Derelict Space

September 19, 2014

Philosophy as Guerrilla War

by ds1977

“Philosophy isn’t a power: religions, States, capitalism, science, the law, public opinion, and television are powers, but not philosophy. Not being a power, philosophy can’t battle with the powers that be, but it does fight a war without battles – a guerrilla campaign – against them. And it can’t converse with them, it’s got nothing to tell them, nothing to communicate, and can only negotiate. Since the powers aren’t just external things, but permeate each of us, philosophy throws us all into constant negotiations with – and a guerrilla campaign against – ourselves.” Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations.

September 17, 2014

Autonomy: A Project of Life

by ds1844

“Autonomy is a political body without organs; antihierarchical, antidialectical, antirepresentative. It is not only a political project, it is a project for existence. Individuals are never autonomous: they depend on external recognition. The autonomous body is not exclusive or identifiable. It is beyond recognition. As a body of workers, it breaks away from labor discipline; as a body of militants, it ignores party organization; as a body of doctrine, it refuses ready-made classifications.” Sylvère Lotringer & Christian Marazzi, The Return of Politics, 8.

September 16, 2014

Competitors Pray While Predators Prey

by ds1977

“Violence, as the absence of competition, has no performance anxiety component. It really is just touching, if we mean it in the same way that we would smash a soda can flat, or slam a car door, or break a stick. The physics and biomechanics involved are all the same. Any considerations beyond that are imaginary. The physical realization that violence is about a failure to compete, an end-run around competition, is liberating. Gone is the worry about being big enough, fast enough, or strong enough. The other guy’s skill counts for absolutely nothing. It’s all about you. The other guy is prey to be taken, meat to be butchered. The pressure is off and you are free to do as you will. You are exercising your legacy as a predator – and by all accounts, predation is pleasurable.” Tim Larkin and Chris Ranck-Buhr How to Survive the Most Critical 5 Seconds of your Life, 43

September 15, 2014

How to Philosophize with a Hammer

by ds1844

“Turning thought into something aggressive, active and affirmative. Creating free men, that is to say men who do not confuse the aims of culture with the benefit of the State, morality or religion. Fighting the ressentiment and bad conscience which have replaced thought for us. Conquering the negative and its false glamour. The use of philosophy is to sadden.” Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 106.

September 12, 2014

What Empire Does

by ds1977

“When we speak of Empire we name the mechanisms of power that preventively and surgically stifle any revolutionary potential in a situation. In this sense Empire is not an enemy that confronts us head-on; it is a rhythm that imposes itself, a way of dispensing and dispersing reality – less an order of the world than its sad, heavy, and militaristic liquidation.” TCI 13.

September 11, 2014

We Strive for the Forbidden

by ds1844

“Nitimur in Vetitum” Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 4.

September 10, 2014

And if Altruism is a Tool of the State …?

by ds1977

“The Southerner has retained and fostered – in a certain way reinstated – the medieval estimate as to the value of life. In the opinion of those ages it was but lightly esteemed; it was not a supreme good for which almost all else was to be sacrificed, but something to be taken in hand and put in risk in the pursuit of manly ideals. Modernism has worked to intensify the passion for existence until those who are under its dominion cannot well conceive how a man – except for some supreme duty to which he is pledged by altruistic motives – can give up his own life or take that of his neighbor.” Nathaniel Shaler, North American Review, 1890.

September 9, 2014

A Rediscovery of the Untimely

by ds1844

“What is clear for Nietzsche is that society cannot be an ultimate authority. The ultimate authority is creation, it is art: or rather, art represents the absence and the impossibility of an ultimate authority.” Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands, 129.

September 8, 2014

The State Captures to Survive

by ds1977

“If there be one human quality that the mountaineer admires above all others, it is “nerve.” And what greater display of nerve has been made in this generation than for a few clansmen to shoot down a judge at the bench, the public prosecutor, the sheriff, the clerk of the court, and two jurymen, then take to the mountain laurel like Corsicans to the maquis, and defy the armed power of the country? The cause does not matter to a mountaineer.” Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders, 392.

September 6, 2014

The Noble Affinity of Thought and Life?

by ds1844

“Life making thought active, thought making life affirmative.” Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 101.