/lit/ - Literature

>The Whiteheadian adventure does not aim at awakening, leaving the cave. It is itself a dream, a storytelling: to learn "inside" the Platonic cave, together with those who live and argue within it. Not in the hope that the false appearances will gradually yield their secrets, but in the hope that these "appearances," if they are appreciated in their affirmative importance, might be articulated into fabulous contrasts. The singularity of the Whiteheadian dream of learning inside the cave is that the person infected by it, who is lured by Whiteheadian propositions, is not mandated to become a missionary and propagate the infection. To be sure, this book tries to do so, but in a way to which only a very benign and limited infection may correspond, not a galloping process. Instead, this dream obliges the person it infects to address the dreams of others, for only dreamers can accept the modification of their dream. Only dreams and stories, because they are the enjoyment of living values, can receive the interstices without the panic effect of people who believe themselves to be in danger of losing hold.

>Every philosophy endeavoring to lead people "out of the cave " has a direct connection to the universal, in which respect it is akin to therapeutics in the modern sense: the first refers to a use of thought that is finally adequate, or moral; the second to a return to health, to the morality of parts reconnecting with the possibility of a healthy cooperation in the service of the whole. This is why the paths they both propose are by right open to all. In contrast, speculative efficacy-the word of a dragon or of a trance, not of a counselor-is addressed to dreams, to doubts, to fears and ambitions, not to perplexity, confusion, to qualms in search of landmarks. No doubt the young Grendel suffered too much for the dragon's words to infect him in a speculative mode. Thus, as the trick of evil, it had the effect of transforming its feeling of loneliness into contempt and hatred.

>As a thinker, Whitehead is thus not so much the author of the scheme and the concepts he articulates as he was obliged by them, in a process of empirical experimentation-verification that is akin to trance, because in it thought is taken, captured, by a becoming that separates it from its own intentionality. A "mechanical" becoming in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari, in the sense that thinkers can produce this thought only because they have themselves become a piece, or gear, of what has captured them, much more than they have created it. Thought is then no longer the exercise of a right but becomes an "art of consequences," consequences that leap from one domain to another, or, more precisely, that make interstices zigzag where a homogeneous right had seemed to reign, and make connections proliferate where "this has nothing to do with that" had prevailed.

>That is why I had to "think with Whitehead," that is, accept the capture and become a gear.