Deleuze Quotes

“Deleuze and Guattari describe capitalism as a kind of dark potentiality which haunted all previous social systems. Capital, they argue, is the ‘unnamable Thing’, the abomination, which primitive and feudal societies ‘warded off in advance’. When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Rien n'est plus troublant que les mouvements incessants de ce qui semble immobile. p214 (Minuit)”
― Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990

“The city seems to be a labyrinth that can be ordered. The world is an infinite series of curvatures or inflections, and the entire world is enclosed in the soul from one point of view.”
― Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

“Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“ثمة عباراتٌ لا معنى لها تملك مثل ذلك السحر، تُظهِر قدرا من الرهافة، بحيث تقول على الفور، "هذا الشخص، إنه يخصّني"، ليس بمعنى الملكية، بل أنه من نوعي، وأتمنى أن أستطيع أن أكون من نوعه. من تلك النقطة، تولد الصداقة، يمكن للصداقة أن تولد. هناك، إذن، مسألة إدراك[حسّي]، إدراك شيءٍ يناسبك أو يعلّمك شيئا، يُفتِّحُك، يكشف شيئا لك”
― Gilles Deleuze, ألف باء دولوز

“Logic is always defeated by itself, that is to say, by the insignificance of the
cases on which it thrives.’
Ibid-25

bit.ly/Mnhoc7”
― Deleuze

“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.”
― Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

“يسخر الناس من المدمنين ومدمني الكحول لأنهم لا يكفُّون أبدا عن قول "آه كما تعلم. أنا مُمسِكٌ بزمام الأمور. يمكنني التوقف عن الشراب وقتما شئت." يسخر الناس منهم لأنهم لا يفهمون ما يعنيه معتادو الشراب. لديّ بعض الذكريات البالغة الوضوح عن ذلك. أظن أن كل من كان يشرب يفهم هذا. حين تشرب، فإن ما تودُّ بلوغه هو المشروب الأخير. حرْفيا، يعني الشربُ عملَ كل شيءٍ من أجل الوصول إلى المشروب الختامي. هذا ما يثير الاهتمام.”
― Gilles Deleuze, ألف باء دولوز

“Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally,

god,
and with god
his organs.

For you can tie me up if you wish,
but there is nothing more useless than an organ.

When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.

Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.”
― Antonin Artaud, Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu

“Referring to a mask as a law of nature is another way of saying that it cannot be escaped or transcended; there is no getting beyond or beneath it. But when Deleuze describes the intention of interpretation, we find it is 'an art of piercing masks, of discovering the one that masks himself, why he does it and the point of keeping up the mask while it is being reshaped'." The Nietzschean-inspired disavowal of ideology is based on the claim that critique is only an ongoing series of interpretations where masks give way to nothing but more of their own. Deleuze's instruction is to pierce masks so that motivations and strategies can be discovered, whether they belong to subjects or to a particular manifestation of power. The obvious implication is that the appearance of a mask obscures other qualities that are potentially more fundamental than just another mask.”
― John Grant, Dialectics and Contemporary Politics: Critique and Transformation from Hegel through Post-Marxism

“Actually, Deleuze wouldn't strike you as being all that unusual,' Foucault replied. 'He appears completely conventional. He is married and has two children.”
― Simeon Wade, Foucault in California [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death]

“Another book out of Mexico which interests me is Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society. Do you know it?' I inquired.
'Yes, and I too have a high opinion of the thesis of the book. Illich is a man with one good idea. I see you have here Deleuze's Proust and Signs. What do you think of it?'
'I consider it the best book about Proust I have ever read.”
― Simeon Wade, Foucault in California [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death]

“You see fringe politics is like raping little girls because usually fringe politics isnt well liked and its insane and immoral or just plain retarded but also it feels so good just like raping little girls.”
― Bishop Bishop

“Selon Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari:

[...]

"C'est une véritable haine qui anime la logique, dans sa rivalité ou sa volonté de supplanter la philosophie. Elle tue le concept deux fois. Pourtant le concept renaît, parce qu'il n'est pas une fonction spécifique, et parce qu'il n'est pas une proposition logique : il n'appartient à aucun système discursif, il n'a pas de référence. Le concept se montre, et ne fait que se montrer. Les concepts sont des monstres qui renaissent de leurs débris."

