SPAT_10_LN

SPAT_08



Guatarri & Deleuze on Kafka:

“Notions of larger and smaller become inappropriate and come to be replaced by the possibility of a micropolitics where everything is immediately and neccesarily contiguous with everything else”

“Men get a chance to take flight from their entrapment, but women get no chance at all except to be perfectly invisible in the flow of the discourse (Jardine 1985). A picking up of Deleuze and Guattari, then, would have to examine not only what they enable but also what they disenable, what they close off” (xxvi)

“In a sense, //Kafka// can do what Deleuze and Guattari say that Kafka was doing; each moment in the writing is only a sort of room that one can leave by going through a door, only to arrive in another room that one won’t stay in and that has doors that, in turn, lead to other rooms” (xxvii)

“We will be trying only to discover what other points our entrance connects to, what crossroads and galleries one passes through to link two points,what the map of the rhizome is and how the map is modified if on enters by another point” (D&G 3)

This makes me think of entering a dungeon in Zeldo, having to find the treasure chest with the map to then be able to chart out where rooms are, if they lead to one aonther, only get to add to map as you discover new rooms, new exits, new entrances

(Kafka the FFIII character? Oh wait, no it's Kefka)



“Moreover, we aren’t looking for any so-called free associations (we are all well aware of the sad fate of these associations that always bring us back to childhood memories or, even worse, to the phantasm, not because they fail to work but because such a fate is part of their actual underling principle)” (7)

“Desire evidently passes through these positions and states or, rather, through all these lines. Desire is not form, but a procedure, a process” (8)

“A Kafka-machine is thus constituted by contents and expressions that have been formalized to diverse degrees by unformed materials that enter into it, and leave by passing through all possible states. To enter or leave the machine, to be in the machine, to walk around it, to approach it – these are all still components of the machine itself: these are the states of desire, free of a ll interpretation”

VERSIONS OF THE DEAD

These eyes were distorted as she past gold-framed glasses that magnified them as she looked around her into a she saw clearly but that evaded me altogether. That was the world of the which she inhabited in forms I would be long in learning. Only years later do I might understand her (474).

A principal objective is to manage what Isidra did with her words, which is to assemble a language for Palo’s dead that is suffused with sensation, affected, in the way that Nietzsche wished language had the strength to be.This would be a writing that was, in a most material way, “touched” by the dead (480)

Being disciplined into an alien language was uncomfortable for me, but this was countered by the forceful sensation of the dead her words produced. I am explicitly not engaging in a translation of Isidra’s language, as this would inevitably lose much of what is powerful in them. Instead, what I seek to do is to create for Palo’s dead a foreign language within our own language, just as her Creole Kikongo, //Palo Kikongo // I have called it elsewhere, was a foreign language within her own Spanish tongue, so that Palo’s dead might survive its encounter with my text and continue to resonate, vibrate, with a force of its own (480)

It must have words for the volatile social potentials found inmatter and termsto arrange what are normally considered dialectically exclusive classes, like “matter” and “spirit,” into mutually affirming couplings and assemblages, paradoxical though these may seem (Deleuze 1990:35, 66–73). It must also have terms for a new materiality, including terms for morphogenic dynamisms immanent to matter itself. (481)

Because of the “minor” quality of these events, because they lack status as empirical measures in the human sciences, ittook me many months of working with Isidra before I could bring myself to give them due place in my fieldwork, let alone my theoretical understanding of Palo (482

Isidra’s teaching of Kalunga was explicitly materialist. It depended on sense experience for its departures into exegesis and for evidence of its claims. In effect, Kalunga was the philosophical basis for Palo’s material practice, and was, in fact, the privileged term of a materialism, although not one we might recognize at once (483)

Within the immanence that is Kalunga, the body is less fixed, more like a membranous peel constituted in any depth it might have only by the hydraulic fluctuations and rearrangements of the dead across and through its surface. This was the status of the body in Isidra’s formulation of Kalunga, the body becoming a form of the dead, and the dead becoming material in momentary coagulations we recognize as bodies and objects. Palo thought holds Kalunga as an unlimited becoming, and bodies, saturated and permeated, as forever becoming unlimited (484)

I look a little closer at the kind of “being” involved in Sense [un-]Certainty, just prior to the appearance of the negating-reasoning subject. I do this because I propose that those who practice Palo, and those who are affected by its modes of healing and harming, are in singular fashion constituted as “living in the world” much as Hegel’s Sense [un-]Certainty defines experience (486)

In Hegel’s telling, Sense [un-]Certainty is felt as “boundless receptivity,” as an experience of the world only as it imposes itself, as it penetrates me with its force, and to which I don’t respond in kind. I only reflect this force in my body, apprehending it as (false) truth (486)

Lingering in the unknown and turbulent…I really like this paragraph

“…but I want to linger here in what I am calling “sense un-certainty,” which is to say, in Kalunga. Linger in this immediacy of sense experience that suffuses those who practice Palo. Linger in the chaos, in infinite, “indefinite” nature, in the //apeiron //of European becoming prior to Hegel’s first negation, prior to his first penetration, prior to the motion that initiates the GermanEnlightenment’s last unselfconscious attempt to constitute wholly stable objectsand<span style="font-family: Perpetua,serif;"> wholly knowing subjects. <span style="font-family: Perpetua,serif; font-size: 7pt;">31 <span style="font-family: Perpetua,serif;">Linger in this radical connection, or immanence, offorces<span style="font-family: Perpetua,serif;"> and receivers, in the flux of limits implied by such an intimate connection, which is the Cuban-Kongo sea of the dead.

Materiality of the dead – how do you present that in a way which is not dismissive or ironic

<span style="font-family: Perpetua,serif;">In lingering through the repetition of the instant just before the crank is turned on the engine of dialectics, I follow my teachers of Palo, but also Nietzsche and Deleuze, who would seek difference, which is to say the basic architecture of concepts—of forms—not in negation, but rather in affirming repetition, affirmed repetition, through a repetition that affirms