The Vertrix – A Body Without Organs or a Corpse Without Organs?

Life begins with an E; it certainly did for me…Deleuze is right, Repetition is always of the singular (event); not repetition as a series of iterations of the same instance/individuation. It is the singular “first time” or Difference that repetition itself repeats – “the event” - to use Deleuze’s own examples: the festival, Monet’s lilies etc… When the Woodstock rock festival 'emerged out' (of all the previous rock festival repetitions) it was a singular event, all the subsequent series of Woodstocks (Woodstock 2000, 2001, 2002 etc..) are not a repetition of the same Woodstock festival iterating itself as the same festival throughout time, but rather the repetition of that singular event (i.e. the original Woodstock festival). This has the paradoxical meaning that what is actually involved in repetition is the always repetition of a singularity - not repetition of/as the same, the common or the general'

A real Repetition always involves a series (of itself through iteration) but what it repeats in-itself, is the first instance of itself - what Deleuze calls “Difference in itself”. It is this Difference that instigates and generates the subsequent series of (its) singular iterations – then, repetition breaks its serial line or continuum with a discontinuity and a Difference emerges out of the “same” singular repetition; which starts another series along another continuum which in turn produces a discontinuity (difference in itself) and a singularity or an event “emerges out”, and creates its singular series…and so on…

This is why the first (E)cstasy is always the best, the event in itself, the ecstasy breaks the previous serial habit of the continuum with a “difference in-itself”; a change of quality and intensity, which has no serial relation to what went before…hence the compulsion to repeat the experience; to take the ecstasy and create an ecstatic series - not to experience the same ecstasy time and again, but rather to repeat or in this case to recapture, the singular break of the differential “first time” event.

Philosophy is the ecstasy of thought, the heroin of contemplation: one of the reasons for my obsession for philosophy is the sheer disbelief that my being is bound or limited by chemistry (Deleuze always believed in the “Pharmacy” as he says in his Abecedary) and the subsequent realisation that one needs to fill in the chemistry with something else (philosophy is of course the worse "content" drug of all).

What Deleuze calls the “Virtual” is a deeply adequate conception for the realm of subjectivity (and nature which Deleuze "subjectivises" without the ontological primacy of the subject): there are whole potential intensities which are waiting endogenously to be actualized in our subjectivities, whole virtual spectrums of intensities which are hidden and made inaccessible by our habits and “ordinary means”…The Vital question is why something “Different in itself” is needed to access those virtual intensities, why the “intensive” needs an asymmetry, a disjunction, a disequilibrium to upset the habits of our mind and world. And it is always a question of relations, what new relations can effect a change in the “temporary nodal coagulations” (TNC) of Substance and Subject, not the Substance itself which has no dynamics. No essences only relations, such is the art of Rhizomatics (i.e. relations are external to their temporary subject which is in-itself just a bundle of previous relations)

The art of drug taking is to develop a symbiotic relationship which does not destroy you in the process - on the edge of Chaos: without falling into the abyss (what Deleuze aptly calls a black hole) such is the balancing act which has to be simultaneously maintained with and within an “vertrix” of disequilibrium - the intensive ethics-aesthetics of the Chaosmos:…seeking to reach the intensive ideal of crystals and their process of crystallization: the Deleuzian “body without organs”; not the “corpse without organs”, such is the challenge…

The Coming of the Overman - a Whole-Hole?

Biotechnology and psychopharmacology will be the new philosophy of the 21 Century on the condition that it can interact with certain “selective” elements of the western religious-aesthetic-philosophical tradition - biotechnology and psychopharmacology without philosophy is blind and philosophy without biotechnology and psychopharmacology is empty.

For the first time in history human beings will have the power over their matter, but nature, genes and neurons are empty voids and the question will remain what spirit/soul will fill the gaping void…where will the semantics come from? Can our past forms, thoughts and traditions be enough? …one can imagine the future overman having overcome all limits (i.e. matter) and finding himself to be a sublime “what” without a “why”…where will the world of our empty words come from? As Heidegger said, animals do not have a world…what about the overman?: the sublime animality of the future.

One must avoid the AI syndrome of the last decade: the reduction of intelligence and understanding to formal circuits with the secret hope that by magic the world will automatically fill itself in. It won’t….the gaping whole-hole of syntax will always remain…unholy question marks in the secular fluxes of electronic circuits…

The semantic sun that gives invisible light is nowhere to be seen…the overman will have killed not only god which is fair enough since he never existed, killed man an even more ludicrous philosophical joke, but also his sun: - the spirit/soul that also never existed - but with a big difference that humanity won’t survive that ambiguous sun death …This is why Nietzsche was so afraid of the age of nihilism he would rather have another 2000 years of Christianity than the Kali age of nihilism: not the creative destruction of Kali or the cosmic dance of Shiva but rather the laser efficiency of stellar supermarkets orbiting a Whole-Hole….where the overman will walk his overdog on the select perfection of a clear moon and contemplate the immensity of the universe and will…will…will…no doubt try to stifle a yawn…

The Queen of Trash - Edwige Fenech

Edwige Fenech is probably the most beautiful woman in the world (and still is)…her beauty is proportional to the trashiness of her films – from erotic thrillers (or what Italians call gialli) to sexy comedies….I “discovered” her when I was in Italy a few years ago on late night regional TV, where the catatonic light of the TV gave her beauty an eerie glow highlighting the incongruity of trashy filmic baseness being amidst holy beauty ...her films are as “bad” as she is beautiful…the “badness” in Edwige’ case is almost sublime, if not divine.

Edwige rose to Italian fame in the 1970’s with such classics titles: “Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer” aka What are those strange drops of blood doing on Jennifer's body? “La Vedova inconsolabile ringrazia quanti la consolarono” aka The Inconsolable Widow Thanks All Those Who Consoled Her…

She is definitely the queen of the Chaosmos (if only she knew what it meant!) – another queen, a more modern Italian beauty is Monica Belluci…but that is another story for another type of beauty….

Discover all about Edwige at:

http://host63.ipowerweb.com/~clubdesm/blanc/edwige.htm

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….”

Chemical Voids - Ecstasy without Content

“Their ecstasy is without content...The ecstasy takes possession of its object by its own compulsive character. It is stylized like the ecstasies savages go into in beating the war drums. It has convulsive aspects reminiscent of St Vitus's dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals”. Theodor Adorno "On The Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening"

The ambiguous thing about illegal chemical intoxication is its blindness: in itself it is pure “nothing” a void of chemistry …chemical voids or as Adorno said of “popular music” “ecstasy without content”. The chemical itself is without meaning/semantics so what makes the difference? Ecstasy, LSD etc… experience “might” well be as “meaningless” as getting drunk or having “casual” sex….Where does the “meaning” or “content” come from…if any?. What is the Huxley effect? …or Adorno for that matter…

Still waiting for Dionysus….