The concept of intensity in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy is multifaceted and central to his ontology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. Here's a breakdown of the main aspects of intensity.

1. Ontological Foundation: In Deleuze's philosophy, "intensity" refers to the qualitative forces that constitute reality but are not themselves extended in space. These intensities are virtual—meaning they are real but not actualized in a tangible form—and they underpin the manifestation of all physical and observable phenomena. For example, consider the concept of temperature in a weather system: temperature itself is an intensive property that doesn't assume a visible shape but influences the formation and behavior of clouds and winds, thus shaping the extended forms of weather patterns that we can observe and measure. Deleuze challenges traditional metaphysics that prioritizes extension (things and their physical properties) over these more foundational intensities. His ontology posits that intensities are what generate the extended forms and qualities of the world we experience. This idea is rooted in his concept of "transcendental empiricism," which requires us to sense these underlying intensities that are not accessible through ordinary perception but through other faculties such as memory and imagination.

2. Difference and Becoming: Intensities are crucial in Deleuze's redefinition of difference. Unlike traditional views that see difference as comparative (i.e., something being different from something else), Deleuze understands difference as an intrinsic property of intensity. For instance, take the intensity of a musical note, which varies not only in pitch but in its emotional resonance and texture. Each variation, even within the same note played at different times or in different contexts, creates a unique event in experience, differing from its previous instances not by comparison but as a distinct occurrence. Intensities themselves are singularities that differ in themselves and from each other without reference to anything external. They cannot be subdivided or altered without changing their nature, which makes each intensity a unique event that fosters change and becoming.

3. Ethics and Politics: Intensity in Deleuze's ethics and politics relates to the potential to transform or become worthy of what he calls "the virtual event"—a significant, transformative force or occurrence that one must be prepared to encounter and engage with. Consider a social movement or a moment of personal revelation; these are examples of virtual events that carry intense transformative potential, pushing individuals to rethink values and behaviors. This involves an ethical and political dimension where individuals strive to increase their capacity for positive encounters that enhance their power and joy, aligning with the philosophical traditions of Stoicism, Nietzscheanism, and Spinozism. Through this process, individuals aim to not only adapt to these changes but to actively shape them, enhancing their ability to contribute to and thrive within these new realities.

4. Aesthetics: In Deleuze's aesthetic theory, intensity shifts focus from traditional forms to sensations, which are direct experiences of forces. Consider an abstract painting that does not depict a recognizable scene but evokes powerful emotions through its colors, shapes, and textures. These elements in the painting are not mere representations but are dynamic interactions of forces that affect viewers and are affected by their interpretations, blurring the lines between the subject (viewer) and object (artwork). The artist, then, is someone who captures and expresses these intensities, creating works that enable others to experience the transformative power of these forces. Through their art, they invite viewers to engage with and be moved by the raw intensities of color and form, catalyzing personal and communal shifts in perception and emotion.

Overall, Deleuze’s concept of intensity challenges conventional ideas of being and perception by emphasizing the unseen forces that underlie and actualize all aspects of reality. It encourages a profound engagement with the world that goes beyond surface appearances to the dynamic interplay of forces that shape existence.

In the concept developed by Gilles Deleuze, "singularity" represents a distinctive point or situation that is pivotal, unique, and serves as a catalyst for change and diversity. Deleuze's use of the term emerges against a historical backdrop where "singularity" originally replaced the notion of a "mirror" used in medieval representations of the world. While the medieval "mirror" depicted a totality reflecting a divine order, the concept of singularity arises with the age of exploration, which introduced new, often contradictory or unprecedented elements that demanded a different, more flexible, and open form of representation. For instance, when European explorers first documented their encounters with the unique wildlife of the Galápagos Islands, these observations challenged existing biological classifications and inspired new scientific theories. The singular nature of the Galápagos fauna, particularly its distinct species like the giant tortoises and finches, served as a pivotal catalyst for the development of evolutionary theory, exemplifying how a singularity can radically transform existing knowledge systems and perceptions.

Deleuze applies "singularity" to describe points of high importance or intensity within a context, where conventional perceptions and experiences are disrupted, leading to new forms of understanding and expression. These points are not fixed; rather, they are dynamic, open to continuous revision and interpretation—what Deleuze terms "open totalities." For example, in the context of art, the Dada movement of the early 20th century can be seen as a singularity. It emerged in response to the horrors of World War I, challenging traditional aesthetics and cultural norms through its embrace of absurdity, randomness, and anti-art elements. This movement disrupted the conventional art scene dramatically, leading to new forms of artistic expression and laying the groundwork for later avant-garde movements like Surrealism. The Dada movement exemplifies how a singularity can destabilize existing structures and open up new possibilities for creativity and interpretation.

Singularity, in a broader philosophical sense for Deleuze, pertains to the unique characteristics of an event or entity that differentiate it from others, enabling novel perceptions and interactions. It is similar to how islands, as distinct entities, create unique interactions with their surroundings. These singular points can influence perceptions both minutely and vastly, allowing a person to experience the world in multifaceted ways—both "infinitesimally" and "infinitely." For instance, the phenomenon of witnessing a solar eclipse can be considered a singularity. This rare event offers a unique and profound experience that alters our usual perceptions of the daytime sky, encouraging both awe and a deeper scientific inquiry into the workings of our solar system. The singular experience of an eclipse, visible only from specific locations on Earth, not only impacts the individuals who observe it but also stimulates broader discussions and studies about celestial mechanics and the nature of the cosmos. This shows how a singularity can provide a powerful moment of connection and transformation, influencing both individual perceptions and collective knowledge.

In civic geography, for instance, a singularity could be a specific geographical feature that defines or characterizes a region, influencing how it is perceived and interacted with. In the realm of creativity and literature, singularity enables writers to transform standard perceptions into unique, impactful visions, thereby altering language and influencing readers' views of the world.

Thus, Deleuze’s concept of singularity encompasses a broad range of applications, from the geographical and the perceptual to the philosophical and the creative, emphasizing the transformative potential of unique, distinct points in forming and re-forming our understanding of the world.

These were generated by Chat GPT

Event

Imagine a dance floor where a dance (the event) emerges from the interactions of the dancers, the music, and the environment. No single element (like just the music or just one dancer) can create the dance. It happens because all these elements come together in a specific way at a specific time. This interaction is what Deleuze means by an ‘event’. It’s not just the movements (what we see), but the energy and interactions that make those movements possible.

In Deleuze’s view, events are like hidden recipes that make certain outcomes possible. They are potentialities that only become visible when they unfold. Take the example of a tree turning green in spring. What we see is the green tree, but the ‘event’ includes all the unseen factors like the soil quality, weather, and the tree’s biology, which interact to produce the greening. Instead of saying “the tree is green,” which makes it sound static and unchanging, saying “the tree greens” suggests this ongoing, dynamic process—a series of interactions becoming visible.

Deleuze challenges traditional ideas that focus on static states or essences of things. Instead of looking at the world as a set of fixed objects (like a series of snapshots), he sees it as a continuous flow of events, an ever-changing landscape where each moment is a blend of various forces coming together. This view emphasizes the fluidity and ongoing creativity of reality, where new potentials are always unfolding.

He also points out that events are unique and original. They don’t just follow a template or mimic something that came before. Each event is a fresh creation, like an artist painting a new scene rather than copying an old one.

Finally, in Deleuze’s philosophy, thinking itself is an event. It’s not just about processing or generating ideas; it’s about engaging dynamically with the world, being open to new possibilities and insights that emerge from the interplay of many forces and factors. This way of thinking challenges us to view life not as a series of static images but as a vibrant, ever-changing canvas.

Exteriority/Interiority

Gilles Deleuze’s concept of exteriority and interiority can be likened to thinking about how we understand a forest. Imagine you’re looking at a forest from a distance. You could think of the forest as having an “interior essence,” like a secret spirit or a definitive, unchanging character that defines what it is, regardless of what happens around it. This view, focusing on the interior essence of the forest, aligns with traditional Western philosophy, which often sees things (including people) as having a core, intrinsic nature or essence that explains their behavior and existence.

Deleuze, however, would argue that this traditional view is limiting and inaccurate. Instead of looking for some hidden essence or interior, Deleuze invites us to consider the forest entirely from the “outside.” This means seeing the forest in terms of the countless interactions and relationships it has with everything around it—the soil, the climate, the animals that live in it, and even the humans who interact with it. The forest, in Deleuze’s view, is its relationships; it doesn’t have a secretive, inner nature that’s detached from these external interactions.

In this metaphor, Deleuze would argue that nothing has a “natural interiority” (a natural, independent essence). What we often think of as the “interior” (like the spirit of the forest) is actually formed through the countless external interactions and relationships (the “exterior”). So, when you see a tree, you shouldn’t think of it as manifesting its inner essence but rather as something existing in a dynamic web of relationships—soil nutrients, water, sunlight, and more.

Therefore, in Deleuze’s philosophy, understanding anything—whether a forest, a person, or society—requires us to look at the external, interconnected relations and influences, not at some supposed intrinsic essence. This approach, which focuses on the exterior and sees the interior as a product of external relations, leads to a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes openness, interconnection, and the constant influence of our environment on what we are. This viewpoint encourages us to embrace the external world and our interdependence with it, rather than retreating into an imagined, isolated interior.

Sensation

Imagine you're walking into a bakery. Before you even see any pastries, the warm, rich aroma of freshly baked bread envelops you. This initial, direct experience is akin to what Deleuze refers to as "sensation." It's something you feel immediately and intensely, without needing to consciously think about it or even recognize it as the smell of bread. This sensation hits you before any cognitive recognition kicks in, like realizing "Ah, that’s the smell of bread baking!" This is a moment of pure sensation — it’s raw and direct.

Deleuze believes this kind of sensation is fundamental to how we experience the world and it’s a key aspect of perception. Perception here doesn't just mean recognizing and naming what we sense (like identifying the smell of bread), but it's also about how these sensations impact us and create experiences. For instance, that smell might evoke a memory of your grandmother’s kitchen or make you suddenly realize how hungry you are.

Applying this to art, when you look at a painting or hear a piece of music, the initial impact before you start to think about what it represents or means is what Deleuze calls sensation. For example, seeing a bold splash of red on a canvas might strike you immediately as intense or aggressive — that's sensation. It’s only after this that you might start to interpret the red as symbolizing anger or passion.

Deleuze uses the artwork of Francis Bacon as an example. Bacon's paintings often depict distorted, abstract figures that convey raw, emotional experiences. When you look at these images, the immediate feeling or mood they provoke happens before you begin to think about what the figures might represent or the story behind them.

Moreover, Deleuze talks about "the Body without Organs" (BwO) as a way of describing a state where sensation flows freely without the typical organization or hierarchy our bodies usually operate under. Think of it as experiencing life like a continuous stream of music, where you feel every note intensely and individually without necessarily thinking about the melody or the song structure.

Finally, sensation for Deleuze isn’t just a passive experience but something very active and dynamic. It involves a direct interaction between the perceiver and the world, where new meanings, events, and experiences are constantly being created. This ties back to his broader philosophy that everything is in a state of becoming and change, and our sensations are a crucial part of this dynamic process.

So, in essence, Deleuze's concept of sensation is about these immediate, powerful experiences that precede and shape our perceptions, influencing not just how we think but how we engage with and create our reality.

Affect

Gilles Deleuze's concept of affect can be tricky, but imagine it this way: affect is like the invisible force behind every experience before it fully forms into thoughts or emotions.

Let's break it down using simple metaphors:

1. The Color of a Sunset: Think of affect as the intensity of color in a sunset. It's not just any color, but the profound, moving quality it has even before you think, "Wow, that's beautiful!" It's the raw impact that color has on you, which might stir feelings or thoughts, but exists before any of that crystallizes into "I feel serene" or "I feel sad."

2. The Moment Before a Kiss: Affect is also like that electric moment just before a kiss. It's not about the kiss itself or even the anticipation you can describe, but rather the undetectable buildup of everything happening in your body and mind right before your lips touch another's. It's a pulse of potential that hasn't yet been defined by your senses.

3. A Ghost's Reaction: Imagine a ghost in a room that suddenly reacts when someone enters. Affect in this context is like the disturbance in the air or the shift in energy — something changes, but it's more about the transition than the visible effect. It's what happens to the atmosphere, not necessarily to the ghost or the person entering.

Deleuze is saying that affect is about these kinds of interactions and changes that occur when different things (bodies, objects, forces) come together. It's not just a feeling or an emotion but the process and effect of being affected.

For Deleuze, using the term affect helps us think about experiences in a fresh way:

- Not just emotional: It's not merely about feelings but about changes that can be physical, spiritual, or intellectual.

- Not passive: It's about active participation in life’s events, not just watching them passively.

- Before cognition and perception: Affect is what happens before we even start to understand or interpret what we're experiencing.

In essence, Deleuze wants us to see affect as a fundamental element of existence that drives how things develop and transform over time, shaping both our personal experiences and the world around us. This approach challenges traditional views that focus only on clear, definable emotions and thoughts, suggesting instead that life is a continuous flow of affects, transformations, and encounters.

Force

Deleuze’s concept of force can be a bit complex, but let’s break it down using a simple metaphor. Imagine a bustling city where everything and everyone is constantly moving and interacting—cars weaving through traffic, people mingling in cafes, and street performers interacting with crowds. This city represents the world, and each entity within it—a car, a person, a coffee cup—is a force.

In Deleuze’s view, inspired by Nietzsche, these forces don’t have a specific origin or end goal; they simply exist to interact in an ever-changing dance. They’re not trying to reach a final state of calm or balance; rather, they’re always in motion, always becoming something new. This ongoing process of transformation is what Deleuze calls ‘becoming’.

For Deleuze, a force isn’t something aggressive or pressurized; it’s any capacity to bring about change. This could be physical, like a gust of wind blowing papers off a table, or more abstract, like an idea sparking a movement or a change in societal norms.

The interactions between these forces are what shape reality. Every car’s path affects another’s; every conversation in a cafe alters the social atmosphere. Each of these interactions is an ‘event’—a unique outcome of forces clashing or cooperating in unpredictable ways.

Now, let’s add another layer. Forces can be ‘active’ or ‘reactive’. An active force is like a person who walks confidently through the crowd, influencing others’ paths with their presence. A reactive force, on the other hand, is like someone who hesitantly steps back into a doorway to avoid disrupting the flow.

In this bustling city, nothing is fixed. Every moment brings new arrangements of cars, people, and interactions, meaning no scene can ever be exactly repeated. The city, like the world in Deleuze’s view, has no permanent structures or essences; it is always in flux, composed only of these forces and their interactions.

Deleuze challenges traditional philosophical ideas that suggest things have an essence or a perfect, unchanging form. Instead, he suggests that everything we perceive is the result of complex, temporary interactions. Just as a pencil on a desk isn’t just an object, but part of a wider array of events including its material properties and its use in that moment, every element of reality is similarly complex and contingent.

So, in Deleuze’s philosophy, the world is less like a stable narrative with a clear beginning and end, and more like an improvisational dance, where every move influences the next, and nothing is predetermined.

Immanence

To explain Gilles Deleuze's concept of immanence in a simpler and more relatable way, let's use the metaphor of a fish swimming in an ocean.

Immanence vs. Transcendence:

Think of immanence like the fish swimming in the ocean. Everything it experiences, understands, and interacts with happens within the ocean. There's nothing "outside" it needs to refer to or rely on for its existence or understanding of the world—it’s all happening in an interconnected, inclusive space. This is Deleuze's idea of immanence: everything exists and functions within the same plane or realm, with nothing beyond or above it dictating its reality.

Now, think of transcendence as the idea that there's something beyond the ocean that the fish needs to refer to or depend upon—like a bird or a human looking at the ocean from the outside. In many traditional philosophies and religions, this is how things are seen: there is a higher realm or a divine being that everything in the "lower" realm (like our ocean) must relate to and is dependent on for meaning and existence. For example, in Christianity, the physical world is often seen as secondary to the spiritual realm of God.

Why Deleuze Favors Immanence:

Deleuze argues against this idea of transcendence because it creates a separation or a hierarchy where the "lower" realm is seen as lesser or incomplete on its own, needing the "higher" realm to give it value or meaning. He dislikes how this setup devalues our immediate, lived experiences (the fish's life in the ocean) by always pointing to something outside of it (like the bird or human observing the ocean).

How Deleuze Uses Immanence:

Deleuze uses the idea of immanence to suggest that everything is interconnected within the same "ocean," without needing an external force to give it meaning. He believes that life, understanding, and reality all unfold and exist within a shared, continuous realm. For example, he draws on Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of the "eternal return," which suggests that life's events and experiences continually recur but always in slightly different ways, showing that change and difference are the natural states of the world.

The Importance of Connection and Difference:

In this view, the focus is not on separating things into categories or ranks (like mind and body, or human and divine) but on seeing how they connect, change, and interact. Deleuze emphasizes how everything is fundamentally related and how new ideas and realities emerge from these connections, not from transcending them.

Critiques and Challenges:

While Deleuze's idea of immanence is compelling, it's also challenging and has been critiqued. Critics like Alain Badiou argue that Deleuze's concept of the "virtual" (the potential of things to become other than they are) is itself a kind of transcendence, because it points to a realm of possibility beyond actual reality. However, Deleuze would argue that this virtual aspect is inseparably connected to the actual, meaning they continually affect and redefine each other without one being superior to the other.

In sum, Deleuze’s philosophy is like saying that the life of the fish is complete within the ocean itself, without needing to refer to anything outside of it to find meaning or value. This perspective values the richness and complexity of our immediate world and our experiences within it.

Materialism

To explain Gilles Deleuze’s concept of materialism in a simplified way, let’s imagine a busy city where everything is constantly moving and changing. This city isn’t just made of buildings and roads, but includes air, sound, people, ideas, and even the invisible forces like gravity and energy. Everything in the city interacts in complex and often unpredictable ways.

Deleuze’s materialism views the world somewhat like this bustling city. He argues against traditional views that separate matter (like physical objects) from form (the shape or idea of those objects). Instead of thinking of the world as being made up of static objects molded into form, like clay pressed into a specific shape, Deleuze sees the world as a dynamic flow of matter that is always changing and evolving—more like a river constantly shaping and reshaping the landscape as it flows.

He was inspired by philosophers like Spinoza and Nietzsche, who emphasized the body and physical existence over the mind or consciousness, suggesting that our thoughts are part of the material world and not separate from it. They argued against putting too much emphasis on consciousness as something distinct from our bodies.

Adding to this, Deleuze introduces the idea of the “plane of consistency,” which is an abstract concept where everything exists together on a single level. On this plane, things are defined not by their shape or form but by their behavior and relationships—like how different parts of the city affect each other in various ways, through movement, energy, and interaction.

Deleuze also talks about “machines,” but not in the usual sense of physical devices. Instead, he imagines abstract machines, which are systems or networks of interaction that produce something new. These machines aren’t necessarily made of metal and gears but could be any kind of relationship that generates change, like the interaction between different ideas, or between technology and humans.

