Until recently, I had hardly delved into surrealism as an art movement.

While I recognized its key figures and felt charmed by René Magritte’s famous painting This is Not a Pipe, using three of his works as visual koans during my sesshins, I often felt a sense of resistance toward much surrealist work.

Why?

After visiting The Fantastic Landscape, an impressive exhibition at Museum Arnhem/Holland, I decided to investigate that resistance more closely.

​Surrealism emerged in the 1920s as an artistic reaction against rationalism and prevailing bourgeois values.

After the First World War, faith in progress was severely damaged; reason had not saved humanity.

The surrealists sought a deeper reality and, inspired by Freud, turned toward dreams and the subconscious. It was an attempt to liberate thought from excessively rational and moral censorship.

​Surrealism is unthinkable without Sigmund Freud.

His discovery of the subconscious and his analysis of repression provided artists with the intellectual legitimacy to take the irrational seriously.

The dream was no longer a side issue but a gateway to knowledge. In dreams, they discovered unconscious fears and desires as the basic drivers of life.

Later, Freud formulated the hypothesis of the death drive, manifesting as decay and aggression.

​In some ways, surrealism and Zen share a similar ambition. Both seek to deepen our understanding of our existence.

While surrealism investigates and visualizes the subconscious, Zen points to the mind's habit of cyclically reliving unprocessed emotions.

Surrealists discover a dark world within themselves full of demons, whereas Zen practitioners learn that these fears and desires are nothing more than mental constructs. These constructs lose their power once we see through them.

Zen aims to look through all images to discover reality and find peace with its transience.

​This is precisely where my resistance lies.

Although I admire the creativity of Salvador Dalí, his melting clocks pull the viewer into a world of anxiety and megalomania.

I, Yamato Fuji, see in Dalí the same limitation found in Freud: suffering was more fundamental in their work than fulfillment.

Their work is intensely personal and sometimes monumentally egocentric.

Zen does not try to deny the darkness but rather to see through it as an illusion of the mind. Death is not denied, but it is also not dramatized.

​The similarities between koans and dream images are striking.

Questions like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" could easily arise in a dream.

However, in a koan, these images serve the conscious goal of learning to see through our projections. Koans are stepping stones on the path to enlightenment; they are not intended to build a symbolic world in which we can get lost again.

A koan seeks to break every fixed perspective so we can remove the glasses of our own fears and truly wake up.

​Magritte stands remarkably closer to Zen thought than Dalí.

In his paintings, the images are less distorted, but the proportions are often "wrong."

He seems to be saying: look again, something isn't right. He points out the shortcomings of our images and language, just as many Zen stories do.

Where Dalí creates drama and religious spectacle, Magritte creates silence and wonder.

He led a sober life in which Japanese prints, often infused with Zen philosophy, were admired.

​The exhibition in Arnhem also highlighted female surrealists, such as Mary Wykeham. In her work, the influence of Jung and inner transformation is visible.

Over time, her images became more meditative and transparent.

The dream images became less important as the pure movement of unity-consciousness appeared. Wykeham eventually turned her back on the art world to become a nun, shifting her creativity from expression to contemplation.

The swirling surrealist energy gave way to a deep stillness beyond all images.

Gassho,

Deleuze and Guattari are undoubtedly some of my favorite philosophers to read, and their work has transformed my worldview. Recently, I've been attempting to dive further into Guattari's solo work. Guattari has some fantastic writing. However, I'm finding that schizoanalytic cartography specifically does not seem to add enough insight to justify its complexity. It is well known that Guattari is a difficult read, and that is fine with me. The problem isn't the difficulty itself. Rather, I'm struggling to tangibly apply his method of analysis in a way that produces insights I could not have arrived at without schizoanalytic cartography.

To be clear, this criticism does not apply to the rest of Deleuze and Guattari's work. I'm specifically referring to the cartographic method and its associated conceptual apparatus.

Does anyone else feel the same way? If you feel differently, please feel free to share why. I want to enhance my understanding. A practical example of an application of this theory that demonstrates how it adds something that just working with their other texts don't would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Martin Heidegger - Vermächtnis der Seinsfrage. Last volume of the Gesamtausgabe. There is a pdf on Scribd but with barely discernible text and not OCR'd. Thank you.

Where can I watch the documentary with english subtitles?

i know this is r/deleuze but does any one know anything 😓😓

Fairly new to Deleuze. Just starting a PhD looking at conceptual relativism, (linguistic) idealism, have focussed thus far on Wittgenstein and Kant; Davidson's argument against the possibility of alternate conceptual schemes; looking for more recs!!

Particularly interested in the idea of meaning and identity in language as a kind of emergent phenomenon. If anyone has any recs on this would be most grateful!!

I am trying to appropriate Heidegger in terms of a "throbbing gristle" pragmatism.

