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When someone asks ‘what’s the use of philosophy?’ the reply must be aggressive, since the question tries to be ironic and caustic. Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into something shameful. Is there any discipline apart from philosophy that sets out to criticise all mystification, whatever their source and aim, to expose all the fictions without which reactive forces would not prevail?…Finally, turning thought into something aggressive, active and affirmative. Creating free men, that is to say men who do not confuse the aims of culture with the benefit of the State, morality or religion….Who has an interest in all this but philosophy? Philosophy is at its most positive as a critique, as an enterprise of demystification.
Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 106. (via trivial-brew)(via deleuzenotes)
Posted on April 22, 2012 via with 326 notes
Source: meta-mash
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A twenty-year old Friedrich Nietzsche, pre-moustache, potentiality lying in wait. The scowling grimace and the distant gaze say it all. 1864.
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Far from reducing the multiplicities’ number of dimensions to two, the plane of consistency cuts across them all, intersects them in order to bring into coexistence any number of dimensions. The plane of consistency is the intersection of all concrete forms…Everything becomes imperceptible, everything is becoming-imperceptible on the plane of consistency, which is nevertheless precisely where the imperceptible is seen and heard.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Mille Plateaux, pp. 251-2. -
Hannah Arendt
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In the situation of radical world-alienation, neither history nor nature is at all conceivable. This twofold loss of the world—the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history—has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them.
Hannah Arendt, The Concept of History, Ancient and Modern -
For the function of violence in lawmaking is twofold, in the sense that lawmaking pursues as its end, with violence as the means, what is to be established as law, but at the moment of instatement does not dismiss violence; rather at this very moment of lawmaking, it specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed by violence but one necessarily bound to it, under the title of power. Lawmaking is powermaking, assumption of power, and to that extent an immediate manifestation of violence. Justice is the principle of all divine endmaking, power the principle of all mythic lawmaking.
Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence -
Capitalism is entirely without precedent, in that it is a religion which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction. It is the expansion of despair, until despair becomes a religious state of the world in the hope that this will lead to salvation. God’s transcendence is at an end. But he is not dead; he has been incorporated into human existence.
Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion”, Unpublished Fragment, 1921 -
Our Rhetorical Theory and Practice class is moving on to Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt next week. Look for a few choice quotes in the coming days, as a presentation on Benjamin is currently in the works.
When we took these photos at Haymarket Café just before moving to Berkeley, we had no hint that we would be reading Gramsci and Benjamin in rapid succession. From the two photos adorning the coffee house’s mantel to the sequence of our class readings, it’s a serendipitous parallelism.
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