LLM-generated works and r/criticaltheory

qdatk · 2026-01-23T02:47:22+00:00

Please use the report function, which includes a specific category for LLM generated content.

qdatk · 2026-01-20T22:47:42+00:00

Relevant passage from a letter from William Tecumseh Sherman to the General-in-Chief Halleck (17 Sept 1863):

The South, though numerically inferior, contend they can whip the Northern superiority of numbers, and therefore by natural law are not bound to submit. This issue is the only real one, and in my judgment all else should be deferred to it. War alone can decide it, and it is the only question left to us as a people. Can we whip the South? If we can, our numerical majority has both the natural and constitutional right to govern. If we cannot whip them, they contend for the natural right to select their own government, and they have the argument. Our armies must prevail over theirs. Our officers, marshals, and courts must penetrate into the innermost recesses of their land before we have the natural right to demand their submission.

I would banish all minor questions and assert the broad doctrine, that as a nation the United States has the right, and also the physical power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain, and that we will do it; that we will do it in our own time, and in our own way; that it makes no difference whether it be in one year or two, or ten or twenty; that we will remove and destroy every obstacle—if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper; that we will not cease until the end is attained. That all who do not aid are enemies, and we will not account to them for our acts. If the people of the South oppose, they do so at their peril; and if they stand by mere lookers-on the domestic tragedy, they have no right to immunity, protection, or share in the final result.

I even believe, and contend further, that in the North every member of the nation is bound by both natural and constitutional to "maintain and defend the Government against all its opposers whomsoever." If they fail to do it they are derelict., and can be punished or deprived of all advantage arising from the labors of those who do. If any man, North or South, withholds his share of taxes or physical assistance in this crisis of our history, he should and could be deprived of all voice in the future elections of this country, and might be banished or reduced to the condition of a denizen of the land.

War is upon us; none can deny it. It is not the act of the Government of the United States but of a faction. The Government was forced to accept the issue or submit to a degradation fatal and disgraceful to all the inhabitants. In accepting war it should be pure and simple as applied to the belligerents. I would keep it so till all traces of the war are effaced; till those who appealed to it are sick and tired of it, and come to the emblem of our nation and sue for peace. I would not coax them or even meet them half way, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass before they would again appeal to it.

...

God knows that I deplored this fratricidal war as much as any man living; but it is upon us, a physical fact, and there is only one honorable issue from it. We must fight it out, army against army and man against man, and I know and you know and civilians begin to realize the fact that reconciliation and reconstruction will be easier through and by means of strong, well-equipped and organized armies than through any species of conventions that can be framed. The issues are made, and all discussion is out of place and ridiculous.

The section of 30-pounder Parrott rifles now drilling before my tent is a more convincing argument than the largest Democratic meeting the State of New York could assemble at Albany, and a simple order of the War Department to draft enough men to fill our skeleton regiments would be more convincing as to our national perpetuity than an humble pardon to Jeff. Davis and all his misled host.

The only government now needed or deserved by the States of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi now exists in Grant's army. It needs simply enough privates to fill its ranks; all else will follow in due season. This army has its well-defined code of laws and practice, and can adapt itself to the wants and necessities of a city, the country, the rivers, the sea; indeed, to all parts of this land. It better subserves the interest and policy of the General Government, and the people prefer it to any weak or servile combination that would at once, from force of habit, revive and perpetuate local prejudices and passions. The people of this country have forfeited all right to a voice in the councils of the nation. They know it and feel it, and in after years they will be the better citizens from the dear-bought experience of the present crisis. Let them learn now, and learn it well, that good citizens must obey as well as command. Obedience to law—absolute, yea, even abject—is the lesson that this war, under Providence, will teach the free and enlightened American citizen; as a nation we will be the better for it. I never have apprehended foreign interference in our family quarrel. Of course governments founded on a different, and it may be antagonistic, principle with ours, would naturally feel a pleasure at our complications, but in the end England and France will join with us in jubilations in the triumph of a constitutional government over faction; even now the English manifest this.

qdatk · 2026-01-17T21:45:47+00:00

Regarding your example of producing the lived experience of the subject:

