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Based Deleuze: The Reactionary Leftism of Gilles Deleuze
"One could write an ebook called Based Deleuze, simply cataloging and explaining all of his many neoreactionary affirmations."
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
99 pages, ebook
First published September 20, 2019
9 people are currently reading
220 people want to read
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Justin Murphy
1 book6 followersLibrarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
September 23, 2019
This book is full of words
February 16, 2023
This book performs the neat trick of immunizing itself in advance to critiques from people like me through an almost hypnotic repetition of affectively loaded signifiers (the central continuum of Murphy's worldview seem to be stretched between the poles of 'based' and 'retarded'). As a result of this touching attempt to achieve imperceptibility from resentful jerks and haters, the book is best approached as a sign of the poverty of contemporary religious appropriations of left wing thought. Murphy's Deleuze is a Christian, though not one of those boring rationalists (read: Aquinas) who think that God is involved in the process of intellection; his "Deleuze" is a theophantic mystic, whose traditionalist Roman God is best approached through affect. In keeping with Murphy's injunction that we be fascists over ourselves, he is adamant that Deleuze's ethics of escape, far from licensing an "anything goes" approach, instead amount to strict discipline over oneself, a reading of the BwO as a Body without [masturbatory] Orgasms. One is reminded of Reich's cartoons in Listen Little Man.
Murphy connects Deleuze to Peterson's work on latent inhibition, though unfortunately the affinity between the two is rather superficial: both are scared of the hidden authoritarianism of social justice. The most despicable aspect of the book is Murphy's fixation on the inferiority of Guattari and his misreading of the intellectual context in which Deleuze was writing. We are told that Guattari (who, of course, was 'retarded') was "a purposeful homewrecker, which he saw as not only defensible but righteous" and treated to the insinuation that Deleuze's collaboration with Guattari was a "pedagogical sponsorship by Deleuze, an experiment in tutelage based on a political ethic of Christian charity." Aside from the politically motivated slander (Guattari was a Trotskyist - https://tinyurl.com/y7dd94qo), this image of Deleuze ignores his political engagements with autonomist thought (for example, his involvement in saving Negri from the Italian state) and his appreciative relationship with thinkers like Foucault that Murphy rejects. The conception of the virtual as a contact with a continuous deep time of tradition is based less on the data of reality and more on fantasy.
So much for the objections. One promising point in the book is his reading of Coldness and Cruelty, where Murphy opposes sadistic institutions to masochistic contracts, arguing for a pronomian leftism, that is a submission to the data of reality in service of liberation. The return to conceptual jurisprudence opens a path beyod the habitual criteria of praxis ("is it worth it?"); one wonders if the cost of asceticism is necessary, or rather a contingency of the particularly Christian form of jurisprudence Murphy has in mind.
The discussion of Deleuze's family is surprising, as is the catalogue of Deleuze's disgusted aristocratic reactions which Murphy dutifully reminds us are often associated with conservative attitudes. The picture of Deleuze as an elitist (whether or not we then endorse this elitism, as Murphy would suggest) rings true, and fits with the interpretive strategy pursued by Badiou and Hallward.
In a twist that is sure to surprise those for whom the Outside is the domain of science, Murphy finds an essay where Deleuze instead sees it as a kind of extimate interiority - this is potentially fruitful, as it opens the question of how an intuitive mystical Outside and a scientific Outside can coexist. Interestingly, Murphy notes a parallel between his attack on the false interiority of Catholic rationalism and his opposition to the false Sartrean distinction between apathetic complicity and activist commitment, though it is less clear whether a political analogy to mystical interiority makes sense.
***
Take two. I'm taking off a star. Deleuze may have been an aristocrat, and his Nietzscheanism is extremely fucked up (see https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1... for a full balance sheet) but Murphy is straight up wrong to separate Deleuze from radical politics. We can criticize Deleuze's version of the law of non-contradiction (Badiou), his Bergsonism (Rose) or his anti-relational ontology (Hallward) but it is dishonest to portray him as recommending fascism. The stated goal of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is to diagnose, subvert and dispose of libidinal black holes, not to reinforce the neofascist Jungianism Peterson represents. Take a toke, Deleuze was woke.
***
Take three. I'll say one more thing about Justin's book. I didn't give it one star bc I hate it. In fact, I think it's an interesting book, and well written. The 1/5 comes from the fact that the book takes as given DG's preference for smooth as opposed to striated spaces. Unfortunately, this preference has more to do with finding certain spaces agreeable, than with their substance or essential structure. Nonetheless, let's give Justin his due: he created a simple recipe for uncuckolding one's mind, and it works. Being based is kinda nice, actually.
