Radio DelEuZe: 'Deleuze.... Empiricism...'

17.7.10

'Deleuze.... Empiricism...'

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I have always felt that I am an empiricist . . . [My empiricism] is derived from the two characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained;

and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness). (D vii; cf. N 88; WP 7)

From __ Mike Johnduff 's Blog : Working Notes_____________ notes on philosophy,

literary criticism, and theory ~.
In the beginning of Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze has an absolutely genius comment about empiricism, that brings out with unbelievable exactitude everything that Nietzsche saw in it as to its immense power to lead one towards an affirmation of difference beyond all sameness or identity--that is, a thought of representation not as a function of the present or of presence,

but of difference (expressed in the re-):

A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction. By detective novel, we mean that concepts, with their zones of presence, should intervene to resolve local situations. They themselves change along with the problems. They have spheres of influence where, as we shall see, they operate in relation to "dramas" and by means of a certain "cruelty."

They must have a coherence among themselves, but that coherence must not come from them selves. They must receive their coherence from elsewhere.

This is the secret of empiricism. Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts, nor a simple appeal to lived experience. On the contrary, it undertakes the most insane creation of concepts ever seen or heard. Empiricism is a mysticism and a mathematicism of concepts, but precisely one which treats the concept as an object of an encounter, as a here-and-now, or rather as an Erewhon from which emerge inexhaustibly ever new, differently distributed "heres" and "nows."

Only an empiricist could say concepts are indeed things, but things in their free and wild state, beyond "anthropological predicates."

I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always

decentered center, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and

differenciates them...

-Difference and Repetition, xx-xxi.

________________________ Working Notes Mike John Duff_____________

__________AnD What I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics.

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__________AnD

What I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics.

And : The question of speed is important and also very complex. It doesn't mean the first in the race: you can be late through speed. Speed is to be caught in a becoming_ which is not a development or an evolution. One must be like a taxi, queue(ligne d'attente), line of flight, traffic jam, bottleneck, green and red lights, slightly paranoid,brushes with the police. To be an abstract and broken line, a zigzag which glides 'between'. The grass and speed. What you misnamed style just now_ charm or style_ is speed.

And :One only discovers worlds through a long, broken flight.

_AnD______as_______for___

As for the method of deconstruction of texts I see clearly what it is, I admire it a lot, but it has nothing to do with my own method. I do not present myself as a commentator on texts.

For me, a text is merely a small cog in an extra-textual practice. It is not a question of commenting on the text by a method of deconstruction, or by a method of textual practice, or by other methods; it is a question of what use it has in an extra-textual practice that prolongs the text ..

Professor D Challanger speaking

in Clinical Critical terms as the hat was in the wind

How else?

How else can one write of those things which one doesn't know, or knows badly? It is precisely here that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one to the other.
Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow -or rather, to make it impossible. Perhaps writing was a relation to silence altogether more threatening that that, which is supposed to entertain with death.
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Difference and Repetition.