Gary,

as you know, I’ve been quiet for awhile, with one thing and another. Incidentally, when it is only you who is doing the writing the number of hits goes up. Interesting. Any ideas? But in any case I’ve been reading all your stuff on Klossowski, which has been really good, and I have a few comments.

The identity of the self depends on the history of the constantly modified body, which has a certain functional cohesion. But the identity of the social person called Nietzsche doesn’t just depend on the history of his body. Nietzsche is a certain functional cohesion. This particular functional cohesion, for some unspecified reason, comes to focus on that which is beyond the self, and its efforts are to liberate that which is beyond from functional constraint. Eventually, Nietzsche achieves his aim.

This idea of liberation is the focus of Lars Von Trier’s film The Idiots. Following Nietzsche, Trier’s thesis is that suffering is a prerequisite to final idiocy, ‘spazzing’, as they call it in the film (this is from memory, mind you). Only the woman who has lost everything can truly spaz.

There is also something of this idea in Kafka’s contention that there is no hope for us but there is an infinite amount of hope for the bunglers and the fools who live on at the margins, on the trash heaps, but are not really a part of this mess. For Kafka, there is no hope for any selves.

I don’t know what Klossowski thinks but the need to understand ourselves as agents that concerns you, Gary, is from my perspective an historical curse. I’m with Shakespeare here. Prospero marshals the forces of nature to overcome the social ill but then surrenders his power over those forces. Agency is of no value in itself.

I think Deleuze’s position, as you describe it, is oxymoronic. We cannot go beyond conceptual reason conceptually, certainly not by some kind of conceptual creation. Prospero uses concepts negatively, to assemble the forces of nature in order to bring an end to the rule of the concept.

Here is a difference between Deleuze and Adorno: the former sees philosophy as about creating concepts, the latter sees it as about getting rid of them. From Nietzsche And Philosophy, Deleuze has explicitly tried to practise philosophy non-dialectically, but it is only through dialectics that the concept can be overcome. This doesn’t end in an identity thesis, in dialectics being the new myth, the last and final universal concept, because for Adorno in the end dialectics itself must be overcome.

As Prospero learnt, without dialectics there is no agency. But when agency has achieved its task we must surrender the powers of agency. We have to know when to spaz. It’s not an intellectual achievement – Trier points that out. How must the human suffer to have such need of being a fool! said Nietzsche. Suffering and dialectics go together.