domenica 31 gennaio 2016

E.2.11. The truth is that we haven't seen anything yet - Pt. XIV - Excerpt from the essay «Money, Revolution and Acceleration in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus», Obsolete Capitalism Free Press/Rizosphere, 2016



The truth is that we haven't seen anything yet


Let us now analyse the last phrase of

the accelerationist passage of the The Civilized Capitalist Machine: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet. (AO, 239) It is necessary to go back to Michel Foucault’s speech in Royaumont in 1964 during one of the first seminaries organized on Nietzsche, entitled: Nietzsche, Freud, Marx. Foucault’s speech is about the techniques of interpretations in the three philosophers who - according to him - have “put us back into the presence of a new possibility of interpretation (...), into an uncomfortable position, since these techniques of interpretation concern us ourselves, since we, the interpreters, have begun to interpret ourselves by these techniques. (AME, 272). The works of these three authors have inflicted a heavy blow to the western thought, but these techniques are necessary especially because, Foucault continues, the language is suspicious. “Suspecting language” signifies “that it means something other than what it says” (AME, 270). According to Foucault there are four characteristics of the new hermeneutic as a basis of an interpretative system that we still apply today: depth meant as exteriority, incompleteness, primacy of interpretation with respect to signs and finally an infinite self-interpretation. Deleuze will draw from Foucault’s words for his Conclusion of the Royaumont seminar: “The reason why we still think there are many hidden aspects in Nietzsche and his work is due to methodological reasons. Each single fact can not have a single meaning. Each fact/thing displays many level of meaning which express the forces and the becoming of such forces in it. (...) Foucault showed it to us: Nietzsche invented new ways of interpretation ... so that the interpretations themselves denounce the «type» that is he who is interpreting, renouncing to the question «what?» in favour of the question «who?»” Deleuze is clearly taking distance from the intellectuals of his time that combine these three philosophers, saying in his Nomad Thought: “Probably most of us fix the dawn of our modern culture in the trinity Nietzsche-Freud-Marx. Never mind that by doing so you defuse the explosiveness of each from the start.” (NT, 142). Who wanted to do so? He continues: “But the fact that modern philosophy has found the source of its renewal in the Nietzsche- Marx-Freud trinity is indeed rather ambiguous and equivocal. Because it can be interpreted positively as well as negatively. For example, after the war, philosophies of value were in vogue. Everyone was talking about values, and they wanted "axiology" to replace both ontology and the theory of knowledge.. .But it wasn't the least bit Nietzschean or Marxist in inspiration. On the contrary, no one talked about Nietzsche or Marx at all, no one knew them, and they didn't want to know them. What they made of "value" was a place to resurrect the most traditional, abstract spiritualism imaginable: they called on values in order to inspire a new
conformity which they believed was better suited to the modern world, you know, the respect for values, etc. For Nietzsche, as well as for Marx, the notion of value is strictly inseparable 1) from a radical and total critique of society and the world (look at the theme of the "fetish" in Marx, or the theme of "idols" in Nietzsche), and 2) from a creation no less radical: Nietzsche's transvaluation, and Marx's revolutionary action. So, in the post-war context, everyone was all for using a concept of value, but they had completely neutralized it; they had subtracted all critical or creative sense from it. What they made of it was an instrument of established values. It was pure anti-Nietzsche — even worse, it was Nietzsche hijacked, annihilated, suppressed, it was Nietzsche brought back to Sunday mass. (DI, 135). To explain why “we haven't seen anything yet” Deleuze says: Now, Marx and Freud, perhaps, do represent the dawn of our culture, but Nietzsche is something entirely different: the dawn of counterculture.(NT 142). In the year 1972 this counterculture has just started and therefore Deleuze and Guattari state that such revolution is in itinere and it will probably be well- combative and well- aware. We, readers of today, do know that such destabilizing omen has not occurred [yet] but maybe The Strong of the Future generation is already among us, embodied by silicon men and nomadic plotters. 

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