In his view, everything—including thoughts, technology, and art—can interact directly with our nervous systems, shaping how we think and perceive the world without necessarily needing a logical or digital code, like in computers.

Ultimately, Deleuze’s materialism is about seeing the world as an interconnected, dynamic flow of material interactions, where new possibilities for thought and existence are constantly being created. This approach moves away from breaking things down into simple parts (like atoms or molecules) and instead focuses on the rich tapestry of interactions that make up the reality we experience.

Expression

Imagine a vast art workshop filled with artists, each with an array of paints and canvases. In this workshop, there is no pre-defined idea that each artist must follow; instead, each artist creates whatever comes to mind, with each stroke of the brush revealing new possibilities and directions for their artwork. This ongoing creative process in the workshop represents life as Deleuze sees it—an expressive and open whole where new relationships and creations continuously emerge.

Now, let’s break down some key points using this metaphor:

1. Concept of Expression: In Deleuze’s philosophy, “expression” is not about simply describing or representing something that already exists. It’s more like how each artist in our workshop makes unique brush strokes on the canvas, constantly creating new forms and ideas. Expression is the dynamic process of unfolding life’s potential, just like each brush stroke brings a new aspect of the artist’s vision to life.

2. Life as an Expressive Whole: Instead of thinking about life as a series of set pieces and fixed terms (like a pre-drawn stencil that artists must color in), Deleuze views life as a canvas with endless possibilities. Each moment and each interaction are like strokes on this canvas, continuously evolving and bringing about new forms.

3. Concepts vs. Structures: In traditional philosophy, concepts might be seen as fixed structures—like a set of rules that govern how to paint or what the painting must look like. Deleuze challenges this by treating concepts like living, changing entities themselves. They are not static but are intensive and dynamic, much like how an evolving painting might inspire various emotions and interpretations.

In essence, Deleuze invites us to think of life and philosophy as an art workshop where creation and expression are continuous and boundless. Every action, thought, and interaction adds to this canvas, making life a never-ending artwork of possibilities.

Individuation

Imagine you have a lump of clay. Traditionally, we think of creating something (like a sculpture) by imposing a form onto this clay using a mold. This is similar to the old philosophical concept called “hylomorphism,” where things (individuals) are thought to emerge by fitting into pre-existing molds or forms (like species or types).

Deleuze criticizes this view because it suggests that individuals are just the final product of a molding process—a predetermined endpoint. Instead, he introduces a more dynamic process called “modulation,” where instead of a mold, the clay continuously changes shapes and forms in response to different pressures and touches. This is a process of constant transformation and adaptation, where the end result isn’t predefined.

The Process of Individuation

Now, imagine that our clay isn’t just physically being shaped, but is also undergoing changes on the inside. Deleuze says that individuation (the process of becoming an individual) involves both the visible changes and the internal dynamics that you can’t see. He distinguishes between:

• Differentiation: This is like the internal changes happening within the clay, based on the conditions it’s exposed to (like moisture, temperature). These conditions aren’t visible but affect how the clay behaves.

• Differenciation: This refers to the observable changes, like the actual shapes and forms the clay takes.

Virtual and Actual

Deleuze talks about two realms: the “virtual” and the “actual.” Using our clay analogy, think of the “virtual” as all the potential forms and states the clay could take, driven by internal and external forces. The “actual” is the specific form the clay takes at any given moment.

The process of moving from the virtual to the actual is driven by what Deleuze calls “intensity.” In our metaphor, intensity could be thought of as the energy or force applied to the clay that drives its transformation from just potential (virtual) to a specific shape (actual).

Haecceities: The Nature of Individuality

Deleuze introduces a term “haecceity,” which refers to the unique identity of an individual, not based on broad categories or types but on unique characteristics (like a specific level of heat or a certain time of day). Imagine each piece of clay having its own set of conditions and responses that make it unique, not just because of its shape but because of how it reacts to its environment.

These haecceities are like individual signatures in the clay—each one is different and unique, contributing to the overall identity of the sculpture not just through its form but through its interaction with the world around it.

Summary

In summary, Deleuze’s concept of individuation is about seeing each individual as a continuously evolving process, not just a static end product. It’s a dynamic interaction between the internal potentials and the external realities, where each individual is shaped and reshaped constantly, influenced by both visible and invisible forces. This process celebrates the uniqueness and creativity of becoming, rather than the conformity to pre-existing molds or categories.

Semiotics

1. Basics of Semiotics: Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and how they create meaning. Think of it as trying to understand how different symbols (like words, traffic signs, or even clothes) convey information and meaning to those who interpret them.

2. Deleuze and Guattari's Approach: Unlike traditional semiotics, which often looks at signs as having a fixed meaning (like a red traffic light means stop), Deleuze and Guattari see meanings as more fluid and open to interpretation. They argue that both content and expression are not fixed entities but are part of a larger, dynamic system. Imagine a conversation where not just the words but the tone, the context, and even the location are all interacting to create a unique meaning each time.

3. Triadic Semiotics: They move away from the traditional binary model of signifier (the form of the word) and signified (the concept it represents), adopting instead a triadic model. This third element introduces a level of interpretation that makes the relationship between signs much more dynamic and fluid, similar to adding a live audience to a performance, which changes the dynamic of the show.

4. Diagrams and Maps: Deleuze and Guattari use the metaphor of a diagram or a map, which doesn't just represent a territory but actively participates in its creation. So, instead of thinking of a map as a static picture of streets and landmarks, imagine it as a tool that can create or transform the physical and social landscape it depicts.

5. Beyond Words: Their concept of semiotics extends beyond linguistic signs to include images, memories, and even emotions, which are understood not in isolation but as part of a network or web of meanings. This is akin to understanding a city not just by its street signs but by its smells, sounds, and the feelings it evokes.

6. Semiotics of Life: They see signs everywhere—in art, in literature, in everyday life—and these signs are "symptoms" of life's vibrant and dynamic nature. Understanding these signs involves engaging with the world in a way that is always open to new interpretations and possibilities.

7. Philosophical Implications: For Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy itself becomes a process of creating and engaging with signs and meanings, not to pin down and define things rigidly but to open up more possibilities for thought and existence.

In essence, Deleuze and Guattari's semiotics is about seeing the world as a continuously shifting tapestry of meanings where everything is interconnected and nothing is fixed. This approach invites us to engage with the world more creatively and open-mindedly, looking for the deeper connections and possibilities that lie beneath the surface.

Power

Imagine power not as something that someone has over someone else, like a boss over an employee, but as an inherent energy or potential within every being or thing. This is similar to thinking of a plant’s power as its potential to grow, flower, and spread seeds. This potential is not just about growing up but expressing all the ways a plant can interact and change its environment.

Deleuze, inspired by philosophers like Spinoza and Nietzsche, sees power as something positive and creative. For Spinoza, every being strives to maintain and enhance its existence, much like a plant stretching toward the sun. This striving isn't about reaching a predetermined shape or size but about continually exploring and expressing its capabilities, which is a joyful process for the plant.

Nietzsche took this idea further by suggesting that beings don’t just have power—they are clusters of forces interacting with other clusters. For instance, a garden isn’t just a collection of individual plants with fixed roles; each plant affects and is affected by its surroundings, like soil, insects, and other plants, constantly changing the dynamics of the garden.

In this view, relationships between things (like plants in the garden) are more important than the things themselves. The nature of a plant is defined not just by its seeds or leaves but by its interactions—how it competes for sunlight, shares space, and even how it might support or hinder other plants.

Deleuze argues that understanding our world requires us to focus on these dynamic interactions and potentials, rather than on static entities. So, instead of seeing the world as a stage where pre-existing characters act out their roles, we should see it as a lively playground where characters can change, relationships evolve, and new stories can be written at any moment.

Ethically, Deleuze makes a distinction between active and reactive powers. Active powers reach out, explore, and maximize their potential, like a vine growing, twisting, and turning in search of light. Reactive powers, on the other hand, withdraw and limit themselves, like a plant that stops growing because it’s in the shade.

Politically, traditional views of power think about organizing people who already exist into systems. Deleuze challenges us to rethink this: it's not about managing what already exists but about unleashing and redirecting energies and potential to create new ways of living together, just as gardeners might introduce new plants or rearrange their gardens to create a more vibrant ecosystem.

In summary, Deleuze invites us to look at the world not as a collection of static beings with fixed powers but as a dynamic interplay of creative energies that define what beings can become. This perspective shifts how we understand power from something that is imposed or held over others to something inherent within every interaction and relationship, always capable of bringing about new and unexpected changes.

Micropolitics

Deleuze and Guattari's concept of micropolitics can be understood by contrasting it with more traditional forms of politics, which they refer to as "molar." Think of molar politics like a traditional garden with neatly arranged flower beds—everything is organized, predictable, and controlled. In this garden, plants (or societal elements) are strictly managed and everything must fit a pre-determined pattern or structure.

In contrast, micropolitics is like a wild, sprawling meadow where plants grow freely in natural patterns, without a central organizing principle. This wild meadow represents a more fluid, dynamic approach to societal organization where local, spontaneous interactions can occur. These interactions are not dictated by a rigid external structure but are self-organizing—like how in nature, ecosystems regulate themselves without any external control.

Micropolitics becomes necessary in what Deleuze and Guattari describe as "societies of control," where capitalism pervades all aspects of life, making traditional, rigid political structures (the neat garden) increasingly irrelevant. In these societies, the lines between private and public, individual and societal become blurred as everything is driven by the need to generate capital. This capital-driven society resembles a meadow taken over by a few aggressive species that spread everywhere, impacting the growth patterns of all other plants.

In this setting, micropolitics is about creating new ways of connecting and organizing—like planting new species in the meadow that can coexist with or even curb the aggressive spread of the dominant ones. It focuses on leveraging individual desires and local conditions to form new, productive connections and alliances, rather than relying on traditional, top-down control mechanisms.

These new connections are termed "desiring machines" by Deleuze and Guattari. They are not literal machines but metaphorical ones—networks of interactions and relationships that redirect and reshape desires and energies within the society to create something novel and dynamic. They challenge the status quo and promote ongoing change and evolution in society, avoiding the stagnation that comes from repetitive, unproductive patterns.

Thus, micropolitics is about fostering a continuous state of becoming and transformation, creating new ways of living together that are not bound by outdated societal structures or the homogeneous demands of capitalist production. It's an ethos of continuous revolution and adaptation, always forming new solidarities and dismantling old, restrictive ones.

A space for people in the Vibrant Matter discussion group to post thoughts, questions, etc.

A space for people in the Ordinary Affects discussion group to post thoughts, questions, etc.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11H1jsXuWIxNZXhX5A8Uc5HWrhbdYmNZS/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SZ_3I8vHqKFpBjgD4g8VQeRyApcbvhbj/view?usp=sharing

Narrative empathy refers to the ability of individuals to understand and share the feelings and experiences of characters within a narrative. It involves putting oneself in the shoes of the characters, imagining their perspectives, and emotionally connecting with their struggles, joys, and challenges.

Narrative empathy does not necessarily translate to genuine care or concern for people. It's possible for individuals to feel empathy towards characters in a news story without fully comprehending the complexities of the situation or the broader systemic issues at play. This can lead to a superficial understanding of the issues and a limited capacity for meaningful action or change.

Genuine care for people requires not just empathy, but also informed action and advocacy for positive change.

These pages are part of a series of studies on “the arts of oneself,” that is, on the aesthetics of existence and the government of oneself and of others in Greco-Roman culture during the first two centuries of the empire.

The Vita Antonii of Athanasius presents the written notation of actions and thoughts as an indispensable element of the ascetic life. “Let this observation be a safeguard against sinning: let us each note and write down our actions and impulses of the soul as though we were to report them to each other; and you may rest assured that from utter shame of becoming known we shall stop sinning and entertaining sinful thoughts altogether. Who, having sinned, would not choose to lie, hoping to escape detection? Just as we would not give ourselves to lust within sight of each other, so if we were to write down our thoughts as if telling them to each other, we shall so much the more guard ourselves against foul thoughts for shame of being known. Now, then, let the written account stand for the eyes of our fellow ascetics, so that blushing at writing the same as if we were actually seen, we may never ponder evil. Molding ourselves in this way, we shall be able to bring our body into subjection, to please the Lord and to trample under foot the machinations of the Enemy.” Here, writing about oneself appears clearly in its relationship of complementarity with reclusion: it palliates the dangers of solitude; it offers what one has done or thought to a possible gaze; the fact of obliging oneself to write plays the role of a companion by giving rise to the fear of disapproval and to shame. Hence, a first analogy can be put forward: what others are to the ascetic in a community, the notebook is to the recluse. But, at the same time, a second analogy is posed, one that refers to the practice of ascesis as work not just on actions but, more precisely, on thought: the constraint that the presence of others exerts in the domain of conduct, writing will exert in the domain of the inner impulses of the soul. In this sense, it has a role very close to that of confession to the director, about which John Cassian will say, in keeping with Evagrian spirituality, that it must reveal, without exception, all the impulses of the soul (omnes cogitationes). Finally, writing about inner impulses appears, also according to Athanasius’s text, as a weapon in spiritual combat. While the Devil is a power who deceives and causes one to be deluded about oneself (fully half of the Vita Antonii is devoted to these ruses), writing constitutes a test and a kind of touchstone: by bringing to light the impulses of thought, it dispels the darkness where the enemy’s plots are hatched. This text—one of the oldest that Christian literature has left us on the subject of spiritual writing—is far from exhausting all the meanings and forms the latter will take on later. But one can focus on several of its features that enable one to analyze retrospectively the role of writing in the philosophical cultivation of the self just before Christianity: its close link with companionship, its application to the impulses of thought, its role as a truth test. These diverse elements are found already in Seneca, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, but with very different values and following altogether different procedures.

No technique, no professional skill can be acquired without exercise; nor can the art of living, the tekhnē tou biou, be learned without an askēsis that should be understood as a training of the self by oneself. This was one of the traditional principles to which the Pythagoreans, the Socratics, the Cynics had long attached a great importance. It seems that, among all the forms taken by this training (which included abstinences, memorizations, self-examinations, meditations, silence, and listening to others), writing— the act of writing for oneself and for others—came, rather late, to play a considerable role. In any case, the texts from the imperial epoch relating to practices of the self placed a good deal of stress on writing. It is necessary to read, Seneca said, but also to write. And Epictetus, who offered an exclusively oral teaching, nonetheless emphasizes several times the role of writing as a personal exercise: one should “meditate” (meletan), write (graphein), train oneself (gumnazein): “May these be my thoughts, these my studies, writing or reading, when death comes upon me.” Or further: “Let these thoughts be at your command [prokheiron] by night and day: write them, read them, talk of them, to yourself and to your neighbor ... if some so-called undesirable event should befall you, the first immediate relief to you will be that it was not unexpected.” In these texts by Epictetus, writing appears regularly associated with “meditation,” with that exercise of thought on itself that reactivates what it knows, calls to mind a principle, a rule, or an example, reflects on them, assimilates them, and in this manner prepares itself to face reality. Yet one also sees that writing is associated with the exercise of thought in two different ways. One takes the form of a linear “series”: it goes from meditation to the activity of writing and from there to gumnazein, that is, to training and trial in a real situation —a labor of thought, a labor through writing, a labor in reality. The other is circular: the meditation precedes the notes which enable the rereading which in turn reinitiates the meditation. In any case, whatever the cycle of exercise in which it takes place, writing constitutes an essential stage in the process to which the whole askēsis leads: namely, the fashioning of accepted discourses, recognized as true, into rational principles of action. As an element of self-training, writing has, to use an expression that one finds in Plutarch, an ethopoietic function: it is an agent of the transformation of truth into ethos.

This ethopoietic writing, such as it appears through the documents of the first and the second centuries, seems to have lodged itself outside of two forms that were already well known and used for other purposes: the hupomnēmata and the correspondence.

THE HUPOMNĒMATA

Hupomnēmata, in the technical sense, could be account books, public registers, or individual notebooks serving as memory aids. Their use as books of life, as guides for conduct, seems to have become a common thing for a whole cultivated public. One wrote down quotes in them, extracts from books, examples, and actions that one had witnessed or read about, reflections or reasonings that one had heard or that had come to mind. They constituted a material record of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering them up as a kind of accumulated treasure for subsequent rereading and meditation. They also formed a raw material for the drafting of more systematic treatises, in which one presented arguments and means for struggling against some weakness (such as anger, envy, gossip, flattery) or for overcoming some difficult circumstance (a grief, an exile, ruin, disgrace). Thus, when Fundamus requests advice for struggling against the agitations of the soul, Plutarch at that moment does not really have the time to compose a treatise in the proper form, so he will send him, in their present state, the hupomnēmata he had written himself on the theme of the tranquility of the soul; at least this is how he introduces the text of the Perieuthumias. Feigned modesty? Doubtless this was a way of excusing the somewhat disjointed character of the text, but the gesture must also be seen as an indication of what these notebooks were—and of the use to make of the treatise itself, which kept a little of its original form.

These hupomnēmata should not be thought of simply as a memory support, which might be consulted from time to time, as occasion arose; they are not meant to be substituted for a recollection that may fail. They constitute, rather, a material and a framework for exercises to be carried out frequently: reading, rereading, meditating, conversing with oneself and with others. And this was in order to have them, according to the expression that recurs often, prokheiron, ad manum, in promptu. “Near at hand,” then, not just in the sense that one would be able to recall them to consciousness, but that one should be able to use them, whenever the need was felt, in action. It is a matter of constituting a logos bioēthikos for oneself, an equipment of helpful discourses, capable—as Plutarch says—of elevating the voice and silencing the passions like a master who with one word hushes the growling of dogs. And for that they must not simply be placed in a sort of memory cabinet but deeply lodged in the soul, “planted in it,” says Seneca, and they must form part of ourselves: in short, the soul must make them not merely its own but itself. The writing of the hupomnēmata is an important relay in this subjectivation of discourse.

However personal they may be, these hupomnēmata ought not to be understood as intimate journals or as those accounts of spiritual experience (temptations, struggles, downfalls, and victories) that will be found in later Christian literature. They do not constitute a “narrative of oneself”; they do not have the aim of bringing to the light of day the arcana conscientiae, the oral or written confession of which has a purificatory value. The movement they seek to bring about is the reverse of that: the intent is not to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to say the unsaid, but on the contrary to capture the already-said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self.

