"Unlike Derrida, what is affirmed is not a form of haunting or afterliving (sur-vie) that interrupts and dislocates the organic form of a living being but the pulsing force of a nonorganic and impersonal life that has infinitely greater vitality than any organism. Indeed, Deleuze suggests that organisms do not genuinely embody life but trap and imprison it within an organized form. Organic life is only a form that actualizes the virtual singularities of the plane of immanence by stratifying the flow of forces and constraining singularities in individuals."

-Pheng Cheah, Non-Dialectical Materialism

"…affirmative difference cannot be reduced to negation because it is prior to consciousness and the objects and things consciousness confronts…This affirmative power of difference is the key principle of Deleuze’s ontology of chance. Being, Deleuze suggests, is a matter of absolute chance because we do not know what it is and why there is being. Being is repeatedly constituted each and every time by events of chance (the fiat of creation) that are projectiles of being, throws of the dice that give rise to different singularities or commencements. These events of chance have the form of questions and imperatives. Ideas or problems arise in response to this clamor of Being. Hence, instead of being an attribute of a thinking substance, ideas are the neuralgic points where the I is fractured…since Being is absolute chance, it cannot be a simple origin or individuality from which the singularities of being issue through repeated throws. Instead, one must think Being itself as a repetition of singularities, the reprise or recommencement of being. The difference that characterizes being qua singularity would then issue from or be emitted by an originary repetition or difference.This movement of originary repetition and difference is not (yet) a being or an existent. But this nonbeing is not negative since this would imply something derived from a prior being. Nonbeing corresponds instead to the continuous field of an idea. When we define this nonbeing as a negative, we reduce it to the propositional language of consciousness and obscure the complexity of the problem as a field formed from an imperative of Being"

-Pheng Cheah, Non-Dialectical Materialism

"For Deleuze, materiality is nothing other than the plane of immanence…Unlike dialectical materialism, the dynamism of matter does not derive from the negativity of human creative labor as it shapes and changes the form of (that is, trans-forms) the inert matter of pregiven objects. It is an inhuman dynamism consisting of speeds and intensities that open up the composition of any individual being…The radical nature of Deleuze’s materialism lies in its overturning of the central principle of dialectical materialism: organization…For Deleuze, however, matter as the plan of immanence is a dynamism of the differentiations, speeds, and flows of particles that are prior to any organized form."

-Pheng Cheah, Non-Dialectical Materialism

suck it, lee edelman

To reduce desire to the regime of the One or the Same—even to name it under a phallocentric economy either as the dominant heternormative center or as its negative  Other—would be to replace or subsume the absolute hetereogeneity and rhizomatic movement of the desire-machine to a static desire-as-lack. Queer time and space—what I will refer to as a haunted/becoming temporality and virtuality—allows us to disrupt the normalizing schema, whether hetero- or homo-normative, of what Dana Luciano has called chronobiopolitics. As with most theoretical projects then, this paper deals with certain (queer) possibilities of/for resistance, but a resistance that cannot be reduced to representation (political or otherwise) or rely on a free and willing subject-agent. However, given the out-of-joint existence that queers live, there is a political and ethical imperative of responsibility to the other and of committing ourselves to the justice of radical critique. This critique can only be just in a queer conception of time as becoming or as haunted/out of joint, and therefore relies on a certain conception of the future-to-come.

…

This waiting for the other and for the event makes possible any justice not reducible to the law, and it is always tied to a spirit of radical “infinite critique.” A refusal to posit ends, to conceptualize the future as a culminating utopic telos, is what allows us to wait for the (radically) other—for an event that is always already prefigured by a certain specter to which we must remain accountable in order to be just. These ghosts, queer by virtue of their radical alterity and disturbance of ontological and epistemological frames, belong neither and both to the past and future. They represent the real loss of life we paradoxically fail to mourn—as Derrida describes the mourning of a loss that is never properly lost—that returns as a specter that wounds and will continue to wound—to remain an open wound for—the queer community (the devastation of HIV, the sanctioned and pervasive violence against queer people at the hands of the State and other institutions, etc.). But these specters are also before representation and signification, of a difference prior to these forms of queer identity, of a kind of “absence” (in the Derridian sense, not of the negative, but of alterity) that makes any presence possible. Queers themselves occupy a kind of unintelligible space and time, and as such we are particularly exposed to this vulnerability that manifests itself as an apparent loss or negativity (“the genesis of the appearance of negation”), but is actually more deeply rooted in a productive movement of difference that is “the genesis of affirmation.”[1] An affirmation of this precariousness could not rely on negation then, or a nihilistic rejection of the future, rather this affirmation is necessary to think the future at all and it relies on a certain kind of waiting that is itself vulnerable to the unpredictability of the future, a radical uncertainty that Merleau-Ponty describes at “the Terror of history.”[2]

…

I do not mean to elide the very real loss and trauma that has haunted queer life and politics. I mean only to say that this loss is not an absence or negation but a generative movement that itself allows for queer life and politics and begs a responsibility to and before those we have lost and will lose. This loss that haunts is not properly present or absent, but exists at the limits of being and thinking, that is, in a hauntology. This loss does not belong to a Hegelian negativity that relies on the logic of the Same, rather it initiates a moment of the in-between, the intermezzo, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, of becoming that marks the present. But this present would not be possible without the trace of the past and the future always already haunting it from within (as opposed to from outside), of an absolute difference that is “no longer in the form of an external difference which separates, but in the form of an internal Difference which establishes as a priori relation between thought and being.”[3] A queer ethics and a concern for justice cannot occur then without an affirmation of difference and a certain thinking of the future…

[1] Deleuze, 206.

[2] Merlou-Ponty, Maurice. Humanism and Terror.

[3] Deleuze, 86.

"For difference implies the negative, and allows itself to lead to contradiction, only to the extent that its subordination to the identical is maintained. The primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of representation. But modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities, and of the discovery of all the forces that act under the representation of the identical. The modern world is one of simulacra…all identities are only simulated, produced as an optical ‘effect’ by the more profound game of difference and repetition. We propose to think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same, and the relation of different to different independently of those forms which make them pass through the negative"

-Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

"Ralph Wayvone’s library happened to include a copy of the indispensible Italian Wedding Fake Book, by Deleuze & Guattari."

-Thomas Pynchon, Vineland

"The American singer Patti Smith sings the bible of the American dentist: Don’t go for the root, follow the canal…"

-

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

OHMYGOD HOW DID I NEVER NOTICE THEY MENTION PATTI SMITH?

queer theory with Kelie

Evie Cheeks: centipedes
Evie Cheeks: eeeeeeeeeeee
Evie Cheeks: i hate them
rhizombie: OH THOSE ARE DISGUSTING
rhizombie: they gross me out more than anything
rhizombie: like all those legs
rhizombie: not normal
rhizombie: really fucking gross
Evie Cheeks: HETEROFASCIST
rhizombie: dude if there was a gay centipede i'd be totally down with the gay part
rhizombie: but i would still be grossed out by the legs
rhizombie: what am i even saying

OHMYGOD DELEUZE TALKING ABOUT DRINKING MY LIFE IS COMPLETE

(Source: absorbingeverything)