Murphy connects Deleuze to Peterson's work on latent inhibition, though unfortunately the affinity between the two is rather superficial: both are scared of the hidden authoritarianism of social justice. The most despicable aspect of the book is Murphy's fixation on the inferiority of Guattari and his misreading of the intellectual context in which Deleuze was writing. We are told that Guattari (who, of course, was 'retarded') was "a purposeful homewrecker, which he saw as not only defensible but righteous" and treated to the insinuation that Deleuze's collaboration with Guattari was a "pedagogical sponsorship by Deleuze, an experiment in tutelage based on a political ethic of Christian charity." Aside from the politically motivated slander (Guattari was a Trotskyist - https://tinyurl.com/y7dd94qo), this image of Deleuze ignores his political engagements with autonomist thought (for example, his involvement in saving Negri from the Italian state) and his appreciative relationship with thinkers like Foucault that Murphy rejects. The conception of the virtual as a contact with a continuous deep time of tradition is based less on the data of reality and more on fantasy.
So much for the objections. One promising point in the book is his reading of Coldness and Cruelty, where Murphy opposes sadistic institutions to masochistic contracts, arguing for a pronomian leftism, that is a submission to the data of reality in service of liberation. The return to conceptual jurisprudence opens a path beyod the habitual criteria of praxis ("is it worth it?"); one wonders if the cost of asceticism is necessary, or rather a contingency of the particularly Christian form of jurisprudence Murphy has in mind.
The discussion of Deleuze's family is surprising, as is the catalogue of Deleuze's disgusted aristocratic reactions which Murphy dutifully reminds us are often associated with conservative attitudes. The picture of Deleuze as an elitist (whether or not we then endorse this elitism, as Murphy would suggest) rings true, and fits with the interpretive strategy pursued by Badiou and Hallward.
In a twist that is sure to surprise those for whom the Outside is the domain of science, Murphy finds an essay where Deleuze instead sees it as a kind of extimate interiority - this is potentially fruitful, as it opens the question of how an intuitive mystical Outside and a scientific Outside can coexist. Interestingly, Murphy notes a parallel between his attack on the false interiority of Catholic rationalism and his opposition to the false Sartrean distinction between apathetic complicity and activist commitment, though it is less clear whether a political analogy to mystical interiority makes sense.
***
Take two. I'm taking off a star. Deleuze may have been an aristocrat, and his Nietzscheanism is extremely fucked up (see https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1... for a full balance sheet) but Murphy is straight up wrong to separate Deleuze from radical politics. We can criticize Deleuze's version of the law of non-contradiction (Badiou), his Bergsonism (Rose) or his anti-relational ontology (Hallward) but it is dishonest to portray him as recommending fascism. The stated goal of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is to diagnose, subvert and dispose of libidinal black holes, not to reinforce the neofascist Jungianism Peterson represents. Take a toke, Deleuze was woke.
***
Take three. I'll say one more thing about Justin's book. I didn't give it one star bc I hate it. In fact, I think it's an interesting book, and well written. The 1/5 comes from the fact that the book takes as given DG's preference for smooth as opposed to striated spaces. Unfortunately, this preference has more to do with finding certain spaces agreeable, than with their substance or essential structure. Nonetheless, let's give Justin his due: he created a simple recipe for uncuckolding one's mind, and it works. Being based is kinda nice, actually.
January 12, 2020
i didnt pay for this book
August 10, 2020
If only there was a Deleuze to Murphy's Guattari!
May 5, 2020
[Placeholder review. I’ll come back to this later. Suffice it to say for now this book blends amusing philosophical buggery, dull Moldbug-Landian cosplay, pusillanimous references to “HBD”, and some occasionally brilliant applications of Deleuze to questions of contemporary left-liberal politics. The question I’m left with right now though is: What differentiates “Reactionary Leftism” from standard Patchwork politics? And what’s the point of this book? Other than chasing the Land hype train for Patreon bucks, of course.)
November 10, 2022
This book badly needs an editor and some greater clarification of the tangential connections it purports to make. I don’t doubt the author’s knowledge of Deleuze (he’s clearly very familiar) but some of the links being forged to things like Jordan Peterson’s latent inhibition read more as an attempt to cash in on a bandwagon than a clearly thought-out claim. Chapters end abruptly without a sense of conclusion and I often found myself wondering if my ebook was faulty. Oh, and that reference to “subtweeting Sartre” (chp8) was pure cringe
October 3, 2021
The most drawn out and boring "i'm not racist, but..." wrapped in an utterly cringeworthy use of online jargon. I miss when the edgy right weren't cowards.
April 17, 2022
Philosophical gossiping, and shit gossip at that. Murphy's arguments amount to little more than biographical tidbits, like 'did you know Deleuze never joined the Communist Party?' etc. You'd be much better off reading Intersecting Lives by François Dosse.