The hupomnēmata need to be resituated in the context of a tension that was very pronounced at the time. Inside a culture strongly stamped by traditionality, by the recognized value of the already-said, by the recurrence of discourse, by “citational” practice under the seal of antiquity and authority, there developed an ethic quite explicitly oriented by concern for the self toward objectives defined as: withdrawing into oneself, getting in touch with oneself, living with oneself, relying on oneself, benefiting from and enjoying oneself. Such is the aim of the hupomnēmata: to make one’s recollection of the fragmentary logos, transmitted through teaching, listening, or reading, a means of establishing a relationship of oneself with oneself, a relationship as adequate and accomplished as possible. For us, there is something paradoxical in all this: how could one be brought together with oneself with the help of a timeless discourse accepted almost everywhere? In actual fact, if the writing of hupomnēmata can contribute to the formation of the self through these scattered logoi, this is for three main reasons: the limiting effects of the coupling of writing with reading, the regular practice of the disparate that determines choices, and the appropriation which that practice brings about.

1. Seneca stresses the point: the practice of the self involves reading, for one could not draw everything from one’s own stock or arm oneself by oneself with the principles of reason that are indispensable for self-conduct: guide or example, the help of others is necessary. But reading and writing must not be dissociated; one ought to “have alternate recourse” to these two pursuits and “blend one with the other.” If too much writing is exhausting (Seneca is thinking of the demands of style), excessive reading has a scattering effect: “In reading of many books is distraction.” By going constantly from book to book, without ever stopping, without returning to the hive now and then with one’s supply of nectar—hence without taking notes or constituting a treasure store of reading—one is liable to retain nothing, to spread oneself across different thoughts, and to forget oneself. Writing, as a way of gathering in the reading that was done and of collecting one’s thoughts about it, is an exercise of reason that counters the great deficiency of stultitia, which endless reading may favor. Stultitia is defined by mental agitation, distraction, change of opinions and wishes, and consequently weakness in the face of all the events that may occur; it is also characterized by the fact that it turns the mind toward the future, makes it interested in novel ideas, and prevents it from providing a fixed point for itself in the possession of an acquired truth. The writing of hupomnēmata resists this scattering by fixing acquired elements, and by constituting a share of the past, as it were, toward which it is always possible to turn back, to withdraw. This practice can be connected to a very general theme of the period; in any case, it is common to the moral philosophy of the Stoics and that of the Epicureans—the refusal of a mental attitude turned toward the future (which, due to its uncertainty, causes anxiety and agitation of the soul) and the positive value given to the possession of a past that one can enjoy to the full and without disturbance. The hupomnēmata contribute one of the means by which one detaches the soul from concern for the future and redirects it toward contemplation of the past.

2. Yet while it enables one to counteract dispersal, the writing of the hupomnēmata is also (and must remain) a regular and deliberate practice of the disparate. It is a selecting of heterogeneous elements. In this, it contrasts with the work of the grammarian, who tries to get to know an entire work or all the works of an author; it also conflicts with the teaching of professional philosophers who subscribe to the doctrinal unity of a school. It does not matter, says Epictetus, whether one has read all of Zeno or Chrysippus; it makes little difference whether one has grasped exactly what they meant to say, or whether one is able to reconstruct their whole argument. The notebook is governed by two principles, which one might call “the local truth of the precept” and “its circumstantial use value.” Seneca selects what he will note down for himself and his correspondents from one of the philosophers of his own sect, but also from Democritus and Epicurus. The essential requirement is that he be able to consider the selected sentence as a maxim that is true in what it asserts, suitable in what it prescribes, and useful in terms of one’s circumstances. Writing as a personal exercise done by and for oneself is an art of disparate truth—or, more exactly, a purposeful way of combining the traditional authority of the already-said with the singularity of the truth that is affirmed therein and the particularity of the circumstances that determine its use. “So you should always read standard authors; and when you crave a change, fall back upon those whom you read before. Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day. This is my own custom; from the many things which I have read, I claim some part for myself. The thought for today is one which I discovered in Epicurus; for I am wont to cross over even to the enemy’s camp,—not as a deserter, but as a scout [tanquam explorator].”

3. This deliberate heterogeneity does not rule out unification. But the latter is not implemented in the art of composing an ensemble; it must be established in the writer himself, as a result of the hupomnēmata, of their construction (and hence in the very act of writing) and of their consultation (and hence in their reading and their rereading). Two processes can be distinguished. On the one hand, it is a matter of unifying these heterogeneous fragments through their subjectivation in the exercise of personal writing. Seneca compares this unification, according to quite traditional metaphors, with the bee’s honey gathering, or the digestion of food, or the adding of numbers forming a sum: “We should see to it that whatever we have absorbed should not be allowed to remain unchanged, or it will be no part of us. We must digest it; otherwise it will merely enter the memory and not the reasoning power [in memoriam non in ingenium]. Let us loyally welcome such foods and make them our own, so that something that is one may be formed out of many elements, just as one number is

formed of several elements.” The role of writing is to constitute, along with all that reading has constituted, a “body” (quicquid lectione collection est, stilus redigat in corpus). And this body should be understood not as a body of doctrine but, rather—following an often-evoked metaphor of digestion—as the very body of the one who, by transcribing his readings, has appropriated them and made their truth his own: writing transforms the thing seen or heard “into tissue and blood” (in vires et in sanguinem). It becomes a principle of rational action in the writer himself.

Yet, conversely, the writer constitutes his own identity through this recollection of things said. In this same Letter 84—which constitutes a kind of short treatise on the relations between reading and writing—Seneca dwells for a moment on the ethical problem of resemblance, of faithfulness and originality. One should not, he explains, reshape what one retains from an author in such a way that the latter might be recognized; the idea is not to constitute, in the notes that one takes and in the way one restores what one has read through writing, a series of “portraits,” recognizable but “lifeless” (Seneca is thinking here of those portrait galleries by which one certified his birth, asserted his status, and showed his identity through reference to others). It is one’s own soul that must be constituted in what one writes; but, just as a man bears his natural resemblance to his ancestors on his face, so it is good that one can perceive the filiation of thoughts that are engraved in his soul. Through the interplay of selected readings and assimilative writing, one should be able to form an identity through which a whole spiritual genealogy can be read. In a chorus there are tenor, bass, and baritone voices, men’s and women’s tones: “The voices of the individual singers are hidden; what we hear is the voices of all together ... I would have my mind of such a quality as this; it should be equipped with many arts, many precepts, and patterns of conduct taken from many epochs of history; but all should blend harmoniously into one.”

CORRESPONDENCE

Notebooks, which in themselves constitute personal writing exercises, can serve as raw material for texts that one sends to others. In return, the missive, by definition a text meant for others, also provides occasion for a personal exercise. For, as Seneca points out, when one writes one reads what one writes, just as in saying something one hears oneself saying it. The letter one writes acts, through the very action of writing, upon the one who addresses it, just as it acts through reading and rereading on the one who receives it. In this dual function, correspondence is very close to the hupomnēmata, and its form is often very similar. Epicurean literature furnishes examples of this. The text known as the “Letter to Pythocles” begins by acknowledging receipt of a letter in which the student has expressed his affection for the teacher and has made an effort to “recall the [Epicurean] arguments” enabling one to attain happiness; the author of the reply gives his endorsement: the attempt was not bad; and he sends in return a text—a summary of Epicurus’s Peri phuseōs—that should serve Pythocles as material for memorization and as a support for his meditation.

Seneca’s letters show an activity of direction brought to bear, by a man

who is aged and already retired, on another who still occupies important public offices. But in these letters, Seneca does not just give him advice and comment on a few great principles of conduct for his benefit. Through these written lessons, Seneca continues to exercise himself, according to two principles that he often invokes: it is necessary to train oneself all one’s life, and one always needs the help of others in the soul’s labor upon itself. The advice he gives in Letter 7 constitutes a description of his own relations with Lucilius. There he characterizes the way in which he occupies his retirement with the twofold work he carries out at the same time on his correspondent and on himself: withdrawing into oneself as much as possible; attaching oneself to those capable of having a beneficial effect on oneself; opening one’s door to those whom one hopes to make better—“The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach.”

The letter one sends in order to help one’s correspondent—advise him, exhort him, admonish him, console him—constitutes for the writer a kind of training: something like soldiers in peacetime practicing the manual of arms, the opinions that one gives to others in a pressing situation are a way of preparing oneself for a similar eventuality. For example, Letter 99 to Lucilius: it is in itself the copy of another missive that Seneca had sent to Marullus, whose son had died some time before. The text belongs to the “consolation” genre: it offers the correspondent the “logical” arms with which to fight sorrow. The intervention is belated, since Marullus, “shaken by the blow,” had a moment of weakness and “lapsed from his true self”; so, in that regard, the letter has an admonishing role. Yet for Lucilius, to whom it is also sent, and for Seneca who writes it, it functions as a principle of reactivation—a reactivation of all the reasons that make it possible to overcome grief, to persuade oneself that death is not a misfortune (neither that of others nor one’s own). And, with the help of what is reading for the one, writing for the other, Lucilius and Seneca will have increased their readiness for the case in which this type of event befalls them. The consolatio that should assist and correct Marullus is at the same time a useful praemeditatio for Lucilius and Seneca. The writing that aids the addressee arms the writer—and possibly the third parties who read it.

Yet it also happens that the soul service rendered by the writer to his correspondent is handed back to him in the form of “return advice”; as the person being directed progresses, he becomes more capable, in his turn, of giving opinions, exhortations, words of comfort to the one who has undertaken to help him. The direction does not remain one-way for long; it serves as a context for exchanges that help it become more egalitarian. Letter 34 already signals this movement, starting from a situation in which Seneca could nonetheless tell his correspondent: “I claim you for myself ... I exhorted you, I applied the goad and did not permit you to march lazily, but roused you continually. And now I do the same; but by this time I am now cheering on one who is in the race and so in turn cheers me on.” And in the following letter, he evokes the reward for perfect friendship, in which each of the two will be for the other the continuous support, the inexhaustible help, that will be mentioned in Letter 109: “Skilled wrestlers are kept up to the mark by practice; a musician is stirred to action by one of equal proficiency. The wise man also needs to have his virtues kept in action; and as he prompts himself to do things, so he is prompted by another wise man.”

Yet despite all these points in common, correspondence should not be regarded simply as an extension of the practice of hupomnēmata. It is something more than a training of oneself by means of writing, through the advice and opinions one gives to the other: it also constitutes a certain way of manifesting oneself to oneself and to others. The letter makes the writer “present” to the one to whom he addresses it. And present not simply through the information he gives concerning his life, his activities, his successes and failures, his good luck or misfortunes; rather, present with a kind of immediate, almost physical presence. “I thank you for writing to me so often; for you are revealing yourself to me [te mihi ostendis] in the only way you can. I never receive a letter from you without being in your company forthwith. If the pictures of our absent friends are pleasing to us ... how much more pleasant is a letter, which brings us real traces, real evidence of an absent friend! For that which is sweetest when we meet face to face is afforded by the impress of a friend’s hand upon his letter—recognition.”

To write is thus to “show oneself,” to project oneself into view, to make one’s own face appear in the other’s presence. And by this it should be understood that the letter is both a gaze that one focuses on the addressee (through the missive he receives, he feels looked at) and a way of offering oneself to his gaze by what one tells him about oneself. In a sense, the letter sets up a face-to-face meeting. Moreover Demetrius, explaining in De elocutione what the epistolary style should be, stressed that it could only be a “simple” style, free in its composition, spare in its choice of words, since in it each one should reveal his soul. The reciprocity that correspondence establishes is not simply that of counsel and aid; it is the reciprocity of the gaze and the examination. The letter that, as an exercise, works toward the subjectivation of true discourse, its assimilation and its transformation as a “personal asset,” also constitutes, at the same time, an objectification of the soul. It is noteworthy that Seneca, commencing a letter in which he must lay out his daily life to Lucilius, recalls the moral maxim that “we should live as if we lived in plain sight of all men,” and the philosophical principle that nothing of ourselves is concealed from god who is always present to our souls. Through the missive, one opens oneself to the gaze of others and puts the correspondent in the place of the inner god. It is a way of giving ourselves to that gaze about which we must tell ourselves that it is plunging into the depths of our heart (in pectis intimum introspicere) at the moment we are thinking.

The work the letter carries out on the recipient, but is also brought to bear on the writer by the very letter he sends, thus involves an “introspection”; but the latter is to be understood not so much as a decipherment of the self by the self as an opening one gives the other onto oneself. Still, we are left with a phenomenon that may be a little surprising, but which is full of meaning for anyone wishing to write a history of the cultivation of the self: the first historical developments of the narrative of the self are not to be sought in the direction of the “personal notebooks,” the hupomnēmata, whose role is to enable the formation of the self out of the collected discourse of others; they can be found, on the other hand, in the correspondence with others and the exchange of soul service. And it is a fact that in the correspondence of Seneca with Lucilius, of Marcus Aurelius with Fronto, and in certain of Pliny’s letters, one sees a narrative of the self develop that is very different from the one that could be found generally in Cicero’s letters to his acquaintances: the latter involved accounting for oneself as a subject of action (or of deliberation for action) in connection with friends and enemies, fortunate and unfortunate events. In Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, occasionally in Pliny as well, the narrative of the self is the account of one’s relation to oneself; there one sees two elements stand out clearly, two strategic points that will later become the privileged objects of what could be called the writing of the relation to the self: the interferences of soul and body (impressions rather than actions), and leisure activity (rather than external events); the body and the days.

1. Health reports traditionally are part of the correspondence. But they gradually increased in scope to include detailed description of the bodily sensations, the impressions of malaise, the various disorders one might have experienced. Sometimes one seeks to introduce advice on regimen that one judges useful to one’s correspondent. Sometimes, too, it is a question of recalling the effects of the body on the soul, the reciprocal action of the latter, or the healing of the former resulting from the care given to the latter. For example, the long and important Letter 78 to Lucilius: it is devoted for the most part to the problem of the “good use” of illnesses and suffering; but it opens with the recollection of a grave illness that Seneca had suffered

in his youth, which was accompanied by a moral crisis. Seneca relates that he also experienced, many years before, the “catarrh,” the “short attacks of fever” Lucilius complains of: “I scorned it in its early stages. For when I was still young, I could put up with hardships and show a bold front to illness. But I finally succumbed, and arrived at such a state that I could do nothing but snuffle, reduced as I was to the extremity of thinness. I often entertained the impulse of ending my life then and there; but the thought of my kind old father kept me back.” And what cured him were the remedies of the soul. Among them, the most important were his friends, who “helped me greatly towards good health; I used to be comforted by their cheering words, by the hours they spent at my bedside, and by their conversation.” It also happens that the letters retrace the movement that has led from a subjective impression to an exercise of thought. Witness that meditation walk recounted by Seneca: “I found it necessary to give my body a shaking up, in order that the bile which had gathered in my throat, if that was the trouble, might be shaken out, or, if the very breath [in my lungs] had become, for some reason, too thick, that the jolting, which I have felt was a good thing for me, might make it thinner. So I insisted on being carried longer than usual, along an attractive beach, which bends between Cumae and Servilius Vatia’s country house, shut in by the sea on one side and the lake on the other, just like a narrow path. It was packed under foot, because of a recent storm .... As my habit is, I began to look about for something there that might be of service to me, when my eyes fell upon the villa which had once belonged to Vatia.” And Seneca tells Lucilius what formed his meditation on retirement—solitude and friendship.

2. The letter is also a way of presenting oneself to one’s correspondent in the unfolding of everyday life. To recount one’s day—not because of the importance of the events that may have marked it, but precisely even though there was nothing about it apart from its being like all the others, testifying in this way not to the importance of an activity but to the quality of a mode of being—forms part of the epistolary practice: Lucilius finds it natural to ask Seneca to “give [him] an account of each separate day, and of the whole day too.” And Seneca accepts this obligation all the more willingly as it commits him to living under the gaze of others without having anything to conceal: “I shall therefore do as you bid, and shall gladly inform you by letter what I am doing, and in what sequence. I shall keep watching myself continually, and—a most useful habit—shall review each day.” Indeed, Seneca evokes this specific day that has gone by, which is at the same time the most ordinary of all. Its value is owing to the very fact that nothing has happened which might have diverted him from the only thing that is important for him: to attend to himself. “Today has been unbroken; no one has filched the slightest part of it from me.” A little physical training, a bit of running with a pet slave, a bath in water that is barely lukewarm, a simple snack of bread, a very short nap. But the main part of the day—and this is what takes up the longest part of the letter—is devoted to meditating on the theme suggested by a Sophistic syllogism of Zeno’s, concerning drunkenness.

When the missive becomes an account of an ordinary day, a day to oneself, one sees that it relates closely to a practice that Seneca discreetly alludes to, moreover, at the beginning of Letter 83, where he evokes the especially useful habit of “reviewing one’s day”: this is the self-examination whose form he had described in a passage of the De Ira. This practice—familiar in different philosophical currents: Pythagorean, Epicurean, Stoic—seems to have been primarily a mental exercise tied to memorization: it was a question of both constituting oneself as an “inspector of oneself,” and hence of gauging the common faults, and of reactivating the rules of behavior that one must always bear in mind. Nothing indicates that this “review of the day” took the form of a written text. It seems therefore that it was in the epistolary relation—and, consequently, in order to place oneself under the other’s gaze—that the examination of conscience was formulated as a written account of oneself: an account of the everyday banality, an account of correct or incorrect actions, of the regimen observed, of the physical or mental exercises in which one engaged. One finds a notable example of this conjunction of epistolary practice with self-examination in a letter from Marcus Aurelius to Fronto. It was written during one of those stays in the country which were highly recommended as moments of detachment from public activities, as health treatments, and as occasions for attending to oneself. In this text, one finds the two combined themes of the peasant life—healthy because it was natural—and the life of leisure given over to conversation, reading, and meditation. At the same time, a whole set of meticulous notations on the body, health, physical sensations, regimen, and feelings shows the extreme vigilance of an attention that is intensely focused on oneself. “We are well. I slept somewhat late owing to my slight cold, which seems now to have subsided. So from five A.M. till nine I spent the time partly in reading some of Cato’s Agriculture and partly in writing not such wretched stuff, by heaven, as yesterday. Then, after paying my respects to my father, I relieved my throat, I will not say by gargling—though the word gargarisso is I believe, found in Novius and elsewhere—but by swallowing honey water as far as the gullet and ejecting it again. After easing my throat I went off to my father and attended him at a sacrifice. Then we went to luncheon. What do you think I ate? A wee bit of bread, though I saw others devouring beans, onions, and herrings full of roe. We then worked hard at grape-gathering, and had a good sweat, and were merry .... After six o’clock we came home.

“I did but little work and that to no purpose. Then I had a long chat with my little mother as she sat on the bed .... Whilst we were chattering in this way and disputing which of us two loved the one or other of you two the better, the gong sounded, an intimation that my father had gone to his bath. So we had supper after we had bathed in the oil-press room; I do not mean bathed in the oil-press room, but when we had bathed, had supper there, and we enjoyed hearing the yokels chaffing one another. After coming back, before I turn over and snore, I get my task done [meum penso explico] and give my dearest of masters an account of the day’s doings [diei rationem meo suavissimo magistro reddo] and if I could miss him more, I would not

grudge wasting away a little more.”

