HL 6 NONSENSE IN PARIS: ALTHUSSER, LACAN AND DELEUZE

6 NONSENSE IN PARIS: ALTHUSSER, LACAN AND DELEUZE
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the man who was singled out by the revolutionaries of 1968 as their intellectual leader, Louis Althusser.
Note:SESSANTOTTINO X ECCELLENZA

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a new species of Marxist dogma: a theory, or rather meta-theory, which iterated in mesmerizing paragraphs the form of a dogma, while contriving meticulously to conceal its content.
Note:IPNOSI

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he offers a model of a new and fortified language, in which no question can be posed, and no answer offered, except in terms that are barely intelligible

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UN DISCORSO ININTELLEGGIBILE

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Refutation must be evaded, so that the truth within the dogma can be protected from the malice contained in real things.
Note:ELUSIONE E LOTTA CONTRO I FATTI

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In plain English, the conclusion is this: you can understand Capital only by believing it or, in even plainer Latin, credo ut intelligam, as St Anselm put it, when discussing the supreme mystery of God: I believe in order to understand.
Note:L ATTEGGIAMENTO RELIGIOSO

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For Althusser, however, dogma is ‘revealed’ by being concealed.
Note:IL DOPPIO MOVIMENTO

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The true revelation consists in the credo quia absurdum of the devotee, who sees darkness everywhere and then turns to Marx’s text, in order to convert this darkness into light.
Note:CREDO XCHÈ ASSURDO

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He was particularly opposed to the rewriting of historical materialism and the theory of value in the terms suggested by the ‘Marxist humanism’ of the 1844 manuscripts and also, in the pre-war years, by Lukács and the Frankfurt school.
Note:LA COSA CHE LO FACEVA PIÙ PIuttosto INCAZZARE

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The early Marx’s concerns were ‘ideological’, the later Marx’s were ‘scientific’.
Note:LA VISIONE DI M

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Understanding an ideological argument implies, at the level of ideology itself, simultaneous, conjoint knowledge of the ideological field in which a thought emerges and grows; and the exposure of the internal unity of this thought: its problematic. Knowledge of the ideological field itself presupposes knowledge of the problematics compounded or opposed to it. The interrelation of the particular problematic of the thought of the individual under consideration with the particular problematics of the thoughts belonging to the ideological field allows of a decision as to its author’s specific difference, i.e. whether a new meaning has emerged.10
Note:IL MODO IN CUI ALTHUSSER DICE: "PER COMPRENDERE UN ARGOMENTO OCCORRE VEDERNE IL SIGNIFICATO"

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the ponderous, suspicion-laden circularity of Althusser’s prose, which goes round and round monotonously on its own heels, like a lunatic trapped in an imaginary cage.
Note:LA PROSA DI A

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The endless circle that is built from that tautology has, however, a mesmerizing quality,
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invocation of ‘economic epicycles’ recalls the attempt to save the Ptolemaic astronomy, by protecting the cherished hypothesis from the evidence that seemed to refute it.
Note:SALVARE MARX NOVELLO TOLOMEO

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Each sentence exhibits the same slightly delirious syntax, embedding a host of unexplained terms in structures that have the shape of thought without the matter. Such, I suspect, was the principal effect of Althusser’s teaching.
Note:LA FRASE DI A

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However Althusser was not, consciously, producing nonsense; rather he was trying to give voice to a religious sentiment, struggling to find the words that would reach through to others and join them to the faith. Religious belief possesses the structure of Pascal’s wager, and this is one way by which we recognize it.
Note:CREDENZA RELIGIOSA...MA DI TIPO PASCALIANO

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we must understand the ‘existential posture’ implicit in the style. The human world is fundamentally opposed to Althusser. Every institution plays its part in the ‘objective’ conspiracy that oppresses him. Church, family, school, trade union, culture, press, judiciary – all belong to the ‘ideological state apparatus’
Note:POSTURA ESISYENZIALE DELL OPPRESSO

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Nothing means anything and that is the revolution, namely the machine to annihilate meaning. The machine was put together by Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and a few others, from discarded fragments of Freudian psychology and Saussurian linguistics, and attached to Kojève’s Hegelian wind-bag, with which to pump it up with hot air.
Note:LA RIVOLUZIONE: IL NONSENSE SIGNIFICA QUALCOSA

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In his Cours de linguistique générale
Note:PUBBLIAZ CHIAVE