December 7, 2022
I didn't read the whole of this, just dipped in here and there, inspired to steal an epub of it when I realised from a series of gonzo articles about the vacuous "Dimes Square" scene in New York that its horrible author was still active.
I admire and have read Deleuze, and it's hard to explain how poor a reading of Deleuze the sections of this book I looked at develop.
It's not as one might expect that Murphy is assembling a compelling resistant interpretation of a thinker who quite rightly is regarded with suspicion by some because of the frequency with which his thought is repurposed by libertarians, techno-fascists and accelerationists.
It's more that Murphy's writing "Deleuze slash" in which he's cobbled together a fantasy of Deleuze as a "based husband & father" who happens to agree with him—as far as he is willing to go—on standard shibboleths of Nazis and the far right like "human biodiversity".
For example:
Murphy's account here doesn't just contradict everything D&G ever said about their collaboration, it is itself un-Deleuzian, positing Deleuze as a fixed point, a Subject given to moral judgement and a devout believer, a cleric who concealed his true sentiments from Guattari and the world for decades while never discontinuing their work together.
Meanwhile here's what D&G actually say about their joint labour in Anti-Oedipus:
After over an hour jumping about in greater and greater disgust, the moment in this book that finally broke me was when Murphy, during his perverse articulation of the body without organs, equated Bergsonian pure memory with tradition, while failing to articulate a faithful Deleuzian understanding of Bergson's idea about memory, the concept of tradition, or even the idea of two things being the same.
To be clear, people like Murphy don't even understand tradition. What these "dumb people's smart people" possess is instead a traditionalism that, in its its labour of witness, produces a lifeless dual of the work of defamiliarisation and unsettlement belonging to any radical critique. But unlike critique, their traditionalisms do their work with a special vanity that ends in exalting a dogmatic but false image of some tradition, an image that contradicts Bergsonian memory and is correspondingly un-generative, raising itself up with an uncritical indulgence that is of necessity fully estranged from any individual or social remembrance.
It would be difficult to overstate how poor this book is. The quarter of it I read (at a guess) was such a shambles the rest could be limpid genius and never compensate for the deficiency. It should perhaps be retitled Cucked Murphy, as there's a palpable feeling that Deleuze's words escape the stencils of right wing nonsense superimposed by the author each time he's cited.
Deleuze spoke of his writing as "[buggering] the philosophers and giving them bastard children". Murphy for his own part can't sustain a hard-on long enough to justify calling the output of his encounter with Deleuze an abortion.
I admire and have read Deleuze, and it's hard to explain how poor a reading of Deleuze the sections of this book I looked at develop.
It's not as one might expect that Murphy is assembling a compelling resistant interpretation of a thinker who quite rightly is regarded with suspicion by some because of the frequency with which his thought is repurposed by libertarians, techno-fascists and accelerationists.
It's more that Murphy's writing "Deleuze slash" in which he's cobbled together a fantasy of Deleuze as a "based husband & father" who happens to agree with him—as far as he is willing to go—on standard shibboleths of Nazis and the far right like "human biodiversity".
For example:
The very notion of a "Deleuze – Guattari collaboration" must therefore be revised. It was not so much a collaboration as a pedagogical sponsorship by Deleuze, an experiment in tutelage based on a political ethic of Christian charity. Stable genius Deleuze knows privately that this gifted but depressive, womanizing, socially liberal activist is doomed to personal and philosophical dissoluteness, but he—a based husband and father—would turn the boy's ideas into something special.
Murphy's account here doesn't just contradict everything D&G ever said about their collaboration, it is itself un-Deleuzian, positing Deleuze as a fixed point, a Subject given to moral judgement and a devout believer, a cleric who concealed his true sentiments from Guattari and the world for decades while never discontinuing their work together.
Meanwhile here's what D&G actually say about their joint labour in Anti-Oedipus:
The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel and think.
After over an hour jumping about in greater and greater disgust, the moment in this book that finally broke me was when Murphy, during his perverse articulation of the body without organs, equated Bergsonian pure memory with tradition, while failing to articulate a faithful Deleuzian understanding of Bergson's idea about memory, the concept of tradition, or even the idea of two things being the same.
Rather, the body without organs brings us into consistency with deep time, what Bergson called pure memory, or what I would call tradition—the eternal, uninterrupted line of divine creation, the infinite self-creation of Being.
To be clear, people like Murphy don't even understand tradition. What these "dumb people's smart people" possess is instead a traditionalism that, in its its labour of witness, produces a lifeless dual of the work of defamiliarisation and unsettlement belonging to any radical critique. But unlike critique, their traditionalisms do their work with a special vanity that ends in exalting a dogmatic but false image of some tradition, an image that contradicts Bergsonian memory and is correspondingly un-generative, raising itself up with an uncritical indulgence that is of necessity fully estranged from any individual or social remembrance.
