“it’s worth remembering some of Deleuze’s key ideas. There is, for example, his famous point that philosophy is the creation of concepts. Without the creation of new concepts, there can be no thinking with a difference, no line of flight in thought. Second, and closely related to this, Deleuze proposed that concepts are tools of analysis, not recognition.”
“True to his word, Deleuze left behind a vibrant conceptual apparatus — the “line of flight” is one of them — with some of his concepts (and the ones he coined with his friend and writing partner, Félix Guattari) taking the form of conceptual connectives: deterritorialization and reterritorialization, smooth space and striated space, the molar and the molecular, majoritarian and minoritarian. These are not to be confused with dualistic pairs. Rather each holds an immanent relation to the other, with the one contained within the other (where the majoritarian can turn into the minoritarian and vice versa).”
“Indeed, Deleuze was a committed philosopher of immanence. One of his biggest contributions on this count was to resuscitate the concept of difference from the grip of identity politics. He developed a concept of difference that dismantled the hierarchical character of dualisms such as being/nonbeing, man/woman, human/animal, black/white, and so on. As a thinker of positive difference-in-itself (rather than the negative difference between, say, a man and a woman), Deleuze complicates how difference is thought, challenging along with it the status that nonbeing occupies in the Western philosophical tradition. Put simply, Deleuze affirms nonbeing. He pursues a positive nonbeing that is not understood within the negative parameters of lack or the absence of presence (a man is not what a woman lacks, and vice versa). Rather, he insists nonbeing is inherent to being. It is the creative potential of life (the life of a man and a woman) to exceed what currently is.”
“In asking how a practice may enhance or diminish a being’s capacity or power to act, Deleuze was intrigued by the problem of autonomy. How are the flows of life — bodies, commodities, money, finance, matter, ideas, language — socially structured and unstructured (“coded” and “decoded,” in Deleuze and Guattari’s language)?”
“The current situation demands that new concepts are created. But make no mistake: as new concepts are put to work, they don’t explain contemporary practices and experiences — it is the concepts themselves that require explanation. That is, one must explain (transcendentally) the conditions that give rise to new concepts. And it is through this process that philosophers grapple with the potential of actual experience (empiricism) to create a difference.”
“Transcendental empiricism offers a critical tool when it comes to shifting the dial from the nihilism of despair to the richness of experience. Instead of using universals such as individual rights to assess how life is practiced, Deleuze invites us to creatively engage with actually existing conditions adequate to the production of real differences: for example, differences that generate an outside to the axiomatic of capital and the violent affects of capital’s movement; differences that come from a consideration for how agency works; experimental and untimely differences that break apart mechanisms of capture; differences that operate as a revolutionary force on the outskirts of history.”
“The singular nonbeing of Deleuze prompts us to rise to the challenge of thinking differently in an effort to create a future that differs from the present. Put otherwise, to embrace the futurity within our midst by affirming the potentiality conditioning the present.”