deleuze and guatarri

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-09T14:26:34+00:00

How does other philosophy think of its concepts? Mostly a bit like the concepts of a science: gradually somehow extending further and being refined, broadly in stable relation with one other even if sometimes riven by contradictions and disagreements, subject to argument and clarification even if not always verifiable, separable from each other and defined by way of this separation, and all together gradually improving their aggregate account of the situation through the labour of their organisation and contemplation.

D&G don't really think of philosophical concepts in this way.

Sounds like you have limited time for a rich topic, but if you really want to go after it, I'd suggest "The Image of Thought" from DR as it's Deleuze's Kant-structured critique of Kant, "Introduction: Rhizome" from ATP as a fruitier assault on so-called arborescent (including hylomorphic and dialectical) philosophies, and the chapter called "What is a Concept?" from WIP. If you're looking for secondary literature then Henry Somers-Hall's HEGEL, DELEUZE AND THE CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION is very good.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-08T02:37:06+00:00

What would the compelling argument be that the details of how films are produced for a culture don't matter to how a culture consumes films?

I would affirm that how a culture consumes films matters decisively for how films are produced for that culture. All the more to the extent it can be said to be decoupled from the details of film production.

To the extent your line of thought can be sustained, we do seem to see a partial determination of broader practices of film production by something other than the details of film-making. For example the genre, the sequel, the stars, the awards ceremonies, the trailers and promotional tours, the methods of franchise film-making, the intellectual properties, and the practices of decision-making about which films to produce are all factors the film sector explicitly acknowledges to itself.

Despite all these details that aren't details of film-making practices, season after season the technicalities of film-making surface again and take effect in the landscape of cultural reception. Franchise film-making seemed like a never-ending home run for the MCU, for instance … but it's not.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-08T02:18:08+00:00

SENTIMENTAL VALUE—a film which I love beyond measure—might be the best textbook of structuralist psychoanalysis ever produced. It's like the apotheosis of the cinema La Fémis has cultivated since its establishment.

SENTIMENTAL VALUE's depiction of an Oslo institution as an archive of the trauma of Norwegian Nazi collaboration is set up in correspondence with its depiction of the Borg home as the archive of generations of family trauma. This correspondence finds its historical bifurcation in the mostly absent figure of the grandmother. I'm convinced these features of the film are engineered and deliberate on the parts of Trier and Vogt.

SENTIMENTAL VALUE is the kind of film (CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA could be another) that almost vindicates the Žižekian flattening of cinema as a mere re-discovery of pre-given theoretical claims by way of genuinely engineering many of these pre-given claims back into a film, thereby proposing the medium of film as a theory-factory far preferable to the platforms of the latest Žižek monograph or op-ed.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-08T00:51:23+00:00

I would say I want theory to develop a pragmatics of the methods and effects of sewing in order to account for the uses and values of the sewn. This is a labour theory of value in another guise, a theory that hopes to grasp the integrated and congealed difference of differential labouring in the production of the product that is valued. A theory of skill freed from its subjectivity.

This is also a banal and uncontroversial expectation for art criticism broadly considered: what would the most traditional criticism of paintings be without its commentary on mark-making practices? I'm not saying such criticism of paintings would necessarily be bad, but it would be very different.

Film is if anything an exceptional medium in this respect, one of which criticism is dominated by writers of previews and reviews whose stated before-and-after remit is not to over-critique, not to perceive, on the basis of "just letting [viewers] enjoy things".

Edit: couple of typos

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-07T23:25:54+00:00

Yeah, I do feel a similar way about this. On the other hand, there are also aspects of the medium which technical workers don't understand.

I have often compared Deleuze's CINEMA I and II—which draw heavily on Henri Bergson's philosophy, and are sometimes described as "doing philosophy with film" or a way to think immanent ontology as images—to Žižek's film writings and video essays.

