Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

EUROPE OCCIDENTALE --- ROYAUME-UNI --- GEOLOGIE REGIONALE

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

What is a problem? What's asked in that question, and how does one even begin to take its measure? How else could one begin, except as one does with any other problem--by way of its impulsion. Of Learned Ignorance: Idea of a Treatise in Philosophy is about philosophy because philosophy is about problems: philosophy, in a word, is where problems become a problem. After Anti-Oedipus, in the Kafka book and in A Thousand Plateaus, what Deleuze and Guattari counsel, strikingly, is sobriety. Sobriety is what they praise in Kafka. And it is sobriety that seems above all else to be necessary here. (Steven Shaviro has pointed out the prominence of structure in Deleuze's writing: "even when Deleuze's prose, by himself or with Guattari, seems to be ranging anarchically all over the place, in fact it has a rigid and unvarying architecture, which is what keeps it from falling apart.") Of Learned Ignorance is a dead letter because it names a problem. It's a dead letter because it is, cautiously, a love letter. It's a dead letter because it lovingly stages an experiment in whimsy, and perhaps above all, because it is problematic (in the Kantian sense): It is a (sober) attempt at exemplifying what it talks about -- and what eludes it: A series of footnotes, with blank (transcriptive) pages above, effects something like the integration of a differential, the reciprocal determination where the sources enter into in relation to one another in order to produce a paper, essay, or (inexistent) (chap)book. Of Learned Ignorance, in facing down a problem, makes a wager; it courts failure; it puts it all on the line. All, yes, for love -- a kind of love ... (of wisdom?).

Philosophy (General) --- philosophy --- Emmanuel Kant --- Franz Kafka --- Louis Althusser --- Gilles Deleuze --- Felix Guattari

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

"No longer imminent, the End is immanent." "Ends are ends," Frank Kermode goes on to clarify, "only when they are not negative but frankly transfigure the events in which they were immanent." From its imminence to its immanence, not "negative," "no longer," but transformative, how is "the End" in turn "transfigured"? In what may ending be said then to consist? To "the end times" of apocalypse and eschatology Giorgio Agamben, following Gianni Carchia, opposes messianism and "messianic time"--to the end of time, in a formula, the time of the end. To the writings of those for whom to philosophize is to learn how to die--from Plato to Montaigne and beyond--one may oppose, in like manner, the writings of Spinoza, who "thinks of death least of all things"--"for nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away," as Benjamin writes--and so in whose pages "wisdom," transfigured, "is a meditation on life."

Ethics. --- Philosophy --- Political aspects. --- philosophy --- utopia --- philology --- poetics --- parables

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

The Communism of Thought takes as its point of departure a passage in a letter from Dionys Mascolo to Gilles Deleuze: "I have called this communism of thought in the past. And I placed it under the auspices of Hölderlin, who may have only fled thought because he was unable to live it: 'The life of the spirit between friends, the thoughts that form in the exchange of words, by writing or in person, are necessary to those who seek. Without that, we are by our own hands outside thought.'"What, in light of that imperative, is a correspondence? What is given to be understood by the word, let alone the phenomenon? What constitutes a correspondence? What occasions it? On what terms and according to what conditions may one enter into that exchange "necessary," in Hölderlin's words, "to those who seek"? Pursuant to what vicissitudes may it be conducted? And what end(s) might a correspondence come to have beyond the ostensible end that, to all appearances, it (inevitably) will be said to have had?And what is the proximity, here, between correspondence and commentary? To what extent might commentary approximate a kind of correspondence? (And with whom? The author of the source text? The source text itself? A future reader of that text? Or then again a third, or fourth, or nth party? And by way of what channels?)The two texts -- the two commentaries -- that form the heart of The Communism of Thought are both short, late texts of Gilles Deleuze's, and they're both reprinted in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975-1995. The first text is Deleuze's last published article, widely considered to be something of a testament, "Immanence: A Life ...." The commentary is staged in the manner of a dictionary definition of the word immanence. The various subentries under the first (and only) sense of the word for Deleuze -- "a life ..." -- develop in tandem with the article to progressively elaborate the centrality of the problematics of definition to Deleuze's conception of immanence. The second text is that of a brief, beautiful correspondence: The five letters that comprise the correspondence between Gilles Deleuze and Dionys Mascolo were written between 23 April and 6 October 1988, and were first published a decade later, in 1998, a year after Mascolo's death and nearly three years after Deleuze's. The commentary, a kind of marginalia to that correspondence, comes gradually and progressively into focus around a single question: To what affinity might a correspondence attest?"What strikes me especially," an interviewer once noted to Deleuze, "is the friendship you have for the authors you write about." "If you don't admire something," Deleuze replied, "if you don't love it, you have no reason to write a word about it."

Philosophers --- Thought and thinking. --- Philosophy. --- Correspondence. --- philosophy --- correspondence --- friendship --- commentary --- Gilles Deleuze

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

What is a problem? What's asked in that question, and how does one even begin to take its measure? How else could one begin, except as one does with any other problem--by way of its impulsion. Of Learned Ignorance: Idea of a Treatise in Philosophy is about philosophy because philosophy is about problems: philosophy, in a word, is where problems become a problem. After Anti-Oedipus, in the Kafka book and in A Thousand Plateaus, what Deleuze and Guattari counsel, strikingly, is sobriety. Sobriety is what they praise in Kafka. And it is sobriety that seems above all else to be necessary here. (Steven Shaviro has pointed out the prominence of structure in Deleuze's writing: "even when Deleuze's prose, by himself or with Guattari, seems to be ranging anarchically all over the place, in fact it has a rigid and unvarying architecture, which is what keeps it from falling apart.") Of Learned Ignorance is a dead letter because it names a problem. It's a dead letter because it is, cautiously, a love letter. It's a dead letter because it lovingly stages an experiment in whimsy, and perhaps above all, because it is problematic (in the Kantian sense): It is a (sober) attempt at exemplifying what it talks about -- and what eludes it: A series of footnotes, with blank (transcriptive) pages above, effects something like the integration of a differential, the reciprocal determination where the sources enter into in relation to one another in order to produce a paper, essay, or (inexistent) (chap)book. Of Learned Ignorance, in facing down a problem, makes a wager; it courts failure; it puts it all on the line. All, yes, for love -- a kind of love ... (of wisdom?).

Philosophy (General) --- philosophy --- Emmanuel Kant --- Franz Kafka --- Louis Althusser --- Gilles Deleuze --- Felix Guattari