It would be difficult to overstate how poor this book is. The quarter of it I read (at a guess) was such a shambles the rest could be limpid genius and never compensate for the deficiency. It should perhaps be retitled Cucked Murphy, as there's a palpable feeling that Deleuze's words escape the stencils of right wing nonsense superimposed by the author each time he's cited.
Deleuze spoke of his writing as "[buggering] the philosophers and giving them bastard children". Murphy for his own part can't sustain a hard-on long enough to justify calling the output of his encounter with Deleuze an abortion.
September 23, 2019
Lib status: Smashed.
Read
July 12, 2021yo this book is perfect if you have a BASED tradwife and youre a zoomer doomer redpilled coomer! just jokes lol but seriously, justin murphy is just so freaking BASED. he is like a pepe magapede kekking for the lulz on the INTARNETZ XDDDDD. so this book was dope first of all but second of al... you know what.... im done wreiting this review. it doesnt matter.
January 27, 2021
I don't consider myself a particularly skilled user of social media, so all I can say is that I heard about the existence of this book rather just remotely and don't find myself really in position to comment on the controversy surrounding its inception. What I got was that the author's own hype around it was big and that it was to be predictably bad. After all, the title... yikes!
Good news - it's not that terrible. Even better news - it even contributes *something*. And I guess that for the author, having actually written it gives some ground (base?) to move further.
So, there is this rub - the book essentially takes up some of the very contemporary discourses over left- and not-so-left-wing politics and uses concepts and episodes from Deleuze's life and thought to twist them around in order to bring forth a critical stance on them. So, to go straight to the point, the distinction used by the author demarcating 'reactionary' from 'reactivist' against the ground of what he considers to be a traditional Catholic and Stoic discipline and commitment as opposed to a political being as responding to as many external stimuli as possible works rather well. While there would be different people in the 'millieu' of the political left from something like the ideal that this book poses as a possibility to completely toxic people, probably just like in most other social millieus, just like the attack on the (derivatively) herd mentality of both the left and the academic / intellectual life is rather strong, and to an extent one can speculate whether with some slightly more carefully chosen words it could also remain as damning (by which I mean that if what the book maintains is inaccurate, that doesn't mean it's all that wrong still), I wonder if some of the stretches toward figures such as Jordan Peterson, Nick Land or Mencius Moldbug aren't perhaps something to be tasked for in the same way like the possible 'reactivist' ethics of responding to irrelevant stimuli. I mean, do they really help make our comprehension of a Deleuzian politics more complete? Doubtful myself, but I will let everyone to make the judgment by themselves.
Now, with this come a few rather interesting points regarding the alleged 'accelerationism' of Deleuze and Guattari, but also interestingly, the resistance to the potential antinomianism of leftist politics and the stress on the necessity of considering both the poles of order / chaos, or fascism / schizophrenia together, which works rather well. I, though, wonder how the stress on markets and production here might tend to be over-stretched a bit. I mean, there is obviously a certain contradiction inherent in Marxism (or at least most of the takes on it that I am familiar with) in how it is historically necessary to participate in the development of capitalism as opposed to merely cultivating / creating a form of life that can not be subsumed by it (i.e. going through and not escaping it) that brings all kinds of considerations in, and while the author is clearly excited here and brings up the forces of law and its importance to the dynamics of capitalism and resistance to it, I would be here extremely careful as to whether what are seen as the accelerating forces do not fall without and/or unnecessarily collapse the more familiar distinctions that Marx inherited from the Scottish Enlightenment political economists and reworked into his own critique. In different words, while I am here less intending to say that Deleuze's politics is identical to those of Marx, the tendency to state the difference might easily trick the reader's attention and make something long ago familiar appear like brand new. I mean, the typical cries like that Marx missed the marginalists' revolution and hence is dated as opposed to the possibility of actually having anticipated enough of it so that his critique can be simply adjusted to account for it without needing to be changed in its essence. In short, I am yet to be convinced that BitCoin, to give one example, is really such a revolutionary game-changer as some claim.
What else? Well, not really a fan of the way how Deleuze is aligned with some of the cited papers in psychology and biology - not for the reason that there would be no space for it in his system, but the way it is integrated seems to me rather naïve, and falling prey into some distinctions, such as in What is Philosophy?
Despite these reservations and some occasional cringe or questionable factual assertions that I'm too lazy to dig up, I don't see this book as such a failure. I was hesitating between two or three stars, and, well, while there is a sense of 'based' pushed by it, I still don't feel like I got a clear sense of what it's supposed to mean. So... two.
Good news - it's not that terrible. Even better news - it even contributes *something*. And I guess that for the author, having actually written it gives some ground (base?) to move further.
