/lit/ - Literature

>>16362737
>Wow he isn't saying much is he?
Not really, yet people still miss the point apparently.
>So to him distinctions don't matter, except for the all-important oedipus complex, which is:
>-defined by him
Defined by Freud rather. Deleuze wasn't really for it, it's just that his approach to undermining it from within can be misleading without full context.
>-a biological gland
>Don't take it so literally.
>-cannot be denied
Deleuze didn't say that.
>-must be confronted by experimenting with your desires
The phrasing there (opening yourself up to love and desire) matters. It doesn't mean randomly indulging every desire.
>-and in fact you can't know anything about yourself unless you satisfy his criteria to do it in a "non-oedipal way."
It's not that you can't know nothing, it's that the labels you put on yourself operate at a different level from the more fundamental level at which desire operates (which is both material and non-material, connecting all kinds of contingent and not so contingent flows and objects in the largest sense of the word, including said labels).

>He certainly had a dog in the race to justify human identity as "strange, fluid, unusual,"
If you're using the term "human identity" as some kind of essentialism and thinking about the need for it to be justified you're already moving away from the point and into a different framework that has nothing to do with Deleuze.

>how much time did he spend inside of rectums?
Probably not much, he banged some actress and then got married to an anorexic and had two kids. There are no other such anecdotes about him that I'm aware of, unlike Guattari who was a notorious womanizer in the most French of ways.

>>14764074
>I've started to locate it on some plane of immanence or in another word virtual plane where all the production and plugging and so on happens.

The difficulty with Deleuze for most is in how the virtual and the actual relate to one another. Even if becoming takes place virtually, its effects (perhaps that isn't even the right word) take place in the actual (in empirical reality if we understand it as the entire phenomenal world of an "individual", including cognition).

>But what exactly begets the creation of a BwO and how regularly that occurs and if it can even be narrowed down to a moment still eludes me.

Well they say that you cannot desire without having a BwO and they understand desire at least in part in a Lacanian sense of underlying all experience (only closer to the empirical and the material, "the unconscious is a factory and not a theater" they say against psychoanalysis). For us it has to do with bodily flows of all kinds to the extent that they are understood as part of assemblages, that is to say having some contingency to their connections (so basically habits of all kinds connecting and disconnecting, including habits of thought). Now an assemblage can be activated from any of its points, albeit probably not in equal measure. So to take a psychological example, it is possible to induce depression from a material point (problems with flows, regulated through other flows caused by medicine or exercise), but it is also possible to induce it through repeated and persistent thinking patterns, usually as a result of stress, which eventually bring with them certain material flows that perpetuate or enhance the condition.

Of course some BwOs stand out more than others and extreme examples like the ones D&G use (masochism, catatonia, anorexia, erotic love, etc.) tend to be the most obvious, but they are not the only ones. BwOs differ from one another in their starting points, in their regularity, in their capacities (what kinds of sensations or thoughts they can bring about), in their requirements (such as abstinence, ironically enough, in the case of masochism or sadism). There is always chaos to them and unpredictability not only due to the contingency of their connections, but also because for D&G the world is a "chaosmos" at its most fundamental level so nothing is guaranteed in advance, especially because of the most well known idea of chaos theory, also promoted by D&G, which is that minor deviations can lead to some very disproportional effects. Some of this stuff is hinted at in plain terms in "Letter to a Harsh Critic", the 7 page letter at the start of Negotiations.

As for narrowing a BwO down to its very first moment, it's almost impossible since we tend to detect thresholds once we've crossed them (one realizes they feel in love once they already "fell", already on the plateau) and that starting point could've been anywhere in the assemblage (you can fall in love even when the other person is absent).

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-deleuze-postscript-on-the-societies-of-control
>There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

>Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines

What are our weapons frens?

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-deleuze-postscript-on-the-societies-of-control
Thoughts?

>>12674426
Great post and spot on. Reminded me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D5CuXW6bT8

>>11702882
I did not imply otherwise. It's still not a complete deterritorialization, which would be more comparable to some psychotic episode, it's rather a controlled deterritorialization that's meant to be freeing. Not the same thing if that's what you're getting at. Although if you have some precise idea that contradicts this I'd unironically love to hear it.

>>11702876
I know it's silly since D had some uplifting influences (especially Nietzsche, but Spinoza and Bergson and countless others, especially writers like Lawrence or Miller), but some might read about how life is trapped in bodies (composite objects) and about how it must be freed and say "welp, out the window I go!"

>>11371013
> You’re probably right regarding what Deleuze says, but that’s kind of where he loses me too because I don’t really see what desire has to do with metaphysics.

Depends on what you mean by metaphysics. But think about it this way: desire is at the core of all experience (if you do not desire anything at a given moment, you desire for that moment to continue as it is for example). Every phenomenon can be interpreted in many ways: artistic, scientific, erotic etc. and every interpretation and evaluation has an assemblage attached to it. Assemblages have many components, part of them material (biological) and part of them relational (some assemblages can share material components). Matter is not just one uniform thing, but a series of self-differentiating intensities (they constantly differentiate from themselves and from each other in their becoming) that have thresholds and limits. At some level assemblages, no matter how fluid, have thus something to do with metaphysics within the Deleuzian framework. The thing is that this doesn't always come out in an obvious manner in his work with Guattari even though it's the same framework (they explicitly use intensities as a concept).