Il serait malaisé pour moi d'expliquer ce que ce passage veut dire [...]. Renaître de ses débris, pour un monstre, est une opération dont personne ne sait grand-chose. Ne pourrait-on pas aussi bien affirmer, avec autant de raisons, qu'un concept est une machine à laver ou un chameau ?”
― Roger Pouivet

“For Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenology of the human body, the very phenomenon of the human body, is intimately linked to "the problems of painting": "Things have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence. Why shouldn't these [correspondences] in turn give rise to some [external] visible shape in which anyone else would recognize those motifs which support his own inspection of the world?" Painting brings forth a carnal visuality, an embodied and incarnate image, by establishing the internal equivalent ("in me") of the outside world, which is made of the "same stuff." I am an extension of the world, but the world extends, intensifies, forms a "line of intensity," to use Gilles Deleuze's idiom, inside me. The world forms a "strange system of exchanges" with me; I am constituted in an exchange with the world. Painting makes this continuity visible, is itself the visualization of this continuity, of this blending of the inside and out. Images—"designs" and "paintings"—says Merleau-Ponty, are "the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of feeling makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary.”
― Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light

“In the counter-actualisation of the revolution that befalls us, the revolution that never comes and yet never ceases to pass is grasped as the untimely, virtual, intensive event; the affirmation of which renders us worthy of our fate.”
― Constantin V Boundas

“I am nothing new under the sun but the moon is old to me”
― Debra Fear, Deleuzian Forms of Being: Poetry, Playlets and Prose Anthology

“In this vision, the worlds is conceived as multiple and performative, i.e. shaped through practices, as different from a single pre-existing reality. This is why, for Bruno Latour, politics should become material, a Dingpolitik revolving around things and issues of concern, rather than around values and beliefs. Stem cells, mobile phones, genetically modified organisms, pathogens, new infrastructure and new reproductive technologies brings concerned publics into being that create diverse forms of knowledge about these matters and diverse forms of action - beyond institutions, political interests or ideologies that delimit the traditional domain of politics. Whether it is called ontological politics, Dingpolitik or cosmopolitics, this form of politics recognizes the vital role of nom-humans, in concrete situations, co-creating diverse forms of knowledge that need to be acknowledged and incorporated rather than silenced. Particular attention has gone to that most central organization of all for political geographers: the state. Instead of conceiving the state as a unified actor, it should be approached as an assemblage, which makes heterogenous points of order - geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological particularities - resonate together. As such, the state is an effect rather than the origin of power, and one should focus on reconstructing the socio-material basis of its functioning. The concept of assemblage questions the naturalization of hegemonic assemblages and renders them open to political challenge by exposing their contingency.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object”
― Deleuze and Parnet

“Only emotion differs in nature from both intelligence and instinct, from both intelligent individual egoism and quasi-instinctive social pressure. Obviously no one denies that egoism produces emotions; and even more so social pressure, with all the fantasies of the story-telling function. But in both these cases, emotion is always connected to a representation on which it is supposed to depend. We are then placed in a composite of emotion and of representation, without noticing that it is potential, the nature of emotion as pure element. The latter in fact precedes all representation, itself generating new ideas. It does not have, strictly speaking, an object, but merely an essence that spreads itself over various objects, animals, plants and the whole of nature. "Imagine a piece of music which expresses love. It is not love for a particular person.... The quality of love will depend upon its essence and not upon its object." Although personal, it is not individual; transcendent, it is like the God in us. "When music cries, it is humanity, it is the whole of nature which cries with it. Truly speaking, it does not introduce these feelings in us; it introduces us rather into them, like the passers-by that might be nudged in a dance". In short, emotion is creative (first because it expresses the whole of creation, then because it creates the work in which it is expressed; and finally, because it communicates a little of this creativity to spectators or hearers).”
― Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism

“Maybe the only way an artist can escape capitalism and patriarchy today is to use art to disappear as an individual. The artists must completely wash away their person and self-expression, along with their individual characteristics and even their own imprint, their own life in the physical world. The artist’s person, ego and even body must disappear quite literally into gunk, shit and black bodily waste. That’s where something new can start.”
― Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“La paradoja coherente de la filosofía de Hume consiste en presentar una subjetividad que se supera y que no es por eso menos pasiva. La subjetividad está determinada como un efecto; es una impresión de reflexión. El espíritu deviene sujeto al ser afectado por los principios.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature

“If there is one thing common to the great modern speculative philosophers, Leibniz, Hegel and Deleuze, it is the risk that re-animating the universe with a non organic life might make it altogether uninhabitable for sane human beings.”
― Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Unconscious

“Ser puesto en el interior del exterior, e inversamente”
― Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

“We wouldn’t need Deleuze if we didn’t sense in his oeuvre something that has never been thought, something capable of affecting philosophy in still inestimable ways—which is a result of our letting ourselves be affected philosophically by it.”
― François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event: together with The Vocabulary of Deleuze

