Fir if You like The layers Ov the Onion

Witkacy

via Don C. Bruital

wicked babe

sheesh

Regarding Psychic Risks

Deleuze on Animals

"Parnet starts by reading a quote from W.C. Fields that she applies to Deleuze: "A man who doesn't like animals or children can't be all bad." She leaves the children aside to ask about Deleuze's relationship to animals. She knows that he does not care for domestic animals, but she notes that he has quite a bestiary, rather repugnant, in fact -- of ticks, of fleas -- in his writings, and that he and Guattari have developed the animal in their concept of "animal-becomings." So she wonders what his relationship to animals is.

Deleuze is rather slow to respond to this, stating that it's not so much about cats and dogs, or animals as such. He indicates that he is sensitive to something in animals, but what bothers him are familial and familiar, domestic animals. He recalls the "fatal moment" when a child brings a stray cat home with the result that there was always an animal in his house. What he finds displeasing is that he doesn't like "things that rub" (les frotteurs); and he particularly reproaches dogs for barking, what he calls the very stupidest cry, the shame of the animal kingdom. He says he can better stand (although not for too long) the wolf howling at the moon than barking.

Moreover, he notes that people who really like cats and dogs do not have with them a human relationship, for example, children who have a infantile relationship with animals. What is essential, claims Deleuze, is to have an animal relationship with animals. Deleuze draws his conclusions from watching people walking their dogs down his isolated street, observing them talking to their dogs in a way that he considers "frightening" [effarant]. He reproaches psychoanalysis for turning animal images into mere symbols of family members, as in dream interpretation. Deleuze concludes by asking what relation one should or could have with an animal and speculates that it would be better to have an animal relation (not a human one) with an animal. Even hunters have this kind of relation with their prey.

About his bestiary, Deleuze admits his fascination with spiders, ticks and fleas, indicating that even his hatred for certain animals is nourished by his fascination. The first thing that fascinates him, and distinguishes what makes an "animal", is that every animal has an extraordinary, limited world, reacting to very few stimuli (he discusses the restricted world of ticks in some detail), and Deleuze is fascinated by the power of these worlds. Then a second thing that distinguishes an animal is that it also has a territory (Deleuze indicates that with Guattari, he developed a nearly philosophical concept about territory). Constituting a territory is nearly the birth of art: in making a territory, it is not merely a matter of defecatory and urinary markings, but also a series of postures (standing/sitting for an animal), a series of colors (that an animal takes on), a song [un chant]. These are the three determinants of art: colors, lines, song --, says Deleuze, art in its pure state.

Moreover, one must consider behavior in the territory as the domain of property and ownership, territory as "my properties" in the manner of Beckett or Michaux. Deleuze here digresses slightly to discuss the occasional need in philosophy to create "mots barbares", barbaric words, even if the word might exist in other languages, some terms that he and Guattari created together. In order to reflect on territory, he and Guattari created "deterritorialization" (Deleuze says that he has found an English equivalent of "the deterritorialized" in Melville, with "outlandish"). In philosophy, he says, the invention of a barbaric word is sometimes necessary to take account of a new notion: so there would be no territorialization without a vector of leaving the territory, deterritorialization, and there's no leaving the territory, no deterritorialization, without a vector of reterritorialization elsewhere. In animals, these territories are expressed and delimited by an endless emission of signs, reacting to signs (e.g. a spider and its web) and producing signs (e.g. a wolf track or something else), recognized by hunters and trackers in a kind of animal relationship.

Here Parnet wonders if there is a connection between this emission of signs, territory, and writing. Deleuze says that they are connected by living an existence "aux aguets", "être aux aguets," always being on the lookout, like an animal, like a writer, a philosopher, never tranquil, always looking back over one's shoulder. One writes for readers, "for" meaning "à l'attention de," toward them, to their attention. But also, one writes for non-readers, that is, "for" meaning "in the place of," as did Artaud in saying he wrote for the illiterate, for idiots, in their place. Deleuze argues that thinking that writing is some tiny little private affair is shameful; rather, writing means throwing oneself into a universal affair, be it a novel or philosophy. Parnet refers parenthetically to Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of Lord Chandos by Hoffmanstahl in A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze says that writing means pushing the language, the syntax, all the way to a particular limit, a limit that can be a language of silence, or a language of music, or a language that's, for example, a painful wailing (cf. Kafka's Metamorphosis). Deleuze argues that it's not men, but animals, who know how to die, and he returns to cats, how a cat seeks a corner to die in, a territory for death. Thus, the writer pushes language to the limit of the cry, of the chant, and a writer is responsible for writing "for", in the place of, animals who die, even by doing philosophy. Here, he says, one is on the border that separates thought from the non-thought."

Fir if you don't listen Francaise

http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G/ABC1.html

More on Animals with Harraway etc. soon. Writing on ethics of Animality (Cyborg, Housecat, Tyger)

silver frame my candlelight

The suprise is absolutely devastating, one of my favorite albums ever. You can guess if you think about what this lady, with a little bit of Michelle Pfieffer from Ladyhawke and some Ernest Shackleton all rolled into a sibyl might sound like. If you ended up here somehow, you probably already know about it, but who knows? (where the time goes)

your wings (spread em)

some people say she used to dance with the fish, some people say she juggled fire in a dish

I roll out my coffin, drink poison in my chalice...

Enki: In Vallhalla; or at least round the way

As an inaugural post, I gotta send concern rays to my cat. I lost Enki about a two months ago, and I been thinking about him almost everyday since. He was a great cat, and I loved having him around while he'd have us. Super sweet to have in bed, killer tree-climber, best pet I've ever had, period. He had a hard time with us at school all the time, and wanted real bad to be outside himself, and I think it got to be too much for him. We had a big party, went to breakfast the next day, and by the time we got back, he'd run off.

Come back someday and visit buddy