More on Gilles Deleuze - a philosopher with a different class

Indiana University Press:  "In Truth and Genesis, Miguel de Beistegui considers the role and meaning of philosophy today. Calling for a new departure for philosophy, one that brings together philosophy's scattered identities, de Beistegui proposes a robust and unified philosophy that would find itself equally at home in artistic and scientific disciplines. To build this renewed philosophy, de Beistegui turns to Aristotle and the earliest foundations of thought. He traces philosophy's development through the medieval and modern periods before comparing and investigating the work of two of the 20th century's most influential thinkers, Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze. In particular, de Beistegui focus    es on Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy for their handling of the concept of difference. De Beistegui concludes that Deleuze and Heidegger are irreconcilable, but it is in their disagreements that he sees a way to liberate philosophy from its current crisis. "

***

These days I am looking into this book, Miguel de Beistegui's  Truth and Genesis... ("beautiful mind")  Since he refers to Deleuze a lot ( In my Philosophy Irrfahrt...I lost track of him after I began to get acquainted to his ideas some years back) I wanted to know more about him and I came across the attached interesting Document, which I like. If you want, take a moment please to throw a glance or more. It is worth it.(He has much to say on "becoming" . The way his ideas are presented here -its form- is also agreable)......  

From.....

L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, avec Claire Parnet

Directed by Pierre-André Boutang (1996)

http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G/ABC2.html#anchor18379

....philosophy is like [painting with] colors


.....because philosophy is like [painting with] colors, before entering into it, one has to take so many precautions, before conquering the "philosophical color" -- and the philosophical color is the concept. Before succeeding in inventing concepts, an enormous amount of work is necessary. Deleuze sees the history of philosophy as this slow modesty, taking a long time doing portraits. It's like a novelist, Deleuze suggests, who might say, I'm writing novels, but cannot read any because I'd risk compromising my inspiration. Deleuze says he has heard young writers make such frightening statements which, for him, means they simply do not need to work. Moreover, Deleuze sees the history of philosophy not only as having this preparatory role, it succeeds quite well by itself. It is the art of portraiture in so far as it allows one to reach toward something. At this point, it becomes a bit mysterious, says Deleuze, and he asks Parnet perhaps to give him another question so he can define this ......


.....there is a music in these philosophers

....................
A third order of things, a kind of connection among them all, are affects. Deleuze says that, of course, there are no percepts without affects, but that these are specific as well: these are becomings that exceed him or her who goes through them, exceed the strength of those who go through them. Doesn't music lead us into these forces that exceed our grasp? It's possible, Deleuze answers. If one takes a philosophical concept, it causes one to see things since the greatest philosophers have this "seeing" trait or aspect , at least in the philosophers that Deleuze admires: Spinoza causes one to "see", one of the most visionary philosophers, Nietzsche as well. They all hurl forth fantastic affects, there is a music in these philosophers, and inversely, music makes one see some very strange things, colors and percepts. Deleuze says he imagines a kind of circulation of these dimensions into each other, between philosophical concepts, pictorial percepts, and musical affects. There's nothing surprising in there being these resonances, he maintains, just the work of very different people, but that never stop interpenetrating......................




http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G/ABC3.html

Getting to know some Old and New Minds...

I would like to give a big attention to the references and "introductions" to
the ideas of people like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John R. Searle...

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/merleau-ponty/

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle

And here an extract out of one of the papers which impressed me:-

http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=7603

Miguel de Beistegui
Questioning Politics, or Beyond Power;

http://ept.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/1/87

On ontology and political power...etc.....(cf. and on Heidegger; putting all legitimate
biases aside; his thoughts and his role may have different dimensions...the way the
following paper presents it... ) . Very interesting...in my view.... I should admit,
I am beginning to understand....some whats and whys of irrational events in the human
history...Just to understand and know. Not to justify or somethings of the sort...events
have to be qualified as they are...and mostly without relativating them through time
but only through reason and ultimate truth...whatever the "truth" may be..
******************
Miguel de Beistegui
Questioning Politics, or Beyond Power
********************
...............>>From the paper...Extract ...

