the problem of the manner in which being is distributed among beings: is it, in the last instance, by analogy or univocality?

Further still, beyond the world of representation, we suppose that a whole problem of Being is brought into play by these differences between the categories and the nomadic or phantastical notions,

The Kantian schemata would take flight and point beyond themselves in the direction of a conception of differential Ideas, if they were not unduly subordinated to the categories which reduce them to the status of simple mediations in the world of representation.

But there still is an affective reading of Spinoza that has always coexisted with a conceptual reading. There is a musical reading of Leibniz that coexists with his conceptual reading.

there are pictorial readings of great philosophers, or affective readings of great philosophers. It’s not that you would lose nothing; you would then lose the purely conceptual aspect, but something very deep which is philosophy itself will remain.

I always am pleading for the necessity of a double reading of great philosophers who must be read philosophically, of course, if one can, but if you might not have the philosophical background to read a great philosopher, you always have perfectly the aesthetic culture and there are musical readings

All this is in a very special domain that we have been pouring over since the start of our questions, that is, what is a becoming? In any event, May ’68 is the intrusion of becoming.

People can always make fun of it after the fact, but there were phenomena of pure becoming that took hold of people, even becomings-animal, even becomings-children, becomings-women for men, becomings-men for women.

Now, there can be bad becomings, and it’s what historians did not understand well, and that’s understandable since I believe so strongly in the difference between history and becomings… May ’68 was a becoming-revolutionary without a revolutionary future.

as is the present, but they are repetition in two different modes which repeat each other.

Historians sometimes look for empirical correspondences between the present and the past, but however rich it may be, this network of historical correspondences involves repetition only by analogy or similitude. In truth, the past is in itself repetition,

As long as there's a need to create concepts, there will be philosophy since that's the definition of philosophy, creating concepts, not expecting them to be ready-made — we have to create them, and we create them as a function of problems. Well, problems evolve, so there is still a place...

I never was affected by people who proclaim the death of philosophy, getting beyond philosophy, it's philosophers who say such complicated things as that. All that never affected me or concerned me because I tell myself, ok, what could all that mean?

So, the choice that recommences without end, that never ceases to recommence – even if I die from the choice – but this choice is that I have made not once for all time but every time for one.

The private thinker is Job or Abraham, the one who enters into a private relationship with God, such that in choosing to choose, he will receive everything twofold.

And here we will have the great attack on public professors, public professors who, for Kierkegaard, were obviously represented above all by Hegel and dialectics. And this will be Shestov’s great opposition, which already emerges fully in Kierkegaard, between Athens and Jerusalem.

But what had already emerged fully with Kierkegaard was that the man of true choice was the private thinker. The others, the devout, the man of evil, all of them, all those assistants of the false choice, were public professors, professors of virtues or vices, it amounts to the same thing.

Take the example of rhyme: it is indeed verbal repetition, but repetition which includes the difference between two words and inscribes that difference at the heart of a poetic Idea, in a space which it determines.

It is always in this gap, which should not be confused with the negative, that creatures weave their repetition and receive at the same time the gift of living and dying. Finally, to return to nominal concepts: is it the identity of the nominal concept which explains the repetition of a word?

the revolving cycles are only abstractions: placed together, they reveal evolutionary cycles or spirals whose principle is a variable curve, and the trajectory of which has two dissymmetrical aspects, as though it had a right and a left.

A bare, material repetition (repetition of the Same) appears only in the sense that another repetition is disguised within it, constituting it and constituting itself in disguising itself. Even in nature, isochronic rotations are only the outward appearance of a more profound movement,

Well, anyway, all these types of abstract painting, at the most basic level, tend toward a sort of geometrism. You get the feeling that yes, that what they tend to do is replace the diagram with code. When that doesn’t work is when the painting merely applies an external code.

Well, I mean, it’s so pretentious; a square can be pretentious, a square can be crap. You shouldn’t think that just making squares is enough to make…. A square can be hideous. There are some hideous squares in bad abstract art.

With the great abstract painters, we’ll see it’s correct, we’ll see if it’s true. But when it goes wrong—and God, abstract painting has some awful painters. Just as many as other kinds of painting, but with abstract painting it’s catastrophic. The guys who make squares or whatever—it’s horrible.

Obviously, a code can mean something grotesque—I’m thinking of botched paintings, but you get what I’m trying to… the attempt to reduce the diagram to a maximum—No, minimum! And to replace it with a code…which is what, exactly? It’s an obvious way to define so-called abstract painting.

And if labor gathers a being of labor, it is not in alliance with political economy, but in a sort of compensation or rupture or uncoupling from political economy. That’s my question.

Similarly, if life gathers a being of life, gathers itself up into a being of life, it doesn’t do so as an alliance or in evolution with biology, but through a compensation for and an uncoupling from biology.

And is it not necessary to extend to life and to labor under the same condition noticed by Foucault, namely: if literature gathers a being of language, it is not through an alliance with linguistics, but through a compensation for linguistics.

We think that notions such as super-ego are completely worthless and that cogs of power don’t function in this way. So how do they function? And then, some people ask, where does all this lead to? It leads to a choice. To make them function or to make them dysfunctional.

You will not define a body (or a mind) by its form, nor by its organs or functions, and neither will you define it as a substance or a subject. Every reader of Spinoza knows that for him bodies and minds are not substances or subjects, but modes.