Quotes from Gilles Deleuze

What does belief applied to the unconscious signify? What is an unconscious that no longer does anything but believe, rather than produce? What are the operations, the artifices that inject the unconscious with 'beliefs' that are not even rational, but on the contrary only too reasonable and consistent with the established order?

Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevation the State to the level of de jure universality

The city seems to be a labyrinth that can be ordered. The world is an infinite series of curvatures or inflections, and the entire world is enclosed in the soul from one point of view.

We must believe in the body, but as in the germ of life, the seed which splits open the paving stones, which has been preserved and lives on in the holy shroud or the mummy's bandages, and which bears witness to life, in this world as it is. We need an ethic or a faith, which makes fools laugh; it is not a need to believe in something else, but a need to believe in this world, of which fools are a part.

A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings: on condition that each being, each drop and each voice has reached the state of excess -- in other words, the difference which displaces and disguises them and, in turning upon its mobile cusp, causes them to return.

The administration of a great organized molar security has as its correlate a whole micro-management of petty fears, a permanent molecular insecurity, to the point that the motto of domestic policymakers might be: a macropolitics of society by and for the micropolitics of insecurity

Identity and resemblance would then be no more than inevitable illusions - in other words, concepts of reflection which would account for our inveterate habit of thinking difference on the basis of the categories of representation.

When Spinoza says that we do not even know what a body can do, this is practically a war cry. He adds that we speak of consciousness, mind, soul, of the power of the soul over the body; we chatter away about these things, but do not even know what bodies can do. Moral chattering replaces true philosophy

The law is not known, since there is nothing in it to know . We come across it only through its action, and it acts only through its sentence and its execution. It is not distinguishable from the application. We know it only through its imprint on our heart and our flesh: we are guilty, necessarily guilty. Guilt is like the moral thread which duplicates the thread of time.

Placing oneself in a position where one is thus traversed, broken, fucked by the socius, looking for the right place where, according to the aims and interests assigned to us, one feels something moving that has neither an interest nor a purpose.

Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy.

The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link. (…). Restoring our belief in the world – this is the power of cinema

The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

Être de gauche c'est d'abord penser le monde, puis son pays, puis ses proches, puis soi ; être de droite c'est l'inverse.

Morality consists in this for each individual: to attempt each time to extend its region of clear expression, to try to augment its amplitude, so as to produce a free act that expresses the most possible in one given condition or another. -- Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 73

It's a strange business, speaking for yourself , in your own name, because it doesn't at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject. Individuals find a real name for themselves, rather, only through the harshest exercise in depersonalization, by opening themselves up to the multiplicities everywhere within them, to the intensities running through them.

Nietzsche then speaks of the eternal joy of becoming ... that joy which includes even joy in destroying, The affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition.

The gray butterfly understands so well the event to be hidden that, by remaining in the same place, plastered to the trunk of a tree, it covers the whole distance separating it from the to invigorate of the black butterfly; it also causes the other event to resonate as individual, within its own individuality as an event, and as a fortuitous case.

It's impossible not to laugh when codes are jammed up.

A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.

The organism is a diversion of life, whereas abstract line is life itself.

Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.

Spinoza or Nietzsche are philosophers whose critical and destructive powers are without equal, but this power always springs from affirmation, from joy, from a cult of affirmation and joy, from the exigency of life against those who would mutilate and mortify life. For me, that is philosophy itself.