From: Goodchild P <p.goodchild-AT-ucsm.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: BwOhhhh
Date: Wed, 05 Jun 96 17:17:00 BST



Greg,

Sorry, it seems to take hours for postings to reach my mailbox.  Yours 
hasn't arrived yet, but here's a quick response, lacking quotes, taking 
refuge in primary texts:

Why choose Spinoza's definition of a substance?  'After all, is not 
Spinoza's Ethics the great book of the BwO?' (TP 153)  Yes, power is better, 
but what is a substance apart from a power to exist and be affected (Hardt, 
71-2)?

Two meaningless questions: to be, to conceive.  Cartesian, unproductive, as 
you say.  But they can be used to explore the problematic nature of thought, 
as passages on Heidegger in Difference and Repetition suggest, so long as 
they are not isolated and considered alone in abstraction.  It is a question 
of the practice of thought implied in thinking them, not attaining a 
solution.  But you're right, questions by themselves lead nowhere.  A single 
problem: find the convergence between being and conceiving (WiP, 38).

The BwO is the unconscious?  Certainly, there is no room in DandG's thought 
for an unconscious that is transcendent or additional to the BwO, nor for a 
BwO that is self-conscious, nor for a BwO that is entirely detached from 
thought.  What is left?  'Immanence is the unconscious itself, and the 
conquest of the unconscious.'  (Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 29)

Wyschogrod?  She did write about someone called Deleuze, but I haven't 
worked out who this was.  Neoplatonism?  My notes on Wyschogrod are full of 
quotations that directly contradict Deleuze and Guattari's texts, eg 'For 
Deleuze, nomadism names a style of counterconceptual thinking.' (Wysch.., 
207)  Such errors leave me with nothing to engage with here - they are 
merely wild assertions that are unrelated to DandG's texts.  The rest of her 
book has its uses, though.  But perhaps I am much more of a Neoplatonist 
than DandG, though not quite for Wyschogrod's reasons.

The ethos of Deleuzean thinking is always implicit.  This means that it is 
possible to inject it into some of the most apparently sterile fields, and 
bring something to life.  Even geometric logic can be adopted with an ethos 
of  masochist humour.  The BwO of a masochist?

Perhaps, Greg, the differences between us are smaller than would appear, but 
too profound to isolate without considerable effort.  And these interchanges 
are very time-consuming.

Phil

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