Elena on Deleuze

I would like to take a look at Deleuze before I move on to other people and processes. The little this biography tells us is very telling in relation to the attitudes current in his days about what their private life was about. Their private life and themselves.
I think we live in a different time where our private lives need not only to be known but studied so that we can make a clear connection between our selves and our blind spots. There is nothing to hide. Nothing. Every life has tremendous inconsistencies and that is alright because beyond those inconsistencies we are still human, still sacred, still us.

"Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments. Deleuze" No matter how great this man still is, this statement must be kept in mind so that we understand what their times were suffering from and heal. What I mean is that in their times and he only died in 1995, as much as still strongly today, the private personal sphere is separated from the man's or woman's work and this just seems another of those upside down and backward separations so current in our times. I think it stems from the same Christian aberration that imposes shame and sin to people's inner inconsistencies which are nothing else than the time’s effects. Every individual is nothing more and nothing less than the sum total of his times and nothing more and nothing less than the sum total of creation. How each internalizes, processes and transforms his and her times throughout his life will become the envelope of the new generation that will equally internalize, process and transform it. Life moves on beyond the individual while the individual moves on beyond life! They free each other when "death does separate them"! Nothing is lost for either one. What is wonderful about understanding that is that we no longer need to become fixed in one or two or twenty seven or three hundred and ninety eight glorious men and women and conceive of our selves as their followers, we can now be our selves and incorporate every man and woman before us into our lives. We can stop looking outside of our selves for what is good and beautiful or bad and terrible and find it in our selves and use it to polish not only our own lives but the life of our times into a more human experience. The “DIVA” is dead! No matter from what sex. We can no longer look outside of our selves to be our selves. Men and women of the past are not outside but inside of us. When we read and study their work and lives it is not so that we follow them but so that we remember them, re-member them in our own selves, to remember is not an indulgence in the past but an actualization of the past in the present. Their lives are theirs: the mile they run so that we could pick up the thread and run our own and not become fixed in their process, which was intrinsic to their times.

I wonder to what extent this strong tendency to separate aspects of reality is part and parcel of the patriarchal authoritarian structure that has laid us at the feet of today’s schizophrenia. It has failed every bit of the way in making us more human, on the contrary, it has dehumanized us. The “family”, the “community” and “humanity” have been burnt at the feet of a vulgar individuality and productivity without proportion while the few, both men and women, stand at the pinnacle of meaningless authoritarianism. The tyrants have been deposed so that every individualist could become the tyrant of his little kingdom: his and her parents, wife, husband and children and the people around him and all those that they can’t perceive in their individualistic race to be accepted by a society in which no one is valued as a human being. The schizophrenia that Foucault and Deleuze and others in our recent history have exposed is not a subject of external study, but a reality within each of our lives. Let us not pretend that life is happening to somebody else. Let us have the courage to be our selves with all our inconsistencies for beyond our inconsistencies, is our humanity.

In Deleuze and Foucault, (and you must realize that I am only beginning to read them), we already begin to see that they are attempting to unite the different aspects of reality into a vision of processes rather than independent phenomenon and yet in their lives they clearly avoid exposing their privacy which is what was necessary in their times, what they had to do to protect their work? Themselves? Both?