Twentieth Series on the Moral Problem in Stoic Philosophy

Axiom: "Divination grounds ethics." (143)

"Divination is, in the most general sense, the art of surfaces, lines, and singular points appearing on the surface." (143) The most basic form of language comprehension is divination, the orientation of data point resulting from the event back into sense. E.g. The big bang emitted stars, and then, "Can you see the Big Dipper?" etc. This sense of sense is the basis for the I-Ching, Jung's schema of psychoanalysis, etc. It posits the idea that there are elements, elemental structures to the formation of reality, and leaves it to us to be the "cryptographer", to "read the folds of the soul", to decipher the hieroglyphs. (cf. The Fold)

The fulcrum of thought and difference: object = x = das ding == identification = paradox. (145)

Expression is "enveloped" in representation. (145) Expression is the means by which we unfurl the thread tangled on the spool (i.e. by spinning the gyre). Representation is a boundary or limit ("lining or hem") to the will to power (Aion) that left undisciplined, behaves schizophrenically.

"The sage waits for the event, that is to say, understands the pure event in its eternal truth, independently of its spatio-temoral actualizations, as something eternally yet-to-come and always already passed according to the line of the Aion. But, at the same time, the sage also wills the embodiement and the actualization of the pure incorporeal event in a state of affairs and in his or her own body and flesh." (146)

When D says the sage "selects" the event, he means that insofar as the sage is a series, other series come up through him the way play-dough gets pressed through a "spaghetti"-maker. It is like one series is flying through a buttonhole, or quilting point, and the common factors are selected by the series which is that sage (in the most immediate sense, think of the changed structure of the lips as raw sound is transformed into articulate speech). So in a sense, when reggae DJs refer to the DJ as the selector, perhaps this is what they mean.

Windmills of Your Mind

Nineteenth Series of Humor

P. 135, Substitution, analogy, and example, generally speaking, are forms of humor. Humor requires a flow through a singularity and a subsequent displacement, such that in retrospect, we can understand the difference between the model and the simulacrum. Remember the quilting point we spoke of earlier? Humor is the flow through that point, and then an abrupt turn, such that we can measure the difference in trajectory, as we might comment on someone's sharp wit. Another example would be the films of Werner Herzog, how he will have a character (say Kinski) step out from behind the camera and then turn to face the camera. The move is very off-putting and jarring, as if Kinski's body is flowing through this sharp U-turn which is meant to disorient us but at the same time provide a new perspective of his character. I think of Herzog because I just watched his new film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and in it, he provides the same camera trick, except he does it with a camera attached to a small helicopter. It as if he has become Kinski, seeing the move as if the camera was the character.

You might feel that this is a too-broad generalization of humor, but I think Deleuze is getting at (perhaps unintentionally) that lived life really only has two valences, two moments, tragedy and farce (humor). There is the shooting off, the aufhebuhn, line of flight (tragic), and the moment of the turn, the stitch, the change in the sign of the first derivative of a line (humor, farce). I think this conversation extends back to Marx and Hegel, though Deleuze might deny it.

Humor "hurls us into the ground of bodies and the groundlessness of their mixtures." (135) Humor is fundamentally a mortifying moment. It humbles us, and reminds us of the smallness of our aspirations and acheivements, makes fun of the gods and masters that we hold dear. Socratic irony "tears the individual away from his or her immediate existence." (137) If the moment is truly magnificent (e.g. Monty Python), we enter the realm of humor as nonsense -- signification has been cut up and unthreaded to the point that all navigation markers have been lost. The sensation of pure sense is to be so caught up in the number of bowling pins thet juggler juggles that we reach a state of immanence with the marvel and time, future and past, contracts and extends without measure (Aion). This infinite moment, at the surface, is where the line rises up and then turns, finally stitching itself to another line or surface. Hence, as Deleuze says, where the space where the line turns -- this "void is the site of sense", "harmonizing" with its own nonsense, the two sides of the coin, etc. (137) The void is the "paradoxical element", the space between, the aleatory point, the space underneath the curve. (137)

Deleuze take a sideline here to speak of Zen and the "absurdity of significations". (136) He seems to return several times in his work to Eastern philosophy to show what I would call the "flattening" of thought, as if one was to take thought and push it into 2-dimensions, as one might take an event and stretch or spread it along an "ordinary line". E.G. A picture using perspective becomes Hokusai, etc.

"[Irony] is the demon who holds up to G-d and to his creatures the mirror wherein universal individuality dissolves." (140) (E.G. The mousetrap (play within a play) set for Claudius in Hamlet.)