Differential cruelty

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Notes

notes

1. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 29.

2. On Tenebrism and the early Renaissance philosophies of nature and alchemy, see Rzepińska 91–112.

3. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 28.

4. Ibid. 29.

5. Artaud 101.

6. Ibid. 102.

7. Ibid. 103.

8. Cicero (qtg from Aristotle) in Hortensius (95M). See also Bos 315–16. Bos argues that the meticulous relationship of the soul – on behalf of the strictly incorporeal nous – with the body qua instrument captures the idea of intelligible ontology or human life on earth as a punishment (timôria).

9. See Virgil, The Aeneid, VIII: 483–88. See also Kronenberg 403–31. Kronenberg associates the atrocity of Mezentius with an Epicurean/materialist reinterpretation of Aristotle's idea of intelligible ontology and incarnate life.

10. See Brunschwig 171–90.

11. The Italian Jurist Andrea Alciati created a series of emblems based on Virgil's depiction of the Etruscan torture for his Emblemata (1531), an influential collection of moral sayings. Known as Nupta Contagioso or Nupta Cadavera (marriage with the diseased or the dead), these emblems depict a naked woman being tied to a male corpse at the order of the king, or a man walking with a female corpse fastened to his body (cf. Francisco Goya's Disparates, plate no. 7, The Matrimonial).

12. For it is an inspired saying of the ancients that the soul pays penalties and that we live for the punishment of great sins. For, indeed, the conjunction of the soul with the body looks very much like this. For as the Etruscans are said often to torture captives by chaining dead bodies face to face with the living, fitting part to part, so the soul seems to be extended throughout and affixed to all the sensitive members of the body. (Iamblichus 48. See also Augustine)

13. Artaud 85.

14. Bacon 353.

15. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 172.

16. On aphairesis as a fundamental logico-semantic concept in the works of Aristotle and neo-Platonists regarding the procedure of negation and determination of the Ideal, see Martin.

17. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 55; emphasis in original.

18. Aside from its interrelations with the concept of intensity, the scholastic notion of contraction is a fundamental ontological and noetic concept which Deleuze resurrects in Difference and Repetition by meticulously presenting it in conjunction with Stoic physics and cosmology. On the concept of contraction in scholasticism, see Catana. And for an alternative Bergsonian/Stoic philosophy of subtraction and contraction in relation to Deleuze's philosophy of immanence and becoming, see Meillassoux 63–107.

19. There are numerous sources on the cosmology of putrefaction and diminution (decay) in the Middle Ages. See, for example, Ginzburg.

20. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 74.

21. Ibid. 76.

22. Ibid. 286.

23. For an elaborately rigorous critique of Deleuze's philosophy of vitalism and an alternative analysis of unilateral determination, see Brassier 140–45, 162–204.

24. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 36.

25. “[…] but Being is the same for everything about which it is said.” On the univocity of Being, see idem, The Logic of Sense 205–06.

26. See idem, Masochism 20.

27. Ibid. 18–19, 25–30.

28. Ibid. 18–19.

29. Ibid. 35.

30. Ibid. 13–14, 132–34.

31. Idem, Difference and Repetition 168.

32. On the soul's mortification and katabasis with regard to the Etruscan torture, see Winston and Dillon.