First let me start by introducing
myself and laying out a few important things as you navigate
my cartographies and explorations of intellectual gene therapy.
1. "I have nothing to admit" -Gilles Deleuze
2. "A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues,
tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. Nor does a map have its own voice. It
is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. A map
provides no answers. It only suggests where to look: discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in
relation to another, orient yourself, begin here...Sometimes a map speaks in terms of physical
geography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the distant vistas of
memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams."
3. I would not have been a poet except that I have been in love and alive in this mortal world, or an
essayist except that I have been bewildered and afraid, or a storyteller had I not heard stories
passing to me through the air, or a writer at all except I have been wakeful at night and words have
come to me out of their deep caves needing to be remembered.
4. " I would like to explain how I view what I have written. I belong to a generation, one of the
last
generations, that wasmore or less assassinated with the history of philosophy. History of
philosophy has an obvious, repressive function in philosophy; it is philosophy's very own Oedipus.
"All the same you won't dare to speak in your own name as long as you have not read this and
that, and that on this, and this on that."
Nietzsche whom I read late was the one who pulled me out of all this. For it is impossible
to submit
him to such a treatment. He gives you a perverse taste that neither Marx nor Freud have ever given
you: the desire for everyone to say simple things in his own name, to speak through affects,
intensities,experiences, experiments. To say something in one's own name is very strange, for it is
not at all when we consider ourselves as selves, persons, or subjects that we speak in our own
name. On the contrary, an individual acquires a true proper name as the result of the most severe
operations of depersonalization, when he opens himself to multiplicities that pervade him and to
intensities which run right through his whole being.
The depth of what I don't know, the deepness of my own underdevelopment is where I
speak from
from.
The problem is not one of being this or that in man, but rather one of becoming human,
of a
universal becoming animal: not to take oneself for a beast, but to undo the human organization of
the body, to cut across such and such a zone of intensity in the body, everyone of us discovering
the zones which are really his, and the groups, the populations, the species which inhabit him.
Why shouldn't I speak of medicine without being a doctor if I speak of it as a dog?
Chavruta
o Matuta!
The Talmud goes so far
as to say, "chavruta o matuta" -- a study partner or death. "Death" in
this context means wasting time and opportunities.
A chavruta is a study-partner. Learning first in a large group and then in pairs, we will unpack
hidden meanings in texts about God, God’s love for us, our love for each other and what Kedushah
(holiness) is all about. If there has been a reason for me to cultivate this space it was so that I
may
interact with you, my chavrutas, so that we can explore Kedushah. Where I fail to convey the depth
of this in my work and deeds, or if I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack.
