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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote

Just read this one and then found out it wasn't Bellamy who posted, but had already started typing up a response, so here it is. I also posted it directly to their website.

Hey, somebody posted this to raddle, and when I found out it wasn't you I thought I would reply here directly also.

In short, it's minimally an argument that you can't include Deleuze among the social constructionists, especially with regards to

the idea of a linguistically-constructed, relativized view of reality as well as a suggestion that you'd benefit from engaging Deleuze's metaphysics further, since it's unique among the general group of people called post-structuralists in not rejecting metaphysics like people down Nietzsche's line do.

Deleuzians don't deny reality altogether at all, and one of the major pushbacks you see from Deleuzians against people like Derrida are on this point. That's what the entire new field of New Materialisms has been about, driven by realists like DeLanda and Massumi, both Deleuzians. Realism is alive and well among Deleuzians. Have you read Deleuze yet, or those two major Deleuzians?

SC is internally incoherent. It claims on the one hand that one cannot truly rise above convention, indoctrination, and relativity in order to attempt (however partially) a sober, universal, trans-historical and cross-cultural perspective. Yet it at the same time makes a sweeping and universal claim about what kind of knowledge is ever possible, and it bolsters its case through cross-cultural comparisons. It assumes the very privileged epistemic position that it claims does not exist!

Deleuze doesn't do this either.
Deleuze also has something we can understand like a god of sorts, like Spinoza's but different; the single substance, difference.

(This is part of why I like him more than Stirner, who I am admittedly much less familiar with)

If morals are relative and culturally contingent, why should we care about quashing political dissent within a society, since there is no clear framework for critiquing a culture internally?

Deleuze has clear frameworks. They are anti-authoritarian, driven by a meta-ethical critique of particular ways of doing ethics, not a rejection of ethics or value outright and definitely not an embracing of any kinds of moral relativism. (It's also an ethical critique of the form of thought, or he would call "the dogmatic image of thought", that comes about when we give primacy to sameness over difference in our metaphysics)

I've actually always been surprised by your take on Stirner, because I'm under the impression that Stirner is not very different, but I haven't read him so I couldn't say definitively.

Foucault is in many ways a shitshow who US (and anglophone to some extent) academia took on strongly along with Derrida for a range of reasons, one being they are both easier to read because they don't require much metaphysical revolution to get hold of. (Derrida though more because of how Spivak drove his popularisation by translating him etc.).

Reflecting on the astounding implications of the quantum physics revolution – which has revealed that ‘matter’ as we typically think of it does not exist ‘out there’ before we go to look for it – the great physicist Werner Heisenberg (1981, p. 34) declared in 1967, “I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato.

Gonna throw this in there; Deleuze's metaphysics was built with astrophysics in mind, in order for there to be productive engagement between the two.
That said, I love Plato also and he is probably my second-most familiar philosopher, but I think that there are very productive interactions to be had between Plato and Deleuze and that that begins with Deleuze's engagement of Plato's Meno in his metaphysical magnum opus, Difference And Repetition.
(Casual readers who are not familiar with these things should know that Meno is about learning, pedagogy, whether goodness can be taught, and where knowledge comes from, among many other things)

Deleuze's cosmological approach is fundamentally of the same kind as Plato's as well.

It's also got metaphysical affinity with much of Daoism, especially the Daoism of the classical Daoist texts (especially the particularly wujun "without a prince" inner chapters of the Zhuangzi), and the later Daoism of the Wei-Jing era.

So that's my initial case. I'm interested to see how this affects your relation to anarchy in later posts.

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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote (edited )

Oh hey I just came across this blog elsewhere and posted it and see now that you've done so here. Welcome. I'm super interested to hear about your movement to perennial philosophy.

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