Erik Davis on Deleuze and Guattari

I’ll just stick to my own work, since I really haven’t tracked the Deleuzian scene in a while. “Back in the day” I was a total maniac for the stuff, and moderated a fascinating listserv devoted to D&G. I think I was attracted to their work because, of all the French poststructuralist thinkers I felt compelled to “master” during college, D&G were by far the trippiest-and the funniest. But I think my own take is rather different from the perspective of many, uh, “orthodox” Deleuzians. I believe Mille Plateaux is a psychedelic text. I think they were trying to write and think a sort of perception, where every aspect of mind and culture are seen as expressions of a mutant probing Tao that is constantly congealing and liquefying as it moves along. Delanda, one of D&G’s most interesting interpreters, is occasionally explicit about their psychedelic dimension, though I interpret this dimension in a more explicitly spiritual/Dionysian/Taoist manner that Delanda or most Deleuzian thinkers. The spiritual key to their work is in the chapter “How do you make yourself a Body without Organs”? It is all about Tantra, although they do not use the term.

Full Story: markdery.com.

5 Comments

  1. Actually they do refer to the BwO as a Tantric egg. Now I need to re-read this. Thanks a lot. 😛

  2. This blog space yet another chunk, a bloc.. of the Fictions Jill, Franny, and Mona, a poetic..blogography of Deleuze and Guattari. The space of epistolary becomings,the chaosmosis of prose poetry. OnE ThoUsAnD BlOgss ~ William D and Mona G This blog is consisting of all sorts of platos and plaketoes. It has no shaken artisticaristotle in its throttle. Rent free dynamism. Text & some Images of this Blog?copyright 2004,5,6 Clifford Duffy.

  3. You know….

    I’ve been reading and re-reading Mille Plateaux and working through it for a long time. I have to agree that the BwO always made more sense to me in a truly energetic sense (I have been wont to describe it in more Castanedan terms as the luminous egg Don Juan described so many times) and I’m glad to see I’m not the only person who made this connection.
    I’m glad to find others who are taking this extraordinary work and reading it the way that I feel it was originally intended. Too many philosophy students have read it to death, not allowing it the freedom to unfold in their minds like the wild soundtrack to unhinged thought it was no doubt meant to be.

    -k.

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