http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqp1i0cUUy1qzh19go1_500.jpg

Thirty-Third Series of Alice's Adventures

This chapter is largely an application of theories previously explicated in LOS.

Page 237: On the author as symptomatologist and the "art" of symptomatology.

On the method of the New Pioneer: "To extract the non-actualizable part of the pure event from symptoms, (or as Blanchot says, to raise the visible to the invisible), to raise everyday actions and passions (like eating, shitting, loving, speaking, or dying) to their noematic attribute...-- this is the object of the novel as a work of art." (238)

Explain in what sense the artist is patient, doctor, and pervert. (238)

Saddle

via decapitate animals

Thirty-Second Series on the Different Kinds of Series

Page 224: D is trying to make his theory commensurate with the psychoanalytic theory of Freud (and also Lacan), hence his inclusion of the analogy of sequence and block to displacement and condensation, respectively.

"A physics of intensive qualities." (225)

Page 226: It is the differential between two series, like resonance in a echo chamber, that causes the incarnation of the phantasm. In this sense, we can think of the event or the eternal return arising from a void. The phantasm (also GCD) is the bounded void, that like a chamber of the heart, pulses so as to both produce and contain resonance and to ensure the communication between the organs.

Page 227: Compare Deleuze's idol to Lacan's objet petit a. The idol (GCD) is the "source of disjunctions" and ramifications between the organs. The disjunctions "resonate by their difference." (228)

Page 227: A conversion from depth to surface. E.g. How we get from sound (sequential batches of frequencies) to sight (all the data points at once). The number to be factored is converted in the same way. From the binary string to the Pascal diagram, etc. Later in the chapter, D uses the word "extraction" in place of conversion. This extraction always "awaits the result" (233); meaning is retroactively pinned to the emissions of the voice -- hence, the double/doubling. Because of the gap inherent in the event, the result is never 100% completed, just as the dragon or dog never successfully catches its tail. This is why one might say the return is "eternal".

Page 227: The line which the event traces marks both an excess and a lack (i.e. a displacement); a lack as perceived by one series is an excess for the other.

Page 228: The phallus (idol, GCD, etc.) which is always "displaced in relation to itself" reminds me again of Derrida. (The phallus as the ultimate organ of "displacement", "center without a center", BwO, filled with pure intensity, etc.)

"Is it not the case that the serial organization presupposes a certain state of language?" (229) (cf. Lacan)

The child learns "formative [language] elements [e.g. phonemes] before any understanding of formed linguistic units." (230)

Page 230-232: Psychoanalysis/schizoanalysis as localization (of "clusters" of intensity/singularities) (e.g. needle-therapy, acupuncture, etc.): "The surface of the entire body as an aggregate or sequence of letters....The child was learning to speak on his own body."

Thirty-First Series of Thought

The phantasm is "inseparable from a displacement, an unfolding, and a development within which it carries along its own origin." (217) The phantasm "reintegrates and retrieves everything in the retrieval of its own movement." (221)

Page 218: D speaks of the result of the phantasm developing on a "second screen". The idea of the screen is important to D's thought. (cf. D's two books on film, also The Brain is the Screen) The stuff of the depths rises to the surface as through a sieve which is the gyre or Pascal triangle or cone of virtuality, etc. (cf. Difference and Repetition). The second screen is the "cerebral or metaphysical surface on which the phantasm is going to develop". [My emphasis] ("The phantasm is the process of the constitution of the incorporeal," the "machine for the extraction of a...thought" (220) [My emphasis]; "The brain is...the inductor of another invisible, incorporeal, and metaphysical surface on which all events are inscribed and symbolized." (223))

"There is thus a leap." (218) Between the depths and the surface/screen, there is a gap, a crack, a synapse to cross, "which marks the powerlessness to think". (218) If you read D's writing on Kant (Kant's Critical Philosophy), you can see that he consciously or unconsciously is evoking Kant's sublime. The sublime is the moment where starstruck (like a trauma), we cease to think, only to be saved by reason (e.g. to become momentarily immanent with the feeling and sight beneath Niagara Falls at the "Maiden of the Mist"). Later, Deleuze writes more on immanence, and I believe the moment of immanence (and the incarnation of the plane of immanence) is just this result from the sublime moment, the "leap", as is were. Thus, the "not", the "with-out", is in fact the link or lineage between assemblages. Two become one through this crack. (cf. Alenka Zupancic's book on Nietzsche) Also, "sublimation" as Deleuze uses it here follows from this reading of the sublime. (219)

The "phantasm has the property of bringing into contact with each other the inner and outer and uniting them on a single side." (220) I.e. a Mobius Strip, the "site of the eternal return". (220) "The entire biopsychic life is a question of dimensions, axes, rotations, and foldings." (222)

The two poles: 1) the orientation of psychosis 2) the orientation of successful sublimation. (222) And between the two poles?