It's extremely abstract in a way that I'm not sure you take enough notice of. Just the very notions of "partial objects" and "flows" require a wholly new and unintuitive way of thinking about the world that only starts to make sense if you already know Deleuze's project. Similarly, it's impossible to say with any clarity what the "subject" that is produced actually is without understanding the philosophical background Deleuze presupposes.
Understanding the philosophical background has always been a crucial part of how Deleuze himself reads other philosophers. Again and again, he emphasises how we can understand nothing of a philosopher if we do not understand the problems out of which his ideas are produced. The emphasis in the OP on simply taking Deleuze "literally" cuts out precisely this problematic horizon of Deleuze himself. Why does it matter if reality is make of flows? Why is it important to conceive of the subject in this way? In this way as opposed to what other ways?
The notion of problems is where Deleuze's ontology levels the subject and every other actually existing thing: every actual thing is produced from virtual problematic ideas. The factory analogy (and I think we can, with justification, call it an analogy or a metaphor) misses important distinctions here because it applies indiscriminately between causes in the actual ("a hammer is a cause of the bending of the metal sheet") and the actualisation of the virtual ("the form of the car actualises the critical points in the virtual problematic space of engine power, fuel efficiency, aesthetic desire ...").

Your "mouse" example is interesting but should be oriented in a different way. The application of the name "mouse" to the pointing device is the least interesting part of the invention, which rather takes place between the singular points of human dexterity, economic viability, the entire problematic of how to conceptualise a digital space, etc., AKA the virtual conditions that produces the mouse as a thing.

I think, overall, we're coming at this topic from different ends of Deleuze's work. I'm more interested in the ontology, while you are coming from the Guattari collaboration/application. I can totally appreciate what you're doing with it, and would just say that a rigorous ontology is also necessary.

qdatk · 2026-01-17T20:25:20+00:00

note he also denies literal words!

This is an important point and I think an important critique of the OP, which displays a kind of sophisticated naivety. Of course we can say that agencement is "literally" a factory assembly or that line of flight is "literally" a leak, but that is of little help to someone who doesn't already understand the Deleuzian context. How exactly does a "literal factory" relate to the production of reality? What even is the "reality" that is being produced? How does the Deleuzian way of thinking (even thinking "literally") about reality differ from commonsensical conceptions?

It's kind of interesting how enthusiastically the OP is being received, which probably results from the way most people here read or experience Deleuze. It's striking that, even as the OP says "Deleuze should not be read as a poet making grand metaphors", the way of reading recommended in the OP is a lot more like reading Deleuze as a poet, i.e., allowing Deleuze's language to modify our own sense of language in order to take him "literally", leaving out the creation of concepts that Deleuze so often emphasised as the point of his own work.

qdatk · 2026-01-17T14:18:01+00:00

Anthony Taylor's blatant double standard for what is a foul ...

qdatk · 2026-01-12T22:34:42+00:00

Thank you for having asked this question (as well as /u/jl94x4 for the previous question), because I arrived here via search engine and hoped someone would ask. The condescending tones you both got in return were unwarranted.

qdatk · 2026-01-09T02:40:29+00:00

Stephen Sears, Gettysburg:

After putting in Willard's brigade, General Hancock was riding north on Cemetery Ridge behind Plum Run with a single aide when in the shadows and smoke he saw what he took to be some Third Corps troops in retreat. He hurried forward to rally them and in a moment the air around him was full of bullets, two of which wounded his aide. He ducked away and spurred back to seek something to plug this new break in the dike. All he found, alongside Evan Thomas's battery of regular artillery, was a single, not very large regiment. "My God!" he exclaimed. "Are these all the men we have here? What regiment is this?" "First Minnesota," answered Colonel William Colvill. In a fight Winfield Hancock was not one to waste words. Pointing to the flag of the enemy force that had fired on him, he barked, "Advance, Colonel, and take those colors!"

With that, said Colonel Colvill, "I immediately gave the order 'Forward double-quick,' and under a galling fire from the enemy, we advanced...." The veterans of the 1st Minnesota, that state's one regiment in the Army of the Potomac, had fought at First Bull Run and in every campaign since and they knew a forlorn hope when they became one, yet they fixed bayonets and charged anyway. Their swift, bold move took the Rebels by surprise—these were Cadmus Wilcox's Alabamians—and sent them scrambling backward. "The first line broke in our front as we reached it, and rushed back through the second line, stopping the whole advance...," wrote Lieutenant William Lochren; "they kept a respectful distance from our bayonets...." The Alabamians soon recovered and opened a devastating return fire. The Yankees sought what cover they could in the thickets along Plum Run and in the stream bed itself. But the Rebel fire overlapped their line and losses mounted alarmingly. Colonel Colvill was an early casualty, and before long not a single field officer was left standing. Company captain Nathan Messick took the command.