So, there is this rub - the book essentially takes up some of the very contemporary discourses over left- and not-so-left-wing politics and uses concepts and episodes from Deleuze's life and thought to twist them around in order to bring forth a critical stance on them. So, to go straight to the point, the distinction used by the author demarcating 'reactionary' from 'reactivist' against the ground of what he considers to be a traditional Catholic and Stoic discipline and commitment as opposed to a political being as responding to as many external stimuli as possible works rather well. While there would be different people in the 'millieu' of the political left from something like the ideal that this book poses as a possibility to completely toxic people, probably just like in most other social millieus, just like the attack on the (derivatively) herd mentality of both the left and the academic / intellectual life is rather strong, and to an extent one can speculate whether with some slightly more carefully chosen words it could also remain as damning (by which I mean that if what the book maintains is inaccurate, that doesn't mean it's all that wrong still), I wonder if some of the stretches toward figures such as Jordan Peterson, Nick Land or Mencius Moldbug aren't perhaps something to be tasked for in the same way like the possible 'reactivist' ethics of responding to irrelevant stimuli. I mean, do they really help make our comprehension of a Deleuzian politics more complete? Doubtful myself, but I will let everyone to make the judgment by themselves.
Now, with this come a few rather interesting points regarding the alleged 'accelerationism' of Deleuze and Guattari, but also interestingly, the resistance to the potential antinomianism of leftist politics and the stress on the necessity of considering both the poles of order / chaos, or fascism / schizophrenia together, which works rather well. I, though, wonder how the stress on markets and production here might tend to be over-stretched a bit. I mean, there is obviously a certain contradiction inherent in Marxism (or at least most of the takes on it that I am familiar with) in how it is historically necessary to participate in the development of capitalism as opposed to merely cultivating / creating a form of life that can not be subsumed by it (i.e. going through and not escaping it) that brings all kinds of considerations in, and while the author is clearly excited here and brings up the forces of law and its importance to the dynamics of capitalism and resistance to it, I would be here extremely careful as to whether what are seen as the accelerating forces do not fall without and/or unnecessarily collapse the more familiar distinctions that Marx inherited from the Scottish Enlightenment political economists and reworked into his own critique. In different words, while I am here less intending to say that Deleuze's politics is identical to those of Marx, the tendency to state the difference might easily trick the reader's attention and make something long ago familiar appear like brand new. I mean, the typical cries like that Marx missed the marginalists' revolution and hence is dated as opposed to the possibility of actually having anticipated enough of it so that his critique can be simply adjusted to account for it without needing to be changed in its essence. In short, I am yet to be convinced that BitCoin, to give one example, is really such a revolutionary game-changer as some claim.
What else? Well, not really a fan of the way how Deleuze is aligned with some of the cited papers in psychology and biology - not for the reason that there would be no space for it in his system, but the way it is integrated seems to me rather naïve, and falling prey into some distinctions, such as in What is Philosophy?
Despite these reservations and some occasional cringe or questionable factual assertions that I'm too lazy to dig up, I don't see this book as such a failure. I was hesitating between two or three stars, and, well, while there is a sense of 'based' pushed by it, I still don't feel like I got a clear sense of what it's supposed to mean. So... two.
October 28, 2019
In 'one immanent movement,' Justin Murphy compiles for us a short and accessible book on Gilles Deleuze, specifically on his very reactionary ideas. He traces aspects that would now be considered ‘controversial’ to a modern audience through the French philosopher’s body of work, a body most uncontroversially would assume leans leftword. Immanence is the dominant theme of Based Deleuze, naturally, as evoked by the internet terminology: 'Based,' constellating something like 'Down to Earth,' or 'Lets get real,’ and 'That lady is in touch with herself,' and 'Tegrity,' with 'Nice .. Emergent, rhizomatic,' or 'Perhaps traditional, no?' and so on.
Right. In this spirit, I must admit I'm no professional but an autodidact living in a multicultural utopia (Toronto.) I got a perspective, sure. I emerged it, fitting the bill of such an internet-oriented, creative hopeful as Murphy might pinpoint with market analytics. .. I've only read thirty pages of Anti-Oedipus, and so what? With such commanding authority, I say, first, to understand the motivation behind Based Deleuze, as I'm sure most of his readers will know, you gotta understand the 'Cave Twitter' phenomenon. Justin's role within the scene being cultivated is as a hubwheel spinning through a scandalous, darkly enlightened, accelerationistically bent network, cross-fertilizing extra-institutional weirdos and revolutionaries on the internet everywhere. The ‘Other Life’ podcast has platformed imo a fantastic, hetereogenic selection of characters and work, and I’ll admit, it seems like courting controversy in this day and age simply works. I mean, maybe it does. I only know about Justin, for instance, because he chose me out of a crowd, a nobody, I was nothing, a babe, a lamb. He livestreamed with me a year and two months ago, and look at me now. For the longest time I didn't know I existed. But I do. People are starting to notice. I write cringey poetry. I've been hooked on Justin Murphy ever since. ..