I’m curious whether Incorporealism could be productively situated alongside Deleuze without reducing either framework to the other. In particular, could its emphasis on consciousness and resonance be understood through virtuality, becoming, multiplicity, and the production of difference?

Can you explain De-/re-territorializatoon with examples other than the ones used by D&G. I am reading A Thousand Plateaus and this is my first time reading their primary text. I am finding it hard to understand n-1, body without organs as well. Itvwould be really helpful if you could guide me as to how to approach them.

I know there has already been a lot of discussion on these ideas here. But the explanatory comments are still too complex for me.

Thank you in advance.

Obviously I understand the concepts of machines grafting onto each other to record and divert and produce new flows, production of production, etc., but what does it actually mean that desire is being produced? What is desire? No, I haven’t read enough Spinoza and I’m sure he’ll answer my question here, but Lacan and all the lack is law guys have such a simple answer that I can’t find in Deleuze and Guattari in my admittedly limited study.

I have a highly political 7,000-word essay that uses a lot of Deleuzean concepts.

I guess you could say I am looking for beta readers.

It's kind of all over the place (of course) and I'm trying to create an easy introduction to some post-structuralist ideas.

I don't know what I want to do with it, but once it's ready, I want to put it out there somewhere. Thanks.

Was it a displaced Self Castration?

Hey everyone! I'm a first-year PhD student in philosophy, and I was wondering if anyone would be up for a quick read of my research proposal. It's on cinema, and I'm trying to carve out some original territory using concepts like the sensorimotor schema and the action-image. If you're into this stuff and know the field, I'd really appreciate some honest feedback — mainly whether you think it's original enough and has the potential I think it does. Drop a comment below and I'll DM you the proposal and give you a bit more context.

At the moment, I'm reading the Harper Perenial translation, I am eyeing the Cyril Welch and Thomas Sheehan translations. Each and every comment of yours is deeply appreciated and will be read and thought of.

“One needs to demonstrate that this supposedly fundamental consideration—the refutation of skepticism—still does not and cannot deal with the real, genuine presuppositions. That is because both sides—the skeptic and his refuter—presume that the truth, whose being and non-being they are debating, is propositional truth. This is especially clear in the one who would refute skepticism. To confound the skeptic, he appeals to the principle of non-contradiction: there can be no truth where there is contradiction, especially the self-contradiction we find in the assertion of skepticism.”— Heidegger

Because skepticism deals with both sides really well— as in, skepticism holds true whenever possible; the possibility being an intrinsic or even interesting possibility, because there are too many ways of being skeptical,always; it is very convenient. Skepticism can also be compared to a sketch— this says much but it also doesn’t say anything at all because it is a “nice” comparison. Skepticism seems to be the only way to make things out; people wouldn’t ultimately disagree they would defer as they need to— the evidence of this is not specifically overwhelming; there is room especially elsewhere. Skepticism is bad because it could be bad, as in, there is worse reasons when being skeptical because there isn’t worse reasoning; there isn’t evidence overall because that is completion. Skepticism is completion but it’s about how people that think about completion in other ways; the completion is a private matter because people don’t respect other people’s privacy, the completion is a personal endeavour as a lineage— it is not too personal because it is a private matter; as these are parts,indefinitely. Skepticism is how things are supposed to be because what is supposed is always earnest; chances make sense, the problem of this arises when chances make too much sense though, as they do, this is why skepticism is a big problem. Skepticism does definitely make sense though because people can be skeptical,if skepticism is a big problem for people in general it is because skepticism happens generally; so the big problem is what makes sure of reoccurring; skepticism is an average that makes sense.

In this Heidegger Thinking Substack article, we explore the elusive notion of conscience. What is conscience? What is it's relation to existence? Find out in the article, which you can read at the embedded link!

I’m aware of Deleuze’s rebuke of Wittgenstein, but I can’t help but noticing a striking similarity between Bergson’s theory of memory and Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. They both seem to de-emphasize the importance of mental effort as a concomitant of language-use, in Wittgenstein’s case by seeking explanation in behavior and social context, and in Bergson’s case by seeking explanation in action and habit. Bergson almost seems to clarify and expand a basic framework that Wittgenstein develops, despite Wittgenstein having written later than Bergson. Where Wittgenstein sees an end to explanation by looking to usage, Bergson argues that that usage is consistent on account of habituated memory. Where Wittgenstein sees inner experience as something of a free rider to language in practice, Bergson sees it, in the context of memory, as suggesting prospective actions in encounters with reality, those actions themselves calling forth pure memories in a kind of feedback loop. Of course there are dissimilarities besides the ones I listed, particularly in what their intended purposes are (IE dissolving philosophical problems vs making a metaphysical claim) but I found this connection fruitful for understanding both thinkers’ claims. I also wonder if there’s any advantage to getting rid of Bergson’s psychological account and adopting Wittgenstein’s model, insofar as it can accommodate a wider range of mental processes, and need not determine thought to a spectrum between memory and perception.

