Gilles Deleuze For You

Some people are completely crazy, they’re mad, they’re complete idiots, they’re… I don’t know what. Yet they say these things with the utmost seriousness.

You see, for as long as there’s been thought, philosophy has never in the least way ‘contained’ the sciences. I mean, the Greeks never confused a philosopher with a mathematician…

we hope, of something yet to come, but which could only come within the structure and through its mutation. This is how we understand the imaginary character of man for Foucault or the ideological character of humanism for Althusser.

For if the place is primary in relation to whatever occupies it, it certainly will not do to replace God with man in order to change the structure. And if this place is the dummy-hand [la place du mort, i.e. the dead man's place], the death of God surely means the death of man as well, in favor,

In short, the very manifesto of structuralism must be sought in the famous formula, eminently poetic and theatrical: to think is to cast a throw of the dice. The third consequence is that structuralism is inseparable from a new materialism, a new atheism, a new anti-humanism.

but a theatre that is neither of reality nor of ideas, a pure theatre of places and positions, the principle of which he sees in Brecht, and that would today perhaps find its most extreme expression in Armand Gatti's work.

The noblest games such as chess are those that organize a combinatory system of places in a pure spatium infinitely deeper than the real extension of the chessboard and the imaginary extension of each piece. Or when Althusser interrupts his commentary on Marx to talk about theatre,

Each of them discovers problems, methods, solutions that are analogically related, as if sharing in a free atmosphere or spirit of the time, but one that distributes itself into singular creations and discoveries in each of these domains — Ism words, in this sense, are perfectly justified.

Others prefer the Saussurean term “system”. These are all very different kinds of thinkers, and from different generations, and some have exercised a real influence on their contemporaries. But more important is the extreme diversity of the domains they explore.

a Marxist philosopher like Louis Althusser, once again taking up the problem of the interpretation of Marxism; a literary critic like Roland Barthes; writers like those from ‘Tel Quel’…Of these, some do not reject the word "structuralism", and use ‘structure’, ‘structural’.

In the current climate, rightly or wrongly, it is customary to name names, to provide 'samples': a linguist like Roman Jakobson; a sociologist like Claude Levi-Strauss; a psychoanalyst like Jacques Lacan; a philosopher like Michel Foucault, renewing epistemology;

‘This is 1967’. Thus we cannot invoke the unfinished character of such work to avoid a reply, for it is that character alone which gives the question its significance. So, the question ‘What is structuralism?’ must undergo certain transformations. In the first place, ‘who’ is a structuralist?

Not long ago we used to ask: What is existentialism? Now we ask: What is structuralism? These questions are of keen interest, provided they are timely and have some bearing on work actually in progress.

It is rather a matter of knowing what it means to ‘produce movement', to repeat or to obtain repetition. Is it a matter of leaping as Kierkegaard believes? Or is it rather a matter of dancing, as Nietzsche thinks?

It then becomes easy to speak of the differences between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Even this question, however, must no longer be posed at the speculative level of the ultimate nature of the God of Abraham or the Dionysus of Zarathustra.

with a language which speaks before words, with gestures which develop before organised bodies, with masks before faces, with spectres and phantoms before characters — the whole apparatus of repetition as a 'terrible power’.

just as movement is opposed to the concept and to representation which refers it back to the concept. In the theatre of repetition, we experience pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit, and link it directly with nature and history,

within repetition, forms a condition of movement under which the 'actors' or the ‘heroes' produce something effectively new in history. The theatre of repetition is opposed to the theatre of representation,

When Marx also criticizes the abstract false movement or mediation of the Hegelians, he finds himself drawn to an idea, which he indicates rather than develops, an essentially “theatrical” idea; to the extent that history is theatre, then repetition, along with the tragic and the comic

It may well be that two negations are not too many to produce a phantom of affirmation. But how would affirmation result from negation unless it conserved that which is denied? Accordingly, Nietzsche indicates the terrifying conservatism of such a conception.

All that is negative and all that denies, all those average affirmations which bear the negative, all those pale and unwelcome 'Yeses' which come from 'Nos', ‘everything which cannot pass the test of eternal return’ — all these must be denied.

not everything is iconic in an icon, not everything is analogical in an analogical image, of course!

In any case, these means of making flesh that resemble the model’s flesh do not, themselves, resemble the means by which nature produces these flesh tones in the model.You see, it’s quite simple, just go back to the formula:

You could say that it’s obvious that Van Gogh’s way of recreating flesh tones has very little to do with Titian’s. They employ completely different means.

from the Middle Ages to post-impressionism, where two great painters, Van Gogh and Gauguin, after the impressionist period, rediscover this fantastic problem of how to recreate flesh. They rediscover it upon new foundations. But how?

This has been a major problem for painting. It’s been a huge problem for painting: how to create flesh? There’s a book that came out recently that’s very, very good, very interesting, very amusing on this point, on this theme of flesh tones, how to recreate flesh. It traverses painting

the flesh tone and the presence of blood beneath the skin, is produced naturally in the model by a certain phenomenon that I’m unable to specify. The flesh tones reproduced by the painter obviously depend on pictorial means, namely, the different ways of producing flesh tones.

How does the painter attain the resemblance? He attains the resemblance through means that themselves bear no resemblance to the means that produced the same or similar qualities in the model. I mean, how can I put it, the flesh – I’m weighing my words –

Already, the resemblance varies, the judgment of resemblance varies according to the society. That’s the non-specific code for judging resemblance. But how is the resemblance attained by the painter? Let’s say that the portrait of the woman is an iconic, analogical image.

What’s more, there are all kinds of codes that come to bear on the cinematographic image.