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the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure
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the idea of language as a system of ‘differences’,
Note:L IDEA CHE EBBE PIÙ SUCCESSO

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The meaning of ‘hot’ must be understood in terms of the difference between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’.
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language has no ‘positive terms’, but is an endless stream of negations, whose meaning lies in what is not said,
Note:LA CONSEGIENZA...IL NON DETTO

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Jacques Derrida went further still, arguing that therefore no sign means in isolation, and meaning waits upon the ‘other’ sign, the sign that completes it by opposing it, but which cannot be finally written down. Meaning is never present but always deferred,
Note:L INTEGRAZIONE DI RIDDA...IL SIGNIFICATO MANCA SEMPRE...CIÒ CHE DA SENSO MANCA SEMPRE E NN APPENA VIENE INTRODOTTO CREA UN ALTRA MANCANZA

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The frame of the nonsense machine was assembled by Jacques Lacan, the cranky psychiatrist whose writings, published in 1966, had an extraordinary impact on the student revolutionaries, with whose cause he publicly aligned himself.
Note:LO STRAMBO PSICHIATRA

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a psychoanalyst who would see ten clients in an hour, sometimes while attended to by his barber,
Note:NN MOLTO PROFESSIONALE

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speak, think and feel in the same paranoid language as their doctor.
Note:LA SUA CURA

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People become famed as psychoanalysts not for their therapeutic successes (maybe there are none), but for their ideas. And the fame of an idea arises from its influence, not its truth.
Note:IL CRITERIO IN PSICHIATRIA

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He also scattered his writings and his lectures with mathematical jargon, taken from theories that he did not care to understand, but which he referred to casually as ‘mathemes’, on the analogy with the phonemes and morphemes into which linguists divide the functional parts of language.
Note:X LUI L INCONSCIO È STRUTTURATO COME UN LINGUAGGGIO...PASSIONE X IL LINGUAGGIO MATEMATICO

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Lacan suggested, a big Other (capital A for Autre), which is the challenge presented to the self by the not-self.
Note:I PERSONAGGI DEL TEATRINO LACANIANO

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‘there is no sexual relation’,
Note:I MANTRA POCO CHIARI DI LACAN

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You become a self-conscious subject by taking possession of your world and incorporating its otherness into your self.
Note:LA COSTRUZION DELL IO

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Lacanians give Lacan credit for a thesis expounded far more lucidly and with all due qualifications by Hegel and Kojève
Note:DEIFICAZIONE DEL MAESTRO

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Lacan’s ruminations on the Other purport to be part of a ‘return to Freud’,
Note:STRINGI STRINGI

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Lacan established his own seminars in 1953. The influence of these seminars – 34 volumes of which have been transcribed and also translated – is one of the deep mysteries of modern intellectual life. Their garbled regurgitation of theories that Lacan clearly neither explored nor understood, is, for sheer intellectual effrontery, without parallel in recent literature.
Note:SEMINARI

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meaningless is used to exert a personal charisma.
Note:L ORIGINALITÀ DI LACAN

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Today then I must keep to the wager to which I committed myself in choosing the terrain in which the object a is most evanescent in its function of symbolizing the central lack of desire, which I have always indicated in a univocal way by the algorithm (−Φ). I don’t know whether you can see the blackboard, but as usual I have marked out a few reference points. The object a in the field of vision is the gaze. After which, enclosed in a chain bracket, I have written: (in nature ( (as = ( − Φ )
Note:IL SIGNIFICATO DI =

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alchemy promises a deeper truth, and one inseparable from power.
Note:ALCHIMIA E POTERE

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Lacan gathers confidence on noticing that barre is an anagram of arbre:
Note:UNA SOLUZIONE COMUNE IN LACAN...L ANAGRAMMA

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Meaning has indeed been reduced to an equation and in the solution of this equation the signified is found to be identical with the square root of minus one:
Note:UN CASO FAMOSO....INTERPRETANDO UN PASSAGGIO OSCURO DI SAUSSURE

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the erectile penis (the primary object of meaning) under bourgeois conditions is no more potent than the square root of minus one
Note:ALTRO PASSAGGIO MEMORABILE

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Derrida had cast doubt, in his theory of deconstruction, on the possibility of meaning anything. Lacan showed that it is not necessary to mean anything anyway.
Note:IL SIGNFICATO NN NECESSARIO...DA DERRIDA A LACAN

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Lacan’s doctrine that the ‘subject’ does not exist. The ‘I’ is an absence,
Note:IL CUORE

