u/TraditionalDepth6924

Always “Japanese people, Chinese people” - why linguistically?

And there’s r/AskAnAmerican and r/AskAJapanese, r/AskAChinese - are the latter names technically incorrect?

I used to question in the beginning why philosophy today always seems to rely on name-droppings and commentaries of other thinkers rather than pure content of the author’s own, like how Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, etc. advanced their logic - but these days I feel like this could be less a bug and more a feature.

Like the anthology book I recently encountered and appreciated, Deleuze and the Postcolonial - it takes the pluralistic form of comparative literature, but the format is also itself kind of an ontology: unlike singular and pure concepts like being, time, etc. “Deleuze” or “the Postcolonial” are never reducible or transparent, they’re always incommunicable complexities as such, all-connectable fields with limitless interpretive/applicative potentials.

There are still authors who do mostly pure “undistracted” philosophy like the previous millennia, e.g. Meillassoux’s After Finitude, Badiou’s Being and Event - but I think this mainstream wave might be signaling a more fundamental democratization of philosophy as a discipline: maybe that you’re always subject to “contaminative” engagements and you can only reach truth through the indirect method of commentarial understandings, as opposed to singular guru-like (phallic) statuses dominating the entire discourse from behind.

As a result, more little names popping as marginal contributors, instead of big names as central anchors, and sometimes non-philosophers and even non-academics chiming in, equally occupying the position of theoretical object, like discipline-wide deconstruction.

Anyone think of the matter from this perspective? Could the subversion of the “primary-secondary” hierarchy be what’s happening here?

Or would you say the application is a flat-out misinterpretation, and if so, why?

Because we see individuals in this specific decade getting more and more vulnerable to algorithmic influences (fake news in social media, also fad diets, longtail marketing, brainrot, etc.), basically everybody with schizophrenic tendencies, which seems to make you either “lose faith in humanity” altogether or at least be skeptical about the firm grounds

For context, I asked the Critical Theory sub yesterday, title: Is there any line of asceticism-ish desire critique that examines how personal cravings (food, cars, relationships) are in fact contaminated/cultivated by capitalism or other system ideologies?

>I ask because I’ve never seen this, theorists seem to tend to take personal desires just as granted, like people naturally “want to” be in a relationship, get married, have children, when in reality so much is manufactured by cultural propaganda everywhere

>Same for pleasure from unhealthy foods: folks reacted harshly last time I brought up this topic in Marxism, basically saying the system should be the only focus

>But any theorists with this specific angle of individual self-critique? (No Žižek please)

Then immediately a Marxist user had to complain under:

>Isn't understanding "the system" a sort of individual self-critique because clearly "the system" heavily influences the individuals? Anyway to do any kind of "critique" of personal desires you'd need to put them into some external framework (ethical, developmental, social, economical) without which those desires would be just mere facts, and chances are that framework is going to be socially determined so we're back to "the system".

When no one even argued that the system isn’t the factor, actually more the crucial and central one, so I’m asking how these marginal angles could mutually enrich the scope and perspective of system critique.

Yet this kind of blind class/system reductionism against any kind of different stylistic approaches is still annoyingly rampant, and ontologically I’d depict this as a digital (0-1) mindset vs. infinitesimals in between.

In my view, Boolean attitude qualitatively picks either this or that, and proposing a slightly different term comes off as a wholesale negation, a hostile confrontation/contradiction to the entire architecture, whereas the latter affirms all responses and let them negotiate on their moderation.

A daily life example: should we use LLMs for intellectual reasoning or not? One would argue they will weaken the human autonomous capacity, another would argue such a position is anachronistic. But for me, what is at stake is quantitative governance: how often specifically you’re going to use them, and specifically how much portion/percentage of your life they will occupy. It all comes to down to the matter of numbers, above words.

And I think Deleuze’s differential intensity signals this reinstatement of quantity: Marxism and intersectional emancipation are in a quantitatively continuous relationship, meant to mutually affect both, i.e. there’s no transcendence (or transcendental position) outside one another.