The last lines of the letter clearly show how it is linked to the practice of

self-examination: the day ends, just before sleep, with a kind of reading of the day that has passed; one rolls out the scroll on which the day’s activities are inscribed, and it is this imaginary book of memory that is reproduced the next day in the letter addressed to the one who is both teacher and friend. The letter to Fronto recopies, as it were, the examination carried out the evening before by reading the mental book of conscience.

It is clear that one is still very far from that book of spiritual combat to which Athanasius refers a few centuries later, in the Life of Saint Antony. But one can also measure the extent to which this procedure of self- narration in the daily run of life, with scrupulous attention to what occurs in the body and in the soul, is different from both Ciceronian correspondence and the practice of hupomnēmata, a collection of things read and heard, and a support for exercises of thought. In this case—that of the hupomnēmata— it was a matter of constituting oneself as a subject of rational action through the appropriation, the unification, and the subjectivation of a fragmentary and selected already-said; in the case of the monastic notation of spiritual experiences, it will be a matter of dislodging the most hidden impulses from the inner recesses of the soul, thus enabling oneself to break free of them. In the case of the epistolary account of oneself, it is a matter of bringing into congruence the gaze of the other and that gaze which one aims at oneself when one measures one’s everyday actions according to the rules of a technique of living.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lO9uk_ZsMOhbS6fVqPueJeu16pmcrvRd/view?usp=drive_link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/144IABF9GjQqb_28hsiHQAy9vitw8ou0c/view?usp=drive_link

Here are the PDFs for each section in case you want to reference them

• https://msc-texts.s3.amazonaws.com/bch-taoe/5-fantasy.pdf
• https://msc-texts.s3.amazonaws.com/bch-taoe/6-the-politics-of-eros.pdf
• https://msc-texts.s3.amazonaws.com/bch-taoe/7-the-end-of-theory.pdf

This year’s course was devoted to the formation of the theme of the hermeneutic of the self. The object was not just to study it in its theoretical formulations but to analyze it in relation to a set of practices that were very important in classical and late antiquity. These practices had to do with what was often called in Greek epimeleia heautou, and in Latin cura sui. This principle that one needs to “attend to oneself,” to “take care of oneself,” is doubtless obscured by the radiance of the gnōthi seauton. Yet, one must bear in mind that the rule of having to know oneself was regularly associated with the theme of care of the self. Through all the culture of antiquity it is easy to find evidence of the importance given to “concern with oneself” and its connection with the theme of self-knowledge.

To start with, in Socrates himself. In the Apology, one sees Socrates presenting himself to his judges as the teacher of self-concern. He is the man who accosts passersby and says to them: You concern yourself with your wealth, your reputation, and with honors, but you don’t worry about your virtue and your soul. Socrates is the man who takes care that his fellow citizens “take care of themselves.” Now, concerning this role, Socrates says three important things, a little farther on in this same Apology: it is a mission that was conferred on him by the deity, and he will not give it up before his last breath; it is a disinterested task for which he doesn’t ask any payment, he performs it out of pure benevolence; and it is a useful service to the city-state, more useful even than an athlete’s victory at Olympia, for by teaching citizens to attend to themselves (rather than to their possessions), one also teaches them to attend to the city-state itself (rather than its material affairs). Instead of sentencing him, his judges would do better to reward Socrates for having taught others to care for themselves.

Eight centuries later, the same notion of epimeleia heautou appears with an equally important role in Gregory of Nyssa. He applies this term to the impulse that moves one to renounce marriage, detach oneself from the flesh, and, through the virginity of one’s heart and body, regain the immortality from which one had fallen. In another passage of the Treatise on Virginity he makes the parable of the lost drachma the model of the care of the self: for a lost drachma one must light the lamp, ransack the house, explore every nook, until one sees the metal of the coin shining in the darkness; in the same way, in order to rediscover the effigy that God imprinted on our soul and that the body has covered with grime, one must “take care of oneself,” lighting the lamp of reason and exploring all the recesses of the soul. So it is clear that Christian asceticism, like ancient philosophy, places itself under the sign of the care of the self and makes the obligation to know oneself one of the elements of this essential care.

Between these two extreme references—Socrates and Gregory of Nyssa —one can ascertain that the care of the self constituted not just a principle but a constant practice. We can consider two other examples, very far apart this time in their way of thinking and their type of ethic. An Epicurean text, the Letter to Menoeceus, begins in this way: “Let no one when young delay to study philosophy, nor when he is old grow weary of his study. For no one can come too early or too late to secure the health of his soul.” Philosophy is assimilated to the care of the soul (the term is quite precisely medical: hugiainein), and this care is a task that must be carried on throughout one’s life. In the treatise On the Contemplative Life, Philo thus designates a certain practice of the Theraputae as an epimeleia of the soul.

We cannot stop there, however. It would be a mistake to think that the care of the self was an invention of philosophical thinking and that it constituted a precept peculiar to the philosophical life. It was actually a precept of living that, in a general way, was very highly valued in Greece. Plutarch cites a Lacedaemonian aphorism that is very significant in this regard. One day Anaxandrides was asked why his fellow countrymen, the Spartans, entrusted the cultivation of their lands to slaves instead of reserving this activity for themselves. This was the response: “It was by not taking care of the fields, but of ourselves, that we acquired those fields.” Attending to oneself is a privilege; it is the mark of a social superiority, as against those who must attend to others in order to serve them or attend to a trade in order to live. The advantage afforded by wealth, status, and birth is expressed by the fact that one has the possibility of attending to oneself. We may note that the Roman concept of the otium has some relation to this theme: the “leisure” designated by the word is, above all, the time that one spends attending to oneself. In this sense, philosophy, in Greece as in Rome, has only incorporated into its own requirements a much more widespread social ideal.

In any case, even after becoming a philosophical principle, the care of the self remained a form of activity. The very term epimeleia does not merely designate an attitude of awareness or a form of attention that one would focus on oneself; it designates a regulated occupation, a work with its methods and objectives. Xenophon, for example, employs the word epimeleia to designate the work of the master of the household who supervises its farming. It is a word also used to designate the ritual respects that are paid to the gods and to the dead. The activity of the sovereign who looks after his people and leads the city-state is called epimeleia by Dio of Prusa. It should be understood, then, that when the philosophers and moralists will recommend care of oneself (epimeleisthai heautō) they are not advising simply to pay attention to oneself, to avoid mistakes or dangers or to stay out of harm’s way; they are referring to a whole domain of complex and regulated activities. We may say that in all of ancient philosophy the care of the self was considered as both a duty and a technique, a basic obligation and a set of carefully worked-out procedures.

The quite natural starting point for a study focused on the care of the self is the Alcibiades. Three questions appear in it, relating to the connection of the care of the self with politics, pedagogy, and self-knowledge. A comparison of the Alcibiades with the texts of the first and second centuries reveals several important transformations.

1. Socrates advised Alcibiades to take advantage of his youth to look after himself: “At fifty you would be too old.” But Epicurus said: “When young one must not hesitate to study philosophy, and when old, one must not hesitate to study philosophy. It is never too early or too late to take care of one’s soul.” It is this principle of constant care throughout life that clearly prevails. Musonius Rufus, for example: “One must always take care of oneself if one wishes to live in a wholesome way.” Or Galen: “To become an accomplished man, each individual needs to exercise, as it were, his whole life through,” even if it is true that it would be better “to have looked after his soul from his earliest years.”

It is a fact that the friends to whom Seneca or Plutarch offer their advice are no longer those ambitious adolescents to whom Socrates spoke: they are men, sometimes young (like Serenus), sometimes fully mature (like Lucilius, who served as the procurator of Sicily when Seneca and he exchanged a long spiritual correspondence). Epictetus, who ran a school, had students who were still quite young, but he, too, occasionally challenged adults—and even “statesmen”—to turn their attention back to themselves.

Attending to oneself is therefore not just a momentary preparation for living; it is a form of living. Alcibiades realized that he must take care of himself if he meant to attend to others. Now it becomes a matter of attending to oneself, for oneself: one should be, for oneself and throughout one’s existence, one’s own object.

Hence the idea of conversion to oneself (ad se convertere), the idea of an existential impulse by which one turns in upon oneself (eis heauton epistrephein). Of course, the theme of the epistrophe is a typically Platonic one. But, as one may have already seen in the Alcibiades, the impulse by which the soul turns to itself is an impulse by which one’s gaze is drawn “aloft”—toward the divine element, toward the essences and the supracelestial world where they are visible. The turning that Seneca, Plutarch, and Epictetus urge people to accomplish is a kind of turning in place: it has no other end or outcome than to settle into oneself, to “take up residence in oneself” and to remain there. The final objective of the conversion to oneself is to establish a certain number of relations with oneself. These relations are sometimes conceived on the jurido-political model: to be sovereign over oneself, to exert a perfect mastery over oneself, to be completely “self-possessed” (fieri suum, Seneca often says). They are also often represented on the model of positive enjoyment: to enjoy oneself, to take one’s pleasure with oneself, to delight in the self alone.

2. A second major difference concerns pedagogy. In the Alcibiades, care of the self was essential because of the deficiencies of education; it was a matter of perfecting the latter or of taking charge of it oneself—in any case, of providing a “formation.”

From the moment that applying oneself to oneself became an adult practice that must be carried out one’s entire life, its pedagogical role tended to fade and other functions came to the fore.

a) A critical function, first of all. The practice of the self must enable one to get rid of all the bad habits, all the false opinions that one can get from the crowd or from bad teachers, but also from parents and associates. To “unlearn” (de-discere) is one of the important tasks of self-cultivation.

b) But it also has a function of struggle. The practice of the self is conceived as a permanent battle. It is not simply a matter of shaping a man of valor for the future. The individual must be given the weapons and the courage that will enable him to fight all his life. We know how frequently two metaphors appeared: that of the athletic contest (in life one is like a wrestler who has to dispose of his successive opponents and who must be training when he is not fighting) and that of warfare (the mind must be deployed like an army that an enemy is always liable to attack).

c) But, above all, this self-cultivation has a curative and therapeutic function. It is much closer to the medical model than to the pedagogical model. Of course, one must bear in mind certain facts that are very ancient in Greek culture: the existence of a notion such as pathos, which denotes both mental passion and physical illness; the breadth of a metaphorical field that allows one to apply to the body and the mind expressions such as “nurse,” “heal,” “amputate,” “scarify,” “purge.” One should also recall the principle —familiar to the Epicureans, the Cynics, the Stoics—that philosophy’s role is to heal the diseases of the soul. Plutarch was able one day to declare that philosophy and medicine constituted mia khōra, a single area, a single domain. Epictetus did not want his school to be regarded merely as a place of education but also as a “medical clinic,” an iatreion; he intended it to be a “dispensary for the soul”; he wanted his students to arrive thinking of themselves as patients: “One man has a dislocated shoulder, another an abcess, another a headache.”

3. In the first and second centuries, the relation to the self is always considered as needing to rely on the relation to a teacher, to a director, or in any case to another person. Yet this presupposed a growing independence from the love relation.

It was a generally accepted principle that one could not attend to oneself without the help of another. Seneca said that no one was ever strong enough on his own to get out of the state of stultitia he was in: “He needs someone to extend him a hand and pull him free.” In the same way, Galen said that man loves himself too much to be able to cure himself of his passions by himself; he had often seen men “stumble” who had not been willing to rely on one another’s authority. This principle is true for beginners but also for what follows, and even to the end of one’s life. Seneca’s attitude, in his correspondence with Lucilius, is characteristic: no matter that he is aged, having given up all his activities, he gives counsel to Lucilius but asks him for advice in return and is thankful for the help he finds in this exchange of letters.

What is remarkable in this soul practice is the variety of social relations that can serve as its support.

• There are the strictly educational organizations: Epictetus’s school can serve as an example. Temporary auditors were given a place next to students who remained for a longer course of study; but instruction was also given to those who aspired to become philosophers and soul directors themselves. Some of the Discourses collected by Arrian are technical lessons for future practitioners of self-cultivation.
• One also finds private counselors, especially in Rome: installed in the entourage of a great personage, being part of his group of clientele, they would give political opinions, supervise the education of the young people, and provide assistance in the important circumstances of life. For example, Demetrius in the entourage of Thrasea Pactus; when the latter was led to take his own life, Demetrius served him as a kind of suicide counselor and braced his final moments with a discourse on immortality.
• But there are many other forms in which this soul direction is carried out. The latter joins and animates a whole set of other relations: family relations (Seneca writes a consolation to his mother on the occasion of his own exile); relations of protection (the same Seneca looks after both the career and the soul of the young Serenus, a provincial cousin newly arrived at Rome); relations of friendship between two persons rather close in age, culture, and situation (Seneca with Lucilius); relations with a highly placed personage to whom one pays homage by offering him useful advice (thus Plutarch with Fundanus, to whom he rushes the notes he himself has taken concerning the tranquility of the soul).

In this way there is constituted what one might call a “soul service,” which is performed through multifarious social relations. Traditional eros play an occasional role in it at best. This is not to say that affective relations were not intense; they often were. Our modern categories of friendship and love are completely inadequate for interpreting them. The correspondence of Marcus Aurelius with Fronto can serve as an example of that intensity and complexity.

This cultivation of the self comprised a set of practices designated by the general team askēsis. It is appropriate first to analyze its objectives. In a passage cited by Seneca, Demetrius resorts to the very common metaphor of the athlete; the athlete does not learn all the possible moves, he does not attempt to do useless feats; he practices the few moves that he needs to triumph over his opponents in the wrestling match. In the same way, we do not have to perform feats on ourselves (philosophical ascesis looks with suspicion on those figures who point to the marvels of their abstinences, their fasts, their foreknowledge of the future). Like a good wrestler, we must learn only what will enable us to bear up against events that may occur; we must learn not to let ourselves be thrown by them, and not to let ourselves be overwhelmed by the emotions they may give rise to in ourselves.

Now, what do we need in order to keep our control in the face of the events that may take place? We need “discourses”: logoi, understood as true discourses and rational discourses. Lucretius speaks of the veridica dicta that enable us to thwart our fears and not allow ourselves to be disheartened by what we believe to be misfortunes. The equipment we need in order to confront the future consists of true discourses; they are what enables us to face reality.

Three questions about them are raised.

1. The question of their nature. There were numerous discussions on this point between the philosophical schools and within the same currents. The main controversy had to do with the need for theoretical knowledge. On this point, the Epicureans were all in agreement: knowing the principles that govern the world, the nature of the gods, the causes of the wonders, the laws of life and death, and so on is absolutely necessary, in their view, if one is to prepare for the possible events of existence. The Stoics were divided according to their proximity to cynical tenets: some attributed the greatest significance to the dogmata, the theoretical principles that complete the practical prescriptions; others assigned the most important place to those concrete rules of behavior. Seneca’s Letters 90–91 lay out the opposing arguments very clearly.8 What should be noted here is that those true discourses we need relate only to what we are in our connection with the world, in our place in the natural order, and in our dependence or independence with respect to the events that occur. They are in no way a decipherment of our thoughts, our representations, our desires.

2. The second question raised concerns how these true discourses exist inside us. To say that they are necessary for our future is to say that we must be able to have recourse to them when the need is felt. When an unforeseen event or misfortune presents itself, we must be able to call upon the relevant true discourses in order to protect ourselves; they must be at our disposal within us. The Greeks have a common expression for this, prokheiron ekhein, which the Latins translate as habere in manu, in promptu habere— to have near at hand.

One needs to understand that this involves something very different from a simple memory that would be recalled when the occasion arose. Plutarch, for example, calls on several metaphors to characterize the presence in us of these true discourses. He compares them to a medicine (pharmakon) we should be supplied with for protection against all the vicissitudes of existence. (Marcus Aurelius compares them to the instrument kit that a surgeon must always have near at hand.) Plutarch also speaks of them as being like those friends “the surest and best of which are those whose useful presence in adversity lends assistance to us.” Elsewhere he evokes them as an inner voice that insists on being heard when the passions stir: these discourses must be in us “like a master whose voice is enough to hush the growling of the dogs.” In a passage of the De Beneficiis, one finds a gradation of this sort, going from the instrument at one’s disposal to the automatism of a discourse that would speak within us of its own volition.9 Concerning advice given by Demetrius, Seneca says that one must “grasp it with both hands” (utraque manu) and never let go; but also “cling” to it, attach (adfigere) it to one’s mind, “making it a part of oneself” (partem sui facere), and finally, “by daily meditation reach the point where these wholesome maxims occur of their own accord.”

Here we see a movement very different from the one prescribed by Plato when he asks the soul to turn back on itself to rediscover its true nature. What Plutarch and Seneca suggest instead is the absorption of a truth imparted by a teaching, a reading, or a piece of advice; and one assimilates it so thoroughly that it becomes a part of oneself, an abiding, always-active, inner principle of action. In a practice such as this, one does not rediscover a truth hidden deep within oneself through an impulse of recollection; one internalizes accepted texts through a more and more thorough appropriation.

3. So a series of technical questions crops up concerning the methods of this appropriation. Obviously, memory plays a large role in it—though not in the Platonic form of the soul rediscovering its original nature and its homeland but, rather, in the form of progressive exercises of memorization. I would merely like to indicate some of the salient points in this “ascesis” of truth:

• the importance of listening. Whereas Socrates questioned people and tried to get them to say what they knew (without knowing that they knew it), for the Stoics or the Epicureans (as in the Pythagorean sects) the disciple must at first keep silent and listen. One finds in Plutarch, or in Philo of Alexandria, a whole set of rules for proper listening (the physical posture to take, how to direct one’s attention, the way to retain what has been said);
• the importance, too, of writing. In this period, there was a cultivation of what might be called “personal writing”: taking notes on the readings, conversations, and reflections that one hears or has or does; keeping notebooks of one sort or another on important subjects (what the Greeks called hupomnēmata), which must be reread from time to time in order to reactualize what they contain;
• and the importance of habitual self-reflection, but in the sense of exercises for committing to memory the things that one has learned. That is the exact technical meaning of the expression anakhōrēsis eis heauton, as Marcus Aurelius uses it: to come back inside oneself and examine the “riches” that one has deposited there; one must have within oneself a kind of book that one rereads from time to time. This corresponds to the practice of the arts of memory that Frances Yates has studied.

So we have a whole set of techniques whose purpose is to link together truth and the subject. But there should be no misunderstanding: it is not a matter of uncovering a truth in the subject or of making the soul the place where truth resides, through an essential kinship or an original law, the truth; nor is it a matter of making the soul the object of a true discourse. We are still very far from what would be a hermeneutic of the subject. The object, rather, is to arm the subject with a truth it did not know, one that did not reside in it; what is wanted is to make this learned, memorized truth, progressively put into practice, a quasi subject that reigns supreme in us.

One can distinguish between those exercises carried out in a real situation, which basically constitute training in endurance and abstinence, and those which constitute training in thought by means of thought.