And my hot take is this book could have been alternatively titled 'Murphy's Motte.' What has been curated for us is an idiosyncratic system of based justification machines as Murphy-engine tech, as theoretical RNA made explicit. .. Is it a secure motte? It's not designed to be. It's written quickly, as a hypothesis of what function e-books fulfill in a landscape predicated on speed. A motivated critic could easily rip this book from the inside, and I have a feeling it could be quite painful for Murphs, quite painful indeed, quite disorienting, and this is baked into the function of the book. One of the background assumptions working here is that the internet is a hate machine. Each new level of infamy brings a more intensive critical process. This process would then force Justin to work. Instead of just writing stupid ass Greta tweets. And calling them provocations later. I’m sure, like rehearsing in his room, pacing, getting ready for the podcast, sweating, Greta’s choking performance blooming in his conscience, looking into the mirror to touch, to touch base with his striking eyes: “You got this, Justin Murphy. Just ..”
And there's plenty that might motivate a critic. It's all but guaranteed that if Justin Murphy gets big, Based Deleuze is gonna be fucking *obliterated.* He’s setting himself on the cross for the world. Speaking of which, he has a chapter called ‘Bearing Your Cross.’ He begins with a passage from ‘Negotiations’:
“The objections people make, even the questions they pose, always come from safe ashore, and they’re like lumps of mud flung at you to knock you down and stop you getting anywhere rather than any help: objections always come from lazy, mediocre people...” .
It fills me with joy and hope to have a badass philosopher think just the same as I do. There’s real gratification here. Like, I literally think that. That’s the shield I use against my critics. Actually its more .. (I think, for instance, if you attack my ego without engaging with my material, I personally believe you’re undergoing a narcissistic wound, and 9 out of 10 times you will be projecting, which is just embarrassing) a great shield, those fucking haters, yeah fuck you. You know, I’m very sensitive about what people think of me online. Anyways, the book sources a lot of its tension from the neoreactionary hypothesis, which can be understood as a *big short on the intellectual market.* Anyone with a leftist background will immediately be uncomfortable. They will notice right away: Murphy ain't handling the radioactive bar of reaction with safety gloves. He promises us automated communism, and this kinda like automates that part of your brain .. but he is using his bare hands. "Now this is based," he whispers, as he wanders like a fellow lamb into the gravitational field produced by the black hole we believe to be situated in Nick Land's anus-machine.
Nick Land believes 'White Nationalism' means incest and low-IQ genetic entropy, Justin Murphy writes. Okay, but Nick Land also writes about entropy on the largest conceptual scale in order to compare it with the now (due to the scale) relatively innocuous dog breed as race HBD claim, see. See, the motte isn't so secure. You know radioactivity burns for a lifetime? Is the Cathedral real? It's like Murphy's HBD chapter is suspiciously underdeveloped and placed near the 'lets speak in secret languages' chapter forrrrrrrrr beccaaaauauusse. Land is 'devilish' yeah no shit. But suppose it were true?
Maybe we *do* perceive things via difference, and to trace a reactionary current through not just Deleuze but the world allows us a re-entry, a heightening, all value might bloom -- and suppose we turn the knob to track acceleration? Does acceleration give us a high definitional rendering via change? within change within change? It's a recipe for madness or creativity, if opened to – Murphy teaches us that actually it is the r-word who succumbs to schizophrenia. If you are an r-word, and you are high in open-mindedness, you’re gonna go fucking insane. Wanna know why? Because you’re not smart. Because the world is fucking schizo. And the only way you can handle it is if you are high IQ, not a master race, but maybe if you imagined yourself as the most master race person in the world, you would realize race is an r-word game. Deleuze tells us so. Guess what, Guattari was a r-word.
You wanna be more like based Gilles Deleuze, who had a wife he loved, and he fucked her good too. Murphy *does* supply us with many ideas to shaken, to disturb, or build and test our first principles. I learned, for instance about sadism and masochism. I looked back to my work, oh yeah, I said, that’s my masochist project. And this is my sadist project. Thank you. I’m glad I read theory. It’s nice to have thought about ‘the body without organs’ as compensation for our organs' failure. You’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s like the water surface is fluctuating, and the real objects beneath in the field of subjectivity .. are real. It’s real, this is immanence. I’ve seen it too, from a different path. Justin knows he’s got gold.
