File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/96-08-12.171, message 132


Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 23:51:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Greg J. Seigworth" <gseigwor-AT-marauder.millersv.edu>
Subject: Re: Machine gunning theo-logics 




On Wed, 31 Jul 1996, Dominic Le Fave wrote:

> Greg: I've been saving the posts to this thread from the beginning 
> because I thought to myself "O, good: this will interesting" (which 
> it was, of course, as anthropological data).  I have just completed a cursory 
> review of the entire thread and I can't see any arguments--certianly 
> not any that were supported by atrocities.  At the beginning there 
> were some suggestions for a discussion on issues in post-modern 
> theology, then there was inter-religious conflict and mud-slinging 
> interspersed with some suggestions for topics in post-modern 
> philosophy of religion.  Then more mud, moralizing,recitations of 
> creeds, statements of faith, and a few really 
> good sermons.  But I'd like to think I overlooked some arguments.  
> What were they?

Boy, I wish that I could be specific but, in a house-cleaning manuever
yesterday (there were almost 300 msgs in my d+glist folder), I dumped a
lot of stuff including most of the current thread.  Still, unless my
memory is playing tricks on me, there were more than a few posts where god
(or the absence of god) was placed in close proximity to babies burning
and planes falling out the sky and bombs bursting in air and men gathering
to plot mass destruction and mothers weeping and joe stalin's cadillac and
hitler's grainy porno flick and the reunion of David Lee Roth with Van
Halen.  Maybe there was no direct causal link (though I obviously read it
into several) but I think it's kind of like those Hollywood movies where
the bad guys are from some unspecified country but manifest accents from
germany or the middle east (or, increasingly for a while anyway, england). 
Guilty by proxemics.  Relations are external to their terms but that
doesn't mean that there aren't certain fortunate and unfortunate forces of
attraction (and repulsion) tugging across their spaces.  And we tend,
sometimes, to habitually fall into the tracks that have been left behind; 
"God?!! Get serious ... we all know where that leads ..."  But maybe not.

> --good point about the Hume book, by the way.  It seems to me though 
> that belief in this sense is something like "unverified knowledge".  
> This is the sense in which one would say "I hold this belief: life is 
> suffering".  Belief stands in for dogma, extrapolations from 
> experience, etc.  

I guess that I'm not sure what you mean by 'belief in this sense.' Who's
sense?  In the sense that I employed it?  Hume's?  Steve's?  Deleuze's? 
Deleuze's reading of experience, through Hume's empiricism, is not all
that simple (or maybe it's exceedingly simple, I dunno).  Foucault has
this nice bit in an interview ('How Much Does It Cost for Reason to Tell
the Truth') where he says that Deleuze first uses "Hume's subterfuge of
empiricism" as an escape from a dissatisfying phenomenological theory of
the subject but that it also leads him to his encounter with Nietzsche. 
Belief isn't "unverified knowledge" but knowledge does--via Hume--become a
particular kind of belief (see, for example, Deleuze's _Negotiations_,
p.136).  And Foucault is right, I think: you can read from D's Hume across
into the Nietzsche book, especially the latter part of the "Critique"
chapter and all that the stuff on the concept of truth, etc.  But, again,
I'm not entirely sure what exactly you're arguing (or, more precisely, who
you're arguing with or against) so I won't pursue this further right now. 

Either too much coffee or not enough,

Greg





   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005