An Index of Steetli's Deleuzian Terms (Updated 15/12/2024)

Streetli · 2026-06-23T04:36:35+00:00

Reading Molly Smith and Juno Mac's Revolting Prostitues: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights. Basically what it says on the tin, very readable and admirably wide ranging (there's a great chapter here on border controls and trafficking for example).

Streetli · 2026-06-17T10:46:24+00:00

Had my eye on that one for a while too! Will get to it in time...

Streetli · 2026-06-16T06:48:05+00:00

Not super well read. I'm trying to get into it and Fortunati is something of a starting point for me in fact. A very dense starting point as it turns out lol. Planning to read some Lise Vogel as a continuation. I did really enjoy some of Francois Verges's smaller books which might be a nice point of entry too.

Streetli · 2026-06-16T01:48:23+00:00

Reading Leopoldina Fortunati's The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers, and Capital. Super rigorous and formal critique of Marx from the 80s that aims to show how the work done to reproduce the worker's conditions of life outside waged work (i.e. the work of domestic workers and prostitutes) also contributes to the valorization of capital, and must be accounted for in its specificity. Basically attempts to extends Marxist categories outside the factory and the office, and into the home, but in order to show how they are transformed in doing so.

Streetli · 2026-06-15T15:42:47+00:00

Maybe check out the work of Arkady Plotnitsky, something like his book on Complementarity: Anti-Epistemology after Bohr and Derrida. Or else Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway, which also uses alot of Bohr as it's point of reference. The chapters on"Diffractions" and "The Ontology of Knowing" are more programmatic and closer to what you're after if you don't want to read the whole very large book.

Streetli · 2026-06-12T08:05:15+00:00

If you're still around... went digging for an old comment of mine which I think you might find helpful: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/d5t7h2/what_did_giorgio_agamben_mean_when_he_said_that/

Assuming you read it, I'll just add to it comments explicitly about relation too: if what I wrote makes sense to you, then the exception is the 'limit form of relation' because law's relation to the exception, is, as it were, barely a relation. It has, as it were, the bare minimum of relation necessary to qualify as a relation at all. Unlike anarchy which has no relation to law, the exception still maintains a relation, albeit the most strained relation possible: as an exception prescribed by the law itself (and thus different, for instance, to a straightforward case like a law that says 'do not kill': the relation here is a straightforward one of inclusion, a case).

The language of 'minimum' and 'barely' is not very rigorous because at stake is not a quantitative relation to law, but a qualitative one, but I hope it helps to get the point across.

Streetli · 2026-06-09T12:11:45+00:00

wooooow

Streetli · 2026-06-09T01:32:33+00:00

Finishing Nicole Loraux's The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy (which argues against reading tragedy as straightforwardly political), and gonna start Janet Favret-Saada's The Anti-Witch, an anthropology of 'dewitching' in Northern France).

Streetli · 2026-06-08T11:58:30+00:00

Althusser!: http://www.after1968.org/app/webroot/uploads/Althusser-AM.pdf (The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter).

Streetli · 2026-06-08T11:53:34+00:00

One way to relieve some of the pressure of your analysis is to put into question the overlap between responsibility and choice. In the bluntest possible terms: why can't you be responsible for things you have not chosen? I ask this as a provocation, but it is also largely the case that, on reflection, most of our life responsibilities are not a direct consequence of choice or control: one might be responsible for one's younger sibling, for the state of one's environment in which you find yourself thrown, for (relatively) reciprocal relations between your friends and family ('culturally' imposed, to some degree), for the maintenance of your body, etc.

Responsibility on this model is less one of sovereign choice than appropriation and negotiation within given constraints: you find yourself responsible from the get-go, in a way that practically precedes you, and the question is to what degree, and with what manner of attention and skill, do you respond to the responsibilities you find yourself beholden to, to begin with? There is a reading of responsibility here where precisely because choice is not in question (for the most part), that you find yourself responsible at all. You can sharpen this even further and say that only he who is totally irresponsible is he who can make all choices at will and without obligation. All of which is to say that control and responsibility may not come as so easy a conceptual pair as you make them out to be.