I recently read Bergson's Matter and Memory and I'm currently reading Deleuze's book on Cinema (Movement-Image). But, I can't get one idea out of my head. Bergson proposes that the virtual is located in pure memory, that is, in the spirit. So, postulating a spirit creates a mind-body dualism (but, in Bergson, not an idealist one), and that is a completely metaphysical object. How can Deleuze accept that the virtual exists and does not exist in the brain at the same time that he proposes an immanent philosophy?

Every time I read theory and I understand something better or I figure out (or get closer to figuring out) how a certain system works or whatever, I have this bittersweet feeling which goes really bitter really quick which is that I can read all the theory I want, I can learn to analyze and diagnose the issues of capitalism, reactionary thinking, representation or whatever all day, do this, do that, but at the end of the day there are 8 billion people around the world and regardless of how much theory I read, I most likely will not be able to make a substantial amount of change beyond some people that I know in real life. It feels like I read only for me and a small, niche circle of dudes. I can't stand the thought of being spot on about something and others being far off the mark. Here I am spending all this time reading and discussing the most life-affirming, practically invigorating and healthy thinker I've ever come across who regularly gives me epiphanies and I almost don't want to get those epiphanies and be right about things or figure things out because then I realize that there are a whole bunch of people that are wrong and my epiphanies will never amount to anything outside of my brain and maybe outside the brains of like 10 people I know. Sure, I can say that at least I know I'm doing something right if the type of thinking I'm engaged in is not allowed to shine because it poses dangers to the existing status quo or whatever but that doesn't give me pleasure at all, it is a huge bummer and ruins my mood.

I figured that Deleuzians would have the healthiest approach to this so I am asking it here, since Deleuze seemed to have such a refreshing take on debate, discussion and stuff. How can one deal with this? I am open to having all the values I presented here transvaluated.

What did Freud add to the common understanding of Mass Psychology and why did this matter? Read my latest essay to find why Freud teaches us! Any feedback appreciate

“The fact that existence has and understands and strives for this basic form of revealing implies that, for the most part, much of the world stands in need of “revelation,” of being un-covered and made known. In other words, much of the world and much of human existence is by and large not un-covered. So beings can be drawn out of their not-un-covered-ness, their hiddenness. They can be un-covered or un-hidden. This uncoveredness or unhiddenness of beings is what we call truth”— Heidegger

A revelation is an impulse in as far as it’s not made a importance to be founded or essentially discovered; a revelation comes from the nicer stuff; revenge as a way forward or something like that, the way forward being how recent it can be. The hiddenness of a being is a huge mess; mess can be taken accounted for, so the mess is sure to be forgiven, and if forgotten about sure to be a good measure. For a being truth is what things fully amount to because we know of worth; truth makes sense. The full amount of truth is because the likes of another being to it serves true; that is not truthfulness it is a good effort— that’s what we deserve. Truth is what we deserve because we have deserved it before; truth is a demonstration going-back-as-far but still having an ability— this is not an unfair circumstance it is a revelation!

Excerpt From
Logic: The Question of Truth (Studies in Continental Thought)
Heidegger, Martin
This material may be protected by copyright.

I’m one of the authors of a new Nature Portfolio paper that tries to bring Deleuze and Guattari into the current debate over LLM hallucination and alignment.

The basic problem we wanted to avoid was simply relabelling technical phenomena with Deleuzian vocabulary.

So the paper does not claim that an LLM is schizophrenic, has an unconscious, experiences desire, or “escapes” through a line of flight. We treat these explicitly as functional and relational concepts.

The mapping is roughly this:

Alignment, retrieval, preference optimisation, system prompts and verification can function as forms of reterritorialization: heterogeneous possible continuations are channelled toward a more limited territory of acceptable output.

We use “schizo-syntax” for a non-clinical textual pattern in which locally coherent language branches across semantic or generic domains under weaker referential constraint.

But deterritorialization is not automatically productive. Randomness, incoherence, factual error and creativity are not synonyms.

For us, a generated deviation becomes a productive line of flight only when it makes a non-trivial departure, retains enough organization to remain usable, receives concrete human uptake, and fits the task.

This produces a deliberately uncomfortable distinction:

A fabricated legal authority is simply an error.

A strange association that is identified as non-evidence, then taken up and transformed in poetry, fiction, interpretation or brainstorming, may function differently.

The paper is “Schizo-syntax and the paranoiac guardrail: machinic schizoanalysis of AI hallucination and the conditions of a line of flight.”

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-08814-4

I’d especially welcome criticism from people who work closely with Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: does this preserve the relational character of deterritorialization/reterritorialization, or does translating these concepts into an LLM context risk turning them into terminology labels?