/lit/ - Literature

>>14733236
(continued)

3. For what it's worth, D&G preferred the term metaphysics over ontology because ontology tends to indicate preformed identities and their exploration, for example a political ontology typically seeks which political objects are crucial and which are less significant (do masses or great men or institutions move history?). The terms metaphysics and ontology have rather contingent meanings, metaphysics historically just meant "the books that came after The Physics in Aristotle's work". In any case, intensities can be a bit hard to pin down, but they refer to an internal logic of relations that lead to extension. So a table has certain internal relations with their own rhythms, speeds, whatever else that allows it to occupy an external space. Basically if you cut a table in half you will not cut its temperature in half even though you will half its volume if you separate the parts. They are related to qualia of course, but it's difficult to draw a precise line because qualia can mean different things in different philosophical models. Intensities are related to concepts, events and so on in the obvious way of forming an assemblage so that meaning is always material to some extent (in "What is Philosophy?" D&G talk at length about all the things that take place whenever we think or talk, how we are constantly actualizing relations between affects, concepts and past experiences even as we believe ourselves to just rationally explore ideas). But there are more important ways in which intensities are related to phenomena, namely in how they connect to one another beyond being filtered through the representation that forms our experience. For example in masochism where sexual arousal caused by periods of abstinence, advocated in both Sacher-Masoch and in De Sade, but for very different reasons, are connected directly to pain and change its meaning (without pain being confused for pleasure).

Of course intensities are also hard to pin down because they "take place" between thresholds (like the freezing and boiling point of water), hence pic related. God is a lobster because he has to pinch certain thresholds in which life can persist. There's also the double bind that Gregory Bateson talked about ("you must love me freely" - an impossible task) and the geology of morals in the sense of strata and capacities. In order to be moral (although for D&G it's probably a bit of an outdated term) one must connect to an intensity that gives meaning to an assemblage, such as the feeling of kinship. Basically, in typical D&G fashion everything they say means a great deal of things and that's basically the point, that's the rhizomatic approach.

Chapter 3 is headed by a simple picture of a lobster, and the chapter's name puns on Nietzsche.

Chapter 3 is headed by a simple picture of a lobster, and the chapter's name puns on Nietzsche.