Gilles Deleuze 1925 - 1995

Richard Pinhas was born in 1951 and soon becomes one of the most active musicians in France in the early 70s. After may 68, he studies philosophy at la Sorbonne and obtains in PhD and attends courses by Gilles Deleuze, who soon becomes a friend and an inspirator.

• http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/volume3-issue1/smithmurphy/index.html What I Hear is Thinking Too: Deleuze and Guattari Go Pop

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  As a concrete example of the deterritorializing potential of the refrain, Deleuze and Guattari cite the analyses of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) who shows in Blues People how black slaves in America, in the conditions of forced labor, took their old African work songs, which were originally territorial refrains, and made use of them in a "deterritorialized" manner, in the process producing an "intensive" and plaintive use of the English language by blending it with their own African languages; these songs were in turn "reterritorialized" by whites in minstrel shows, and the use of "blackface" (Al Jolson); and then taken back by blacks in another movement of deterritorialization and translated into a whole series of new musical forms (blues, hootchie-koochie, etc.) (cited in A Thousand Plateaus 137-138).
  
• http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/volume3-issue1/smithmurphy/smithmurphy2.html -- Smith and Murphy
• http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-August-1997/buchanan.html Rightly or wrongly, Deleuze has been labelled a snob for his high-brow taste in music, art and literature. For the most part, Deleuze depicts the popular as the undesirable other, or worse, an enormous homogenising machine depriving art of its place and value in contemporary society. 1 In this respect, at least, Deleuze is very much like Adorno, utterly modernist. [...]

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  Mille Plateaux article by Simon Reynolds on the German collective, inspired by Gilles Deleuze.

It has often been said that the relationship between cinema and psychoanalysis is not coincidental, because both emerged around the same time. Although Freud himself didn't consider cinema of any value, psychoanalysis has greatly influenced modern film theory. Ever since in the seventies feminist film theory joined and critiqued the concerns of the psychosemiotic apparatus theory, psychoanalysis's impact on film theory is undeniable. However, at the same time that Freud wrote his first case studies and cinema projected its first images, another set of ideas was first published: Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory. According to Bergson cinema provided a model of human consciousness and the experience of time and memory. But it was not until almost a century later, with Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image that Bergson's philosophical ideas where taken up in film theory. http://www.hum.uva.nl/~ftv/faculty/Patricia/deleuze.html

In his stunning essay, Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze examines the work of the late-nineteenth-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-­Masoch. He shows that masochism is something far Tore subtle and complex than the enjoyment of pain, that masochism has nothing to do with sadism; their worlds do not communicate, just as the genius of those who created them - Masoch and Sade - lie stylistically, philosophically, and politically poles apart. Venus in Furs, the most famous of all of Masoch's novels, belongs to an unfinished cycle of works that Masoch entitled The Heritage of Cain.
• Masochism : Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs - Gilles Deleuze [Amazon US]
• Deleuze's desperate attempts to undermine the illusion of "the sadomasochistic entity" result in a virtually endless list of dualities, a polarization between sadism and masochism whose rigidity itself reeks of reductionism and over-simplification. For example, when summarizing the most essential differences between sadism and masochism, Deleuze goes so far as to assert without further elaboration that "there is an aestheticism in masochism, while sadism is hostile to the aesthetic attitude." What, frankly, is meant by the phrase "the aesthetic attitude"? Sadism and masochism may be linked or identified with differing aesthetic characteristics, but such a monolithic conception of THE aesthetic posture is just as disturbing and problematic as "THE sadomasochistic entity," the indiscriminate and careless combining of the two terms which Deleuze tries to deconstruct. On the other hand, Deleuze's efforts to highlight the separateness of sadism and masochism are admirable, for it is still quite rare to find a contemporary critic who is sensitive to discerning such differences. -- http://sites.uol.com.br/formattoso/informative.htm
• see also: Sado Masochism

In the following I would like to talk about a topic that has been treated very little in academic philosophy. The works of GILLES DELEUZE - and not to forget his co-author, FÉLIX GUATTARI - are still treated as 'curiosities' and their importance for philosophical discussions is not recognized. (2) In opposition to this, I will show what the very concept of philosophy means to these two thinkers. http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContGunz.htm from Immanence and Deterritorialization: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari -- Stephan Günzel

