Manifesto for the Second Subject. Part 2: The Second Subject

“I am innately genital […] There are some fools who think of themselves as beings, as innately being. I am he who, in order to be, must whip his innateness. One who innately must be a being, that is always whipping this sort of non-existent kennel, O bitches of impossibility! … Underneath grammar there lies thought, an infamy harder to conquer, an infinitely more shrewdish maid, rougher to overcome when taken as an innate fact. For thought is a matron who has not always existed.” – Antonin Artaud

Manifesto for the Second Subject. Part One: The Dogmatic Image

Deleuze contends that philosophy requires a pure beginning not indebted to a presupposition. There is a difference between true philosophical thinking and an Image of thought. Thinking is movement, creation, it is the real as in real experience and is the participle of individuation. The Image of thought is representational, it involves an act of recognition and constructs identity. Deleuze argues that the majority of philosophers participating in so-called philosophical thought have done nothing but promote an Image through subjective presuppositions that direct the thinker towards a recognition of an object and furthermore into a predetermined representational field. Deleuze demands philosophy to start unbeholden to any presuppositions in order to witness true thinking—a movement alongside the real.

Ethics as Optics – Emmanuel Levinas

“The first ‘vision’ of eschatology […] reveals the very possibility of a eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without context. The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision—it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics.But it is a ‘vision’ without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision, a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type.”