‘Memories of a sorcerer’: notes on Gilles Deleuze-Felix Guattari, Austin Osman Spare and Anomalous Sorceries.

Published in 'The Journal for the Academic Study of Magic, Issue 1, 2003

My aim here is to introduce the philosophers Deleuze-Guattari to readers perhaps unfamiliar with their work and indicate something curious about their work, which is that it appears to have some sort of relation in a practical sense to the concept of the sorcerer.  Whilst not a central figure in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, the sorcerer and the witch are themes that do crop up in their texts more often than might be expected and play more than a simply ‘metaphorical’ role.  I think that Deleuze and Guattari can provide a resource for those interested in sorcery, magic and witchcraft in two ways: firstly they can provide theoretical tools which can challenge or at least complement structuralist, constructivist and historicist accounts and so can be of use to researchers attempting to understand these phenomena; secondly, they can provide a theoretical resource for those within the magical community who at times attempt to theorise their practise with what are essentially philosophical concepts.

An Approach to An Introduction to Metaphysics; on the desire of being.

Introduction

"The essay is a judgement, but the essential, the value-determining thing about it is not the verdict (as is the case with the system) but the process of judging."Georg Lukacs, Soul and Form.

This essay intends to interrogate an aspect of the texts of Martin Heidegger in the hope that such an interrogation of a particular aspect will open up some insight into the wider body of works that constitute the Heideggerian text and are the focus of trying to understand the meaning of this text.  There is a desire to attempt a concerted totalisation of the meaning of Heidegger's work, but also a desire not to, perhaps even a knowledge that a totalisation is impossible, not least because the space required for such a task would far exceed what would be seen as reasonably acceptable in a thesis of this type.  There is also, however, a question over whether such an attempt could ever succeed, in the sense of putting an 'end to interpretation', a question perhaps over the very principle and possibility of totalisation.  Of course this then makes the term 'meaning' and any attempt to 'know what Heidegger means', taken here as a total and thus totalised meaning, inherently problematic in principle.  As such this study takes its exergue from Lukacs'A .  A further desire then is to draw attention to the attempt that is contained here.  This is also needed, I believe, because at the heart of this essay is a situation which seems to teeter on the edge of paradox, undercutting me as I write.

The role of the question in Heidegger is fascinating, I believe, because it is set up in such a way that in order to begin to think it we simultaneously find ourselves drawn into it - our ability to even make a pretence of standing outside the 'object' under interrogation, in this instance 'the question', is troubled by the fact that it appears as questioning about the question of the question.  We enter that realm where words seem peculiarly slippery and a notion of almost vertiginous regression lurks at our shoulders, where it seems all too easy to succumb to the forgetfulness of inquiry.  This situation merits me pointing to it, I believe, because the principal texts in question here also form the arena of debate over the nature and role of the 'turn' within Heidegger and I wish to ignore this whole issue, as far as this is possible without damaging doing unnecessary violence.  It is almost inevitable that such violence as will be necessary will also be seen as ultimately self-destructive and this deliberate ignorance is possibly the most immediate danger I face.  My principal defence would be, however, precisely that it is deliberate and as such the ignored (or 'bracketed') is, if not actually present in the essay, at least apparent on its horizon.

Another seeming ignorance would be to Derrida, most notably to the text Of Spirit and the surrounding debates and discussions, already alluded to .  The first chapter of this essay deals explicitly with the area of Heidegger under discussion in Of Spirit, though it is perhaps discussed obliquely in Derrida, the principal focus of Derrida's work being on another concept within Heidegger, that of Geist, Geistlich, Gesitlichkeit.  In this first chapter I ignore this debate as far as possible in order to establish my own entrance into this area of Heidegger's work, an entrance that would lead me to a focus on Levinas, Blanchot and Derrida in the long term, but which has the issue of desire as its immediate concern.  There is thus a sort of false beginning, where I feel compelled to acknowledge a body of work that surrounds my attempt and which I do not wish to fully engage as yet.  With regard to both this issue and that of the kehre I feel, therefore, much like a navigator in dangerous waters, aware of icebergs around me but concerned to avoid them rather than crash inexperienced into their midst.

A brief word about the second part and the broader structure of this essay.  Having pursued Heidegger and, increasingly unavoidably Derrida too, through the issue of interpretation I turn to Barthes.  The notion of desire that I want to introduce in the second part, that I attempt to introduce despite the inevitable difficulties in using such a loaded term, stems from an attempt to re-read or understand the chase of interpretation.  What will be called 'the interminability of interpretation' is fundamentally boring despite its seductive attraction.  I would also argue that it is fundamentally incapable of allowing life to breathe in the text, though such a negative opinion is troublesome and too simplistically put in such a short space.  The slant or bias though in the text is undoubtedly informed by a fundamental problem with the whole game of language in terms of its ability to express life and to 'touch us', perhaps to 'graze' us as, though that it does is not simply denied.  Heidegger wants to claim the question does also.  If the essay is troubled by the ability of language to graze us then it is inevitably troubled by this suggested ability of the question.  It is for this reason, as a way to work on the trouble here, that the figure of desire is brought in, to attempt to get a grip, a point of purchase, on this troubling situation.  It is probably most heavily informed by Roland Barthes work A Lover's Discourse though 'Barthes' as a figure that exists as part of a wider corpus is avoided.  A Lover's Discourse is the area from which certain conceptual structures of 'figures' and 'figuration' come, forming a form of 'methodology' in the second part.  The desire there is to be able to read and it is with this desire that the essay moves towards a final set of figures, through Barthes and Nietzsche into the possibility of a 'new bibliography' represented, though not totalised by, the figure of Irigaray.  She appears, as the only woman in the text - a not unimportant fact - as this indication of the further directions that could arise from the essay but which are not the 'point' of it in the sense of its content, rather perhaps the 'point' of it in the sense of a 'pointing to'.

What is Chaos Magic?

Published in Razorsmile #2

A brief and exploratory essay, published as part of a series from practitioners.

Rhizomatic #1

published in Actual/Virtual, MMU Reserach Journal

Rhizomatic 1# is a documnetary about a squatted art and community space that took place in Brighton in January 2001. It was organised by an anarchist collective called SPOR, which developed from the original Spiral Tribe founders with a focus of providing active spaces of freedom within local communities, based on the thought that "without somewhere to be free then freedom is nothing more than an abstract idea". They base their activities on a method of action that draws inspiration from Hakim Bey's concept of 'temporary autonomous zones' and from as Deleuzian notion of the rhizome which they can put into action. They consciously organise a network that does not attempt to maintain a permanent political presence but which rather appears at intermediate intervals, inspired by the mushroom which fruits intermittently on the basis of an ongoing mycelium. Their experiments inspire and spread this network of ideas, people, connections and actions.

Directed by Matt Lee, the film was made by Indifference Productions and Weigh In, Way Out Productions, independent film-makers active in Brighton, UK.