1. The most famous of these thought exercises was the praemeditatio malorum, a meditation on future ills. It was also one of the most disputed: the Epicureans rejected it, saying that it was useless to suffer in advance ills that had not yet come to pass, and that it was better to practice calling up the memory of past pleasures as a protection against present ills. The strict Stoics, such as Seneca or Epictetus, but also men like Plutarch, whose attitude toward Stoicism is very ambivalent, practice the praemeditatio malorum assiduously. One needs to be clear about what it consists in: it appears to be a somber, pessimistic anticipation of the future. In reality, it is something quite different.

In the first place, it is a matter not of visualizing the future as it is likely to be but, rather, very systematically imagining the worst that might happen, even if it is not at all likely to happen. Seneca says concerning a fire that had destroyed the town of Lyons: this example ought to teach us to regard the worst as always certain.

• Further, these things should not be considered as a possibility in the relatively distant future, but envisioned as already present, already occurring. Let us imagine, for example, that we are already exiled, already subjected to torture.
• Finally, if one pictures them in their actuality, this is not in order to experience beforehand the pain or suffering they would cause us but to persuade ourselves that they are not in any sense real troubles, and that only the opinion we have of them lets them be taken for true misfortunes.

Clearly then, this exercise consists not in contemplating a possible future of real evils, as a way of getting used to it, but neutralizing both the future and the evil. The future, since one envisions it as already given in an extreme actuality; the evil, since one practices no longer thinking of it as such.

2. At the other end of these exercises, one finds those carried out in reality. These exercises had a long tradition behind them: they were practices of abstinence, privation, or physical resistance. They could have a purificatory value or attest the “demonic” strength of the person who practiced them. Yet in the cultivation of the self, these exercises have another meaning: it is a matter of establishing and testing the individual’s independence relative to the external world.

Two examples. The first in Plutarch, On the Daemon of Socrates.10 One of the speakers alludes to a practice, whose origin, moreover, he attributes to the Pythagoreans: first, one engages in athletic activities that whet the appetite; then one takes his place before tables laden with the most savory dishes; and, after gazing upon them, one gives them to the servants while taking the simple and frugal nourishment of a poor man for oneself.

In Letter 18, Seneca relates that the whole town is getting ready for the Saturnalia. He plans, for reasons of expediency, to take part in the festivities, at least after a fashion; but his preparation will for several days consist in wearing a coarse cloak, sleeping on a pallet, and nourishing himself only with hard bread. This is not in order to build an appetite for the feasts—it is to establish both that poverty is not an evil and that he is fully capable of bearing it. Other passages, in Seneca himself or in Epicurus, evoke the usefulness of these short periods of voluntary trials. Musonius Rufus also recommends periods spent in the country where one lives like the peasants, devoting oneself to farm work as they do.

3. Between the pole of the meditatio, where one practices in thought, and the pole of the exercitatio, where one trains in reality, there is a whole series of other possible practices designed for proving oneself.

In particular, Epictetus gives examples of these in the Discourses. They are interesting because quite similar ones will be found again in Christian spirituality. They are especially concerned with what one might call the “control of representations.”

Epictetus insists that one must be in an attitude of constant supervision over the representations that may enter the mind. He expresses this attitude in two metaphors: that of the night watchman who does not let just anyone come into the town or the house; and that of the moneychanger or inspector —the arguronomos—who, when presented with a coin, examines it, weighs it in his hand, and checks the metal and the effigy. The principle that one must be like a moneychanger with respect to one’s own thoughts is found again in Evagrius Ponticus and in Cassian; but, in their case, it’s a matter of prescribing a hermeneutic attitude toward oneself: decipher what there may be that is lustful in our seemingly innocent thoughts, recognize those coming from God and those coming from the Tempter. In Epictetus something else is at issue: one needs to determine whether or not one is affected or moved by the thing that is represented, and what reason one has for being or not being affected in that way.

With this in view, Epictetus recommends to his students an exercise of control inspired by the Sophistic challenges that were so highly regarded in the schools; but instead of tackling one or another of the questions difficult to resolve, one will address types of situations that demand a reaction: “Someone’s son has died.—Respond: That is beyond our power, so it is not an evil.—Someone’s father has disinherited him. What do you think about it?—It is beyond our power, it is not an evil ...—He was distressed about it. —That does concern us, it is an evil.—He bore it courageously.—That concerns us, it is a good.”

One can see that this control of representations is not aimed at uncovering, beneath appearances, a hidden truth that would be that of the subject itself; rather, it finds in these representations, as they present themselves, the occasion for recalling to mind a certain number of true principles—concerning death, illness, suffering, political life, and so on; and by means of this reminder one can see if he is able to respond in accordance with such principles—if they have really become, according to Plutarch’s metaphor, that voice of the master which is raised as soon as the passions growl and is able to silence them.

4. At the apex of all these exercises, one finds the famous meletē thanatou—a meditation on death or, rather, a training for it. Indeed, it does not consist of the mere reminder, even the insistent reminder, that one is fated to die; it is a way of making death actual in life. Among all the Stoics, Seneca was especially given to this practice. It tends to make one live each day as if it were the last.

To fully understand the exercise that Seneca proposes, one needs to recall the correspondences traditionally established between the different time cycles: the times of the day from dawn to dusk are related symbolically to the seasons of the year from spring to winter; and these seasons are related in turn to the ages of life from childhood to old age. The death exercise as it is evoked in certain letters of Seneca consists in living the long span of life as if it were as short as a day, and in living each day as if one’s entire life depended on it; every morning one ought to be in the childhood of his life, but one ought to live the whole day as if the evening would be the moment of death. In Letter 12, he says: “Let us go to our sleep with joy and gladness; let us say; I have lived.” It is this same type of exercise that Marcus Aurelius was thinking of when he wrote that “moral perfection requires that one spend each day as if it were the last” (7.69). He would even have it that every action he performed be done “as if it were the last” (2.5).

What accounts for the particular value of the death meditation is not just the fact that it anticipates what is generally held to be the greatest misfortune; it is not just that it enables one to convince oneself that death is not an evil; it offers the possibility of looking back, in advance as it were, on one’s life. By thinking of oneself as being about to die, one can judge each action that one is performing in terms of its own value. Death, said Epictetus, takes hold of the laborer in the midst of his labor, the sailor in the midst of his sailing: “And you, in the midst of what occupation do you want to be taken?” And Seneca envisaged the moment of death as one in which an individual would be able to become a sort of judge of himself and assess the moral progress he will have made, up to his final day. In Letter 26, he wrote: “I shall leave it to Death to determine what progress I have made .... I am making ready for the day when I am to pass judgment on myself—whether I am merely declaiming brave sentiments or whether I really feel them.”

Secret Location

Palto Flats(DJ

MIZU x Kennie Zhou Live)

Ex Wiish x Laser Days (Live)

Bookworms(Live)

James K(DJ)

Relaxer(Live)

000

Installation by

N.mohl_r

本

February 16th

Mansions

Friday: Happy Hour 8-10 with Lanav and then...

Aurora Halal & Deep Creep 10-4

Opening Friday, Feb 16:

Immediate Release

a solo exhibition by Andrew Straub

HYPNOPOMPIA a new Performance by @joni.com

FRIDAY 02/16/24 7PM

FREE WITH RSVP LINK IN BIO

The Intima, 16-15 weirfield street Ridgewood, 7PM

Saturday

MARKET HOTEL 16 YEAR ANNIVERSARY PARTY

DI CHAOTIGUGLY

ACEMO

KUSH JONES- SEVYN 0000

AEON VICE DJ ELIOT

1140 MYRTLE AVE. BROOKLYN NY

UMRU

PURP

JONI

Here are the PDFs for each section in case you want to reference them

https://msc-texts.s3.amazonaws.com/bch-taoe/3-bare-life.pdf

https://msc-texts.s3.amazonaws.com/bch-taoe/4-porn.pdf

Q: You suggest in your work that sexual liberation is not so much the uncovering of secret truths about one’s self or one’s desire as it is a part of the process of defining and constructing desire. What are the practical implications of this distinction?

M.F: What I meant was that I think what the gay movement needs now is much more the art of life than a science or scientific knowledge (or pseudoscientific knowledge) of what sexuality is. Sexuality is a part of our behavior. It’s a part of our world freedom. Sexuality is something that we ourselves create—it is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire. We have to understand that with our desires, through our desires, go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality: it’s a possibility for creative life.

Q: That’s basically what you’re getting at when you suggest that we should try to become gay—not just to reassert ourselves as gay.

M.F: Yes, that’s it. We don’t have to discover that we are homosexuals.

Q: Or what the meaning of that is?

M.F: Exactly. Rather, we have to create a gay life. To become.

Q: And this is something without limits?

M.F: Yes, sure, I think when you look at the different ways people have experienced their own sexual freedoms—the way they have created their works of art—you would have to say that sexuality, as we now know it, has become one of the most creative sources of our society and our being. My view is that we should understand it in the reverse way: the world regards sexuality as the secret of the creative cultural life; it is, rather, a process of our having to create a new cultural life underneath the ground of our sexual choices.

Q: Practically speaking, one of the effects of trying to uncover that secret has meant that the gay movement has remained at the level of demanding civil or human rights around sexuality. That is, sexual liberation has remained at the level of demanding sexual tolerance.

M.F: Yes, but this aspect must be supported. It is important, first, to have the possibility—and the right—to choose your own sexuality. Human rights regarding sexuality are important and are still not respected in many places. We shouldn’t consider that such problems are solved now. It’s quite true that there was a real liberation process in the early seventies. This process was very good, both in terms of the situation and in terms of opinions, but the situation has not definitely stabilized. Still, I think we have to go a step further. I think that one of the factors of this stabilization will be the creation of new forms of life, relationships, friendships in society, art, culture, and so on through our sexual, ethical, and political choices. Not only do we have to defend ourselves, not only affirm ourselves, as an identity but as a creative force.

Q: A lot of that sounds like what, for instance, the women’s movement has done, trying to establish their own language and their own culture.

M.F: Well, I’m not sure that we have to create our own culture. We have to create culture. We have to realize cultural creations. But, in doing so, we come up against the problem of identity. I don’t know what we would do to form these creations, and I don’t know what forms these creations would take. For instance, I am not at all sure that the best form of literary creations by gay people is gay novels.

Q: In fact, we would not even want to say that. That would be based on an essentialism that we need to avoid.

M.F: True. What do we mean for instance, by “gay painting”? Yet, I am sure that from the point of departure of our ethical choices, we can create something that will have a certain relationship to gayness. But it must not be a translation of gayness in the field of music or painting or what have you, for I do not think this can happen.

Q: How do you view the enormous proliferation in the last ten or fifteen years of male homosexual practices: the sensualization, if you like, of neglected parts of the body and the articulation of new pleasures? I am thinking, obviously, of the salient aspects of what we call the ghetto—porn movies, clubs for S&M or fistfucking, and so forth. Is this merely an extension into another sphere of the general proliferation of sexual discourses since the nineteenth century, or do you see other kinds of developments that are peculiar to this present historical context?

M.F: Well, I think what we want to speak about is precisely the innovations those practices imply. For instance, look at the S&M subculture, as our good friend Gayle Rubin would insist. I don’t think that this movement of sexual practices has anything to do with the disclosure or the uncovering of S&M tendencies deep within our unconscious, and so on. I think that S&M is much more than that; it’s the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously. The idea that S&M is related to a deep violence, that S&M practice is a way of liberating this violence, this aggression, is stupid. We know very well what all those people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body—through the eroticization of the body. I think it’s a kind of creation, a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure. The idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure as the root of all our possible pleasure—I think that’s something quite wrong. These practices are insisting that we can produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations, and so on.

Q: So the conflation of pleasure and sex is being broken down.

M.F: That’s it precisely. The possibility of using our bodies as a possible source of very numerous pleasures is something that is very important. For instance, if you look at the traditional construction of pleasure, you see that bodily pleasure, or pleasures of the flesh, are always drinking, eating, and fucking. And that seems to be the limit of the understanding of our body, our pleasures. What frustrates me, for instance, is the fact that the problem of drugs is always envisaged only as a problem of freedom and prohibition. I think that drugs must become a part of our culture.

Q: As a pleasure?

M.F: As a pleasure. We have to study drugs. We have to experience drugs. We have to do good drugs that can produce very intense pleasure. I think this puritanism about drugs, which implies that you can either be for drugs or against drugs, is mistaken. Drugs have now become a part of our culture. Just as there is bad music and good music, there are bad drugs and good drugs. So we can’t say we are “against” drugs any more than we can say we’re “against” music.

Q: The point is to experiment with pleasure and its possibilities.

M.F: Yes. Pleasure also must be a part of our culture. It is very interesting to note, for instance, that for centuries people generally, as well as doctors, psychiatrists, and even liberation movements, have always spoken about desire, and never about pleasure. “We have to liberate our desire,” they say. No! We have to create new pleasure. And then maybe desire will follow.

Q: Is it significant that there are, to a large degree, identities forming around new sexual practices, like S&M? These identities help in exploring such practices and defending the right to engage in them. But are they also limiting in regards to the possibilities of individuals?

M.F: Well, if identity is only a game, if it is only a procedure to have relations, social and sexual—pleasure relationships that create new friendships, it is useful. But if identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think that they have to “uncover” their “own identity,” and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is “Does this thing conform to my identity?” then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. If we are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity to our unique selves. But the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation. To be the same is really boring. We must not exclude identity if people find their pleasure through this identity, but we must not think of this identity as an ethical universal rule.

Q: But up to this point, sexual identity has been politically very useful.

M.F: Yes, it has been very useful, but it limits us, and I think we have— and can have—a right to be free.

Q: We want some of our sexual practices to be ones of resistance in a political and social sense. Yet how is this possible, given that control can be exercised by the stimulation of pleasure? Can we be sure that these new pleasures won’t be exploited in the way advertising uses the stimulation of pleasure as a means of social control?

M.F: We can never be sure. In fact, we can always be sure it will happen, and that everything that has been created or acquired, any ground that has been gained will, at a certain moment be used in such a way. That’s the way we live, that’s the way we struggle, that’s the way of human history. And I don’t think that is an objection to all those movements or all those situations. But you are quite right in underlining that we always have to be quite careful and to be aware of the fact that we must move on to something else, that we have other needs as well. The S&M ghetto in San Francisco is a good example of a community that has experimented with, and formed an identity around, pleasure. This ghettoization, this identification, this procedure of exclusion and so on—all of these have, as well, produced their countereffects. I dare not use the word dialectics—but this comes rather close to it.

Q: You write that power is not just a negative force but a productive one; that power is always there; that where there is power, there is resistance; and that resistance is never in a position of externality vis-à-vis power. If this is so, then how do we come to any other conclusion than that we are always trapped inside that relationship—that we can’t somehow break out of it.

M.F: Well, I don’t think the word trapped is a correct one. It is a struggle, but what I mean by power relations is the fact that we are in a strategic situation toward each other. For instance, being homosexuals, we are in a struggle with the government, and the government is in a struggle with us. When we deal with the government, the struggle, of course, is not symmetrical, the power situation is not the same; but we are in this struggle, and the continuation of this situation can influence the behavior or nonbehavior of the other. So we are not trapped. We are always in this kind of situation. It means that we always have possibilities, there are always possibilities of changing the situation. We cannot jump outside the situation, and there is no point where you are free from all power relations. But you can always change it. So what I’ve said does not mean that we are always trapped, but that we are always free—well, anyway, that there is always the possibility of changing.

Q: So resistance comes from within that dynamic?

M.F: Yes. You see, if there was no resistance, there would be no power relations. Because it would simply be a matter of obedience. You have to use power relations to refer to the situation where you’re not doing what you want. So resistance comes first, and resistance remains superior to the forces of the process; power relations are obliged to change with the resistance. So I think that resistance is the main word, the key word, in this dynamic.

Q: Politically speaking, probably the most important part of looking at power is that, according to previous conceptions, “to resist” was simply to say no. Resistance was conceptualized only in terms of negation. Within your understanding, however, to resist is not simply a negation but a creative process; to create and recreate, to change the situation, actually to be an active member of that process.

M.F: Yes, that is the way I would put it. To say no is the minimum form of resistance. But, of course, at times that is very important. You have to say no as a decisive form of resistance.

Q: This raises the question of in what way, and to what degree, can a dominated subject (or subjectivity) actually create its own discourse. In traditional power analysis, the omnipresent feature of analysis is the dominant discourse, and only as a subsidiary are there reactions to, or within, that discourse. However, if what we mean by resistance in power relations is more than negation, then aren’t some practices like, say, lesbian S&M, actually ways for dominated subjects to formulate their own languages?

M.F: Well, you see, I think that resistance is a part of this strategic relationship of which power consists. Resistance really always relies upon the situation against which it struggles. For instance, in the gay movement the medical definition of homosexuality was a very important tool against the oppression of homosexuality in the last part of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. This medicalization, which was a means of oppression, has always been a means of resistance as well—since people could say, “If we are sick, then why do you condemn us, why do you despise us?” and so on. Of course, this discourse now sounds rather naïve to us, but at the time it was very important. I should say, also, that I think that in the lesbian movement, the fact that women have been, for centuries and centuries, isolated in society, frustrated, despised in many ways, and so on, has given them the real possibility of constituting a society, of creating a kind of social relation between themselves, outside the social world that was dominated by males. Lillian Faderman’s book Surpassing the Love of Men is very interesting in this regard. It raises the question: What kind of emotional experience, what kind of relationships, were possible in a world where women in society had no social, no legal, and no political power? And she argues that women used that isolation and lack of power.

Q: If resistance is a process of breaking out of discursive practices, it would seem that the case that has a prima facie claim to be truly oppositional might be something like lesbian S&M. To what degree can such practices and identities be seen as challenging the dominant discourse?

M.F: What I think is interesting now, in relation to lesbian S&M, is that they can get rid of certain stereotypes of femininity which have been used in the lesbian movement—a strategy that the movement has erected from the past. This strategy has been based on their oppression. But now, maybe, these tools, these weapons are obsolete. We can see that lesbian S&M tried to get rid of all those old stereotypes of femininity, of antimale attitude and so on.

Q: What do you think we can learn about power and, for that matter, about pleasure from the practice of S&M—that is, the explicit eroticization of power?

M.F: One can say that S&M is the eroticization of power, the eroticization of strategic relations. What strikes me with regard to S&M is how it differs from social power. What characterizes power is the fact that it is a strategic relation which has been stabilized through institutions. So the mobility in power relations is limited, and there are strongholds that are very, very difficult to suppress because they have been institutionalized and are now very pervasive in courts, codes, and so on. All this means that the strategic relations of people are made rigid. On this point, the S&M game is very interesting because it is a strategic relation, but it is always fluid. Of course, there are roles, but everybody knows very well that those roles can be reversed. Sometimes the scene begins with the master and slave, and at the end the slave has become the master. Or, even when the roles are stabilized, you know very well that it is always a game. Either the rules are transgressed, or there is an agreement, either explicit or tacit, that makes them aware of certain boundaries. This strategic game as a source of bodily pleasure is very interesting. But I wouldn’t say that it is a reproduction, inside the erotic relationship, of the structures of power. It is an acting-out of power structures by a strategic game that is able to give sexual pleasure or bodily pleasure.