The body of organs, of identity (not forgetting that organs without a body might be more dangerous still) has privileged the eye, and in contemporary culture, makes this privileging a site of control: "the eye is a masochistic orifice in the age of panoptic power, capable of endless discipline and of being seduced beyond bodily subjectivity into a floating free fall within the society of the spectacle", leaving the ear repressed, except in terms of receiving "spectacular" sound (muzak, MTV) (Kroker, Spasm, 49). The body without organs, though, would not free us from this, but drive us further in, playing masochism beyond jouissance. "Freeing" the ear would not liberate us, either. Rather, the ear has to become masochistic, in the Deleuzian sense (see "Coldness and Cruelty" in Masochism (New York: Zone, 1994), 9-138) instead of being forced to submit. It must then renounce both control and contract. There is, of course, another story of the eye -- Bataille's, followed up by Foucault, in which the upturned eye, removed, trans(un)figured, is the site of the loss of meaning. Eugene Thacker assimilates this story with noise music: "the visuality of Bataille transgressing itself is analogous to the music of noise" ("Bataille/Body/ Noise: Notes Toward a Techno-Erotics", (63), in Brett Woodward (ed.), Merzbook: The Pleasuredome of Noise (Melbourne, Cologne: Extreme, 1999), 57-65). The comparison is perhaps too easy as the ear does not have the status of the eye, nor is music of noise in itself capable of the reversibility of the eye, which seeks to be both medium and control of media.

• A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia - Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari [Amazon US]
  In their final work together, "What is Philosophy?" Guattari and Deleuze envision philosophy as moving at infinite speeds in a mad creation of concepts. This formula is expressed marvelously in "A Thousand Plateaus". In roughly each "plateau", the authors explore a different opposition, although always in relation to the previous concepts, as well as those that are yet to be fully elaborated. Some of these oppositions include smooth/ Striated, rhizome/ tree, war machine/ State, etc. Each one loosely overlaps with the others, although by no means are they synonymous. However, because a similar formula is used to explore each of these oppositions, this greatly facilitates understanding the book, especially since the authors aren't always the clearest writers. However, because many of the central themes (including the fundamental opposition between creative forces and those forces which attempt to halt creation or bring it under control) are repeated, even if confusing at first, this book eventually starts to make sense. The ideas expressed in it are applicable to countless aspects of society and life (and even inorganic structures), such as the rhizome, which desribes a system in which elements interact horizontally, maintaining their heterogeneity (a prime example of this is the internet). My only complaint about "A Thousand Plateaus" is that the authors, despite their rigorous defining of various concepts, often present examples of these concepts poorly, assuming that the reader has knowledge of the examples, introducing them without preparation and then leaving them behind. For example, in plateau 3, "the geology of morals", i was able to understand the basic "abstract machine" described but unable to understand how the given examples fit into the plateau without resorting to an outside source. Of course, why use Guattari and Deleuze's examples when there are numerous instances of these "abstract machine" all around us? -- Timmy Jones
• Masochism : Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs - Gilles Deleuze [Amazon US]
  In his stunning essay, Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze examines the work of the late-nineteenth-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-­Masoch. He shows that masochism is something far Tore subtle and complex than the enjoyment of pain, that masochism has nothing to do with sadism; their worlds do not communicate, just as the genius of those who created them - Masoch and Sade - lie stylistically, philosophically, and politically poles apart. Venus in Furs, the most famous of all of Masoch's novels, belongs to an unfinished cycle of works that Masoch entitled The Heritage of Cain.
• In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze - Various Artists[2 CD, Amazon US]
  Deleuze died in 1995, this CD was released in 1996, as an hommage to Gilles. An excellent CD that showcases a lot of the top electronic artists. Even this is in no way an easy piece of art to listen to, it sure pays back all the effort and the concentration it requires from the listener. The general mood is very dark and the drones play a big part in it, so stay away if minimalist electronics are not your cup of tea, otherwise enjoy.

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