The third and last trait I wish to emphasize, then, concerns the connection of
essence between power and what Heidegger calls the end of the first beginning,
or the end of metaphysics: ‘The essential unfolding of Power as machination
negates the possibility of the truth of beings. It is itself the end of metaphysics.’7
It is metaphysics itself, and metaphysics in its entirety, that is of power. This means
that all metaphysics is metaphysics of power, and that power itself is through and
through metaphysical. How does Heidegger understand metaphysics? As the
negation of the possibility of the truth of beings, as the systematic and radical
impossibility of an awakening to the truth of Being. What do the thematic of
power, the interpretation of nature and of the human, in terms of power, amount
to? They amount to the ultimate degree of occultation of truth. And yet, power
or, more specifically perhaps, the horizon of power that serves as the backdrop
against which all things and all situations are evaluated, or simply come to be seen,
is itself a possibility and an epoch of the truth of Being. It is the regime of truth in
which the event of truth itself is least visible, most concealed. It is the uttermost
non-essence of truth, yet still a modality of its unfolding. This, in turn, means that
any reversal or overcoming of metaphysics, any recovering of the truth of Being
will amount to an overcoming, or at least a neutralizing, of power itself. It will
amount to the constitution of a horizon other than that of power and its will to
dominate. Will such a reversal, or such an overcoming, greater than any revolution,
ever take place? And might it be a matter of and for politics? No, it could not;
at least not in 1940, not after the absurd and blind hope invested in Nazi politics.

****************

My Question....:

...Only Nazi politics of the past or still today in all its manifestations witnessed ???


Further:.....the paper goes...
***************
This means that the political in modernity is essentially totalitarian, that is,
driven by a logic and a demand of total power over which it itself has no power, a
drive it itself cannot call into question. ‘Totalitarianism’ is a direct consequence
of the lack of questioning, that is, of thought in the most fundamental sense,
which characterizes the logic of the will-to-power.
*****************

Question:

Indeed : lack of thought.... (Gedankenlosigkeit..cf. H. Arendt)

Further....
*****************

which characterizes the logic of the will-to-power.
It is not the political, or politicians, that lead and guide. For they are themselves
driven, that is, subjected to a force that is nothing personal, nothing like a lust for
personal power, for what, too often, and especially in the case of the so-called
‘tyrants’ or ‘dictators’, we call megalomania.

And it still goes further ...to claim that...
**************

The psychopathological does not
operate at the level at which issues of power, politics and history can be adequately
dealt with. The reason for the belonging together of the lack of questioning of the
political and its totality, or for the existence of totalitarianism as the politicization
of Being in its totality, Heidegger goes on to write, does not lie, ‘as some naïve
minds think, on the arbitrary willfulness of dictators’, but ‘in the metaphysical
essence of modern actuality in general’.14


My question and opinion....

We may stop one day to hope for a better "state" but for a better "mind"..a "collective mind"?.
I have finalized my hope in something like the "Words of Emotion" (in a way
"The Journey of the Fool" from my perspective)...ie.the "Shift" we need in the "Mind"...etc.
and so on....until that mind becomes beautiful and has enough of the "knowledge"
it can encorporate to leave for the "Unknown" or "Beyond"...as every one of us in his own way
wishes or contemplates. Be it true or not is not our problem.
*****************

And he, Mr.Miguel de Beistegui goes further....

Thus...........
debates have emerged over the merits and limitations of democracy, monarchy,
aristocracy and, in the last 150 years, over socialism and fascism. Now, as I
suggested towards the very beginning of this article, Foucault has done a lot to
reveal how power, whilst in many ways indissociable from state apparatus
(government, the police, the penal system, bureaucracy), is more diffuse and more
complex and not simply identifiable with state structures. In a way, Heidegger
goes further still, by attempting to reveal a single unifying structure, or, rather, a
single historical event, of which all relations of power, including those regulating
institutions such as the family, the school and the university, healthcare, etc.,
would be an effect. Without ever going into the kind of microanalysis Foucault
develops,
****************

Further.....

