Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1998 10:42:08 -0500
From: Inna Semetsky <innasense-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: deleuze and mysticism (fwd)


Hi Greg, as usual you provide terrific references, thanks.
I wonder what exactly Edith means talking about codes? And how close her
interpretation is to Deleuze intention? I can't help but think about Abner
Shimoni's neologism "passions-at-a-distance" and wonder how "coded" they
might be, that is how 'little' is mystical portion?
Inna

>From: Inna Runova Semetsky <irs5-AT-columbia.edu>
>Sender: irs5-AT-columbia.edu
>To: innasense-AT-earthlink.net
>Subject: deleuze and mysticism (fwd)
>
>
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1998 11:22:08 -0500 (EST)
>From: "Greg J. Seigworth" <gseigwor-AT-marauder.millersv.edu>
>Reply-To: deleuze-guattari-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: deleuze-guattari-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: deleuze and mysticism
>
>
>I dunno (except that I know that I have been skimming quickly and deleting
>the thread that led to this intersection) ... but Deleuze's relation to
>mysticism [of a particular kind] is somewhat more ambivalent (at least) 
>than I think has been addressed thus far.  See the conclusion ("*Elan
>Vital* as Movement to Differentiation") of his _Bergsonism_, though
>admittedly it is useful too to consider then the 'eight-year hole' that
>follows [see Hardt's Deleuze book] and his taking up of Nietzsche as a
>means of not going to far into the mystic (although Deleuze is - I think -
>not entirely averse to peering, he hesitates certainly in ways that, say,
>Walter Benjamin or Van Morrison [great overlooked philosopher] do not). 
>Check out Evelyn Underhill's _Mysticism_ and its "Mysticism and Vitalism" 
>chapter, and Bergson's _The Two Sources of Morality and Religion_
>(particularly its "Dynamic Religion" chapter).  And, though - yeah - it is
>plenty problematic, even Edith Wyschogrod's _Saints and Postmodernism_
>offers an in-roads: "...  mystical experience is not composed of brute
>'feels' but is organized and articulated in terms of cultic,
>institutional, and linguistic frameworks that give form to this
>experience.  Deleuze and Guattari now offer a way of distinguishing
>between the ecstasy of experience and the codes of its inscription .... 
>With the molecularization, the dissemination, and the breaking up of
>ordinary meaning and with the deterritorialization of repressive modes of
>desire, even the ecstatic stream as something given beyond framing
>discourse can be glimpsed, if only obliquely, and described, just as the
>qualitied world is reducible to particulate atomicity in Democritus and
>Lucretius or to number in Pythagorus" (p.209).  And I cannot help but
>think that Deleuze's Leibniz book provided an opportunity to toss several
>of these notions in the air again, watching them fall like minute dust
>particles on a dark and billowing backdrop.  Pulverizing and
>spiritualizing, as I remember it.
>
>magical mystical motherfull majestical (BranVan 3000's "Rainshine -- in my
>head the whole time)
>
>Greg
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