Philosophy should always be a challenge. Not an oppressive or subjugating challenge - as with the teacher and the student, the parent and the child, the boss and the employer, or any other relationship composed of all too clearly defined and opaque hierarchies - but a loving challenge; a challenge borne out of a bond of … Continue reading Thought: Philosophy & the Loving Challenge
Book Review: D.H. Lawrence – St. Mawr
This is a great book. It details the relationship between Lou Carrington and her mother Mrs. Witt, as well as her husband Rico, and depicts Lou's desire to escape the stuffy, claustrophobic social circles of middle-class British society. The horse St. Mawr becomes an object of fascination for Lou as her disillusionment increases. Lawrence uses … Continue reading Book Review: D.H. Lawrence – St. Mawr
Book Review: Mark Fisher – Exiting the Vampire Castle
An essay in which Fisher utilises some Nietzschean tools to criticise the modern, moralising left. In short, it's basically a polemic against what we can call identity politics. Now, identity politics is not necessarily a new phenomenon, in fact the grouping of individuals by common signification - whether affirmatively as an act of solidarity and … Continue reading Book Review: Mark Fisher – Exiting the Vampire Castle
Ditty #22
The success of any organisation is defined not by the degree to which it can homogenize its constituent parts, but rather by how well it can preserve its compositional differences.
Thought: Before the Personal There is Politics
The personal is political; "before Being there is politics". This of course does not refer to a deferment of collective action, much less the idea that politics consists in our intimate little narcissistic struggles: "schizophrenics do at least have real problems". In fact, it refers precisely to a process of de-individualisation: a process of opening oneself … Continue reading Thought: Before the Personal There is Politics
Book Review: Gilles Deleuze – Postscript on the Societies of Control
Taking the baton from Foucault, Deleuze in this brief essay articulates some simple yet profound notions apropos of our transition from a society of discipline to a society of control. Early capitalism sought to manage with great detail various environments of enclosure, whereas our modern (written in the 90s but equally relevant today) societies are more concerned with … Continue reading Book Review: Gilles Deleuze – Postscript on the Societies of Control
Thought: Machines & Flows
Everything is a machine, insofar as everything is at once an interceptor and a producer of flows. What we mean by this, more precisely, is that everything is involved in a generalized transference of flows, according to the principles of conservation of energy. Machines must be described by the connections that they involve and invoke. Each … Continue reading Thought: Machines & Flows
Thought: Creativity & Becoming Lovers
The noble person knows that the only way to comment upon or critique a creation is with love; but love necessitates the harshest of depersonalisations, the opening up to multiplicities; thus we have no interest in belittling or degrading creativity, but only in latching onto flows, engulfing ourselves in streams; in short: becoming lovers.
Essay: The Art & the Artist
All creativity is a state of flowing. The problem with the attachment of the art to the artist is that it at all times seeks to pin down and segregate a global, totalising person or identity, and thus always attempts to subjugate and subordinate the real function of multiplicities, lines and flows. We are all, … Continue reading Essay: The Art & the Artist
Ditty #21
We have no interest in condemning nor vilifying men for their failings, weaknesses, or vices; this is a job for priests and tyrants, for cops and courtroom psychiatrists.
Doing the Multiple 