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Essays

Id is what id is

This time I’ll be dealing with machines as that’s all there is, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2) argue in ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. I could explain this by using the term they use in ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, that is to say assemblages, as all they (22) know are assemblages, but […]

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Levels of difficulty

I can’t say it was like clockwork, the usual three months or so that a typical manuscript takes to go through review, because it was way longer than that, not that I minded, really, because I had other stuff to do in the meanwhile, but, anyway, a text of mine came back from review. As […]

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Nth-articulation

This is continuation to the previous essay, in which I focus on stratification. I did my best to avoid mentioning assemblages and abstract machines in that essay. Why? Well, to be clear, they are relevant to stratification, but I thought it would make more sense to discuss that first and then move on to assemblages […]

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N-articulations

I was recently asked to do a remote lecture on Louis Hjelmslev’s work. I accepted. It was mainly on the ‘Prolegomena to a Theory of Language’, mixed with ‘Structural Analysis of Language’ and ‘La stratification du langage’. I won’t comment on that lecture, considering it’s already in the past. Instead, what I want to do […]

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My house > Your house

I’ve already covered parts I, II, and III of Baruch Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ and I thought I’d move on to cover part IV, which continues from part III. It’s titled ‘Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions’. There’s a short preface. I thought I’d get through it quickly, but I was wrong as it […]

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Love and hate, pleasure and pain

I covered parts one and two of Baruch Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ in a previous essay and this time I’ll cover the third part of it, dealing with emotions. I was going to include the fourth part in this essay as well but getting through the third part turned out to be more of a slog than […]

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Essays

What is not and not what is

I was browsing through ‘Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974’, a collection of short texts by Gilles Deleuze, not really knowing what to read, not being sure what I had already read, while I noticed something that tickled my fancy. It’s contained in ‘“He Was my Teacher”’. Deleuze (79) mentions Jean-Paul Sartre as having created […]

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Essays

God wills it all, or it is what it is

I was writing another essay, which led me to crawl through Baruch Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’. There is this bit in Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’ where he (lvi) makes note of people’s tendency to attribute whatever it is that they fail to explain to the will of God. I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve mentioned this issue […]

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Essays

Harvesters, Bodies and Mead!

I thought I’d do something short(er) this time, but, as you’ll quickly notice, that didn’t happen. I had gone through this text before and thought I’d be able to make a quick summary of it, highlighting what I like about it, while also providing some related commentary. I honestly didn’t realize how good this text […]

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Essays

Outnumbered, outgunned, but not outdone: Smells like team spirit

I was going to write about the current situation and how media plays a role in it, or, should I say its role in it, but I haven’t really finished that, so it’ll just have to wait. It’s something that I managed to forget, that I had written about it, and the recent events made […]