Psychotic Episodes

"But what happened in this long history of "nihilism," before the world lost its principles? At a point close to us human Reason had to collapse, like the Kantian refuge, the last refuge of principles. It falls victim to "neurosis." But still, before, a psychotic episode was necessary. A crisis and collapse of all theological Reason had to take place. That is where the Baroque assumes its position: Is there come way of saving the theological ideal at a moment when it is being contested on all sides, and when the world cannot stop accumulating its "proofs" against it, ravages and miseries, at a time when the earth will soon shake and tremble....? The Baroque solution is the following: we shall multiply principles - we can always slip a new one out from under our cuffs - and in this way we will change their use."

Deleuze - The Fold (67)

As some of you may know I have been spending the last few months reading the Fold and it's probably about time I wrote something about it. Although reading is what I have been doing and it's only really in the past few days that I've focused on the above passage in relation to nihilism and Deleuze's own project. I had been considering that the Baroque and the Neo-Baroque were both psychotic episodes but today I thought that the Neo-Baroque might be a schizophrenic episode; therefore Baroque to Neo-Baroque constitutes a movement from psychosis to schizophrenia; proliferation of principles based on the closure of the monad to a speed and trajectory of the open monad.

Anyhow, I've only really been thinking about that for the past few hours and if I don't write something about it I won't be able to sleep. Here's some notes I jotted down.

1. In The Fold(68) and A Thousand Plateaus (352 'Treatise on nomadology) Deleuze talks about games, primarily Go and Chess. In the Fold the game is of inventing principles, one of skill (chess) but it is also a non-battle of guerrilla warfare like Go ('you don't catch your adversary in order to reduce him to absence, you encircle his presence to neutralize him, to make him incompossible, to impose divergence upon him.') In ATP he seems to prefer Go as the 'smooth' space whereas chess is the 'striated.' Chess codes and decodes space while Go deterritorializes and reterritorializes. Also in ATP he says that Go is pure strategy while chess is semiology.

2. The nomad arrives from without; possibily the incompossible? (chaosmos etc)


3. For some reason I've written down 'feelings -----> affects'. I can't remember why I've written that.

4. Something that I'm wondering about is if the schizophrenic does not carry out the differential equation that is necessary in Deleuze's reading of the Leibnizian unconscious. "Differential relations indeed fill the role of a filter - and already of an infinity of filters - since they let through only minute perceptions that in each instance can furnish a relatively clear perception. (TF 91)" (multitude of droplets of wave ----> wave). The schizophrenic would instead percieve the pure multiplicity. I'm not really sure about this, but it's something that I'm thinking about so expect more to come on Deleuze's reading of the Leibnizian unconscious.

5. Movement from absolute interiority (monad) to no distinctions between public and private (TF 137). "And in Kleist the secret is no longer a content held within a form of interiority; rather, it becomes a form, identified with the form of exteriority that is always external to itself (ATP 356))."

6. Franny's dream (ATP); "A very good schizo dream. To be fully part of the crowd and at the same time completely outside it, removed from it: to be on the edge...." Schizo dream involves being a part of the crowd yet being not part of it.


Anyhow, they're not very coherent thoughts but I'm going to try to get together some sort of essay and paper for workshop on them.

|