Q: How does this strategic relation in sex differ for that in power relations?

M.F: The practice of S&M is the creation of pleasure, and there is an identity with that creation. And that’s why S&M is really a subculture. It’s a process of invention. S&M is the use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure (physical pleasure). It is not the first time that people have used strategic relations as a source of pleasure. For instance, in the Middle Ages there was the institution of “courtly love,” the troubadour, the institutions of the love relationships between the lady and the lover, and so on. That, too, was a strategic game. You even find this between boys and girls when they are dancing on Saturday night. They are acting out strategic relations. What is interesting is that, in this heterosexual life, those strategic relations come before sex. It’s a strategic relation in order to obtain sex. And in S&M those strategic relations are inside sex, as a convention of pleasure within a particular situation. In the one case, the strategic relations are purely social relations, and it is your social being that is involved; while, in the other case, it is your body that is involved. And it is this transfer of strategic relations from the court(ship) to sex that is very interesting.

Q: You mentioned in an interview in Gai Pied a year or two ago that what upsets people most about gay relations is not so much sexual acts per se but the potential for affectional relationships carried on outside the normative patterns. These friendships and networks are unforeseen. Do you think what frightens people is the unknown potential of gay relations, or would you suggest that these relations are seen as posing a direct threat to social institutions?

M.F: One thing that interests me now is the problem of friendship. For centuries after antiquity, friendship was a very important kind of social relation: a social relation within which people had a certain freedom, certain kind of choice (limited of course), as well as very intense emotional relations. There were also economic and social implications to these relationships—they were obliged to help their friends, and so on. I think that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we see these kinds of friendships disappearing, at least in the male society. And friendship begins to become something other than that. You can find, from the sixteenth century on, texts that explicitly criticize friendship as something dangerous. The army, bureaucracy, administration, universities, schools, and so on— in the modern senses of these words—cannot function with such intense friendships. I think there can be seen a very strong attempt in all these institutions to diminish or minimize the affectional relations. I think this is particularly important in schools. When they started grade schools with hundreds of young boys, one of the problems was how to prevent them not only from having sex, of course, but also from developing friendships. For instance, you could study the strategy of Jesuit institutions about this theme of friendship, since the Jesuits knew very well that it was impossible for them to suppress this. Rather, they tried to use the role of sex, of love, of friendship, and at the same time to limit it. I think now, after studying the history of sex, we should try to understand the history of friendship, or friendships. That history is very, very important. And one of my hypotheses, which I am sure would be borne out if we did this, is that homosexuality became a problem—that is, sex between men became a problem—in the eighteenth century. We see the rise of it as a problem with the police, within the justice system, and so on. I think the reason it appears as a problem, as a social issue, at this time is that friendship had disappeared. As long as friendship was something important, was socially accepted, nobody realized men had sex together. You couldn’t say that men didn’t have sex together—it just didn’t matter. It had no social implication, it was culturally accepted. Whether they fucked together or kissed had no importance. Absolutely no importance. Once friendship disappeared as a culturally accepted relation, the issue arose: “What is going on between men?” And that’s when the problem appears. And if men fuck together, or have sex together, that now appears as a problem. Well, I’m sure I’m right, that the disappearance of friendship as a social relation and the declaration of homosexuality as a social/political/medical problem are the same process.

Q: If the important thing now is to explore anew the possibilities of friendships, we should note that, to a large degree, all the social institutions are designed for heterosexual friendships and structures, and the denial of homosexual ones. Isn’t the real task to set up new social relations, new value structures, familial structures, and so on? One of the things gay people don’t have is easy access to all the structures and institutions that go along with monogamy and the nuclear family. What kinds of institutions do we need to begin to establish, in order not just to defend ourselves but also to create new social forms that are really going to be alternative?

M.F: Institutions. I have no precise idea. I think, of course, that to use the model of family life, or the institutions of the family, for this purpose and this kind of friendship would be quite contradictory. But it is quite true that since some of the relationships in society are protected forms of family life, an effect of this is that the variations which are not protected are, at the same time, often much richer, more interesting and creative than the others. But, of course, they are much more fragile and vulnerable. The question of what kinds of institutions we need to create is an important and crucial issue, but one that I cannot give an answer to. I think that we have to try to build a solution.

Q: To what degree do we want, or need, the project of gay liberation today to be one that refuses to chart a course and instead insists on opening up new venues? In other words, does your approach to sexual politics deny the need for a program and insist on experimentation with new kind of relations?

M.F: I think that one of the great experiences we’ve had since the last war is that all those social and political programs have been a great failure. We have come to realize that things never happen as we expect from a political program, and that a political program has always, or nearly always, led to abuse or political domination from a bloc—be it from technicians or bureaucrats or other people. But one of the developments of the sixties and seventies which I think has been a good thing is that certain institutional models have been experimented with without a program. Without a program does not mean blindness—to be blind to thought. For instance, in France there has been a lot of criticism recently about the fact that there are no programs in the various political movements about sex, about prisons, about ecology, and so on. But in my opinion, being without a program can be very useful and very original and creative, if it does not mean without proper reflection about what is going on, or without very careful attention to what’s possible. Since the nineteenth century, great political institutions and great political parties have confiscated the process of political creation; that is, they have tried to give to political creation the form of a political program in order to take over power. I think what happened in the sixties and early seventies is something to be preserved. One of the things that I think should be preserved, however, is the fact that there has been political innovation, political creation, and political experimentation outside the great political parties, and outside the normal or ordinary program. It’s a fact that people’s everyday lives have changed from the early sixties to now, and certainly within my own life. And surely that is not due to political parties but is the result of many movements. These social movements have really changed our whole lives, our mentality, our attitudes, and the attitudes and mentality of other people—people who do not belong to these movements. And that is something very important and positive. I repeat, it is not the normal and old traditional political organizations that have led to this examination.

Here are the PDFs for each section in case you want to reference them

https://msc-texts.s3.amazonaws.com/bch-taoe/0-foreward.pdf

https://msc-texts.s3.amazonaws.com/bch-taoe/1-melancholia.pdf

https://msc-texts.s3.amazonaws.com/bch-taoe/2-being-able.pdf

This year’s course is to be the object of a forthcoming publication, so it will be enough for now to give a brief summary.

Under the general title of “Subjectivity and Truth,” it is a question of beginning an inquiry concerning the instituted models of self-knowledge and their history: How was the subject established, at different moments and in different institutional contexts, as a possible, desirable, or even indispensable object of knowledge? How were the experience that one may have of oneself and the knowledge that one forms of oneself organized according to certain schemes? How were these schemes defined, valorized, recommended, imposed? It is clear that neither the recourse to an original experience nor the study of the philosophical theories of the soul, the passions, or the body can serve as the main axis in such an investigation. The guiding thread that seems the most useful for this inquiry is constituted by what one might call the “techniques of the self,” which is to say, the procedures, which no doubt exist in every civilization, suggested or prescribed to individuals in order to determine their identity, maintain it, or transform it in terms of a certain number of ends, through relations of self- mastery or self-knowledge. In short, it is a matter of placing the imperative to “know oneself”—which to us appears so characteristic of our civilization —back in the much broader interrogation that serves as its explicit or implicit context: What should one do with oneself? What work should be carried out on the self? How should one “govern oneself” by performing actions in which one is oneself the objective of those actions, the domain in which they are brought to bear, the instrument they employ, and the subject that acts?

Plato’s Alcibiades can be taken as the starting point:1 the question of the “care of oneself”—epimeleia heautou—appears in this text as the general framework within which the imperative of self-knowledge acquires its significance. The series of studies that can be envisaged starting from there could form a history of the “care of oneself,” understood as an experience, and thus also as a technique elaborating and transforming that experience. Such a project is at the intersection of two themes treated previously: a history of subjectivity and an analysis of the forms of “governmentality.” The history of subjectivity was begun by studying the social divisions brought about in the name of madness, illness, and delinquency, along with their effects on the constitution of a rational and normal subject. It was also begun by attempting to identify the modes of objectification of the subject in knowledge disciplines [dans ses savoirs] such as those dealing with language, labor, and life. As for the study of “governmentality,” it answered a dual purpose: doing the necessary critique of the common conceptions of “power” (more or less confusedly conceived as a unitary system organized around a center that is at the same time its source, a system that is driven by its internal dynamic always to expand); analyze it rather as a domain of strategic relations focusing on the behavior of the other or others, and employing various procedures and techniques according to the case, the institutional frameworks, social groups, and historical periods in which they develop. The studies already published concerning confinement and the disciplines, the courses devoted to the reason of state and the “art of governing,” and the volume in preparation, with the collaboration of Arlette Farge, on the lettres de cachet in the eighteenth century,2 constitute elements in this analysis of “governmentality.”

The history of the “care” and the “techniques” of the self would thus be a way of doing the history of subjectivity; no longer, however, through the divisions between the mad and the nonmad, the sick and nonsick, delinquents and nondelinquents, nor through the constitution of fields of scientific objectivity giving a place to the living, speaking, laboring subject; but, rather, through the putting in place, and the transformations in our culture, of “relations with oneself,” with their technical armature and their knowledge effects. And in this way one could take up the question of governmentality from a different angle: the government of the self by oneself in its articulation with relations with others (such as one finds in pedagogy, behavior counseling, spiritual direction, the prescription of models for living, and so on).

The study done this year delimited this general framework in two ways. A historical limitation: we studied what had developed in Hellenic and

Roman culture as a “technique of living,” a “technique of existence” in the philosophers, moralists, and doctors in the period stretching from the first century B.C. to the second century A.D. And a limitation of domain: these techniques of living were considered only in their application to that type of act which the Greeks called aphrodisia, and for which our notion of “sexuality” obviously constitutes a completely inadequate translation. The problem raised was the following, then: How did the philosophical and medical techniques of living, on the eve of Christianity’s development, define and regulate the practice of sexual acts—the khrēsis aphrodisiōn? One sees how far one is from a history of sexuality organized around the good old repressive hypothesis and its customary questions (how and why is desire repressed?). It is a matter of acts and pleasures, not of desire. It is a matter of the formation of the self through techniques of living, not of repression through prohibition and law. We shall try to show not how sex was kept in check but how that long history began which, in our societies, binds together sex and the subject.

It would be completely arbitrary to connect a particular moment in time to the emergence of the “care of oneself” in regard to sexual acts; but the proposed demarcation (around the techniques of the self in the centuries immediately preceding Christianity) has its justification. In fact, it is certain that the “technology of the self”—reflection on modes of living, on choices of existence, on the way to regulate one’s behavior, to attach oneself to ends and means—experienced an extensive development in the Hellenistic and Roman period, to the point of having absorbed a large portion of philosophical activity. This development cannot be dissociated from the growth of urban society, from the new distribution of political power, or from the importance assumed by the new service aristocracy in the Roman Empire. This government of the self, with the techniques that are peculiar to it, takes its place “between” pedagogical institutions and the religions of salvation. This should not be taken to mean a chronological succession, even if it is true that the question of the education of future citizens seems to have occasioned more interest and reflection in classical Greece, and the question of an afterlife and a hereafter caused more anxiety in later periods. Nor should it be thought that pedagogy, government of the self, and salvation constituted three utterly distinct domains, employing different notions and methods; in reality there were numerous crossovers and a definite continuity between the three. The fact remains that the technology of the self intended for the adult can be analyzed in the specificity and breadth it took on during this period, provided it is pulled out of the retrospective shadow cast on it by pedagogical institutions and the salvation religions.

Now, this art of self-government as it developed in the Hellenistic and Roman period is important for the ethic of sexual acts and its history. Indeed, it is there—and not in Christianity—that the principles of the famous conjugal arrangement, whose history has been so long, were formulated: the exclusion of any sexual activity outside the relation between spouses, the procreative purpose of these acts, at the expense of pleasure as an end, the emotional function of sexual relations in the marriage partnership. But that is not all; it is also in this technology of the self that one observes the development of a form of uneasiness about sexual acts and their effects, an uneasiness whose origin is too readily attributed to Christianity (when it is not attributed to capitalism or “bourgeois morality”!). Of course, the question of sexual acts was far from having the importance then that it would subsequently have in the Christian problematic of the flesh and its lusts; the question, for example, of anger or reversal of fortune undoubtedly looms larger than sexual relations for the Hellenistic and Roman moralists; but even if the place of sexual relations in the order of concerns is rather far from being the first, it is important to note the way in which these techniques of the self connect the order of sexual acts to the whole of existence.

In this year’s course we focused on four examples of these techniques of the self in their relation with the regimen of the aphrodisia.

1. The interpretation of dreams. Artemidorus’s Oneirocritica,3 in Book One, Chapters 78–80, constitutes the basic text in this area. The question raised there does not directly concern the practice of sexual acts but, rather, the use to be made of the dreams in which they are represented. In this text, it is a matter of determining the prognostic value they should be given in everyday life: what auspicious or inauspicious events may one expect according to whether the dream has presented this or that type of sexual relation? A text of this sort obviously does not prescribe any morals, but it does reveal, through the play of positive or negative significations that it ascribes to the dream images, a whole set of correlations (between sexual acts and social life) and a whole system of differential valuations (hierarchizing the sexual acts relative to one another).
2. The medical regimens. These aim directly to assign a “measure” to sexual acts. It is noteworthy that this measure almost never concerns the form of the sexual act (natural or not, normal or not), but its frequency and its moment. Quantitative and circumstantial values are all that is taken into consideration. A study of Galen’s great theoretical edifice shows clearly the connection established in medical and philosophical thought between sexual acts and the death of individuals. (Because each living being is destined to die, but the species must live eternally, nature invented the mechanism of sexual reproduction.) It also clearly shows the connection established between the sexual act and the substantial, violent, paroxysmal, and dangerous expenditure of the vital principle that it involves. A study of regimens properly speaking (in Rufus of Ephesus, Athenaeus, Galen, Soranus) shows, through the endless precautions they recommended, the complexity and tenuousness of the relations established between sexual acts and the life of the individual: the sexual act’s extreme sensitivity to all external and internal circumstances that might make it harmful; the immense range of effects of every sexual act on all parts and components of the body.
3. Married life. The treatises on marriage were quite numerous in the period under study. What remains of the work of Musonius Rufus, Antipater of Tarsus, or Hierocles, as well as the works of Plutarch, shows not only the valorization of marriage (which seems to correspond to a social phenomenon, according to the historians) but also a new conception of the marital relationship: added to the traditional principles of the complementarity of the two sexes necessary for the order of the “household” is the ideal of a dual relation, involving every aspect of the life of the two partners, and establishing personal emotional ties in a definitive way. Sexual acts must find their exclusive place inside this relationship (a condemnation of adultery therefore, understood, by Musonius Rufus, no longer as an infringement on a husband’s privileges but as a breach of the marriage tie, which binds the husband as well as the wife4 ). So they must be directed toward procreation, since that is the end given by the nature of marriage. And, finally, they must comply with an internal regulation required by modesty, mutual affection, and respect for the other (Plutarch offers the most numerous and valuable indications on this last point).
4. The choice of loves. The standard comparison between the two loves —the love for women and the love for boys—left two important texts for the period studied: Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love and Lucian’s Amores.5 An analysis of these two texts attests to the persistence of a problem with which the classical period was very familiar: the difficulty of giving a status and a justification to sexual relations in the pederastic relationship. Lucian’s dialogue concludes ironically with a precise reminder of those acts which the erotics of boys sought to elide in the name of friendship, virtue, and pedagogy. Plutarch’s much more elaborate text brings out the mutual consent to pleasure as an essential element in the aphrodisia; it shows that this kind of reciprocity in pleasure can only exist between a man and a woman; better still, in the marriage relationship, where it regularly serves to renew the marriage covenant.

As it turned out, this year’s course was devoted in its entirety to what was to have formed only its introduction. The theme addressed was “biopolitics.” By that I meant the endeavor, begun in the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems presented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity, race ... We are aware of the expanding place these problems have occupied since the nineteenth century, and of the political and economic issues they have constituted up to the present day.

It seemed to me that these problems could not be dissociated from the framework of political rationality within which they appeared and developed their urgency. “Liberalism” enters the picture here, because it was in connection with liberalism that they began to have the look of a challenge. In a system anxious to have the respect of legal subjects and to ensure the free enterprise of individuals, how can the “population” phenomenon, with its specific effects and problems, be taken into account? On behalf of what, and according to what rules, can it be managed? The debate that took place in England in the middle of the nineteenth century concerning public health legislation can serve as an example.

What should we understand by “liberalism”? I relied on Paul Veyne’s reflections concerning historical universals and the need to test a nominalist method in history. And taking up a number of choices of method already made, I tried to analyze “liberalism” not as a theory or an ideology—and even less, certainly, as a way for “society” to “represent itself ...”—but, rather, as a practice, which is to say, as a “way of doing things” oriented toward objectives and regulating itself by means of a sustained reflection. Liberalism is to be analyzed, then, as a principle and a method of rationalizing the exercise of government, a rationalization that obeys—and this is its specificity—the internal rule of maximum economy. While any rationalization of the exercise of government aims at maximizing its effects while diminishing, as far as possible, its cost (understood in the political as well as the economic sense), liberal rationalization starts from the assumption that government (meaning not the institution “government,” of course, but the activity that consists in governing human behavior in the framework of, and by means of, state institutions) cannot be its own end. It does not have its reason for being in itself, and its maximization, even under the best possible conditions, should not be its regulative principle. On this point, liberalism breaks with that “reason of state” which, since the end of the nineteenth century, had sought, in the existence and strengthening of the state, the end capable both of justifying a growing governmentality and of regulating its development. The Polizeiwissenschaft developed by the Germans in the eighteenth century—either because they lacked a large state form, or also because the narrowness of their territorial partitions gave them access to much more easily observable units, given the technical and conceptual tools of the time—always subscribed to the principle: One is not paying enough attention, too many things escape one’s control, too many areas lack regulation and supervision, there’s not enough order and administration. In short, one is governing too little. Polizeiwissenschaft is the form taken by a governmental technology dominated by the principle of the reason of state, and it is in a “completely natural way,” as it were, that it attends to the problems of population, which ought to be the largest and most active possible—for the strength of the state. Health, birthrate, sanitation find an important place in it, therefore, without any problem.