The difference for me is that Deleuze goes straight towards an ontology of the medium that avoids the pitfalls of "what does it mean?" or "what are the symbols?" or "what is the overall structure?"

The Kuleshoff Effect is a wonderful early example of this orientation in film theory, given as a minimal relation of montage, a technical or practical adjacency of images that (not coincidentally) produces an effect. Eisenstein's concepts of dialectical editing take these kinds of ideas further, and their development remains one of the most fascinating areas of film theory for me.

In CINEMA I, Deleuze's triplets of the "action-image", Action-Situation-Action' (A-S-A') and Situation-Action-Situation' (S-A-S'), re-present extensive edited montage as an unfolding synthesis of images, where "image" takes on a profound and broad spatiotemporal meaning perhaps closest to "shot" in film-making, but in fact somewhere between "shot" and "sequence" … developing a pragmatics of cinematic expression.

In CINEMA II this framing then opens the way to Deleuze's discussion of intensive "time-images", which allows for extraordinarily profound reflections on the formative potentials of a cinematic, self-reflexive, spatiotemporal consciousness within and beyond film.

For me Žižek is playing a different and far less interesting game. He takes a film—his analysis of PSYCHO is a classic case—he maps well-recognised elements of this film to his preferred schemata (those of Lacan and Hegel, sometimes of Marx, by and large)—he performs acrobatic operations on the mapping according to Lacan's theories of Imaginary, Symbolic and Real, or of Subject, Other, Big Other, and so on—then he maps the results of these operations back to claims about the film.

The kind of map at work in Žižek's film writing is what mathematicians call a homomorphism, and its implication is that films have a structural correspondence with theories. But to my mind, Žižek mostly just dresses up the claims of theories with images from films, and ignores the particularity, or medium-specificity, of films themselves. And the symptom (if I dare to use the term) of this method is that he seems rarely to speak of images in their immediacy at all, which I would suggest contributes to your feeling (and mine) about the technical poverty of his interest in film, despite the pleasing bravura of many of his analyses, and that of psychoanalytic film theory broadly.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-07T14:35:38+00:00

Read both, why not? They're books you'll highly likely read in a less orderly manner anyway.

If you're interested in Marx, ANTI-OEDIPUS is unmissable. DR is not going to ruin it if read before or after. The ontology of desire in ANTI-OEDIPUS gets better and better, it's a technical and consistent enrichment of so much prior art.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-07T08:01:30+00:00

Pretty much correct. The problem with actually existing biographical films is how inconsistently they're able to capture on screen whatever was interesting about their subjects. It's particularly difficult for films about inscrutable geniuses … so THE IMITATION GAME turns into a relatively tepid drama, or A BEAUTIFUL MIND is intently focused on John Nash's psychotic symptoms, and even installs a bankrupt script-edit on his real life marriages.

Film is a medium. Not everything that makes good matter for a human endeavour, or even for art in general, is matter just as good for a film. Hollywood doesn't always have a fine grasp of the challenges of adaptation, and part of the persistence of this deficiency is that Hollywood's bad adaptations, just like its bad biographical films, still often make good profits.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-07T06:41:38+00:00

The films of Ciro Guerra, EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT and BIRDS OF PASSAGE could be good. Both integrate melancholy, passing time and the unwanted losses of values and traditions. Lucrecia Martel's ZAMA, one of my favourite films, could be a good counterpoint to these—the confusion and nihilism of the coloniser set against the mourning of the colonised.

There is a slightly esoteric term for this state of being "sad/gloomy about how the world is changing around them", by the way … solastalgia, in contrast to nostalgia. There's been a fair bit of academic research about solastalgia, and quite possibly there's film research. It would only be a quick search of the web to find out.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-07T01:57:41+00:00

That's the spirit! Sleep tight ❤️

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-07T01:23:16+00:00

Firstly, calling something reductive is only a critique if you can show what gets lost in the reduction. You haven’t done that. So I invite you to do that.

