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The idiot..

In the immanence philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, there are 3 aspects connected to each others: the plane immanence as the founding concept of ontology, as opposed to transcendence; the concept that is a pure creation out of the interacting multiplicities; the conceptual personage which is the link between the plane of immanence and the concept.

The original element in What is philosophy? in which Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy, is by far the conceptual personage that has humanistic traits which will produce concepts and philosophical systems.  the conceptual personage is the idiot. the idiot here is to be understood upon the Greek etymology, idiotes,  which means: the peculiar, the singular, the unique. therefore, every personage, every system is unique. the cogito of Descartes, the Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot etc. are all idiots in this Greek sense. They are all unique moments in life, events that pushed philosophy into the becomings. Without them, philosophy would have remained the same.

On the other hand, the same deleuzian idiotic element is to be found in politics. According to Deleuze, the world does not have much to offer to us since all its macro political systems failed to make humankind happy, safe, prosperous. Therefore, what is required now is to be idiots as in to be sensitive to all the micro political movements, to be able to read the virtual that is about to actualize itself in a new event which will creates some becomings in the political scene. One of the typical examples of being idiot and creating becomings is the Brexit: the British people decided to leave the EU (good decision or bad that is not the point) and by doing this, they invented something different in the European political scene to which the world was used to since the its beginning. Deleuzian’s political ethics is all about these events that can bring change to our horizon, a way to have hope and to give hope…

 

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