/lit/ - Literature

a note here on raymond ruyer, who has a connection to both leibniz and D&G:

>Like the embryo with both its capacity for equipotentiality and self-survey, the brain is form in itself rather than form perceived, requiring a perceiver behind it or framing it. It has a capacity to disperse itself and yet remain in immediate touch with itself, at absolute speed and with all of itself simultaneously. Like the subatomic particle! For Deleuze and Guattari, the brain is not just a property of vertebrates, an acquisition of higher beings in their evolutionary march, but a property of materiality itself that all living beings capitalize on in their different ways. Every concept, affect or percept, that is, every mode of affecting and being affected, every mode of living, is itself a microbrain, a state of self-survey without distance, a mode of matter-idea that knows itself from the inside.

>Not only are all higher vertebrates engaged in a process of brain-becoming, even plants, rocks, and crystals are part of a process of becoming-brain to the extent that they contract within their boundaries forces that are outside them, and insofar as they constitute a mode of self-survey or immediate proximity. This constitutes a world of things and events, along with living beings, becoming-brain, becoming-thought: “Not every organism has a brain, and not all life is organic, but everywhere there are forces that constitute microbrains, or an inorganic life of things."

>Matter must be understood outside itself, through the sense, the ideality, that inheres in its most minute operations; and equally, life must be understood as outside itself, even though it must also be understood as that which produces an interiority for itself, for it is only possible and capable of functioning creatively through the indeterminacy and openness of the materiality which sustains and surrounds it. Matter ‘lives’ through the capacity for being-otherwise, that is, for becoming-other, a brain-becoming; and life materializes itself through the inventiveness, the surprise, that it brings back to the world in which it lives, through its extension and expression through matter. Each is a becoming-brain, the drawing together of forces that constitute boundaries, forms of connection and forms of self-transformation. Each is a form of materialism that moves beyond matter and a mode of finality, in which an ideal or a tendency, a direction or goal can be discerned. Each is a becoming-brain in the sense that the brain is the site for the entwined connections between and transformations of the inside and the outside. The brain is the way that the outside folds into an inside, but equally the way in which interiority is folded out into exteriority, the point of transition from the one to the other and thus the condition for the creative connections between them.

source:
https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia15/parrhesia15_grosz.pdf