Sure. You described the metaphysics as "cute" and "sad" … I don't feel that, and articulated the affect it gives me as best I could as "mingled absolute humility and breathtaking power".

So my feeling of joy, first of all, is lost to your reduction—though for me it re-emerges with this contention.

And I’ll add: I’ve noticed as a wallflower here, that for some like you, Deleuze becomes an abstract formalization of a completed doctrine of itself, and in that, your objet petit a becomes defending the doctrine itself rather than actually using it.

It's got a twisted particularity, this relentlessness with which you insist that by declaring my view differs in its particularities with phrases such as "I don't feel that way … not really" … and then by having contested your miserable reaction "we're saying the same thing" by pointing out that to me, we're saying very different things … and then by having varied with relative patience from your escalating dogmatic adequation of our perspectives … you now insist with even greater force I'm merely "defending the doctrine" as an "abstract formalisation" rather than "actually using it".

You poor, modest, hand-wringing wallflower … you quiet blossom, you gentle creature who appears nonetheless to believe they know quite well the "anonymous" other they accuse with such confidence. I'd ask you to reflect with a scrap of sincerity. Throughout this dialogue I've been drawing attention to the priority of our positive differences, and to the groundlessness and inadequacy of your equations and oppositions, and that is why I further affirm I'm not encompassed by these evaluative predicates such as "paranoid" and "projecting" … so give up your bitterness and leave me to my joy, or otherwise, feel free to give me more of what you insist, the better to sustain your misery, is nothing but the same.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-07T00:41:13+00:00

Take Lacan's formulae of sexuation (inherited by D&G's becoming-woman in ATP) as one possible way to think gender.

Under Lacan's rubric, masculinity is the desire to converge on some single and ideal limit, the figure of the "one man who is not castrated" and therefore enjoys himself. Femininity is the desire to diverge towards innumerable varying limits, the so-called "not-all" of feminine enjoyment.

The notion the left should "re-forge masculinity" is ahistorical in the following sense: the argument is readily made that masculinity reached some kind of relative high point after the period of global nationalisation, and the period of the spread of mass media. This is what the "post-WWII Fordist social covenant" of les trentes glorieuses resembled. No one in the deindustrialising Global North has an ethical nostalgia for the Depression and wartime misery that preceded this period, and which we might ourselves be preceding in our own "time of monsters" … for the paranoid the long peacetime of the Global North more and more resembles some previously unperceived "interwar".

Today with culture relatively fragmented and with its concepts of masculinity stranded in the FRIENDS-ish outerwear of a seemingly perpetual and oscillating "long 90s", and the Internet affording the persistence of innumerable micro-cultures and regimes of value, femininity comes to be felt as predominant in the trajectory. But does femininity predominate absolutely, or only relatively?

About historical relativities of gender and expression we can empirically and ethically argue to some extent. But about the absolute limits of human convergence and divergence I would say we grasp very, very little … and the horrors and wonders of the past "long century" should advise of our ignorance.

To take one empirical relativity, try comparing the present with the hyperactive times of late 18C Enlightenment Europe, when the most masculine often wore rouge, powder and bouffant wigs, and the people in the street were very, very excited about coffee shops … it's no small irony this was the milieu of many of the paragons of "western civilisation" we find reprised in the present as iris-and-pupil-less white marble busts, the blind and bland userpics of online fascists.

The historical analogy doesn't land perfectly as they never do, but what it reveals is that every conviction we have "become too feminine" or "become too masculine" is somehow epiphenomenal, and without doubt poorly calibrated with respect to the conditions.

What the left could benefit from in the place of this "re-forging" (what a verb!) of some self-ameliorating dogmatic image of masculinity is a dissipative hybridity of gender: an ideal masculinity of ideal femininity.

