articulation- Content: The process by which the paper is initially bent, where it provides resistance and use is made of its flexibility. It's an ephemeral sort of control, a dance of force relations.

Binary relations of Content: the ends of the paper being bent are brought together, sandwiched by the fingers which hold them in place.

Second articulation- Expression: The process by which the Bent paper is pressed, creating permanent lines.

Binary relations of Expression: The relationship between lines produced, the shape of the origami product. The set of all lines found once the paper is unfolded.

Biunivocal relations between Content and Expression:

As we are dealing with an example of Physico chemical Strata, the second articulation of Expression that of folding, strictly biunivocally corresponds to a set of movements on the Content plane. This is to say there's no pressing that doesn't Biunivocally correspond to a bending of paper.

Expression has no autonomous status, it depends on content, but it centers and crystalizes the transformations that Content undergoes.

There is also the question of Epistrata and Parastrata, these are defined as essential to the processes of strata but are not belonging to either articulations of Content or Expression.

The Epistrata, "pile one on top of another" they are understood as the intermediary states. In the case of origami they concern the multiple successive states of the folded paper that it goes through.

For example the Origami frog depends on its Epistrata, which introduce a hydraulic dynamic into it, allowing it to jump.

The Parastrata mobilize the forms of the strata to capture external resources. The creases produced be the second articulation are often used as basis for performing other folds, thus having a kind of surplus value of code extracted from them.

Anyway Idk I kinda ran out of steam here. But yeah there it is.

I was comparing with the Spanish translation by a publisher called pre-textos, and there are quite a lot of mis-translations in A thousand plateaus. I do not trust my book anymore and am considering just buying the Spanish version. ¿Is it worth it? It is kind of frustrating because I feel there are ideas I could misunderstand just by having some very silly mistranslations. ¿Am I being too paranoid?