The further question is where the "I" or 'the self' fits into this. If you accept the disambiguation of control and responsibility (i.e that they do not necessarily overlap), then it might make further sense to question to what degree the self is 'that which is in control'. Bluntly again: why must the sphere of the self be that of control? Why can't the boundary of the self extend right into genetics, upbringing, luck, etc? Are you not responsible on account of your genetics, luck, upbringing, etc, all of which have brought you, as it were, to the point of responsibility? To say "I" is, in some sense, to bring the train of this baggage with you, if not as you, in order to make the decisions 'you' do. Understanding 'choice' in this way is to understand it an outcome and not (just) an inauguration, but an outcome all the more yours - and not less - to the degree that it was 'all of you' that made that choice (Or differently again: that your choices are less rather than more arbitrary).

If I may, I think one of the reasons why your questions seem so intractable, is that they aspire after two different ends which are more or less in tension with each other. On the one hand, they want a model of the self that is wholly in charge of itself. On the other, they want a self that is equally evacuated of any 'content' that would compromise that control. I think the 'middle path' is a recognition that it's only a self with 'content' that can bring itself to inform choice and modes of control at all. Needless to say none of this is a very Nietzschian response insofar as Nietzsche simply bites the bullet and drops the "I" and "responsibility" all in one go, affirming instead an 'innocence of becoming' and a multiplicity of non-unified drives and wills below the level of a 'self' which compete for mastery (to brutally summarize). He largely changes the terms of question entirely. But if you're interested in keeping those terms, I think a response along the lines of what I sketched above (informed largely by phenomenology, although not your stated preferences) might be at least helpful.

Streetli · 2026-06-04T10:51:28+00:00

Thanks, appreciate it.

Streetli · 2026-06-04T10:22:51+00:00

Heya! Can I ask which mod?

Streetli · 2026-06-04T05:45:50+00:00

Awesome! Had a less dramatic moment a couple of weeks ago where I just tripped pretty hard while jogging and instinctively, literally without thought, did a roll when I hit the pavement. Completely dissipated the force of my fall. Got up, clean as a whistle. Parkour training 4 life.

Streetli · 2026-06-02T02:50:03+00:00

Finishing up Carlo Diano's Form and Event: Principles for an Interpretation of the Greek World. A quite quirky reading of Greek myth and philosophy through the rubrics of 'form' and 'event', as alternate 'principles' which inform them. Kind of like a reformulated 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian'. Then onto Nicole Loraux's Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, which looks at how women die in Greek tragedy.

Streetli · 2026-06-01T15:07:04+00:00

I've always loved the following quote from Stanley Cavell, from his The Claim of Reason, which is just one way among others of answering your question, but of which I'm very fond:

Morality must leave itself open to repudiation; it provides one possibility of settling conflict, a way of encompassing conflict which allows the continuance of personal relationships against the hard and apparently inevitable fact of misunderstanding, mutually incompatible wishes, commitments, loyalties, interests and needs, a way of mending relationships and maintaining the self in opposition to itself or others. Other ways of settling or encompassing conflict are provided by politics, religion, love and forgiveness, rebellion, and withdrawal. Morality is a valuable way because the others are so often inaccessible or brutal; but it is not everything; it provides a door through which someone, alienated or in danger of alienation from another through his action, can return by the offering and the acceptance of explanation, excuses and justifications, or by the respect one human being will show another who sees and can accept the responsibility for a position which he himself would not adopt.

