Gilles Deleuze For You

there exists a justice that is opposed to all judgment, according to which bodies are marked by each other, and the debt is inscribed directly on the body following the ‘finite blocks’ that circulate in a territory.

which provoke a change of state and create something new in them: an affect. Everything takes place between parties, and the ordeal is not a judgment of God, since there is neither god nor judgment. Where Mauss and then Lévi-Strauss still hesitated, Nietzsche did not hesitate:

Nietzsche's greatness lies in having shown, without any hesitation, that ‘the creditor-debtor relation was primary in relation to all exchange’. One begins by promising, and becomes indebted not to a god but to a partner, depending on the forces that pass between the parties,

And would this be the same thing as an antijudicative, understood as Antichrist—less a ground than a collapse, a landslide, a loss of horizons? Existing beings confront each other, and obtain redress by means of ‘finite’ relations that merely constitute the ‘course’ of time.

according to which a relation was established between existence and the infinite following an order of time: the existing being as having a debt to God. But what then can be distinguished from judgment? Would it be enough to invoke a "prejudicative" that would be both its ground and its horizon?

Even the judgment of knowledge envelops an infinity of space, time, and experience that determines the existence of phenomena in space and time ("every time that ..."). But the judgment of knowledge in this sense implies a prior moral and theological form,

Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly permeated by money — and not by accident but by their very nature. We've got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating.

A decision is not a judgment, nor is it the organic consequence of a judgment: it springs vitally from a whirlwind of forces that leads us into combat. It resolves the combat without suppressing or ending it. It is the lightning flash appropriate to the night of the symbol.

At bottom, a doctrine of judgment presumes that the gods give ‘lots’ to men, and that men, depending on their lots, are fit for some particular ‘form’, for some particular organic ‘end’.

It was only gradually that the gods and men together raised themselves to the activity of judging — for better or for worse, as can be seen in Sophocles' plays.

but to the gods who were supposed to have given us these forces. Many circuitous paths had to be taken, for at the outset the gods were passive witnesses or plaintive litigants who could not judge (as in Aeschylus's Eumenides).

Judgment did not appear on a soil that, even had it been quite different, would have favored its blossoming. Ruptures and bifurcations were necessary. The debt had to be owed to the gods; it had to be related, no longer to the forces of which we were the guardians,

Artaud presents this "body without organs" that God has stolen from us in order to palm off an organized body without which his judgment could not be exercised.

The world of judgment establishes itself as in a dream. It is the dream that makes the lots turn (Ezekiel's wheel) and makes the forms pass in procession.

You always get the truth you deserve according to the sense of what you say, and according to the values to which you give voice.

At the limit, dividing oneself into lots and punishing oneself become the characteristics of the new judgment or modern tragedy.

as it does of the formal judgment of God. A final bifurcation takes place with Christianity: there are no longer any lots, for it is our judgments that make up our only lot; and there is no longer any form, for it is the judgment of God that constitutes the infinite form.

leading to delirium and madness, when man is mistaken about his lot, and in the form the ‘judgment’ of God, when the form imposes another lot. ‘Ajax’ would be a good example. The doctrine of judgment, in its infancy, has as much need of the false judgment of man

Men judge insofar as they value their own lots, and are judged insofar as a form either confirms or dismisses their claim. They judge and are judged at the same time, and take equal delight in judging and being judged. Judgment burst in on the world in the form of the ‘false judgment’

We never know how someone learns; but whatever the way, it is always by the intermediary of signs, by wasting time, and not by the assimilation of some objective content.

by their nature, they would be signs, but by their function, they could bring us out of the world of signs.

I get the impression that constantly in Spinozism, in Spinoza, there is a kind of functionalism; what interests him is really the functions, how things can work. So, signs, which by their function, which by their nature would be signs, this would be quite paradoxical:

Very unfortunate, but if you want to think what you want, well, I don’t see how you could. I don’t know how anyone can think what they want. It’s in the very nature of thought that you can’t think what you want.

Generally speaking, the ideal for thought is precisely not to think what it wants, meaning to be forced to think something. Before a painting, a Rembrandt, say, you can’t think what you want, it’s unfortunate but that’s the way it is.

this is what provokes thought.

The outside is what provokes thought, what prompts thought. All the more reason for me to reiterate, restate my warning: it is not a form of exteriority, it is not an external world. It is the most distant. This is what prompts thought, this absolutely distant. This is what prompts thought,

There are only ever practical critiques.

There are people who do not have the right to critique representation because, when they critique representation, it is really lip-service, and they critique representation while claiming to represent something or someone. I would say that this is the academic critique of representation.

I make, remake and unmake my concepts
along a moving horizon, from an always decentred centre, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differenciates them. The task of modern philosophy is to overcome the alternatives temporal/non-temporal, historical/eternal and particular/universal.

There are no universals, only singularities. Concepts aren't universals but sets of singularities that each extend into the neighborhood of one of the other singularities.