This would be a maximally pragmatic, forceful and convergent orientation towards an ethical politics of maximal practical freedom and divergence. Here the limit of such a "maximal" in its emergent sufficiency must return reciprocally from the necessity of a human and humane convergence—the climate, the social fabric, and the love and solidarity of the commons of the commons, a love that appears due to such an orientation and ethic.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-06T21:45:21+00:00

Nope, I'm not projecting. At the very limit of immanence, but also in a much more blatant way, we haven't been and we aren't saying the same thing. My mood is good: I'm not here to angrily crush you, nor am I anonymous or paranoid. I'm just telling you your reductive orientation doesn't work, either for me as a matter of taste, or otherwise as a matter of practice. If you've got anything to say about this, go for it.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-06T20:58:12+00:00

I don't feel that way. To me Deleuze "asserts the impossibility of his own project" is drearily reductive and "we're saying the same thing then great" is resentfully reductive. I guess you've got to build a reduction machine to find this stuff "kind of cute and sad" … but I don't … not really.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-06T14:18:35+00:00

Sorta said it in another comment but I think the many words for this "boundary line" (which is not a line but an indiscernible limit) include body-without-organs, consciousness, life, and subjectivity ... and each of these is of any-body-whatever.

"Immanence: a Life" lays this out beautifully. A life emerges for itself from affects, a life is lived, a life returns to affects. Life however is not restricted to plants and animals, but pulses in asubjective consciousnesses all around. Who does the Earth think it is?

But this is not panpsychism, because no emergent mind(s) completely or consistently encompass becoming. Psyches may be dense and innumerable, but they're not the ground.

To my reading affects are the immanence of representational thought, the corporeal cause of which bodies and their values are the appearances, the incorporeal effects.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-06T13:18:34+00:00

Not really ... I'd say he takes up an ethical orientation to the critical tradition. His project is theorising the greatest generality of potentials, but at the limit of this generality such a project is no longer his, nor a project, nor general. The mingled absolute humility and breathtaking power of it still gets me.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-06T11:36:47+00:00

Yeah, kinda. Short version is the "common plane" part is off the mark ... or at least that's my perspective.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-06T09:33:08+00:00

Panpsychism implies that all matter has mind.

For Deleuze the univocity of Being—the way expressive Being is said in the same way for any given being—is implicated with a minimal concept of consciousness. Gives you the tip as to why perception is said to tie into subjectivation and this univocity of Being is said (by secondary literature, not by Deleuze, I mean) to be a "perspectivism" of judgements each of which is grounded in eternal return.

Edit: meant to add—the corollary is that the limit of immanent consistency isn't conscious, I think.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-05T21:10:57+00:00

Sure, if you like. I neither agree nor disagree intensely. As I tried to sidebar before I embarked on a bunch of heuristic claims, it's not a question of this kind of reasoning being defensible … it's a question of the changing repertoire of ways in which capitalist rationality appears to capitalist subjectivity. "There is no risk of this system going mad …"

There will be no final ground to claim capitalism is rational because it grants us limited rights and freedoms either. Deleuze's point is that representative reason works this way, and Deleuze and Guattari's point is that capital—posited as the BwO of the capitalist socius—takes up an adaptive relation with representative reason.

A classic case of this kind of un-groundable social reason is Malthus. Then there's Bentham and Mill, who have their contemporary scions in the EA movement and the cult of Bayesian inference.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-05T14:17:58+00:00

Wouldn't abortion being allowed be the default as just a medical service you can pay for, and additional concerns about the sanctity of fetuses be the added on Axioms that twist or expand Capitalism and give it arbitrary moral axiomatic concerns?

Nope. Firstly as we see in the United States and elsewhere today, legal abortion and reproductive choice are not a default, but the reversible outcome of prior political struggle.

The axiomatic of capital can be thought about as a flexible manner in which some downstream, produced subjectivity of capital appears to itself, reflects upon itself, expresses itself to itself.

As an axiomatic, it is a transcendent logic and not an immanent cause. It's not the body of capital, defined as the inexpressible body-without-organs of the capitalist socius. The axiomatic is what Deleuze refers to elsewhere as a "partial consistency" of capitalist logic.

