“What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person's. Heavenly nuptials, mulitplicities of multiplicities. Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that someone can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. [...]Above all, it should not be thought that it suffices to distinguish the masses and exterior groups someone belongs to or participates in from the internal aggregates that person envelops in himself or herself. They are always relative, changing, and reversible, but between different types of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate, and change places--machines, cogs, motors, and elements that are set in motion at a given moment, forming an assemblage productive of statements: 'I love you' (or whatever).”
—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus“Real communism consists in creating the conditions for human renewal: activities in which people can develop themselves as they produce, organizations in which the individual is valuable rather than functional. Accomplishing this requires a movement - to change the character of work itself. And redefining work as creative activity can only happen as individuals emerge from stifled, emotionally blocked rhythms of constraint. It will take more than the will to change, in the current situation; to resist neutralization itself demands desire.”
—Felix Guattari and Toni Negri - Communists Like Us
“Forget capitalism and socialism: instead we have in place one vast machine, extending over the planet an enslavement of all mankind. Every aspect of human life–work, childhood, love, life, thought, fantasy, art—is deprived of dignity in this workhouse. Everyone feels only the threat of social demise: unemployment, poverty, welfare. Work itself defaults on its promise of developing the relations between humanity and the material environment; now everyone works furiously, to evade eviction, yet only hastening their own expulsion from the mechanical process that work has become. Indeed work itself—as organized by capitalism or socialism—has become the intersection of irrational social reproduction and amplified social constraints. Fetters—irrational social constraints—are thus at the foundation of all subjective consciousness formed in the work process. And establishing this collective subjectivity of restriction and surveillance is the first imperative of the capitalist work apparatus. Self-surveillance and doubt prevent any intimations of escape, and preempt any questioning of the political, legal or moral legitimacy of the system. No one can withdraw from this capitalist legality of blindness and absurd goals. Each instance of work, each sequence, is "overdetermined" by the imperatives of capitalist reproduction; every action helps to solidify the hierarchies of value and authority.”
—Guattari & Negri, “Communists Like Us”
This book is going to be a great outlet for all my current frustrations.
“When Virginia Woolf was questioned about a specifically women's writing, she was appalled at the idea of writing "as a woman." Rather, writing should produce a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming. Very soft particles—but also very hard and obstinate, irreducible, indomitable. The rise of women in English novel writing has spared no man: even those who pass for the most virile, the most phallocratic, such as Lawrence and Miller, in their turn continually tap into and emit particles that enter the proximity or zone of indiscernibility of women. In writing, they become-women.”
—Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus“back of head touching the ceiling, gaze on ground, lifetime of unbloody bowed unseeing glaring.”
— Samuel Beckett, from “All Strange Way”
“We’ll start with a modest way in—that of The Castle’s inn parlor where K discovers the portrait of a porter with his head bent, his chin sunk into his chest. These two elements—the portrait or the photo, and the beaten and bent head—are constant in Kafka, although there are varying degrees of autonomy of one from the other. The photo of the parents in Amerika. The portrait of the woman in fur in “The Metamorphosis” (there an actual mother has a bent head, and an actual father wears a porter’s uniform). Proliferation of photos and portraits in The Trial from Fraulein Burstner’s room to Titorelli’s studio. The bent head that one can no longer raise appears all the time in the letters, in the Notebooks, in the Diaries, in the stories, and also in The Trial where the judges have their backs bent against the ceiling, against some of the assistants, the executioner, the priest and so on.”
— Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, from “Content and Expression” in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
“In short, it’s not Oedipus that produces neurosis; it is neurosis—that is, a desire that is already submissive and searching to communicate its own submission—that produces Oedipus. Oedipus, the market value of neurosis. In contrast, to augment and expand Oedipus by adding to it and making a paranoid and perverse use of it is already to escape from submission, to lift one’s head up, and see passing above the shoulders of the father what had really been the question all along: an entire micropolitics of desire, or impasses and escapes, of submissions and rectifications.
[…]
Two years after the “Letter to the Father,” Kafka admitted that he had ‘plunged into discontent’ and did so ‘with all the means that [his] time and tradition gave [him].’… But Kafka does not refuse the exterior influence of the father only in order to invoke an interior genesis or an internal structure that would still be Oedipal. ‘I cannot grant that the first beginnings of my unhappiness were inwardly necessitated; they may have indeed had a necessity, but not an inward one—they swarmed down on me like flies and could have been as easily driven off.’ In that lies the essential point: beyond the exterior or the interior, an agitation, a molecular dance, an entire limit-connection with an Outside that is going to disguise itself as an exaggerated Oedipus that is beyond all limits.”
— Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, from “An Exaggerated Oedipus” in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
“No way in, none out, he’s not here. […] See how light stops and five soft and mild for bodies, eight no more, one per wall, four in all, say all of Emma. First face alone, lovely beyond words, leave it at that, then deasil breasts alone, then thighs and cunt alone, then arse and hole alone, all lovely beyond words. See how he crouches down and back to see, back on head against face when eyes on cunt, against breasts when on hole, and vice versa, all most clear. So in this soft and mild, crouched down and back with hands on knees to hold himself together, say deasil first from face through hole then back through face, murmuring, imagine him kissing, caressing, licking, sucking, fucking and buggering all this stuff, no sound. […] So for example as chance may have it on the ceiling a flyspeck or the insect itself or a strange of Emma’s motte. Then lost and all the remaining field for hours of time on earth. Imagination dead imagine to lodge a second in that glare a dying common house or dying window fly, then fall the five feet to the dust and die or die and fall.”
— Samuel Beckett, from “All Strange Way”
“I am not trying to seem resistant to influences. I merely note that I have always been a poor reader, incurably inattentive, on the look-out for an elsewhere. And I think I can say, in no spirit of paradox, that the reading experiences which have affected me most are those that were best at sending me off to that elsewhere… I felt at home—too much so… I remember feeling disturbed by the imperturbable aspect of his approach. I am wary of disasters that let themselves be recorded like statements of account.”
— Samuel Beckett on reading Kafka, from The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956
