Nietzsche’s break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple.
The old monetary mole is the animal of the spaces of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network.
Spinoza or Nietzsche are philosophers whose critical and destructive powers are without equal, but this power always springs from affirmation, from joy, from a cult of affirmation and joy, from the exigency of life against those who would mutilate and mortify life. For me, that is philosophy itself.
Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.
A minority may be bigger than a majority.
Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money – and not by accident but by their very nature. We’ve got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles on noncommunication, circuit breakers, so that we can elude control.
Nietzsche then speaks of the “eternal joy of becoming... that joy which includes even joy in destroying”, “The affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy.
It’s a strange business, speaking for yourself, because it doesn’t at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject.
Plato will have to invent a transcendence that can be exercised and situated within the field of immanence itself. This is the meaning of the theory of Ideas.
It’s impossible not to laugh when codes are jammed up.
We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world.
When Spinoza says that we do not even know what a body can do, this is practically a war cry. He adds that we speak of consciousness, mind, soul, of the power of the soul over the body; we chatter away about these things, but do not even know what bodies can do. Moral chattering replaces true philosophy.
Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.
The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.
Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse. Difference is not the phenomena but the noumena closest to the phenomena.
But what is it that happens precisely when we encounter someone we love? Do we encounter somebody, or is it animals that come to inhabit you, ideas that invade you, movements that move you, sounds that traverse you? And can these things be parted?
What we should in fact do, is stop allowing philosophers to reflect ‘on’ things. The philosopher creates, he doesn’t reflect.
History progresses not by negation and the negation of negation, but by deciding problems and affirming differences. It is no less bloody and cruel as a result. Only the shadows of history live by negation.
One does not go back to reconquer the myth, one encounters it anew, when time quakes at its foundations under the empire of extreme danger.
There is always another breath in my breath, another thought in my thought, another possession in what I possess, a thousand things and a thousand beings implicated in my complications: every true thought is an aggression.
The organism is a diversion of life, whereas abstract line is life itself.