“Take the plunge: an ethics of engagement. One that contains, among its tics and dispositions, political tendencies that are anything but spontaneist in the way the word is thrown around to mean anything goes and nothing really matters. For speculative pragmatism, anything potentially goes. But precisely because of that, every little thing matters — more than we can ever know in advance. Everything matters; but everything also matters on, following the singular trail of potential’s unfolding. To prove equal to the import, to follow the trail of the mattering-on, to honor the potential of the process, it is necessary to participate with great pragmatic and speculative care — and just as much artfulness. There is by the nature of this activity a political element to it. The art of mutual inclusion, with care: that could stand as the very definition of the political.
Nothing is more foreign to the modus operandi of the academic institution than this. Its model of inquiry is slave to the general idea and its associated ideal of critique. It purports already to know, as if the stakes of understanding came ready made. Such a thing would be possible only if everything were played out in advance. The academic institution mistakes the active process of understanding as the expression of potential for the transmission of acquired knowledge. The potential force of Deleuze’s thought will survive its incorporation of the academy only where that alternative image of speculative-pragmatic thought revives. For Deleuze to become unassimilable again, that image of thought must be turned back on Deleuze’s own corpus, from whence it came — so as to hoist it on its own singularity. Wrap thinking anew around the singular contours of the texts’ residual energies. Mutually include in the corpus its own as-yet-unknown variations, deleuzes to come, already contained in the smallest details. Matter the deleuzian corpus into becoming again, rebel to digestion. Tweak it, tic it forward. Make it decamp.
synthetic zerØ 