Likewise, how about the topic of the realization of socialism? Žižek keeps raving about how “little bit pushing it to the left, slight changes here and there” do not work, but isn’t Deleuze more empathetic toward internal struggles and minor resistences?

What do you think? How would you apply quantity vs. quality in viewing and resolving this kind of practical matters?

My lasting suspicion is that nonbinary is another identitarian category, also the same for queerness, and as we all know, Žižek has nonstop annoying talking points about transgenderhood

Is a “non-identitarian” gender or sexual identity possible, or rather actively a multiplicitarian one? If yes, what would they look like? Perhaps like multiple personality disorder, i.e. literal schizophrenia?

What gender is a Deleuzian supposed to have, or (not) “identify as?”

As someone who started with Christianity then engaged mainly with Hegel and Heidegger, believing the singular One (whether God, Being, Reason) is the ultimate purpose of life and philosophy, I appreciate being able to think multiplicity as something that’s at stake, through Deleuze.

Hegel, inheriting from Spinoza’s substance, famously and often notoriously starts from one concept (Begriff) then returns to this concept, like a grand panentheistic circle, even though there are negativity and retrospectivity elements (Minerva’s owl) added to give it dynamic traits: it is one big identitarianism, at the end of the day.

Even though Deleuze is explicitly anti-identitarian in this regard by putting differentiation prior to identities, my curiosity is whether he’s genuinely surpassing singularitarinism: because just like Hegel’s contradictions return to the one concept, Deleuze’s multiplicities seem to return to the one plane of immanence.

As I have posted about it, Badiou disputed this from the seemingly multiplicitarian concern, but in my view, Badiou’s alternatives (rupture, event, void, inconsistency) are also singularitarian because it’s always “THE one tear” that works as the ultimate locus for the subject. (Basically the same structure as apophaticism: you wouldn’t say God reached by denials is not one God after all)

So can we truly think multiplicities qua multiplicities, without any regard to a singular field to house them ever? Or am I missing out and is Deleuze already talking about multiple planes? Or is the singular plane less a bug, more a feature in the first place?

From an emancipatory critical perspective, I think one could argue Deleuze’s ultimate plane of consistency, if that’s the case, might represent Eurocentric humanism that he resides in, kind of like how Heidegger’s “homeland” trope secretly went hand in hand with Aryanism: multiculturalism under the benevolence of Western progressivism vs. some more radically chaotic model of coexistence (or maybe co-mutation?), is how I’d try to put it in the practical politics sense.

Heidegger, who is Deleuze’s official predecessor regarding difference, famously thought we did: known to be openly allergic to fellow scholars deeming his philosophy as theology, complaining about it.

And Stephen Houlgate, a renowned Hegel scholar, in a user-made YouTube clip “Things that Worry Me about Deleuze” (link in comments), suspects that, for Deleuze, “the virtual seems to take the place of the transcendental,” whereas in Hegel, “there's nothing that doesn't manifest itself” which would be “perhaps anti-Deleuzian.” (I think this is a wrong take)

In the contemporary German protestant theology line, Wolfhart Pannenberg (1928-2014) tries to bridge the secular physical world with the theological world via the Holy Spirit qua “field,” something that is material yet can’t be reduced to matter. On the other hand, in Catholic phenomonologist Jean-Luc Marion (1946-), God is found as “givenness” prior to being, resulting in the receiver with “saturation” of overwhelming intuitive content, i.e. Revelation.

Don’t these sound like Deleuze’s ontology already covers all of them? I’m not sure if Deleuze’s is an atheist ontology, because unlike atheism, it aims to be fully exhaustive of all reality there is, including traditionally that of theology. It is para-theological or hyper-theological, in my view.

I think it is primarily about being, and by virtue of such being thoroughly about being, it manages to be about God at the same time: crossing the lignes-de-fuite over to where the mundane theism-versus-atheism contradiction renders pointless. As a result, it is God that is rhizomatic, God that is multiplicities, God that is desiring-machines in agencements, etc. You’re always-already dealing with God when you’re utterly dealing with being, and that would make it revolutionary.

Do we need a separate theology for “what’s truly ultimate” in this age, if we were to remove all the survival needs of Christianity as a religious institution?