Right. In this spirit, I must admit I'm no professional but an autodidact living in a multicultural utopia (Toronto.) I got a perspective, sure. I emerged it, fitting the bill of such an internet-oriented, creative hopeful as Murphy might pinpoint with market analytics. .. I've only read thirty pages of Anti-Oedipus, and so what? With such commanding authority, I say, first, to understand the motivation behind Based Deleuze, as I'm sure most of his readers will know, you gotta understand the 'Cave Twitter' phenomenon. Justin's role within the scene being cultivated is as a hubwheel spinning through a scandalous, darkly enlightened, accelerationistically bent network, cross-fertilizing extra-institutional weirdos and revolutionaries on the internet everywhere. The ‘Other Life’ podcast has platformed imo a fantastic, hetereogenic selection of characters and work, and I’ll admit, it seems like courting controversy in this day and age simply works. I mean, maybe it does. I only know about Justin, for instance, because he chose me out of a crowd, a nobody, I was nothing, a babe, a lamb. He livestreamed with me a year and two months ago, and look at me now. For the longest time I didn't know I existed. But I do. People are starting to notice. I write cringey poetry. I've been hooked on Justin Murphy ever since. ..
And my hot take is this book could have been alternatively titled 'Murphy's Motte.' What has been curated for us is an idiosyncratic system of based justification machines as Murphy-engine tech, as theoretical RNA made explicit. .. Is it a secure motte? It's not designed to be. It's written quickly, as a hypothesis of what function e-books fulfill in a landscape predicated on speed. A motivated critic could easily rip this book from the inside, and I have a feeling it could be quite painful for Murphs, quite painful indeed, quite disorienting, and this is baked into the function of the book. One of the background assumptions working here is that the internet is a hate machine. Each new level of infamy brings a more intensive critical process. This process would then force Justin to work. Instead of just writing stupid ass Greta tweets. And calling them provocations later. I’m sure, like rehearsing in his room, pacing, getting ready for the podcast, sweating, Greta’s choking performance blooming in his conscience, looking into the mirror to touch, to touch base with his striking eyes: “You got this, Justin Murphy. Just ..”
And there's plenty that might motivate a critic. It's all but guaranteed that if Justin Murphy gets big, Based Deleuze is gonna be fucking *obliterated.* He’s setting himself on the cross for the world. Speaking of which, he has a chapter called ‘Bearing Your Cross.’ He begins with a passage from ‘Negotiations’:
“The objections people make, even the questions they pose, always come from safe ashore, and they’re like lumps of mud flung at you to knock you down and stop you getting anywhere rather than any help: objections always come from lazy, mediocre people...” .
It fills me with joy and hope to have a badass philosopher think just the same as I do. There’s real gratification here. Like, I literally think that. That’s the shield I use against my critics. Actually its more .. (I think, for instance, if you attack my ego without engaging with my material, I personally believe you’re undergoing a narcissistic wound, and 9 out of 10 times you will be projecting, which is just embarrassing) a great shield, those fucking haters, yeah fuck you. You know, I’m very sensitive about what people think of me online. Anyways, the book sources a lot of its tension from the neoreactionary hypothesis, which can be understood as a *big short on the intellectual market.* Anyone with a leftist background will immediately be uncomfortable. They will notice right away: Murphy ain't handling the radioactive bar of reaction with safety gloves. He promises us automated communism, and this kinda like automates that part of your brain .. but he is using his bare hands. "Now this is based," he whispers, as he wanders like a fellow lamb into the gravitational field produced by the black hole we believe to be situated in Nick Land's anus-machine.
Nick Land believes 'White Nationalism' means incest and low-IQ genetic entropy, Justin Murphy writes. Okay, but Nick Land also writes about entropy on the largest conceptual scale in order to compare it with the now (due to the scale) relatively innocuous dog breed as race HBD claim, see. See, the motte isn't so secure. You know radioactivity burns for a lifetime? Is the Cathedral real? It's like Murphy's HBD chapter is suspiciously underdeveloped and placed near the 'lets speak in secret languages' chapter forrrrrrrrr beccaaaauauusse. Land is 'devilish' yeah no shit. But suppose it were true?
Maybe we *do* perceive things via difference, and to trace a reactionary current through not just Deleuze but the world allows us a re-entry, a heightening, all value might bloom -- and suppose we turn the knob to track acceleration? Does acceleration give us a high definitional rendering via change? within change within change? It's a recipe for madness or creativity, if opened to – Murphy teaches us that actually it is the r-word who succumbs to schizophrenia. If you are an r-word, and you are high in open-mindedness, you’re gonna go fucking insane. Wanna know why? Because you’re not smart. Because the world is fucking schizo. And the only way you can handle it is if you are high IQ, not a master race, but maybe if you imagined yourself as the most master race person in the world, you would realize race is an r-word game. Deleuze tells us so. Guess what, Guattari was a r-word.
