Status Updates From The Hermetic Deleuze: Philo...

Endlessly fascinating...

About 70 pages in and absolutely fantastic so far (although the chapter on hermetic tradition was a little hard to understand and follow in some places).

I will definitely need to give this a reread after having listened to a series of podcasts which are basically "Deleuze for Dummies". I'm definitely able to follow the threads here in a much more informed manner.

Understanding less and less as I approach the finish! And this after listening to several podcasts about Deleuze.

. . . when a person dies, the event is the result of physical causes, but the meanings of a death are multiple and thus both precede and exceed the physics of the event itself. Teh mental or ideal time in which the meanings of a death are played and replayed is not linear and sequential, but aberrant and discontinuou . . .

Cue: differentiation between Aion and Chronos.

For Deleuze, all genuine artistic experimentation must be understood as a local activation of otherwise imperceptible cosmic forces that move through natures, cultures, and psyches. When it is successful, the work of art suggest new modes of sensible and affective engagement within the world . . .

. . . the flesh is pulled or pushed out from the outside by the planes that frame it (in musical terms melody and rhythm push sound towards its pulsing vitality . . . harmony represents the planes that intersect and frame sound in a cosmos, a universe of vectors and dimensions.

This cryptic passage is actually helping me to understand Deleuze's approach/view on art more clearly.

About two years and three rereads, that's what I'm going to need to crack the code on that last chapter. Phew!

Deleuze's concept of "difference" escapes me at the moment. It is not as simple as one might think. Honestly, I don't even think I have a mental direction to face in order to begin to understand it. Guess I'll just intellectually wallow until I find some piece of driftwood to hang on to.

Aha! The notion of "intensity" in Deleuze provides me a nice window to peer into his philosophy. Now, I just need a glass house made of those windows.

So, in sum, as I understand it, Deleuze is more concerned with "becoming" as an action than with the platonic "idea," which is a static state of being? I guess? It seems that Deleuze delights in multiplicities, rather than The One. I would love someone to confirm or repudiate my understanding, please!

. . . Deleuze continues to be haunted by the connection of philosophy to symbolic iterations - artistic, scientific, and esoteric - that would be adequate for the expression of immanence and indispensable for philosophy as an act of creation.

Deleuze, here, seems to be most concerned with symbols as indicating the search for knowledge and wisdom, rather than the categorization of knowledge into discrete containers.

It is rotative thought, in which a group of images turn ever more quickly around a mysterious point, as oppossed to the linear allegorical chain.

I might be starting to "get" Deleuze. Starting . . .

My hypothesis is that we should continue to see, on the horizon of Deleuze's work, the persistence of his adolescent vision of an ecstatic, erotic, and unfinished project of mathesis universalis as that "prephilosophical" or "nonphilosophical" apprehension of immanence alluded to on the final pages of What is Philosophy?

Biography helps. Deleuze was a member of a Salon during the French Resistance where he was exposed to Hermetic ideas, particularly Mathesis at a young age. He wrote the forward to Malfatti's Mathesis: or Studies on the Anarchy and Hierarchy of Knowledge in 1946, when he was 21. He later renounced this work.

Bruno views art as potentially generative of magic if the image is less concerned with verisimilitude and more concerned with what may be. "The artist who wishes to move himself must be moved". Art, then, generates resonance with that which is beyond the art itself, so the art is representative, but more importantly, a sort of portal to access that which is beyond mere form.

Never use the word "obvious" in a philosophical text. Just don't. Still, I'm starting to see the tip of the iceberg regarding the relationship between Bruno's conception of nature and matter and Deleuze's immanence. It's like it's on the tip of my brain - I can sense a . . . presence about the intersection of the concepts, but can't articulate it.

*sigh* I am SO over Aristotle. Bruno's not helping.

Interesting that Pico considers true Magic not a work in itself - it doesn't cause miracles, it reveals miracles already inherent in, but hidden by nature. Goeteia, on the other hand, calls on the "operations and power of demons". Magic, in his estimation, is noble and complimentary with Christianity, while the dark arts are contradictory. I wonder where he drew the line between the two?

Ah, more Pico. This is something I can sink my brain into. I remember finding Pico's writings quite intuitive as an undergraduate. Hopefully, I can slip back into the magic Christian frame of mind easily enough again.

The contradictory notions of Bruno and Pico outlined on page 51 are worthy of exploration. I can feel a short story coming on . . .