Terence Blake’s ‘ANTI-PLATONISM: horizontal movement and actualising powers’

 

by Corry Shores

 

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Terence Blake

 

ANTI-PLATONISM: horizontal movement and actualising powers

 

In this post Blake discusses false movements and the witch’s flight in relation to passages from Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?:

The state of “indifference” that I discussed earlier, in particular the state of indifference to thinking, is the state of servitude (in Spinozian terms). It is a state of passivity that is subjected to the “false movements” dictated by a transcendence (extrinsic values or goals, divine commands, objectivised political necessities) and which dictate a trajectory constructed out of straight lines. (Note: here I am paraphrasing Deleuze’s marvelous little book PERICLES AND VERDI). Thinking involves breaking with that servitude and passivity and becoming-active, actualising one’s powers. This is what Deleuze calls the “natural movement”, and it traces and follows the curved and zigzag lines of sorcery.

One can modify the translation of the sentence “To think is always to follow the witch’s flight”. In French this reads “Penser, c’est toujours suivre une ligne de sorcière”. Literally: “To think is always to follow a sorceress’s line”. It is useful to recall the literal translation, as one of the allusions here is to Carlos Castaneda’s initiation into sorcery. One of the degrees of the initiation was learning to “stop the world” (stop the false movement, break with the general indifference). According to Deleuze, in his comments on the cinema and elsewhere, this allows one to see the “lines of the universe” or the lines of becoming, and to pass through the wall that cuts us off from running to the horizon and actualising our powers .

(Terence Blake)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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