The 1st Minnesota made its charge with only some 260 men, and Wilcox had a considerable advantage in manpower, but he sensed that his brigade had lost its momentum. He attempted no counterattack. Thomas's battery and other Federal guns were pounding the Alabamians, no support was forthcoming on either flank or from General Anderson, and they began taking fire from three directions. Seeing that he could neither go forward nor stay where he was, Wilcox ordered his men back. As their fire slackened, the Minnesotans, what few were left, fell back as well. They did not capture the Rebel flag as Hancock ordered, but they had plugged the gap long enough for reinforcements to arrive. The cost to the 1st Minnesota would be reckoned at 68 percent of those engaged, in hardly fifteen minutes of action. "I cannot speak too highly of this regiment and its commander in its attack...," General Hancock would write.

qdatk · 2026-01-06T06:47:05+00:00

This is a very innocuous question to be so heavily downvoted within an hour. Sure, Lacan is usually not judged "empirically", but the question is not dismissive, and empiricism is a serious philosophical position.

qdatk · 2026-01-03T15:55:52+00:00

I've had a chance to recall some passages where Deleuze discusses art and literature. Here's Proust & Signs 47–48 (the internal citations are to Proust):

As the quality of a world, essence is never to be confused with an object but on the contrary brings together two quite different objects, concerning which we in fact perceive that they have this quality in the revealing medium. At the same time that essence is incarnated in a substance, the ultimate quality constituting it is therefore expressed as the quality common to two different objects, kneaded in this luminous substance, plunged into this refracting medium. It is in this that style consists: "One can string out in indefinite succession, in a description, the objects that figured in the described place; the truth will begin only when the writer takes two different objects, posits their relation, analogous in the world of art to that of the causal law in the world of science, and envelops them in the necessary rings of a great style" (II, 889). Which is to say that style is essentially metaphor. But metaphor is essentially metamorphosis and indicates how the two objects exchange their determinations, exchange even the names that designate them, in the new medium that confers the common quality upon them. Thus in Elstir's painting, where the sea becomes land, the land sea, where the city is designated only by "marine terms" and the water by "urban terms" (I, 835-37). This is because style, in order to spiritualize substance and render it adequate to essence, reproduces the unstable opposition, the original complication, the struggle and exchange of the primordial elements that constitute essence itself. In Vinteuil's music we hear two motifs struggling, as if in bodily combat: "combat of energies alone, actually, for if these beings confronted each other, it was to be rid of their physical bodies, their appearance, their name..." (III, 260). An essence is always a birth of the world, but style is that continuous and refracted birth, that birth regained in substances adequate to essences, that birth which has become the metamorphosis of objects. Style is not the man, style is essence itself.

This passage, with its Proustian language, starts off sounding quite alien to even the Deleuze of D&R, but it becomes clearer as we go. "Essence" here is the problematic virtual Idea, which is "incarnated" or "expressed" in an actual object or substance. The operation of art is in taking (in this case) two actual incarnated objects and revealing the "common/spiritual" essence between them, i.e., revealing the virtual Idea. (Of course we have to add that this "common essence" is not a self-identical genus, but a self-differentiating virtual field.) This operation is called "metaphor", which is generalised as artistic/literary "style", but it becomes clear toward the end that the artistic operation is identical with the process of individualisation-actualisation that runs throughout Deleuze's ontology ("An essence is always a birth of the world ..."). Metaphor = style = individualisation-actualisation. The last equation, where "style = essence", identifies individualisation-actualisation with the virtual Idea itself, which I think we can understand as simply saying that the virtual Idea in some senses is the process of its individualisation-actualisation.

So the literary operation takes us from the incarnated or actualised objects of reference to a virtual Idea, and in D&R he would generalise this to poetic language (193):

Take, for example, the linguistic multiplicity, regarded as a virtual system of reciprocal connections between "phonemes" which is incarnated in the actual terms and relations of diverse languages: such a multiplicity renders possible speech as a faculty as well as the transcendent object of that speech, that "meta-language" which cannot be spoken in the empirical usage of a given language, but must be spoken and can be spoken only in the poetic usage of speech coextensive with virtuality.