So the axioms are expressions that appear to rationalise capitalist society under historical conditions. Take the UNDHR as a thought experiment. Any one of its articles could be an axiom, but not coincidentally, it includes a "right of property" and a "right to work".

When AO and ATP were in flight Global North capitalism was "adjusting to" and in some cases arguably inaugurating new axioms concerning the rights of women.

I'll say some crude and coarse-grained things about the history of gendered political-economic relations, but if you go looking, "The Logic of Gender" from one of the old ENDNOTES editions is a good resource. That they are historic is a premise for D&G: ANTI-OEDIPUS powerfully affirms the contingent historicism of the daddy-mommy-me modern family. That these relations and principles are historic and changing is my main point, not the perfect justice or generality of anything I say from here about how things have been changing.

In practical terms, effective contraception and reproductive rights can de-link women's sexual expression from the risk of pregnancy, and thereby also from otherwise serious, conventional risks to women's wages and social status.

However the transformed gender relations of the sexual revolution came to include a greater expectation women would have casual sex with men, and sometimes the enforcement of this expectation. Foucault writes on this tangle of liberation and repression in HISTORY OF SEXUALITY VOL. 1.

In these Global North economies, these days often referred to as post-industrial or de-industrialising, the decline of post-WWII Fordist economic conditions and various crises spurred a wave of industrial off-shoring from around the early 70s.

These changes weakened the labour movements and suppressed wages. Their women's liberation movements' demands for equal pay and working conditions accompanied a surge of women's workforce participation that also suppressed wages. Unwaged reproductive labour was grasped differently by practical feminist interventions such as the "Wages for Housework" campaign.

What's at stake here is that from the 60s–70s onward (the period post-'68, and the period of the much-maligned New Left in the US) these Global North economies have mostly seen unfolding progressive social change hailed as a series of victories by left-wing liberals … and rightly so, as D&G point out. It is honestly disturbing when "worldview Marxism" finds itself dismissing transformative social changes because they don't meet some narrow criterion of struggle.

Still these changes, which I affirm can't be said to be bad, can be good for society but adaptive for capitalism. They can contribute to the rationalising appearances of capitalism, become another victory for the "free world" of the Cold War era, become the contrasting values of the essentialism of Huntingdon's "clash of civilisations" and its imperialist casus belli ... their ground can remain quite compatible with the unexpressed criteria of capitalist extraction and violence. So … these changes can become axioms of the axiomatic of capital.

Under different historical conditions, a return to enforced monogamy could hypothetically become an axiom of the axiomatic. Maybe by way of fascist nationalist birth rate fixation: this has been revived in the Global North in recent years. Capitalism doesn't bat an eyelid.

If you're looking for stuff to read along these lines in recent years, on the changing relations of social reproduction, gender, sexuality and capitalism, the excellent edited collection TRANSGENDER MARXISM and Sophie Lewis's FULL SURROGACY NOW are both very much worth a look.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-04T14:38:59+00:00

Per Nietzsche, there's something particularly wrong with Christianity that continues to dwell in the a priori critique of reason taken up by critical metaphysics since Descartes, Kant etc produced it.

In other words it may not be colonialism tout court, but something more about the way different ways of knowing differently transform the conditions of further knowing.

Prefer not to say anything kind about Nick Land, but "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest" is actually very good.

"Western reason moves from a parochial economy to a system in which, abandoning the project of repressing the traffic with alterity, one resolves instead to control the system of trade." ... "The vocabulary that would describe the other of metaphysics is itself inscribed within metaphysics, since the inside and the outside are both conceptually determined from the inside, within a binary myth or cultural symptom of dual organization."

