r/Deleuze

I have a sever, and there’s also the Guattari one. Just wanted to get a feel if there was interest

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari employ intricate language and complexity theory to discuss these three concepts. Yet, in practice, I am unable to clearly distinguish between them. It seems to me that all three reveal a nested, interpenetrating, and articulated interrelationship between deterritorialization and reterritorialization—one that does not operate according to the dialectics of identity (e.g., A, not-A, and then A again).Can anyone tell me about their relationship? Thanks.

I've got The Interpretation of Dreams, Capital, Beyond Good and Evil, and Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Is that necessary? I'm not a very disciplined reader so it's a big project, might not work. Question is: is it even worth it to jump straight into Anti-Oedipus?

I was scrolling through the abécédaire and Deleuze correlates deterritorialization and outlandishness:

> For example, I happened to notice that in Melville, there appears all the time “outlandish” – I pronounce poorly, you can correct it yourself – but “outlandish” is precisely the equivalent of “the deterritorialized,” word for word.

Accepting that the parallels are imprecise — I’m not even taking Deleuze at his word about deterritorialization/outlandishness directly correlating — are there any rough, accessible parallels of his ideas? Little heuristics?

For example,the following kinda make sense for the time being (for me):

Desire seems to be this unconscious drive that gloms onto things to keep us overturning life’s stability.

By analogy to an egg, BwO as a stem cell (healthy) and as a developed organ (not healthy) seems to make sense to me.

Rhizome just seems to be a method of understanding that isn’t linear, but gradually learned and which kinda shifts over time.

As basic etymology, agence in French refers to agency, like advertising, employment, real estate agencies with tiny offices.

Now think of a stadium or a megachurch chapel, in contrast: they’re perfectly “assemblages” on the surface (podiums, seats, lights…), yet if you take a close look, everything is arranged according to a vertical hierarchy, meant to house thousands or tens of thousands of people within their massive unit.

So, assemblage is still molar, while agencement is fully molecular - and I think this is a crucial difference.

Agencies are interfaces, rather than containers. They don’t need big spaces to accommodate a lot of crowds at once. They’re usually only about 100 squares with minimal equipments in them, reminding you the distinction of personal property vs. private property in Marx.

By being smaller yourself as a unit, or by giving yourself out in a “kenosis/relinquishment” way in Hegelian terms, you get to connect to bigger worlds. A megachurch can’t do this: it is completely self-contained within its specific religious streak, by which there’s no room for flexible transformations from secular encounters. It will only insist on expanding its current logic and eventually either explode or fossilize as the result.

What about Hollywood movies, obsessed with scales and spectacles, despite the colorful assemblages of characters/universes? What about social media, which look like grassroots assemblages but often end up conforming (metrics, trends, bait…) through and through? What about students using the agencement potentials of LLMs for mere assemblage functions? What about countries/governments as the most “universal” container assemblages?

As shown in these examples, what I find problematic is how the English translation ‘assemblage’ can be often perfectly compatible with capitalist drives, because assemblage is what already happens in neoliberal capitalism all the time, under the fake disguise of diversity celebration.

In my view, agencement signals communitarian and solidaritarian infinity, via international and even inter-planetary body-without-organs.

Sometimes what’s at stake can be precisely about which assemblage you decide to detach off in order to remain faithful as an agency or agencement that never belongs in the first place, because belonging sucks and becoming rules - and this is why I think the distinction matters.

Hello, this might have some personal content which I hope is welcome

I'm a psychology student (6 years programme in a mostly psychoanalytic university and region). I'm in the middle of my degree and I've been trying to find some solid or semi solid ground to stay in while studying and organizing politically and just thinking in general (?)

I've always been very sciency, "truth" and maths focused and my degree has shaken that quite a lot. Right now I've found deleuzian works and it seems to me like a sort of conclusive position I'd arrive at, to sort of find myself in the non-knowing critical and schizophrenic position deleuze proposes or offers (feel free to criticize this idea)

But to do that I have to go through Lacan (and for him I must read saussure and Hegel and so on) and Marx and Nietzsche and a lot of other authors, and just in general progress through my degree and through life. D&G are just not authors one "gets" or "manages to pass through" quickly or early in life, as I understand it

Now my question is, what do I do in the meantime? For example in my therapeutic work (as a patient) how do I navigate therapy watching out for deleuzian warnings without understanding him already? How do I avoid getting locked in oedipal triangles? Or choosing things I later find out have power or ideological influences/wieldings I don't feel okay with (like joining as an assistant teacher at a non-critical course (where I'm from each course has a team and being an AT is how you get to be a teacher there))? Or how do I read Lacan critically without locking myself inside his logic?

There are no practical and accesible tool boxes, aside from the issue that that is for the average person. How can I go through that?

The answer may be half theoretical and half pointing to me being dumb

Thanks for reading if you made it this far!!

Why is it that you can decompose a computer then reassemble it later to make it work again but you can’t with a human being? Because life is the entire flow each second: if the specific intensity of each synaptic connection changes, the whole system irreversibly breaks down.

But at the atomic or quantum level, cells are always already part of the outside ecosystem, entropically ready to disassemble in their potentiality. Life seems to be kind of an impossible dream of struggling towards a permanent assemblage, or what folks like to call an “identity.”

Should we take a more continuity-based view on death, given our scientific knowledge of molecular realities?

So they often criticize starting from 0, starting over, turning a new leaf, wiping the slate clean, establishing new foundations.

Is the mistake drug users make always to start over again from

ground zero, either going on the drug again or quitting, when what they

should do is make it a stopover, to start from the "middle," bifurcate from

the middle?

But what does this practically entail? It's easy to see practically what starting from Zero entails, it's about saying "we can't control the past but we can control the future" and this always fails. SO what does starting from the middle mean? Does it mean looking at what is happening in the past and continuing the processes that are already happening? I mean we already do that by very nature of exisiting. We constantly just continue processes alrady underway. SO what does it mean to situate yourself in the middle practically?

At least from what I can tell, he never directly deals with the question of freedom, which is strange to me because his philosophy is very political. He talks about lines of flight and many concepts that kind of surround freedom, but never in itself beyond minor references. I'd love to be wrong on this!

Hello everyone,
Do any of you know where i can find the abecedaire (or the abc) of Deleuze, possibly with english subtitles (or if any of you is italian, with italian subtitles).
i’ve noticed in my research for this interview that a couple of people have already asked this question in the past, but all the links provided in the other posts don’t work anymore.
Thank you so much.

I got it from some actual real analysis I found on Deleuze I ordered the guy’s book just to see if there was any actual argument outside the surface level. I forgot the name of it but I’ll find it later and comment it in the replies. If anybody knows what I’m talking about let me know if it’s slop or not