It is normally assumed, Heidegger argues, that those regimes that
give a free rein to the unlimited unfolding of power are the so-called ‘authori-tharian or,
we might say today, ‘totalitarian’ states. In the case of such regimes, it
seems that power is entirely concentrated in the hands of one or a handful of individuals,
who secure their power through the submission and exploitation of the
masses. From the point of view of parliamentary democracies, such a display of
unrestrained violence is attributable to the blind rage that is indissociable from the
bare lust for total power. Power, it is thought, is abused, and the counter-power
(Gegenmacht) of the people contained and silenced. By contrast, parliamentary
democracies see themselves as involved in a process of checks and balances and
alternative governments with the aim of securing the sharing of power. Their
power game takes on the appearance of ‘free’ negotiations and consultations, and
this appearance generates another, in which such an organization of power alone
is deemed to be ‘ethical’. There is no doubt that differences of this kind matter,
or that they mattered especially in Heidegger’s lifetime. There is no doubt, either,
that Heidegger chose to ignore such differences, preferring instead to equate
‘Americanism’ and ‘Bolshevism’, refusing – even after the war – to condemn
National-Socialism, or to acknowledge its criminal responsibility in the deaths of
millions of Jews, gypsies, communists and other political and religious groups.
The question, however, is one of knowing whether there is anything to
Heidegger’s claim regarding the fundamental unity in the destiny of totalitarian
and democratic states. There is something deeply disturbing about such a claim.

***************

My question....

Is there really no grain of truth in this claim....taking into account a lot of the "stuffs"
we witness today in the globe around...not only Africa and our kinds but the "Bush"
domains too.?

My resumee....and my opinion is in the "Words of Emotion"....:-

When
Demo-cracy goes crazy....
*

At such moments,
Stop TIME,

Go and Go ahead,
To the SOURCE....the best breed.
Change your mind
Challenge your head.
Don’t hesitate,
Break your head,
Break your heart
You would have IT,
It is THE HEAT
A MOMENT bit,
universal, AFRICAN BEAT.
(Back to the origin of the homo-sapiens....and perhaps endeavor to be triple sapiens..)

**************

And further....goes the Mann....

The problem, Heidegger believes, is that we remain blind with respect to the
real origin and siege of power, blind as to who or rather what is really in power.
And this is primarily because there is a general ‘occultation of the true ruler [eine
Verschleierung der eigentlichen Machthabe]’, a self-concealing of power in its
imperatives, effects and general unfolding.15 The question, as Arendt asked, is
indeed one of knowing who or what is in power, who or what governs, or rules.

*****
My Question:

The paper approaches its end and comes to its conclusions.........and I think you have
to read it yourself.... unless you have already dismissed it ...due to your "WELT - ANSCHAUUNG"
/ the way of looking at the world.../ an eidetic concept in german/...Everyone with his
"Welt-anschauung to form "the field of Being" (cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty) culminating
one day in a healthy "collective mind" with a self-evidence of peace and abundance to freely exist
together.

And it goes....:
***********
But, unlike Arendt, Heidegger believes it is power itself that governs and rules,
and this in such a way that it is itself never visible as such in the effects it generates.
Power is what ‘authorizes’, or ‘empowers [ermächtigt]’, political power, but
also economic and symbolic power. It is what authorizes us as powerful beings,
what empowers us in the face of nature, of the world and of others. There is something
like an authorization of power, or a process of empowering, through which
our relation to all beings becomes one of power. The only thing it does not
empower us to do is to resist power, to turn power back upon itself and replace it
in the site of its own metaphysical origin.

******
He goes to his concluding chapter...

Overcoming Power...
***************
...........................................regarding the will-to-power-and-domination
that has taken over the human in its relation to the world as such and as a
whole, the question is one of knowing whether something can be opposed to
power, whether we, humans, can mobilize a certain power against power itself. Or
could our very powerlessness in the face of power be the very form of our resistance
to power? Could it be an opportunity to reawaken ourselves to another power – not
another form of power, of distribution and organization of power, but another sense
of power: our power, and so our freedom to be, our power to be free. >From what?
>From nothing – other than from power itself. For what, then? For that which, from
the start, and irreducibly, points beyond the will-to-power, beyond the current
consummation of metaphysics in the drive for power, and into the truth of Being.
.....

After setting his Hope in Europe ....he concludes with the following poetic words...