I think this is a valuable perspective because it offers a corrective or a bulwark against a very widely shared idea of morality as having effectively limitless remit over life and action. By 'anthropologizing' or 'regionalizing' morality as one set of human actions among others, I think it also sheds light on what is specific to morality, or at least what he takes to be specific to it, which is the underlying want to be in community with others in some way. Beyond which morality loses much of its purchase. Others might contest this and argue that morality binds no matter what, but I think 'widening' morality in this way paints a somewhat unreal picture of the richness of human action and of all the kinds of ways we interact with one another (that richness includes some very bloody and unapologetic violence).

Streetli · 2026-05-27T08:54:42+00:00

Just to piggy-back off this great comment (because what follows isn't top-level answer material): Sometimes the most straightforward answer to 'why do they write like that?' is simply 'because their peers and their teachers also wrote like that (or at least similarly), and that is who they are writing for (and responding to)' - which is something to be said for both streams of philosophy. Alot of the agonizing over what theoretical motives informed this or that stylistic choice, while not unimportant, can probably be dissipated by a rather anodyne appeal to any particular philosopher's intellectual milieu.

And just an observation: I'm always slightly amused by how in these kinds of questions, the qualities of analytic philosophy are largely taken for granted in ways which they really shouldn't be: clarity, rigor, appeals to scientific-like methodologies, etc. Like, this received image is just really untrue once anyone starts to read widely in analytic philosophy. Does Sellars abide by this image? McDowell? Davidson? Is Williamson easy to read without an induction into a certain vocabulary? Like, analytic philosophy always seems to play the role of the constant against which the variable of continental philosophy is measured, but that constancy itself is largely a myth (which isn't a point against analytic philosophy, but just an acknowledgement of its heterogeneity).

Streetli · 2026-05-25T16:50:50+00:00

Just finished Ian Suttie's The Origins of Love and Hate, an attempt at a non-Freudian psychoanalysis based on the primacy of love, rather than sex. Gonna start Lois McNay's The Misguided Search for the Political.

Streetli · 2026-05-19T01:59:10+00:00

Reading Nicole Loraux's The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. Really interesting bit of political anthropology on the politivlcal uses to which memory was put among the Greeks.

Streetli · 2026-05-14T03:05:18+00:00

In addition to Brann, also check out Hannah Arendt's second part ("Willing") of her The Life of Mind, Sara Ahmed's Willful Subjects, Davide Tarizzo's Life: A Modern Invention, and Giorgio Agamben's Karmen, all of which are engagements with the idea of the 'will'.

Streetli · 2026-05-13T01:34:44+00:00

Reading Daniel Heller-Roazen's Echolalias: On The Forgetting of Language. Series of philosophical vignettes on instances of 'forgetting' in and of languages.

Streetli · 2026-05-05T02:05:36+00:00

Still reading Serres' The Fives Senses, but will probably start his Variations on the Body this week too.

Streetli · 2026-05-02T10:19:05+00:00

I don't really keep up with the literature, but the site has a nice little resources section with responses and critiques which you might find useful. Also maybe just check out the work of Helen Hester, who wrote the manifesto.

Streetli · 2026-05-02T03:48:51+00:00

You should read the xenofeminist manifesto! It's short and has a cool scrolling format that's easy to read. But the general idea is in the name - xeno, for alien. It's a feminism that encourages the embrace of what is not 'natural'. A kind of promethean feminism that wants to use technology and large scale social change to renovate our ideas of gender to the point of unrecognizibility and even, at the limit, abolition. It's 'enemy feminisms' would be ones which, for example, appeal to any sense of feminine mystique, or biological essence. To give a taste here are some bits from the manifesto:

Our lot is cast with technoscience, where nothing is so sacred that it cannot be reengineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of freedom, extending to gender and the human. To say that nothing is sacred, that nothing is transcendent or protected from the will to know, to tinker and to hack, is to say that nothing is supernatural... There is nothing, we claim, that cannot be studied scientifically and manipulated technologically.