You wanna be more like based Gilles Deleuze, who had a wife he loved, and he fucked her good too. Murphy *does* supply us with many ideas to shaken, to disturb, or build and test our first principles. I learned, for instance about sadism and masochism. I looked back to my work, oh yeah, I said, that’s my masochist project. And this is my sadist project. Thank you. I’m glad I read theory. It’s nice to have thought about ‘the body without organs’ as compensation for our organs' failure. You’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s like the water surface is fluctuating, and the real objects beneath in the field of subjectivity .. are real. It’s real, this is immanence. I’ve seen it too, from a different path. Justin knows he’s got gold.
August 15, 2020
Es war definitiv ein wilder Ritt durch eine eigene Auslegung. Diese Art der interpretativen Verarbeitung, Inbesitznahme fremder Gedanken, spricht mir sehr zu. Zusätzlich lässt sich nicht leugnen, dass der Autor die Literatur von und über Deleuze kennt. Ich freue mich auf weitere Bücher der Reihe.
March 18, 2025
This was just such a disappointing read. I was actually kind of excited for it. It is interesting seeing authors interpreted from atypical points of view or see their thought employed in creative ways, bringing out latent tendencies and allowing new potentials to be realized. And one certainly could find some right wing or reactionary tendencies in Deleuze, whether by looking at prejudice he didn't deal with, his opposition to Marx, those aspects of his philosophy which shaped Nick Land... And the book is short so there's no need to grasp at straws and stretch things beyond necessity. The introduction also seemed very promising, indicating that the book is going to meet my expectation and bringing in an fun tongue in cheek attitude toward criticism. Then everything went downhill. The first chapter is on terminology and most of it is dedicated to explaining postmodernism. This is done horrible and seemingly with acceptance of right wing scarecrow perception of postmodernism without question, desperately trying to salvage Deleuze from this by differentiating between postmodernism and poststructuralism, badly arguing he only belonged to the latter and understanding poststructuralism as only a matter of style. All the points that seemed like promising places to latch on to in order to justify the thesis are covered without much depth and less lengthy than would be necessary. Meanwhile points that are less relevant or seem like a stretch are given more attention to. What is given most attention in the book? Biographical details and character traits. It is confusing why he would latch on to these flimsy justifications stretching definitions while better justifications of his thesis are covered very briefly. It is confusing until you realize that the author has an understanding of the left-right division of a typical right winger. It's based merely on preconceptions and stereotypes. Right wingers are based and good people who live a certain way and exhibit certain character traits, left wingers are cringe bad people who exhibit different traits and live differently. Murphy doesn't look at politics and ideology first, he sees those he admires as right wing and those he doesn't as left wing and he builds his perception of politics and ideology on top of this. And what happens if he finds a left wing figure he admires? He takes it as proof that they are secretly right wing, of course! Sadly, way too many right wingers think like this and way too few left wingers realize this. But really his lack of understanding political thought should be clear enough already with his horrible understanding of Marx who is misrepresented as a simplistic idealistic egalitarian as he sadly so often is. All of this to say, don't read the book, it is horrendous.
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August 9, 2024Justin Murphy calls Gilles Deleuze both a leftist and a reactionary. That makes little sense in today's political paradigm, where being a reactionary is seen as far-right. But Murphy's unorthodox take on Deleuze's work attempts to thread the needle between the two, showing Deleuze's pronomian reaction against an antinomian leftism. I'd have to read more Deleuze to figure out how close Murphy's take is to the real Deleuze, but this book does leave a lot to chew on. One thing I do have to say is that I am surprised Murphy never brings up Deleuze's concept of the rhizome, which would make a lot of sense in this book given the sort of political maneuvering and redefinition (reterritorialization?) that Murphy engages in. In general, I'm a fan of the many assemblages that that Deleuze's theory can be interpreted in.
December 26, 2020
I was looking to get to know more about the postmodernists and Deleuze is one of the main culprits. Justin outlines a very subversive reading of Deleuze in which Deleuze is as much of a hardcore reactionary as he is in line with leftist politics. I enjoyed this thread of thought quite a bit, especially when he didn't tie it to only one aspect of the nrx but through all of them. He touched on HBD, religion, being and becoming and all the other nuggets of fun exploration one typically ones to know what an author thinks of. I'll start reading more of Deleuze, thanks Justin.
July 14, 2023
If I didn't like this, no one will. I'm rightwing, use imageboards, and love to stretch my mind with deep theoretical dives.
And hey, I kind of did like Based Deleuze. It's okay, but should have remained a Substack post (and even then, it would have needed a bit more flavour).
And hey, I kind of did like Based Deleuze. It's okay, but should have remained a Substack post (and even then, it would have needed a bit more flavour).
September 22, 2021
One has to take into account some sinister nietzschean laughter behind the play of dozen masks.
August 22, 2024
What did Justin Murphy hope to accomplish by writing this book? The information therein is mildly interesting, but disjointed and never seemed to build up to any real point or argument.
May 5, 2023
Very funny, orthodox take on Deleuze. Even funnier take on Guattari.
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