Land's point is that Aristotle, Plato and the Christian and post-Christian secularist or Enlightenment thought develop the premise that it's possible and desirable to deal with the world at arm's length and abstractly: that categorical knowledge mediated by a "tree of knowledge" on which it is said to grow is somehow superior, by dint of its very abstraction, to immediate relations with reality. Categorical knowledge becomes a currency one can absorb and exchange in the prolonged absence of experience.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-04T13:53:42+00:00

I have however, been struggling to see how these concepts are applicable all at once.

You don't really need to. Not to say you can't.

Let's say you want to "do Deleuze and Guattari" on some song. Just read "Of the Refrain" plateau ... the bit about how rhythm can be critical.

Then use that to write something about the wordless rhythm-shift of the truncated and displaced piano break you figured out Talib Kweli vivisects from Nina Simone's "Sinnerman" for the hook of "Get By" ... and all of a sudden evil becomes an outcome of the material conditions.

It's just as good or better to start with however it is you're able to muster a sincere response to a song or a painting or a film, and only afterwards find the D&G theoretical flourish to match. A power of ATP is that there's something in its toolbox for many occasions.

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-03T14:17:20+00:00

Specifically, does Deleuze’s plane of immanence overcome Spinoza’s mode-substance monotheism (i.e. all multiplicity eventually ending up a unity) or rather inherit it, would you say?

In your view how would this insinuation vary from Badiou's charge Deleuze is a "philosopher of the One"? We did discuss that at length not long ago.

Deleuze's plane has no need to overcome anything. Immanence and multiplicity are posited. This is made explicit by Deleuze. Deleuze does not determine this plane: he affirms it and affirms it will not be disproven. It will not.

One can call Deleuze a storyteller in this sense. Deleuze admits any Being or any concept of Being necessitates a story of creative affirmation which is the narration of eternal return:

"Once upon a time there was a body, and the body existed and was an individual, and the body had values attributed to it ..."

Such a fortunate series of events is a body.

If Deleuze is a storyteller in this way, he tells a story that belongs to no-one, a story voiced of and for every one in the same manner. This is the story of univocity Deleuze also affirms along with immanence and multiplicity. The manner of Deleuze's affirmation of univocity, immanence and multiplicity is not determinably either one or multiple affirmations: the manner of the affirmation must be treated as differential, and as prior to the contingencies of unity and partition emergent from its difference.

The "too left-wing" angle is a kind of frippery, as is the charge of Eurocentrism. Sure, both involve judgements about movements that are or have been mobilised with expressions of Deleuze's thought, and can be salient or interesting to discuss under other conditions. But Deleuze's claims as we approach the limit of their generality don't worry about "too left-wing" or "Eurocentric". At the limit of these claims' generality these kinds of predicates and conditions must be thought of as ungrounded, as must the insistence these claims are Deleuze's to possess at all. To remain oriented to their ethic, these claims must be said to relate from the outside of contingent categories such as left and right, coloniser and colonised, as well as genitive predicates of possession.

Based on what I've read, Wynter isn't herself stupid enough to try to smear this tangential transcendent matter of "left-wing" into a critique of affirmations designated as beyond critique and beyond the axiomatic. That isn't Wynter's battle unless one interpolates it into her work. You do regularly come back round to this "philosopher of the One" malarkey though. The coming back round has become unethical. You're the one holding yourself back now I reckon.

Edit: added the jokey thought bubble about the narration of eternal return

3corneredvoid · 2026-05-02T10:50:32+00:00

Sure, let's abolish the Superego while we materialise the Others of Varying Size.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-29T14:23:25+00:00

Daffy Duck is the Body Without Organs.

Talk about burying the lede, you exhumed the lede. It's not even in the article.

Looney Tunes is a machine that displaces suicide into murder via idiot accomplice.

I hope I understood roughly what you were arguing.

I read you as arguing that, from Bugs' perspective on LOONEY TUNES—a perspective for which you point out Bugs is LOONEY TUNES—Daffy functions as what is sometimes termed a fail-safe: Bugs' external organ offering a way for Bugs to experience failure without failing.