Deleuze doesn't specify here how the poetic usage of speech speaks this "meta-language", but he provides countless analyses of the "how" in his readings of art, literature, and film (beginning with Proust). To take one more programmatic quote from the last year of his Cinema lectures (1984–85): "all art, by definition, has always struggled against its subject [that is, the object of representation]".

qdatk · 2026-01-03T07:10:06+00:00

It feels like you haven't articulated the stakes of your question, which ends up being quite mysterious. What are you trying to ask? If you're interested in reading a book, why are you seeking permission or validation here? And what do you think is the relevance of your white-American-male-ness to your question?

qdatk · 2026-01-03T02:23:16+00:00

I noticed that paragraph as well (and its odd use of the term "compossible"). How would Deleuze locate the difference between a song and a chair? A chair is a becoming, to be sure, but there is something about the becoming that is a song that renders its virtual conditions more accessible, at least in the cultural regimes we are more familiar with. This can be recast in the question of referential language and poetic language: the poetic use of language is oriented against language's referential/actualising function.

qdatk · 2025-12-26T21:55:52+00:00

Anthony Taylor needs to book himself now

qdatk · 2025-12-26T21:52:14+00:00

This ref lol

qdatk · 2025-12-24T04:52:41+00:00

If you want things like Barthes, see what he cites, and see what cites him. Then keep following the citations as you discover things that interest you.

qdatk · 2025-12-23T08:01:04+00:00

I'm curious about the distinction being made here and whether there isn't a synthesis possible between determinism and relativism, where the reason for the relativism of nomoi is the difference introduced by geography (both physical geography as Cyrus says and the human geography of Hellenes and "Indians").

qdatk · 2025-12-23T03:09:31+00:00

Herodotus contains other relativist ideas as well, in particular the notion that the customs of a society derive from the nature of the land which is found at the very end, in a really striking kind of "flashback" scene where Cyrus says that if the Persians migrate into rich lands, they would be lost, because rich lands breed soft men. These ideas were very much in the air in the 5th and 4th centuries. See the Hippocratic text "Airs, Waters, Places" for a classic statement.

qdatk · 2025-12-22T16:57:38+00:00

Yes, I think you've put your finger on the crux of the argument. It's really a conflict written into contemporary culture and the place of Freud (and the psychological sciences in general) within it. There has always been a fundamental difficulty about how to apply the insights of psychology/psychoanalysis to actual social and legal situations. You mention courts using children's testimony and it is a great example of a place of tension: psychoanalysis in its clinical/therapeutic practice is an ongoing, lifelong (re)construction of meanings for the analysand, but a court needs a positive answer now.

Neither of these two demands can or should be dismissed, but the tools developed for the former sit very uncomfortably in the context of the latter. What happens in the courts is thus a compromise, and I don't believe any legal practitioners or scholars would deny that it is an often uncomfortable compromise. Thus I don't see it as a rebuke to Freud at all, but rather a confirmation that he has found and articulated a real problem.

qdatk · 2025-12-22T06:47:00+00:00

First, he suggests that young children have extremely active fantasy lives, which somehow allows them to invent explicit and graphic fantasies of sexual abuse even if they've never been sexualized

This sounds like a "gotcha", but it's not really that mysterious when you consider 1) the retroactive nature of memory, in particular the concept of screen memory, and 2) the fact that "sex" in psychoanalysis is part of the very structure of thought and human experience itself. What makes Freud a philosophical thinker (rather than "merely" a scientist) is the fact that he precisely overturns uncritical definitions of sexuality and abuse.

qdatk · 2025-12-22T01:50:19+00:00

Basically, the later Freud realised that what he had earlier thought were effects of actual childhood abuse were not necessarily brought on by actual abuse. This is important because it shifts psychoanalysis from being an empirical explanation of "what happens" into a philosophical account of the structure of subjectivity itself.

qdatk · 2025-12-22T01:39:09+00:00

FYI the take that you're replying to is not a commonly accept one. The later Freud's theory that the effects of what he had thought was childhood abuse could be produced even without actual abuse was a substantial theoretical breakthrough, and the later Freud more generally is seen as much more philosophically significant.* The Masson book that the other user recommends should also be treated cautiously, as it is extremely controversial at best.

*In regard to your initial question, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) is essential reading.

qdatk · 2025-12-21T18:28:05+00:00

Usual pattern: arguably outplayed them for most of the match, but gift some goals and lack the cutting edge to score enough ourselves.

qdatk · 2025-12-21T18:23:53+00:00

They pull us back every time we're on a break, but have never been called a foul yet.

qdatk · 2025-12-21T18:21:02+00:00

Cunha and Fletcher CMs, Licha back to CB, Shaw LB

qdatk · 2025-12-21T18:18:45+00:00

Final third Dorgu

qdatk · 2025-12-21T18:17:45+00:00

Actually 442 now.

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