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Gilles Deleuze (1925–95)
Note:ASSIAMO A LUI...PIÙ ACCADEMICO

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Foucault going so far as to describe the post-war period as ‘le siècle Deleuzien’.
Note:MOLTO LODATO

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Deleuze was not, at first, a political, still less a politicized, thinker, and the nonsense machine that he helped to assemble was put to political use primarily by other and less scrupulous spirits.
Note:POLITICIZZATO DA ALTRI...ALL INIZIO

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his major treatise, Difference and Repetition, published in 1968, shows the true nature of his thinking, presented as a rumination on the words in the title.
Note:RUMINAZINI OSSESSIVE...SCAVO APPROFONDIMENTO

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Heidegger, whose Being and Time was a revelation to philosophers of Sartre’s generation,
Note:IL RIFERIMENTO

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Deleuze wished to replace the idea of being, and its associated notions of substance and identity, with that of difference.
Note:IL PROGETTO

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time is to be in some way transcended through the ‘eternal recurrence’ of all that happens
Note:ALTRA IDEA RUBATA A NIETZ

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Hence ‘Being and Time’ becomes ‘Difference and Repetition’.
Note:DI FATTO

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identity must now give way to difference.
Note:IL PIANO DI D.

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For identity is presupposed by individuation, the act of singling something out as an object of reference.
Note:DA ARISTOTELE

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What would it be, to single out difference as more basic than identity, so that ‘being different’ from other things, rather than identical with a specific thing, is understood as the primary way of being?
Note:IL MISTERO DI D.

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Deleuze’s thesis is put forward as deeply subversive: we were imprisoned by sameness and have been released into difference! But does this really subvert the entire previous course of Western metaphysics, and if so, to what effect?
Note:UNA RIVOLUZIONE DIFFICILE DA CAPIRE

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an endless stream of abstractions,
Note:LA PROSA DI D

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He does not argue, but encloses his key words in fortified boxes, which he firmly locks against all questioning before throwing the key away:
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The seamless web of abstractions continues to the very end of the book, at which point Nietzsche, the most concrete and immediate of modern philosophers, is wrapped in more abstractions and reissued as a philosopher of ‘difference’, in rebellion against identity:
Note:NIETZ IN CATENE

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in the Logic of Sense and elsewhere, he is explicitly challenging the distinction between sense and nonsense, showing that the true use of language is expressive, not representational, so that nonsense is as much a part of communication as what is normally called sense.
Note:NONSENSE NN È UN INSULTO VISTO CHE IL LINGUAGGIO È ESPRESSIONE PIÚ CHE RAPPRESENTAZIONE

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(Deleuze writes without paragraphs. His pages are like cliff faces from which fragments can be broken away, only to yearn through their jagged edges for the mother stone.)
Note:NO PARAGRAFI

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Sometimes, reading Deleuze, I think that he has something like that in mind – the primordial religious experience, which uses repetition as an icon of eternity.
Note:MISTICISMO? VOGLIA DI VINCERE IL TEMPO?

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Later, writing with Félix Guattari, Deleuze puts aside the abstractions of metaphysics, and becomes both more psychoanalytical and more political
Note:LA SECONDA FASE

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Their influential book L’anti-Oedipe is at one level an attack on the Freudian theory of the Oedipus complex – or rather, an attack on the bourgeois family,
Note:IL NEMICO

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They describe the human being as a ‘machine désirante’
Note:DESIDERIO...D IDENTITÀ

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you can understand why Deleuze and Guattari think that they have hit on the true explanation of schizophrenia.
Note:LA RICERCA FOLLE D IDENTITÀ

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Schizophrenia, they suggest, is exactly what we should expect when the BwO is hit by capitalism:
Note:LA GIOSTRA DELLE IDENTITÀ ...LA RUTILAMTE PROPOSTA

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Each particle of that comparatively lucid utterance makes sense. But what is the connection between them?
Note:ESTRATTO DAL DELIRIO DI MILLE PIANI

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rhizome’ and ‘territorialisation’.
Note:LE NUOVE PAROLE CHIAVE

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A rhizome is a plant stem that grows horizontally underground,
Note:RIZOMA

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In his earlier work Deleuze advanced the view that ‘identity’ had hitherto characterized Western thinking, and that ‘difference’ must now replace it. A similar claim is now made for ‘rhizomatic’ thinking. Instead of the vertical tree – the up/down, cause/effect,
Note:LA NUOVA RIVOLUZIONE AUSPICATA

