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Deleuze Quotes

Browse 8 quotes about Deleuze.

Deleuze Quotes

“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).”

“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.”

“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 ?”

“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.”