Thirtieth Series of the Phantasm

Where you see phantasm here, you can substitute in GCD:

"What appears in the phantasm is the movement by which the ego opens itself to the surface and liberates the a-cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual singularities which it had imprisoned." (213) The phantasm is the result of a pure event, it is "inseparable...from a toss of the dice." (210, 214) It is a "surface phenomenon". (216) "Its topological property is to bring "its" internal and external sides into contact, in order for them to unfold onto a single side." (211) Where you read phantasm, you can substitute in the hieroglyph, the code, the ghost, the uncanny. (cf. The Fold)

Twenty-Ninth Series -- Good Intentions are Inevitably Punished

Page 207: On the "double screen" or doubled surface.

In this chapter, D expands his psychoanalytic/schizoanalytic take on Oedipus. Though we may have good intentions, to intend anything is to use the negative arts. Conversely, the "sage" makes no decisions -- actions flow through him like Tai Chi. To act in the way Oedipus does, to repair the world, is to build the world by division, by a (false, inessential) taxonomy of good and evil. Hence, the player, Oedipus, upsets the structure of the game in attempting to fix it. The loose pieces are seemingly annulled, but then come back in a form more terrible and perverse than he could have ever imagined (cf. Freud's return of the repressed). Thus, our most beneficent acts actually harbor a (perverse) drive that we don't understand, the results of which are shown to us in plain light from a cracked mirror, a mirror turned inside-out, a fun house mirror, a monster, etc. (Follow the connection here to the doubling of events, twin faces of tragedy and farce, etc.)

Twenty-Eighth Series of Sexuality

Page 196-197: On the organs' projection to a surface (i.e. body without organs).

There is a nestedness to the organization of organs and surfaces. "Each zone [surface] is the dynamic formation of a surface space around a singularity constituted by an orifice." (197) See this post on the buttonhole. The orifice is the archetypal example of the buttonhole. If you can understand the structure of the singularity, then you can understand how singularities are nested and communicate. This is integral to Deleuzian geophilosophy.

Page 198: If one can imagine the Pascal triangle as a 3-dimensional gyre, the gyre can invert where what was depth (i.e. the mixtures of depth, the interior of the cone) are pushed into 2-dimensions, while what was surface rises to the height to observe this new surface, not realizing it is at the pinnacle of the now-inverted gyre. As D says, "from a bird's eye view, it is but a fold more or less easily undone." [my emphasis] In this way, each event, each inversion and projection, is in fact, doubly, a subversion and a perversion. I am not entirely sure of what D means when he says, "Each zone is pierced by a thousand orifices which annul it," but I believe this refers to the thousand singularities, red dots, that give shape to the Pascal triangle, both giving it a form and also disciplining it. This is how the Body without Organs (surface) is tied up and bound, so that it does not go off schizophrenically propagating into n dimensions.

Twenty-Seventh Series of Orality

Page 188: Good description of Body without Organs.

Page 190: On the two parts of the organism/object: 1) The organs, or partial objects, internal mixtures of depth. 2) The body without organs, or form or surface. The organs supply the force to generate the form or surface. Within the Pascal diagram, the organs are the individual triangles filled with red dot singularities. When those series combine/intersect with one another (i.e. "the violent confrontation of two dimensions") , they generate a GCD which rises up from their factors into a new dimension. This GCD is sheer surface, like the body without organs.

Page 194: "The voice...presents the dimensions of an organized language, without yet being able to grasp the organizing principle [of]...language." The voice, the sound of language, the product of orality, has so many as yet uninterpreted signs waiting to be decoded. It "awaits the event", the interaction of organs (series) that will decode the crystals (constellations) into interpretable language. The series, or Pascal triangles, act as "sifters" of these crystals (constellations) (e.g. the pachinko machine, spinning gyre, etc.).

Twenty-Sixth Series of Language

On the eternal return / event: "The line-frontier brings about the convergence of divergent series; but it neither abolishes nor corrects their divergence." The series converge "around a paradoxical element, a point...circulating throughout the series." (183)

Page 184: Please see my notes in the eleventh and seventeenth series on the "ring".

Twenty-Fifth Series of Univocity

Page 178: "The eternal return has a sense of selection..."

Axiom: Being is univocal. (179) ("...the ultimate form for all the forms that remain disjointed in it...")

Univocality is simultaneously both sense and event. It is the "pure form" of the Aion, the thread between things and propositions, "the decentered center which traces between series." (176, 180)

More stuff reiterated in this chapter re: the eternal return, the pure event, selection, neutrality, affirmation.