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a narrative dependent on binary divisions: cause and effect, us and them, one and many, and so on.
Note:CONTRO LA BINARIETÀ OCCIDENTALE....OVVERO LA LOGICA CLASSICA

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those who represent language through generative trees, as Chomsky does, have made a fundamental mistake about the available possibilities).
Note:IL RIZOMA CONDANNA ANCHE CHOMSKY

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Rhizomatic development establishes a territory.
Note:AUTONOMIA

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In the place of definitions we are offered associations, and in the place of theories we are given terms that can be stretched from category to category
Note:IL MODO DI PROCEDERE DI D

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if you wanted a word to describe the intellectual method of Deleuze and Guattari, there is none more apposite than ‘packaging’.
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We are to discard the old hierarchies, the binary structures, the ‘trees’ of the bourgeois family and the capitalist machine,
Note:TANTO OSTICO INTELLETTUALMENTE TANTO NAIF POLITICAMENTE

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the language of ‘schizanalysis’, which is an assault on the existing structures in the name of desire.
Note:IL GRIMALDELLO DELLA RIVOLUZIONE

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the language that we know as rational argument and the pursuit of truth, and which is dismissed by Deleuze and Guatarri as mere ‘representation’, rather than the transformation that their writings herald.
Note:IL LINGUAGGIO DEL NEMICO

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‘The love of truth’, declared Jacques Lacan, ‘is the love of this weakness whose veil we have lifted; it is the love of what truth hides, which is called castration.’
Note:SOLO IL DEBOLE AMA LA VERITÀ

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‘the notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth,
Note:COSA CONTA DI PIÙ

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Truth is subservient to power,
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All normal forms of thought, all empirical observation, all pre-existing knowledge is dissolved in their delirious prose,
Note:D & G

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authoritative-sounding language – in which assertoric sentences succeed each other without a break, and with never the slightest nod towards a real or imagined interlocutor
Note:ANCORA SULLO STILE

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Abundant footnotes, referring to out-of-the-way works in political theory, anthropology, biology, musicology, particle physics, etc., serve further to intimidate the reader,
Note:IL VEZZO

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If you can reproduce that language – and it is, after all, not so hard, since there are no constraints of logic, truth, observation or sincerity – you will be on the way to the A grade
Note:10 E LODE

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the idea of the Other rescued from ‘classical German philosophy’ by Kojève.
Note:FRSE L IDEA FULCRO DEL VDELIRIO FRANCESE

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By the early 1970s, a kind of impenetrable meta-literature, literature about literature about literature, had evolved, incorporating the features I have mentioned, and about which only one thing was clear – namely, what side it was on. If the politics were obvious, then the obscurity of the language was no defect.
Note:UNA SOLA COSA È CHIARA

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obscurity could be read as proof of a profundity
Note:...ANZI

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In their now famous book Intellectual Impostures, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont attack the phony expertise of Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, Lacan and many more.
Note:LA REAZIONE

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My real criticism is that they overlook the political significance of the postmodern meta-literature.
Note:CRTICA A SOKAL

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they fail to point out, and perhaps fail even to see, that being on the left is what it is all about.
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For the mass of commentators (and they do indeed form a mass) Deleuze is to be received as a prophet.
Note:UN PROFETA DEVE FAR ACCADERE LE COSE

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Having touched base, so to speak, with the real agenda, the prose then rambles on,
Note:LA PROSA COME UNA TROBA X LA CARICA

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Occasionally there is an abrupt and arresting paradox. For example, we are told that ‘the Idea knows nothing of negation’; we learn that ‘while it is in the nature of consciousness to be false, problems by their nature escape consciousness’.63 And because these hints are dropped in the course of endorsing (without explaining) the argument of Das Kapital, the reader can be assumed to accept them as obvious.
Note:XCHÈ SI ACCETTANO CERTE STRONZATE?

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What excites them is the promise that ‘difference’ means revolution,
Note:EPPURE C È CHO LEGE QUESTI LIBRI

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syntax without semantics.
Note:NUOVO STILE ACCADEMICO

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When real thought appears, it is out of context, shorn of its foundations, reduced to a scattering of uprooted technicalities.
Note:Cccccccfcfffff

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Moreover, howsoever you build your career, one thing will be certain, you are ‘on the left’ politically, vindicated by all the righteous causes (whatever they might be) of the day, and therefore immune from serious criticism.
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