encounters
hm, received an invitation to d’s birthday/housewarming party today. not quite sure what to think about it or whether to go. i mean we don’t really know each other (nor do i know anybody who’ll be there) because the times we’ve met we didn’t do a lot of talking.
when i was paying yesterday night i overheard how victoria the beautiful was saying to a guest. “…but before i can continue studying philosophy i have to pass my latin exam.” so, she’s studying philosophy and she’s learning latin right now.
“you’re taking a latin course at the university?” i asked her.
“yes.” she answered and it turned out that she’s in the parallel course which always takes place at eight in the morning!!! very weird. i’ve never met her at the university before! and she’s studying philosophy! who would have guessed! and i thought : ‘great! someone has just coated the cookie that’s dangling just out of reach in front of me with chocolate and sprinkled kissables all over it!’
comments to yesterday’s post:
1 - …. how could there BE any PASSIONiate kind of love for you if YOUR
passion in your mirror looks only in one way - back?
Written by: today at 2007/05/29 - 00:44:35
2 - hm. though there’s some essential wisdom here, not entirely fair.
you only deal with what you’ve been given…
Written by: libertine at 2007/05/29 - 02:31:04
3 - ah, the connoisseurs of passion… so, they do exist! why not impart
to us your magic formula, dear sir/madam, so that we can all bathe in
the perennial stream of love?
Written by: MJ at 2007/05/29 - 12:12:36
folks, folks, relax! let me quote this great encounter-passage from dialogues:
“But what precisely is an encounter with someone you like?”
this, obviously is the important question because it relates back to passion. passion is that which fills the ‘in-between’ that an encounter constitutes. in that it is very close to a becoming. because a becoming, also, is always ‘in-between’. it’s not the transformation of one term into an other (ahab becoming ‘like’ the whale or the whale becoming ‘like’ ahab) but a deterritorialization of both terms/poles which creates something new. the whale-becoming of ahab and the ahab-becoming of the whale.
“Is it an encounter with someone, or with the animals who come to populate you, or with the ideas which take you over, the movements which move you, the sounds which run through you? And how do you separate these things?” (D 11)
and now : concrete example:
“I can talk of Foucault, tell you that he has said this or that to me, set it out as I see it. This is nothing as long as I have not been able really to encounter this set of sounds hammered out, of decisive gestures, of ideas all made of tinder and fire, of deep attention and sudden closure, of laughter and smiles which one feels to be ‘dangerous’ at the very moment when one feels tenderness – this set as a unique combination whose proper name would be Foucault.” (D 11)
and similarly, there is a set of unique combinations whose proper name is s.. and this combination (and sometimes even those parts that are not necessarily bound to a ‘presence’ such as a recorded voice or a captured smell or a photograph) can trigger passion. of course this passion is then necessarily directed into the past.
new question: “How to shatter even our love in order to become finally capable of loving? How to become imperceptible?” (D 46)
concrete example from Miller’s Tropic of Cancer:
“I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms, but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, a world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatever … this selfless eye neither reveals nor illuminates. It travels along the line of the horizon, a ceaseless, uninformed voyager … I have broken the wall created by birth and the line of voyage is round and unbroken … My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity … Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth. Before I shall become quite man again, I shall probably exist as a park …” (quoted in Dialogues 46).
To “become finally capable of loving” is a real ‘becoming’. note that being capable of loving is here synonymous with passion. passion, then, initiates and presupposes a becoming imperceptible:
“There, we no longer have any secrets, we no longer have anything to hide. It is we who have become a secret, it is we who are hiding, even though we do all openly, in broad daylight. [We're becoming imperceptible because we] have painted ourselves in the colors of the world.” (D 46)
“Your secret [the little, dirty Oedipal secret, "Signification and interpretosis are the two diseases of the earth, the pair of despot and priest. The signifier is always the little secret which has never stopped hanging around mummy and daddy"] can always be seen on your face and in your eyes. Lose your face. Become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge. A man and a woman are fluxes. All the becomings which there are in making love, all the sexes, the n sexes in a single one, or in two, which have nothing to do with castration. On lines of flight there can no longer be but one thing, life-experimentation.” (D 47)
loving without remembering only functions in an encounter.
“Other becomings will link up here, molecular-becomings in which the air, sound, water are grasped in their particles at the same times as their flux combines with mine. A whole world of micro-perceptions which lead us to the imperceptible. Experiment, never interpret.” (D 48)
i *love* deleuze.