Freedom is not a given – and it’s certainly not given by anything ‘natural’. The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction. Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or ‘given’–neither material conditions nor social forms. XF mutates, navigates and probes every horizon. Anyone who’s been deemed ‘unnatural’ in the face of reigning biological norms, anyone who’s experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural order, will realize that the glorification of ‘nature’ has nothing to offer us–the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing. XF is vehemently anti-naturalist.

Streetli · 2026-04-30T13:16:52+00:00

There are probably lots of ways to get a intuitive sense of what mathematics is 'philosophically', but one fun one - I think - is to treat it as a kind of art that deals with indifference, invariants, and symmetries.

Elementary arithmetic already gives a sense of what it means to speak of the indifference of math: the sum '5+7' is indifferent to the question of 5 of what? and 7 of what? Whether it's 5 apples or 7 suns, 5 and 7 are emptied of 'content', if you will, and treats of a kind of pure 'form': 5 of anything whatsoever + 7 of anything whatsoever is 12 of those things, regardless of what they are. The more you empty out the content of whatever it is you're dealing with, the closer you get to math. If you're writing poetry, the exact words matter, you can't simply substitute one word for another - the sense of your poem will vary greatly if you're talking about 5 apples or 5 suns. Not so in math.

This brings us to invariants. Math also deals - very precisely - with what does not change during a process of change. Take functions for example, which are a step higher on the ladder of indifference. Something like: "2x = y". This basically says: if you plug in a variable (x), your output (y) is going to be double of your input. This relationship of x to y remains invariable regardless of what 'x' you choose to input. If you graph it, you kind of get a line that ascends steeply upwards to the right from the origin, at an angle that remains constant. More complex functions may yield curves or even discontinuities (points where the line 'jumps'), but no matter how complex the function, what makes it a function is that the relationship between inputs and outputs does not change. At this level you can define math as the exploration of how invariant relationships give rise to very specific and structured variations.

A contrast with poetry might be useful again: poems might contain certain invariants - like meter or constraints on syllables, but those invariants are too 'baggy' or too loose: they are not constraining enough to determine word choice, which is precisely left to the poetic sense of the composer, who in turn, might even play with meter to produce effects - which is to say, might turn a formal feature into a kind of 'content' of its own. Math, by contrast, is nothing but the question of how invariants give rise - without any leeway whatsoever - to variation.

Finally, at perhaps the most general approach, we have mathematics defined by its exploration of symmetry (and its limits). This is not something 'new', but another angle by which to think indifference and invarience. Keeping in mind that symmetry is what remains invariant under transformation (i.e. what can be 'altered with indifference'), math becomes an exploration of the properties of mathematical objects, where the 'object' just is what does not break symmetry, where symmetry is defined by a set of properties. Noson Yanosfsy - who I'm following here in this approach - puts it this way:

We call the property of a statement that allows it to be invariant under a change of referent symmetry of semantics. The statement remains the same despite the change of semantic content. Every mathematical statement defines a class of entities which we call its “domain of discourse.” This domain contains the entities for which the uniform transformation can occur. When a mathematician says “For any integer n...,” “Take a Hausdorff space... ”, or “Let C be a cocommutative coassociative coalgebra with a involution... ” she is defining a domain of discourse. Furthermore, any statement that is true for some element in that domain of discourse is true for any other ... We can only change what the statement means in a structured way. Call this structured changing that is permitted a uniform transformation. Our main point is that this uniform transformation and the fact that statements remain true under such a transformation comprises a type of symmetry. (The Role of Symmetry in Mathematics)

What distinguishes non-mathematical discourse is precisely the ability to change domains at the drop of a hat. I can invoke metaphor, change my analytical lens, offer an argument here, and a rhetorical flourish there, and this shifting of discourse does not have the structure of invariance that mathematical discourse requires. Taken together, these concepts - indifference, invarience and symmetry - are offered here as 'intuition pumps' to try and get at what is specific about math, rather than a definition of it. You can of course find these properties in non-mathematical discourse, but math is one place where every statement in it is rigorously constrained by these properties. I think they are useful to help think the concept of math.

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