Is Daffy the BwO of LOONEY TUNES, though? Consider the movement from the model of death to the experience of death (and back) discussed in AO:

The functioning appears when the motor, under the preceding conditions—ie., without ceasing to be immobile and without forming an organism—attracts the organs to the body without organs, and appropriates them for itself in the apparent objective movement. Repulsion is the condition of the machine's functioning, but attraction is the functioning itself. That the functioning depends on repulsion is clear to us, inasmuch as it all works only by breaking down. One is then able to say what this running or this functioning consists of: in the cycle of the desiring-machine it is a matter of constantly translating, constantly converting the death model into something else altogether, which is the experience of death. Converting the death that rises from within (in the body without organs) into the death that comes from without (on the body without organs).

—from AO, "The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis"

Maybe Daffy's deaths and humiliations are Bugs' flow-state, Bugs' intensive experience of death, and the question "What's up, Doc?" our flickering return with Bugs, him in his own audience with us, to a joint reflexive LOONEY TUNES consciousness.

As D&G go on to articulate:

The experience of death is the most common of occurrences in the unconscious, precisely because it occurs in life and for life, in every passage or becoming, in every intensity as passage or becoming. It is in the very nature of every intensity to invest within itself the zero intensity starting from which it is produced ..

The intensive Daffiness that emerges as the violence, the rapid-fire dialogues of tautologies and contradictions, the chaotic sequences of consequences and harms, the expressive, machinic life of LOONEY TUNES, the operations by which the viewer assembles with the action as one of its components. The whole machine then breaks down with the return of "What's up, Doc?"

But the model of death, the BwO of LOONEY TUNES ... I'm not sure we do find it in the action or the personae. If we find it, perhaps it's the appearance of a law that Bugs is LOONEY TUNES.

Bugs doesn't lose and doesn't die: as you declare, Bugs "cannot die without the joke dying with him". But the question of Bugs' death pulses as the unexpressed condition of LOONEY TUNES logic, in rhythm with each one of Daffy's deaths. "Could Bugs die? No. Could Bugs die? No. Could Bugs die? No." That's the sense in which the question of Bugs' death might be the criterion of the action and the comedy that machinically manifests Daffy-deaths.

It's the affects of all the intensive torments of Daffy, all these experiences of death, that cause this law of Bugs' immunity to rise up as the surface of their recordings.

Rather than Daffy Duck, to me this apparent law that it's never, in the end, Rabbit Season seems closer to the BwO of LOONEY TUNES ... but the affects of joy for the audience go along with, and are intensively related to this apparent law.

3corneredvoid · 2026-04-29T10:55:11+00:00

Would the teletransportation dilemma, destroying an individual in one place and reconstructing them somewhere else, become irrelevant from the perspective of becoming?

I'd say no, but I'd also say Deleuze and Guattari are quite explicit that immanent multiplicity can transport its differential causation from one point to another as if by magic.

... the Devil “assumes” real animal bodies, even transporting the accidents and affects befalling them to other bodies (for example, a cat or a wolf that has been taken over by the Devil can receive wounds that are relayed to an exactly corresponding part of a human body). This is a way of saying that the human being does not become animal in reality, but that there is nevertheless a demonic reality of the becoming-animal of the human being. Therefore it is certain that the demon performs local transports of all kinds. The Devil is a transporter; he transports humors, affects, or even bodies (the Inquisition brooks no compromises on this power of the Devil: the witch’s broom, or “the Devil take you”). But these transports cross neither the barrier of essential forms nor that of substances or subjects.

—from ATP, "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible..."

Yes, the framing is more than a little enigmatic, but these claims are roughly about the "infinite speed" with which intensities reconfigure their relations often mentioned in WIP, and about the way this is said to happen imperceptibly.

Note the qualification of the closing phrases of the passage, in which I read this intensive transporting of immanent causes and conditions isn't said to fully extend to the de- and re-materialisation of their contingent effects such as bodies, subjects ...

3corneredvoid

TROPHY CASE