“Belli bir manada filozof şarkı söyleyen biri değil, bağıran, çığlık atan biridir. Çığlık atma ihtiyacı duyduğunuz her defasında felsefenin bir tür çağrısına uzak olmadığınızı sanıyorum. Kavramın bir tür çığlık ya da çığlık atmanın bir biçimi olması ne anlama geliyor? İşte bu, kavrama ihtiyaç duymak: yani haykıracak bir şeyi olmak! Bu çığlığın kavramını bulmak gerekir… Binlerce şey haykırılabilir. Şöyle haykıran birini hayal edin: “Yine de bütün bunların bir nedeni olması lazım.” Bu çok basit bir çığlıktır. Tanımına dönelim: kavram çığlığın biçimidir; o zaman hemen “evet! evet!” diyecek bir sürü filozof bulursunuz. Bunlar tutkunun filozoflarıdır, coşkunun, pathos’un filozoflarıdır ve logos’un, sözün filozoflarından ayrılırlar. Mesela Kierkegaard – bütün felsefesini derinden gelen çığlıklar halinde haykırır ve temellendirir.

Ama Leibniz büyük rasyonalist (akılcı) gelenektendir. Leibniz’i hayal edin: ürkütücü bir şey vardır onda. O, düzenin filozofudur; hatta düzenin ve polisin, polis kelimesinin tüm anlamlarıyla… Özellikle de polis kelimesinin ilk anlamında – yani kentin, devletin kurallı örgütlenmesi… Düzen terimlerinin dışında asla düşünmeye yanaşmaz. Bu bakımdan aşırı tutucudur, düzenin dostudur. Ama çok tuhaftır – bu düzen zevkine kapılmış haldeyken ve bu düzeni temellendirmekle, kurmakla uğraşırken, felsefede korkunç denilebilecek bir çılgın kavramlar yaratma uğraşına koyulur. Dizginsiz, gemi azıya almış kavramlar; en taşkın, en düzensiz olanı biteni teyit etmek adına en karmaşık kavramlar. Her şeyin bir nedeni olması lazımdır.

Aslında iki tür filozof vardır – eğer tanımımızı kabul ettiyseniz – eğer felsefe kavramlar yaratan faaliyetse – ama sanki iki kutup var gibidir: çok ayık kavramlar yaratmaya koyulmuş filozoflar vardır; ötekilerden çok iyi ayırt edilmiş şu ya da bu tekillik düzeyinde yaratırlar kavramlarını – ve sonuçta şöyle bir şey düşünebiliyorum: filozofları saymak, nicelendirmek, yarattıkları veya imzaladıkları kavramların sayısı bakımından nicelendirmek… Mesela Descartes… Onunki ayık kavram yaratma tipidir. Cogito’nun, “düşünüyorum”un tarihi – tarihsel olarak burada her zaman bir gelenek, önceller ve ardıllar bulunabilir, ama bu cogito kavramında Descartes imzasını taşıyan bir şeyin bulunmasını engellemez – yani şöyle bir önermenin (bir önerme bir kavram ifade edebilir): “Düşünüyorum, o halde varım”; bu tam anlamıyla yepyeni bir kavramdır. Bu özneliliğin, düşünen öznelliğin keşfidir. Altında Descartes’ın imzası vardır. Elbette bütün bunlar Aziz Augustinus’ta da aramaya girişebilirsiniz – önceden hazırlanmış olup olmadığını araştırabilirsiniz – kavramların tarihi elbette vardır, ama bu Descartes’ın imzasını taşır. Descartes… çok hızlı geçmedik mi? Ona atfedebileceğimiz beş altı kavram vardır. Altı kavram yaratmış olmak muazzam bir şeydir. Ama bu ayık bir yaratıştır.

İkinci olarak azgın, öfkeli filozoflar vardır. Onlarda her kavram bir tekillikler kümesini kapsar – ve onlara sürekli olarak başka kavramlar, yeni kavramlar gerekir. O zaman çılgın bir kavramlar yaratımına tanık olursunuz. Tipik örnek Leibniz’dir; yeniden ve yeniden bir şeyler yaratmayı asla bırakmaz. Açıklamak istediğim şey işte buydu.

O Alman dilinin kavram bakımından kudreti üzerine düşünün ilk filozoftur – Almanca hangi bakımdan kavramsal bir üstünlüğe sahiptir? Ve bunun aynı zamanda büyük bir haykırma, çığlık dili olması da tesadüfi değildir. Leibniz bir sürü şeyle uğraşır – neredeyse her şeyle, çok büyük bir matematikçi, çok büyük bir fizikçi, çok iyi bir hukukçu, siyasi faaliyetin her türü, hep düzenin hizmetinde… Dur durak bilmez, çok karanlık, şüpheli bir heriftir.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Leibniz Üzerine Beş Ders