For its part, liberalism resonates with the principle: “One always governs too much”—or, at any rate, one always must suspect that one governs too much. Governmentality should not be exercised without a “critique” far more radical than a test of optimization. It should inquire not just as to the best (or least costly) means of achieving its effects but also concerning the possibility and even the lawfulness of its scheme for achieving effects. The suspicion that one always risks governing too much is inhabited by the question: Why, in fact, must one govern? This explains why the liberal critique barely detaches itself from a problematic, new at the time, of “society”: it is on the latter’s behalf that one will try to determine why there has to be a government, to what extent it can be done without, and in which cases it is needless or harmful for it to intervene. The rationalization of governmental practice, in terms of a reason of state, implied its maximization in optimal circumstances insofar as the existence of the state immediately assumes the exercise of government. Liberal thought starts not from the existence of the state, seeing in the government the means for attaining that end it would be for itself, but rather from society, which is in a complex relation of exteriority and interiority with respect to the state. Society, as both a precondition and a final end, is what enables one to no longer ask the question: How can one govern as much as possible and at the least possible cost? Instead, the question becomes: Why must one govern? In other words, what makes it necessary for there to be a government, and what ends should it pursue with regard to society in order to justify its existence? The idea of society enables a technology of government to be developed based on the principle that it itself is already “too much,” “in excess”—or at least that it is added on as a supplement which can and must always be questioned as to its necessity and its usefulness.

Instead of making the distinction between state and civil society into a historical universal that allows us to examine all the concrete systems, we can try to see it as a form of schematization characteristic of a particular technology of government.

It cannot be said, then, that liberalism is a utopia never realized—unless the core of liberalism is taken to be the projections it has been led to formulate out of its analyses and criticisms. It is not a dream that comes up against a reality and fails to find a place within it. It constitutes—and this is the reason for both its polymorphism and its recurrences—a tool for criticizing the reality: (1) of a previous governmentality that one tries to shed; (2) of a current governmentality that one attempts to reform and rationalize by stripping it down; (3) of a governmentality that one opposes and whose abuses one tries to limit. So that we will be able to find liberalism, in different but simultaneous forms, as a regulative scheme of governmental practice and as the theme of a sometimes-radical opposition. English political thought, at the end of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth, is highly characteristic of these multiple uses of liberalism. And even more specifically, the developments and ambiguities of Bentham and the Benthamites.

There is no doubt that the market as a reality and political economy as a theory played an important role in the liberal critique. But, as P. Rosanvallon’s important book has confirmed, liberalism is neither the consequence nor the development of these;1 rather, the market played, in the liberal critique, the role of a “test,” a locus of privileged experience where one can identify the effects of excessive governmentality and even weigh their significance: the analysis of the mechanisms of “dearth” or more generally, of the grain trade in the middle of the eighteenth century, was meant to show the point at which governing was always governing too much. And whether it is a question of the physiocrats’ Table or Smith’s “invisible hand”; whether it is a question, therefore, of an analysis aiming to make visible (in the form of “evidence”) the formation of the value and circulation of wealth—or, on the contrary, an analysis presupposing the intrinsic invisibility of the connection between individual profit-seeking and the growth of collective wealth—economics, in any case, shows a basic incompatibility between the optimal development of the economic process and a maximization of governmental procedures. It is by this, more than by the play of ideas, that the French or English economists broke away from mercantilism and cameralism; they freed reflection on economic practice from the hegemony of the “reason of state” and from the saturation of governmental intervention. By using it as a measure of “governing too much,” they placed it “at the limit” of governmental action.

Liberalism does not derive from juridical thought any more than it does from an economic analysis. It is not the idea of a political society founded on a contractual tie that gave birth to it; but in the search for a liberal technology of government, it appeared that regulation through the juridical form constituted a far more effective tool than the wisdom or moderation of the governors. (Rather, the physiocrats tended, out of a distrust of law and the juridical institution, to look for that regulation in the recognition, by a despot with institutionally limited power, of the economy’s “natural” laws, impressing themselves upon him as an evident truth.) Liberalism sought that regulation in “the law,” not through a legalism that would be natural to it but because the law defines forms of general intervention excluding particular, individual, or exceptional measures; and because the participation of the governed in the formulation of the law, in a parliamentary system, constitutes the most effective system of governmental economy. The “state of right,” the Rechtsstaat, the rule of law, the organization of a “truly representative” parliamentary system was, therefore, during the whole beginning of the nineteenth century, closely connected with liberalism, but just as political economy—used at first as a test of excessive governmentality—was not liberal either by nature or by virtue, and soon even led to antiliberal attitudes (whether in the Nationaloekonomie of the nineteenth century or in the planning economies of the twentieth), so the democracies of the state of right were not necessarily liberal, nor was liberalism necessarily democratic or devoted to the forms of law.

Rather than a relatively coherent doctrine, rather than a politics pursuing a certain number of more or less clearly defined goals, I would be tempted to see in liberalism a form of critical reflection on governmental practice. That criticism can come from within or without, it can rely on this or that economic theory, or refer to this or that juridical system without any necessary and one-to-one connection. The question of liberalism, understood as a question of “too much government,” was one of the constant dimensions of that recent European phenomenon, having appeared first in England, it seems—namely, “political life.” Indeed, it is one of the constituent elements of it, if it is the case that political life exists when governmental practice is limited in its possible excess by the fact that it is the object of public debate as to its “good or bad,” its “too much or too little.”

Of course, the above reflections constitute not an “interpretation” of liberalism which would claim to be exhaustive but, rather, a plan of possible analysis—of “governmental reason,” that is, of those types of rationality which are brought into play in the methods by which human behavior is directed via a state administration. I have tried to carry out such an analysis concerning two contemporary examples: German liberalism of the years 1948–62, and American liberalism of the Chicago school. In both cases, liberalism presented itself, in a definite context, as a critique of the irrationality peculiar to “excessive government” and as a return to a technology of “frugal government,” as Franklin would have said.

In Germany, that excess was the regime of war, Nazism, but, beyond that, a type of directed and planned economy developing out of the 1914–18 period and the general mobilization of resources and men; it was also “state socialism.” In point of fact, German liberalism of the second postwar period was defined, programmed, and even to a certain extent put into practice by men who, starting in the years 1928–1930, had belonged to the Freiburg school (or at least had been inspired by it) and who had later expressed themselves in the journal Ordo. At the intersection of neo-Kantian philosophy, Husserl’s phenomenology, and Weber’s sociology, on certain points close to the Viennese economists, concerned about the historical correlation between economic processes and juridical structures, men like Eucken, W. Roepke, Franz Böhm, and Von Rustow had conducted their critiques on three different political fronts: Soviet socialism, National Socialism, and interventionist policies inspired by Keynes. But they addressed what they considered as a single adversary: a type of economic government systematically ignorant of the market mechanisms that were the only thing capable of price-forming regulation. Ordo-liberalism, working on the basic themes of the liberal technology of government, tried to define what a market economy could be, organized (but not planned or directed) within an institutional and juridical framework that, on the one hand, would offer the guarantees and limitations of law, and, on the other, would make sure that the freedom of economic processes did not cause any social distortion. The first part of this course was devoted to the study of this Ordo-liberalism, which had inspired the economic choice of the general policy of the German Federal Republic during the time of Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard.

The second part was devoted to a few aspects of what is called “American neoliberalism”: that liberalism which is generally associated with the Chicago school and which also developed in reaction against the “excessive government” exhibited in its eyes, starting with Simons, by the New Deal, war-planning, and the great economic and social programs generally supported by postwar Democratic administrations. As in the case of the German Ordo-liberals, the critique carried out in the name of economic liberalism cited the danger represented by the inevitable sequence: economic interventionism, inflation of governmental apparatuses, overadministration, bureaucracy, and rigidification of all the power mechanisms, accompanied by the production of new economic distortions that would lead to new interventions. But what was striking in this American neoliberalism was a movement completely contrary to what is found in the social economy of the market in Germany: where the latter considers regulation of prices by the market—the only basis for a rational economy—to be in itself so fragile that it must be supported, managed, and “ordered” by a vigilant internal policy of social interventions (involving assistance to the unemployed, health care coverage, a housing policy, and so on), American neoliberalism seeks rather to extend the rationality of the market, the schemes of analysis it proposes, and the decisionmaking criteria it suggests to areas that are not exclusively or not primarily economic. For example, the family and birth policy, or delinquency and penal policy.

What would need to be studied now, therefore, is the way in which the specific problems of life and population were raised within a technology of government which, without always having been liberal—far from it—was always haunted since the end of the eighteenth century by liberalism’s question.

The seminar was devoted this year to the crisis of juridical thought in the last years of the nineteenth century. Papers were read by François Ewald (on civil law), Catherine Mevel (on public and administrative law), Eliane Allo (on the right to life in legislation concerning children), Nathalie Coppinger and Pasquale Pasquino (on penal law), Alexandre Fontana (on security measures), François Delaporte and Anne-Marie Moulin (on health policy and health politics).

Address: 36 Orchard Street

From the Miguel Abreu Gallery's Instagram page:

"This Saturday, 1/27, 7pm: Sequence Press and Urbanomic are pleased to host Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh and Reza Negarestani at Miguel Abreu Gallery for a conversation and book launch of Mohaghegh’s recently released, “Omnicide II: Mania, Doom, and the Future-in-Deception.”

In a new work in which conceptual elaboration, storytelling, and poetics are fused in the infernal heat of the desert, the cycle of Omnicide is closed with a philosophy of doom and deception, plunging headlong into the inevitable, the fatal, and the infinite. There are certain games which can only be played at the end of worlds: their stakes are impossibly higher; their rules are unique to the collapse of all things. The author will be joined by fellow philosopher Reza Negarestani for a sequence of spirited reflections on those apocalyptic poetries of the Middle East found throughout the book—calling up the voices of Adonis, Joyce Mansour, Forugh Farrokhzad, Ibrahim al-Koni, Mahmoud Darwish, and Ahmad Shamlu.

Here, language starts to resemble a deck of cards; consciousness turns with the throw of dice; the mind becomes a blank domino. Through these rare challenges of thought, Mohaghegh and Negarestani will articulate an endgame that belongs to those strange plays of imagination (mirage) that surface only at the hour of pure vanishing.

Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please visit the link in our bio for more information. @sequencepress @urbanomicdotcom"

In order to conduct a concrete analysis of power relations, one would have to abandon the juridical notion of sovereignty. That model presupposes the individual as a subject of natural rights or original powers; it aims to account for the ideal genesis of the state; and it makes law the fundamental manifestation of power. One would have to study power not on the basis of the primitive terms of the relation but starting from the relation itself, inasmuch as the relation is what determines the elements on which it bears: instead of asking ideal subjects what part of themselves or what powers of theirs they have surrendered, allowing themselves to be subjectified [se laisser assujettir], one would need to inquire how relations of subjectivation can manufacture subjects. Similarly, rather than looking for the single form, the central point from which all the forms of power would be derived by way of consequence or development, one must first let them stand forth in their multiplicity, their differences, their specificity, their reversibility: study them therefore as relations of force that intersect, interrelate, converge, or, on the contrary, oppose one another or tend to cancel each other out. Finally, instead of privileging law as a manifestation of power, it would be better to try and identify the different techniques of constraint that it brings into play.

If it is necessary to avoid reducing the analysis of power to the scheme suggested by the juridical constitution of sovereignty, if it is necessary to think about power in terms of force relations, must it be deciphered, then, according to the general form of war? Can war serve as an effective analyzer of power relations?

This question overlays several others:

• Should war be considered as a primary and fundamental state of things in relation to which all the phenomena of social domination, differentiation, and hierarchization are considered as secondary?
• Do the processes of antagonism, confrontation, and struggle between individuals, groups, or classes belong, in the last instance, to the general processes of warfare?
• Can the set of notions derived from strategy or tactics constitute a valid and adequate instrument for analyzing power relations?
• Are military and war-related institutions and, in a general way, the methods utilized for waging war, immediately or remotely, directly or indirectly, the nucleus of political institutions?

But perhaps the question that needs to be asked first of all is this one: How, since when and how, did people begin to imagine that it is war that functions in power relations, that an uninterrupted combat undermines peace, and that the civil order is basically an order of battle?

That is the question that was posed in this year’s course. How was war perceived in the background of peace? Who looked in the din and confusion of war, in the mud of battles, for the principle of intelligibility of order, institutions, and history? Who first thought that politics was war pursued by other means?

A paradox appears at a glance. With the evolution of states since the beginning of the Middle Ages, it seems that the practices and institutions of war pursued a visible development. Moreover, they tended to be concentrated in the hands of a central power that alone had the right and the means of war; owing to that very fact, they withdrew, albeit slowly, from the person-to-person, group-to-group relationship, and a line of development led them increasingly to be a state privilege. Furthermore and as a result, war tends to become the professional and technical prerogative of a carefully defined and controlled military apparatus. In short, a society pervaded by warlike relations was slowly replaced by a state equipped with military institutions.

Now, this transformation had scarcely been completed when there appeared a certain type of discourse on the relations of society and war. A historico-political discourse—very different from the philosophico-juridical discourse organized around the problem of sovereignty—makes war the permanent basis of all the institutions of power. This discourse appeared shortly after the end of the wars of religion and at the beginning of the great English political struggles of the seventeenth century. According to this discourse, which was illustrated in England by Coke or Lilbume, in France by Boulainvilliers and later by Du Buat-Nançay, it was war that presided over the birth of states: not the ideal war imagined by the philosophers of the state of nature but real wars and actual battles; laws are born in the middle of expeditions, conquests, and burning cities; but war also continues to rage within the mechanisms of power—or, at least, to constitute the secret driving force of institutions, laws, and order. Beneath the omissions, illusions, and lies that make us believe in the necessities of nature or the functional requirements of order, we are bound to reencounter war: it is the cipher of peace. It continuously divides the entire social body; it places each of us in one camp or the other. And it is not enough to find this war again as an explanatory principle; we must reactivate it, make it leave the mute, larval forms in which it goes about its business almost without our being aware of it, and lead it to a decisive battle that we must prepare for if we intend to be victorious.

Through this thematic, which I have characterized loosely thus far, one can understand the importance of this form of analysis.

1. The subject who speaks in this discourse cannot occupy the position of the universal subject. In that general struggle of which he speaks, he is necessarily on one side or the other; he is in the battle, he has adversaries, he fights for a victory. No doubt, he tries to make right prevail, but the right in question is his particular right, marked by a relation of conquest, domination, or antiquity: rights of triumphant invasions or millennial occupations. And if he also speaks of truth, it is that perspectival and strategic truth that enables him to win the victory. So, in this case, we have a political and historical discourse that lays claim to truth and right, while explicitly excluding itself from juridico-philosophical universality. Its role is not the one that lawmakers and philosophers dreamed of, from Solon to Kant: to take a position between the adversaries, at the center of and above the conflict, and impose an armistice, establish an order that brings reconciliation. It is a matter of positing a right stamped with dissymmetry and functioning as a privilege to be maintained or reestablished, of asserting a truth that functions as a weapon. For the subject who speaks this sort of discourse, universal truth and general right are illusions and traps.

2. We are dealing, moreover, with a discourse that turns the traditional values of intelligibility upside down. An explanation from below, which is not the simplest, the most elementary, the clearest explanation but, rather, the most confused, the murkiest, the most disorderly, the most haphazard. What is meant to serve as a principle of decipherment is the confusion of violence, passions, enmities, revenges; it is also the web of petty circumstances that decide defeats and victories. The dark, elliptical god of battles must illuminate the long days of order, labor, and peace. Fury must account for harmonies. Thus, at the beginning of history and law one will posit a series of brute facts (physical vigor, force, character traits), a series of chance happenings (defeats, victories, successes or failures of conspiracy, rebellions or alliances). And only above this tangle will a growing rationality take shape, that of calculations and strategies—a rationality that, as one rises and it develops, becomes increasingly fragile, more and more spiteful, more closely tied to illusion, to fancy, to mystification. So we have the complete opposite of those traditional analyses which attempt to rediscover, beneath the visible brutality of bodies and passions, a fundamental, abiding rationality, linked by nature to the just and the good.

This type of discourse develops entirely within the historical dimension. It undertakes not to measure history, unjust governments, abuses, and acts of violence with the ideal principle of a reason or a law but, rather, to awaken, beneath the form of institutions or laws, the forgotten past of real struggles, of masked victories or defeats, the dried blood in the codes. It takes as its field of reference the undefined movement of history. But at the same time it is possible for it to draw support from the traditional mythical forms (the lost age of great ancestors, the imminence of new times and millennial revenge, the coming of a new kingdom that will wipe out the ancient defeats): it is a discourse that will be able to carry both the nostalgia of decaying aristocracies and the ardor of popular revenges.

In summary, as against the philosophico-juridical discourse organized in terms of the problem of sovereignty and law, this discourse which deciphers the continued existence of war in society is essentially a historico-political discourse, a discourse in which truth functions as a weapon for a partisan victory, a discourse at once darkly critical and intensely mythical.

This year’s course was devoted to the emergence of that form of analysis: how was war (and its different aspects—invasion, battle, conquest, victory, relations of victors and vanquished, pillage and appropriation, uprisings) used as an analyzer of history and, in a general way, of social relations?

1. One must first set aside some false paternities—that of Hobbes, in particular. What Hobbes calls the “war of all against all” is not in any way a real historical war but a game of representations by which each measures the danger that each represents for him, estimates the others’ will to fight, and calculates the risk he himself would be taking if he resorted to force. Sovereignty—whether it involves a “commonwealth by institution” or a “commonwealth by acquisition”—is established not by an act of bellicose domination but, rather, by a calculation that allows war to be avoided. For Hobbes it is nonwar that founds the State and gives it its form.

2. The history of wars as wombs of states was doubtless outlined in the sixteenth century at the end of the wars of religion (in France, for example, in the work of Hotman ). But it was mostly in the seventeenth century that this type of analysis was developed. In England, first, in the parliamentary opposition and among the Puritans, with the idea that English society, since the eleventh century, was a society of conquest: monarchy and aristocracy, with their characteristic institutions, were seen as Norman imports, while the Saxon people preserved, not without difficulty, a few traces of their original freedoms. Against this background of martial domination, English historians such as Coke or Selden restored the chief episodes of England’s history; each of these is analyzed either as a consequence or as a resumption of that historically primary state of war between two hostile races with different institutions and interests. The revolution of which these historians are the contemporaries and sometimes the protagonists would thus be the last battle and the revenge of that ancient war.

An analysis of the same type is also found in France, but at a later date and, above all, in the aristocratic circles of the end of the reign of Louis XIV. Boulainvilliers will give it the most rigorous formulation; but this time the story is told, and the rights are asserted, in the name of the victor. By giving itself a Germanic origin, the French aristocracy lays claim to the right of conquest, hence of eminent possession, upon all the lands of the realm and of absolute dominion over all the Gallic or Roman inhabitants; but it also claims prerogatives with respect to royal power, which would have been established originally only by its consent, and which should always be kept within the limits established back then. The history written in this way is no longer, as in England, that of the perpetual confrontation of the vanquished and the victors, with uprising and extracted concessions as a basic category; it will be the history of the king’s usurpations or betrayals with regard to the nobility from which he descended, and of his unnatural collusions with a bourgeoisie of Gallo-Roman origin. This scheme of analysis, taken up again by Freret and especially Du Buat-Nançay, was the object of a whole series of polemical exchanges and the occasion of substantial historical research up to the Revolution.