.....‘the name polis is precisely the word for that realm that constantly became
questionable anew, (and) remained worthy of question’.1Perhaps this domain ought
to be revived to provide something like a passage, a transition, or a way into ‘politics’
in the other beginning. This is revolutionary politics in the strongest sense, insofar as it
presupposes a break with the metaphysics of power and production that rule today.
Yet it is also the most silent, most imperceptible of revolutions, insofar as it elevates
powerlessness to the heights of a practice.


****************
OH ! Please read the rest yourself and enjoy his thoughts..., if you like of course......I think the man has,...
I call such minds "beautiful".... a beautiful mind...(After the name of the film...called
Beatiful Mind..if you have seen it). It was for me an enlightening contribution..

De Beistegui: Questioning Politics, or Beyond Power.

I would like to read the paper again in full attention.....The above is just an outcome
of an overview...It is unfortunate that ...there is so little time to read such a damned tremendous
amount of stuff .....circling around this globe...all worthy of the knowledge.

****************
My Opinion:
***********

I have enjoyed reading it...It is fortunate that there are all over the globe such concerned minds....
Since it is my first encounter with this mind, ...I looked in some sides to know more about the author...
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=7603

A new world ...a new mind....? One can always be happy..only and...
if only ....the truth of our being behind the veil could prevail...but this takes
time and is at the cost of time..NoTime...however, once it gets hold of you...you
are happy that it won't let you free, since it is all free...free of all and any constraints
one can imagine of in the "old" world of time... into which you will be thrown back
just to be soothed only by the dream...the very dream you always remember
until the end of your own Time..And when you read such contributions and
encounter such minds...this dream will be revived again and again.....
The rest of the feeling is only gratitude and humilty...And I would even say
thanks God that I am powerless...and full of "OHNMACHT". There rings
the song I heard during the process of such events like "ohnmacht"..."Somethings
will never change"...And I would take it that this "somethings" is perhaps
the "nature of power" - Macht - metaphysically crystallized in the "state" in all its
different forms; specially similar in their nature in times of crisis (cf. Toggia; Thanks,
though I miss some "spiritual" dimensions; just to take into account some nuances,
which actually don't make that qualitative difference one would expect)
This "state" is highly difficult to change....The very prequisite for it to be changed
is my own personal "state" and everyone's personal "state"....(of course including
the head of a state..that state which would otherwise refuse to change and develop--
see one Gorbachow- in our epoch)...
The personal "state of mind". I am afraid any other approach of the matter...ie. to change or
develop the latter, - that crystallized non-grey matter..."the state"....the police...
the prison...the administration...etc. .(cf. Foucault) is just only to play the same game,
the same poker with some other dices...I will no doubt be happy if say ...
for example, to come back down to our world, to the "Obama fever"
- if Obama wins in the coming game...But I can't help having in mind where
he began in his campaingns and where he is now in his priorities
(Though this time he made a good speech on the convention.)
However, you can feel and sense throughout the event, how he is embeded
and constrained in the reigns and strings of the "power of the state".
Nonetheless, Hope is always a principle and the rest is to be seen.
Moreover, it seems, Man doesn't have so far and in the history
of mankind any other alternative except to work on himself peu a peu...
I have discovered for myself that philosophy is indeed a good
therapy in this hard work. That is why I would simply say ...
Change your mind ..you will get your state, if you are at stake...
challenge your head...you will get your bread...etc. .The rest comes on its own...
And now I would like to come to the end of my bla bla to work for my bread.
"sew bemigib bicham baynor migibim, demozim yasfeligewalina".

********

As a Farewell here some verses from "Hölderin", who apparently was the spiritual "source" of a lot of modern philosophers:
(Verses in which I was so inaftuated some 4 years back at the beginning of my amateur
and self-patched "philosophy odyssey" ).

Out of the piece called "Celebration of Peace"

....
Man has learned much since morning,
For we are a conversation, and we can listen
To one another. Soon we'll be song.
And the picture of time, which the great spirit unfolds,
Lies as a sign before us, indicating that a covenant
Between himself and others, himself and other powers exists.
Not he alone, but also the unconceived and eternal ones
Are recognizable in the picture,
Just as our mother, the earth, recognizes herself,
And light and air, through the plant kingdom.
But the all-gathering day of the festival
Is the ultimate sign of love, the witness
Of your existence, o holy powers. 1

.....


1 http://home.att.net/~holderlin/poem/celebrationofpeace.htm