Friday, March 04, 2005

Awaiting the Dark Precursors - A Deleuzian Century?

Thinking beyond representation - the traditional philosophy/thinking “image of thought” - is for Deleuze a psychedelic, narcotic an “non-organic life” process, which is unfortunately limited by matter; our all “human all too human” identity driven biology...

One needs to think beyond the human... thinking as “non-organic life”…

“Difference and Repetition” is the ultimate drug book awaiting the drugs of the future…that will finally liberate philosophy/thinking from our “human all too human” identity/representative thinking: i.e. to achieve in thought what abstract art has achieved in art.

One of the reasons of Foucault’s famous “perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian”… is that when biotechnology and pharmacology will propel us in the post-human era it will need a new form of thinking - based on difference not identity….

Until then we have only crude psycho-tools to experiment the play of “difference and repetition” underlying the Chaosmos…

Foucault on the drugs of thinking:

“We can easily see how LSD inverts the relationships of ill humor, stupidity, and thought: it no sooner eliminates the supremacy of cat­egories than it tears away the ground of its indifference and disinte­grates the gloomy dumbshow of stupidity; and it presents this univocal and acategorical mass not only as variegated, mobile, asym­metrical, decentered, spiraloid, and reverberating but causes it to rise, at each instant, as a swarming of phantasm-events. As it slides on this surface at once regular and intensely vibratory, as it is freed from its catatonic chrysalis, thought invariably contemplates this indefinite equivalence transformed into an acute event and a sumptuous, appar­eled repetition. Opium produces other effects: thought gathers unique differences into a point, eliminates the background and deprives im­mobility of its task of contemplating and soliciting stupidity through its mime. Opium ensures a weightless immobility, the stupor of a butterfly that differs from catatonic rigidity; and, far beneath, it estab­lishes a ground that no longer stupidly absorbs all differences but allows them to arise and sparkle as so many minute, distanced, smil­ing, and eternal events. Drugs - if we can speak of them generally - have nothing at all to do with truth and falsity; only to fortune-tellers do they reveal a world "more truthful than the real." In fact, they displace the relative positions of stupidity and thought by eliminating the old necessity of a theater of immobility….”