The important point is that the principle of historical analysis was sought in the duality and the war of races. Starting from there and going via the works of Augustin and Amédée Thierry, two types of decipherment of history will develop in the nineteenth century: one will be linked to class struggle, the other to biological confrontation.

This year’s seminar was devoted to a study of the category of “the dangerous individual” in criminal psychiatry. The notions connected with the theme of “social defense” were compared with the notions connected with the new theories of civil responsibility, as they appeared at the end of the nineteenth century.

Come to Woodbine on Feb 4th for the final ATP discussion. For this meeting we’re discussing chapters 5, 11, & 14.

No plans for February as of now. If anyone wants to organize something please do! Can't host at the usual spot, unfortunately. Feel free to discuss things in the comment section!

Join us next month, Dec 17th at @woodbine.nyc from 5-7, for the second to last discussion in our ATP series! Given the structure of the book, no prior experience is necessary.

For the meeting please read chapter 13 apparatus of capture & chapter 14 the smooth and the striated.

If you have any questions please reach out via Instagram. Hope to see you there!

🎼 🐺 🪨🎙️🧭🦋🥚😶📚🎣🚊

Come to @woodbine.nyc on Sunday October 22nd at 5pm for a discussion of these 3 chapters from a thousand plateaus!

🕸️🐺🌋🎤⛺️🦋🥚😊📚

A four-week-long series led by Alexa 🪄

Tuesdays from 630-830 in Ridgewood. Starts October 3rd. Limited space so send a DM if you’re interested in joining 🫦

You’re invited to @woodbine.nyc on Sunday September 17th at 5PM to discuss chapter 10 of A Thousand Plateaus! Send a DM if you have any questions :)

🕸️🐺🦞🗣️🏕️🦋

Come to @woodbine.nyc Sunday August 6th at 5PM to discuss the Treatise on Nomadology — The War Machine!

🕸️🐺🦞🗣️⛺️

Discussing chapters 3 & 4 of 1000 Plateaus Sunday July 9th 5PM at @woodbine.nyc. Hope to see you there!

Going to be working through this slowly 🐌 (meeting once a month)

For the first session we’re meeting on Sunday June 11th 5PM at @woodbine.nyc to discuss the first two chapters. Hope to see you there :)

If you felt catfished by How to Blow Up a Pipeline, or if you love Bataille & Kaczynski, then you should check out Atassa. Now available at @toposbookstore, @humanrelationsnyc, @molassesbooks, & @aeonbooks

In this first issue of the journal the contributors tell the history of eco-extremism — a post-Kaczynski international network of anonymous and autonomous groups who have abandoned all morals in their struggle against civilization.

If you've been meaning to read Freud, this Sunday at 5 PM, there will be a casual group discussion of one of his easier works, 'Civilization & Its Discontents,' at @woodbine.nyc It should be an interesting conversation as the text touches on a range of topics, including psychology, technology, anthropology, religion, history, politics, and ethics.

For those not familiar with the text, it is an exploration of the relationship between our psychic states and civilization.

6 weeks. Starts April 11th. 630-830 every Tuesday in Ridgewood. Limited space. Send a DM if you’re interested 🫦

New series starts March 8th! We’re discussing subcultures every Wednesday from 630-830 in Ridgewood.

The readings in the series will cover things like deterritorializing and reterritorializing the world, our consumerist subjectivity, cultural appropriation, identity modification & fluidity, the supremacy of the image, the role of material conditions, temporality, instability, networks, the construction of collective affiliations and meaning.

Limited space. Send a DM if you want to attend. 4 weeks. $40 deposit. $10 back every session you attend. NOTAFLOF.

New series starts January 10th! We're discussing Queer Phenomenology every Tuesday from 615-815 in Ridgewood.

“In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.”

Send a DM if you want to attend. 4 weeks. $40 deposit. $10 back every session you attend.

Come out this Thursday night to hear @eero.talo read their new essay “A theory of the Internet as Religious System”. This is the first text in a new series called Our Friends which is meant to give attention to the work that our friends are producing. Stick around afterwards to hang for a bit. BYOB. You can find a link to eero’s text in the bio 🖤

Come to @woodbine.nyc this Sunday 10/23 at 5 PM to discuss the first half of Simone Weil’s book The Need for Roots!

“In this, her most famous book, Weil reflects on the importance of religious and political social structures in the life of the individual. She wrote that one of the basic obligations we have as human beings is to not let another suffer from hunger. Equally as important, however, is our duty towards our community: we may have declared various human rights, but we have overlooked the obligations and this has left us self-righteous and rootless. She could easily have been issuing a direct warning to us today, the citizens of Century 21.”

Come out to @woodbine.nyc on October 2nd to discuss Guattari’s work The Three Ecologies! Stick around afterwards for their weekly Sunday dinner. Discussion starts at 5! Check the bio for a link to the text.

“Extending the definition of ecology to encompass social relations and human subjectivity as well as environmental concerns, The Three Ecologies argues that the ecological crises that threaten our planet are the direct result of the expansion of a new form of capitalism and that a new ecosophical approach must be found which respects the differences between all living systems. A powerful critique of capitalism and a manifesto for a new way of thinking, the book is also an ideal introduction to the work of one of Europe's most radical thinkers.”

New series starts October 11th! We’re discussing Difference & Repetition every Tuesday from 645-845. Send a DM if you want to attend. $60 deposit. $10 back every session you attend.

A Bataille-themed picnic at Fort Greene.

Come out to @woodbine.nyc on Sunday August 28th to discuss Byung-Chul Han’s book The Disappearance of Rituals: A Typology of the Present. Discussion starts at 5:30! 🖤 stick around afterwards for their Sunday dinner 😛

“Untrammelled neoliberalism and the inexorable force of production have produced a 21st century crisis of community: a narcissistic cult of authenticity and mass turning-inward are among the pathologies engendered by it. We are individuals afloat in an atomised society, where the loss of the symbolic structures inherent in ritual behaviour has led to overdependence on the contingent to steer identity.

Avoiding saccharine nostalgia for the rituals of the past, Han provides a genealogy of their disappearance as a means of diagnosing the pathologies of the present. He juxtaposes a community without communication – where the intensity of togetherness in silent recognition provides structure and meaning – to today’s communication without community, which does away with collective feelings and leaves individuals exposed to exploitation and manipulation by neoliberal psycho-politics. The community that is invoked everywhere today is an atrophied and commoditized community that lacks the symbolic power to bind people together. For Han, it is only the mutual praxis of recognition borne by the ritualistic sharing of the symbolic between members of a community which creates the footholds of objectivity allowing us to make sense of time.

This new book by one of the most creative cultural theorists writing today will be of interest to a wide readership.”

A new series Intro to Bataille starts in a month (Sept 6th)

"One of the few philosophers in history to actually center the concept of transgression ... Georges Bataille would however go on to develop some of the most unsettling even disturbing ideas in the history of philosophy. His philosophical project would focus in on concepts of sacrifice, violence, the erotic as a kind limit experience, excess, and transgression all built on an ontology built on ancient gnosticism in which the base of all Being in a sense was itself a violent destabilization of metaphysics itself. His work would go on to form the foundation for everything from philosophical deconstructionism to the metaphysical erotic torture of the demonic cenobites of the Hellraiser franchise. I dare say there is perhaps no more sinister philosophy in history than that of Georges Bataille." - Georges Bataille - Sacrifice, the Accursed Share and the Gnosticism of Base Materialism

4 weeks, Tuesday nights 6:30 - 8:30. 10 spots. $40 deposit — $10 returned per session attended. DM if you’re interested 🖤

Come out this Sunday to 1. Discourse with the girlies & 2. Spend time with Yousef before they go to grad school 🤮 ❤️ bring snacks, bring friends, bring ❤️🍄. Sunday 430 PM @ Maria Hernandez. Everyone’s invited 🏴🥳

A new series introducing dialectics starts in a month (July 26th)

“Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.”

6 weeks, Tuesday nights 6:30 - 8:30. Clinton Hill near the G. 10 spots. $80 deposit — $10 returned per session attended. DM if you’re interested 🖤

Join us this June for our doomer series! Inspired by the doomer meme, this series will explore the idea that there is a collective sense of doom & attempt to outline its origins, implications, and future.

Discussions are on Wednesday nights from 630 - 830 at Fort Greene Park. Send a DM for more info ✨

Join us Sunday May 1st at 4 for a discussion about forms of life.

Instead of a book we’ll be reading three essays.

Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat (1923)

The Beaubourg-Effect: Implosion and Deterrence (1982)

Geontologies: The Concept and Its Territories (2017)

A four week series introducing Freud starts in two weeks (March 30th).

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”

4 weeks, Wednesday nights 7-9. Clinton Hill near the G. 10 spots. $80 deposit — $20 returned per session attended. DM if you’re interested.

If you can’t put down a deposit but want to come just send a DM & we’ll figure something out.

Also if you want to put together a series let’s talk!

Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth century—and yet his name still deserves to be better known in the rest of the world. He made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl. Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally—into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by M’Bissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s.

Streaming two movies this week inspired by chapters one and two of Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Check the bio for links.

Catch Arrival every night at 8. Inspired by chapter 1, The Sublime Language of My Century, Arrival begins with the sudden arrival of 12 distributed UFOs (capitalism). As pandemonium ensues intellectuals around the world (Marxist sects) work to decipher the logic of the aliens. Only by breaking with all preconceived notions of language is the main character (Wark) able to see things for how they actually are.

Catch Sorry to Bother You every night at 10. Inspired by chapter 2, Capitalism — or Worse?, Sorry to Bother You is a story about a precariat that becomes an isolated achievement subject. As an information worker, Cash subjects himself to dehumanizing affective labor only to end up learning the price of individualism & why fulfillment can’t come from selling one’s labor even in a “creative” job.

In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. Through the ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems.

While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers—and the planet—it’s worse. The new ruling class uses the powers of information to route around any obstacle labor and social movements put up. So how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyze this new world, but ways to change it. Drawing on the writings of a surprising range of classic and contemporary theorists, Wark offers an illuminating overview of the contemporary condition and the emerging class forces that control—and contest—it.

Countersexual Manifesto is an outrageous yet rigorous work of trans theory, a performative literary text, and an insistent call to action. Seeking to overthrow all constraints on what can be done with and to the body, Paul B. Preciado offers a provocative challenge to even the most radical claims about gender, sexuality, and desire.

Preciado lays out mock constitutional principles for a countersexual revolution that will recognize genitalia as technological objects and offers step-by-step illustrated instructions for dismantling the heterocentric social contract. He calls theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and Haraway to task for not going nearly far enough in their attempts to deconstruct the naturalization of normative identities and behaviors. Preciado’s claim that the dildo precedes the penis―that artifice, not nature, comes first in the history of sexuality―forms the basis of his demand for new practices of sexual emancipation. He calls for a world of sexual plasticity and fabrication, of bio-printers and “dildonics,” and he invokes countersexuality’s roots in the history of sex toys, pornography, and drag in order to rupture the supposedly biological foundations of the heterocentric regime. His claims are extreme, but supported through meticulous readings of philosophy and theory, as well as popular culture. The Manifesto is now available in English translation for its twentieth anniversary, with a new introduction by Preciado. Countersexual Manifesto will disrupt feminism and queer theory and scandalize us all with its hyperbolic but deadly serious defiance of everything we’ve been told about sex.

Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable.

Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.

This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout.

Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phenomenology of emotion. But this provocative essay proposes counter models too, presenting a wealth of ideas and surprising alternatives at every turn.

Residency for March, April, May, June.

While in his 20s, Karl Marx struggles to establish himself as a writer of political and sociological importance. The film begins with a scene where poor people are gathering dead wood in a forest where they have done this for centuries, but the government has made it illegal to collect the wood as it is now legally private property of the landlords. The poor are persecuted and extrajudicially killed by the government officials. Marx wrote about these events and believes that the bourgeois class has taken ownership of the state itself.

Marx meets Friedrich Engels, a young man whose wealthy father owns factories. Engels' belief that the workers there and elsewhere, including children, are mistreated and underpaid matures. The men begin to work together to create a new political movement to reform and unite the impoverished workers. Eventually, the two stage a coup during a meeting of the League of the Just and create the Communist League in its place. The film ends with Marx and Engels publishing select theories, in a simple language for anyone to understand in a relatively short writing known as The Communist Manifesto the same year of the 1848 revolutions.

The Theory of Bloom is the theory of the isolated subject of the modern era.

The Bloom is forced to fixate on certain social roles in order to survive. Worker, housewife, professional, student, citizen, all of the roles are but masks, donned and rarely removed. The Bloom must remain positive while wearing these masks, ignoring its own power and sovereignty. -Review of The Theory of Bloom

This short book lays bare our social isolation and the conceptually simple (yet practically difficult) solution to it. This is a foundational text of Tiqqun's thought, and this version is the translation by Robert Hurley (translator of Anti-Oedipus and multiple books by Foucault, Bataille, and Deleuze).

Lizzie Borden’s feminist, queer, science fiction film takes a “documentary-style” approach in presenting its futuristic image of America reborn as a socialist democracy pushed toward anarchist activation by women’s pirate radio.

In New York City, ten years after the peaceful socialist revolution, two feminist radio stations give voice to the shortcomings of the revolution, which some argue has led to a dystopian system of governmental control and aggravated patriarchal abuse.

After a prominent feminist is detained and dies in custody, three investigative journalists are fired for their coverage of FBI agents, and both radio stations are burned down, the radio groups unite and join with the Women’s Army in direct actions against the authorities.

A small, heroin seeking UFO lands on a Manhattan roof, observes a bizarre, drug addicted fashion model and sucks endorphin from her sexual encounters' brains.

Carlos, directed by Olivier Assayas, is an epic, intensely detailed account of the life of the infamous international terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez—also known as Carlos the Jackal. One of the twentieth century’s most wanted fugitives, Carlos was committed to violent left-wing activism throughout the seventies and eighties, orchestrating bombings, kidnappings, and hijackings in Europe and the Middle East. Assayas portrays him not as a criminal mastermind but as a symbol of seismic political shifts around the world, while the magnetic Édgar Ramírez brilliantly embodies him as a swaggering global gangster. Criterion presents the complete, uncut, director-approved, five-and-a-half-hour version of Carlos.

Why think? Not, according to Gilles Deleuze, in order to be clever, but because thinking transforms life. Why read literature? Not for pure entertainment, Deleuze tells us, but because literature can recreate the boundaries of life. With his emphasis on creation, the future and the enhancement of life, along with his crusade against 'common sense', Deleuze offers some of the most liberating, exhilarating ideas in twentieth-century thought. This book offers a way in to Deleuzean thought through such topics as:

• 'becoming'
• time and the flow of life
• the ethics of thinking
• 'major' and 'minor' literature
• difference and repetition
• desire, the image and ideology.

Written with literature students in mind, this is the ideal guide for students wishing to think differently about life and literature and in this way to create their own new readings of literary texts.

Why has there been such an explosion of discussion about sex in the West since the 17th century? Here, one of France's greatest intellectuals explores the evolving social, economic, and political forces that have shaped our attitudes toward sex. In a book that is at once controversial and seductive, Michel Foucault describes how we are in the process of making a science of sex which is devoted to the analysis of desire, rather than the increase of pleasure.

Gilles Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control" contrasts the disciplinary societies described by Michel Foucault with the emerging forms of control in the late 20th century. While disciplinary societies operated through institutions (schools, factories, prisons), control societies function through continuous modulation and flexible networks. Technologies and digital codes replace enclosed structures, resulting in a more fluid but pervasive form of control. For Deleuze, this new paradigm is characterized by ceaseless change, where individuals become "dividuals" - data sets to be monitored and regulated. The shift indicates a transformation in how power operates, moving towards decentralized yet omnipresent mechanisms of surveillance and normalization.

Industrial Society and Its Future, generally known as the Unabomber Manifesto, is a 1995 anti-technology essay by Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber". The manifesto contends that the Industrial Revolution began a harmful process of natural destruction brought about by technology, while forcing humans to adapt to machinery, creating a sociopolitical order that suppresses human freedom and potential. The 35,000-word manifesto formed the ideological foundation of Kaczynski's 1978-1995 mail bomb campaign, designed to protect wilderness by hastening the collapse of industrial society.

An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History is a book by the philosopher Stephen Houlgate in which the author provides an introduction to the philosophy of Hegel.

An early text from Tiqqun that views cybernetics as a fable of late capitalism, and offers tools for the resistance.

The cybernetician's mission is to combat the general entropy that threatens living beings, machines, societies—that is, to create the experimental conditions for a continuous revitalization, to constantly restore the integrity of the whole.

—from The Cybernetic Hypothesis

This early Tiqqun text has lost none of its pertinence. The Cybernetic Hypothesis presents a genealogy of our “technical” present that doesn't point out the political and ethical dilemmas embedded in it as if they were puzzles to be solved, but rather unmasks an enemy force to be engaged and defeated. Cybernetics in this context is the teknê of threat reduction, which unfortunately has required the reduction of a disturbing humanity to packets of manageable information. Not so easily done. Not smooth. A matter of civil war, in fact. According to the authors, cybernetics is the latest master fable, welcomed at a certain crisis juncture in late capitalism. And now the interesting question is: Has the guest in the house become the master of the house?

The “cybernetic hypothesis” is strategic. Readers of this little book are not likely to be naive. They may be already looking, at least in their heads, for a weapon, for a counter-strategy. Tiqqun here imagines an unbearable disturbance to a System that can take only so much: only so much desertion, only so much destituent gesture, only so much guerilla attack, only so much wickedness and joy.

Using a range of ‘case studies’ from Critical Theory to Candy Crush, ‘Gangnam Style’ to Game of Thrones and Football Manager to Hieronymus Bosch, this book argues that we need to rethink our enjoyment. Inspired by psychoanalysis, the book offers a new way of thinking about how we talk about what we enjoy and how we enjoy what we talk about.

After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The audiobook analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work, and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also shows that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.

In the eighteenth century, medicine underwent a mutation. For the first time, medical knowledge took on a precision that had formerly belonged only to mathematics. The body became something that could be mapped. Disease became subject to new rules of classification. And doctors begin to describe phenomena that for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible.

In The Birth of the Clinic the philosopher and intellectual historian who may be the true heir to Nietzsche charts this dramatic transformation of medical knowledge. As in his classic Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault shows how much what we think of as pure science owes to social and cultural attitude—in this case, to the climate of the French Revolution. Brilliant, provocative, and omnivorously learned, his book sheds new light on the origins of our current notions of health and sickness, life and death.

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 - from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the "insane" and the rest of humanity.