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The Poison Garden THE POISON GARDEN Beau Anthony Deurwaarder ORCID: 0000-0001-9880-2893. MR-FAIAP Master of Fine Arts (Interdisciplinary Arts Practice). March 2017. Centre For Ideas, Victorian College of the Arts. Melbourne University, Australia. This thesis is being submitted in total fulfilment of the degree. 2 ABSTRACT In their three 'Memories of a Sorcerer' passages in A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari identify as sorcerers instead of as philosophers, and draw a line between the practice of sorcery and writing philosophy. At the heart of these passages, they mysteriously state that "[i]f the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings-writer...".1 This thesis is an effort to investigate the strange becomings that dictate the practice of writing philosophy. More firmly, it is an attempt to practice sorcery through the discipline of reading and writing philosophy. To do so, it targets the strange-becomings that traverse Friedrich Nietzsche's writing as cues of an untimely and sorcerous philosophy. In particular, it poses Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return as a philosophically ripe motif for practicing sorcery. The allure of the eternal return is at once a blessing and a curse, depending on how its cast is received. Nietzsche articulated the weight of his doctrine philosophically in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He also recounts literally experiencing the thought of the eternal return in Sils-Maria in 1881. This experience haunted Nietzsche's life and his writing from its arrival until his collapse in 1889. Accordingly, this thesis will revolve with Nietzsche's thought of the eternal return at its axis, in tandem with a definition of sorcery inspired by Deleuze and Guattari. It will consider significant episodes from Nietzsche's main works, as well as biographical details, and perspectives put forth by other philosophers in his wake, such as Isabelle Stengers, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze, George Bataille, and Pierre Klossowski. This work treats citations from their texts as fragments of a larger incantation which, when read together, cast Nietzsche's thought of the eternal return into a new light. The practice of sorcery will be rethought philosophically as an active expression of the will to power, and further, as a means of fidelity to Nietzsche's overman and his untimely hope for the future. This will be put in direct contrast to reactive expressions of the will to power championed by ideologies of late-capitalism and neoliberalism. Throughout its course, this strange pairing of sorcery with Nietzschean philosophy is bound by an implicit thematic refrain, The Poison Garden, which is formally addressed and summarised at the conclusion of the work. 1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004), 'Memories of a sorcerer I', 265. 3 DECLARATION (i) This thesis comprises only my original work towards the Master of Fine Art (Interdisciplinary arts practice) except where indicated in the preface; (ii) Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used; and (iii) This thesis is fewer than the maximum word limit in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices. Beau Deurwaarder 31 March 2017. This thesis was amended to address examination criteria on 12 December 2017. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As always, my deepest thanks go to my partner Jennifer McAuliffe, for her constant servings of patience, love and support. Thank you to Narli for the cuddles and deep chats, and thank you to Vera, Astro, and Quantum, for patrolling the backyard. I would like to thank my supervisor Elizabeth Presa, for her constant encouragement, guidance and support. Thank you to Louise Burchill, David Shae, and everyone at the Centre For Ideas at the VCA. Thank you to everyone who attended the thinking the thought of the Eternal Return reading group: thank you Suzi Elhafez, Jonathan Rainin, Tony Yap, and Greg Dyson for those wonderful mornings. Thank you to Sean Crossley, for sharing his art, his studio, and 'the blank slate' with me. I look forward to seeing The Poison Garden return in a new form later in 2017. Thank you to Caroline Wolewinski for her continued support of our project. Thank you to Eva Bujalka for being the first to read this work, and for her kind words and advice. Thank you to Jake Moore and Ryan Edwards for listening to the draft and offering their thoughts. Thank you to Nathan Delbridge for Nietzsche Club at Raleigh Street. Thank you Nadja Mott for inviting me to speak at the exhibition 'Nigredo'. Thank you to Amy Ireland for her support throughout the entire project. I presented an early version of 'Magic and Reality', in collaboration with Sean Crossley, entitled 'The Poison Garden: Unnatural Participation', at the 'The Dark Precursor: International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research', held at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium, on 9-11 November 2015. This was made possible by a Faculty Small Grants Scheme awarded to me by Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne. Thank you to Sean, Chris and Jonas at Hekla for hosting me in Brussels in the lead up to that event. I presented an early version of 'Intension' entitled 'The Poison Garden: Anomalous Intension', at the 9th International Deleuze Studies Conference, 'Virtuality, Becoming, Life', held at the University of Roma Tre, Rome, Italy, on 11-13 July 2016. This was made possible by a Faculty Graduate Student Assistance Grant awarded to me by Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne. Thank you to Peter Villwock at the Nietzsche Haus in Sils Maria, Switzerland, for welcoming me after that event. Attached as an appendix is a paper entitled 'The Poison Garden: Nietzsche's Flowers', that I presented at the Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy (ASCP) Conference held at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, on 7-10 December 2016. 5 CONTENTS 2 Abstract 3 Declaration 4 Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 17 PHILOSOPHER COMETS 25 SOUNDERS OF THE DEPTHS 33 FIG-WASP 43 DO YOU BELIEVE IN SORCERY? 52 SORCERER LOVE 59 THE WAVES 70 POSITIVE DISTANCE 84 'IN SPITE OF' 97 INTENSION 108 Conclusion 113 Bibliography 119 Appendix 120 a: Magic and Reality 134 b: Nietzsche's Flowers 6 Imagine a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then, that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction than between edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye... 1 1 Hermen Hesse, Steppenwolf (Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1965), 'Treatise on the Steppenwolf', 79. 7 INTRODUCTION Looking back, this research began in 2013. At the time I was renting a small art studio in Northcote, which I used mostly for drinking coffee and reading philosophy. Without any clear intentions or expectations in mind, I started working on a series of experiments dedicated to the complexity of A Thousand Plateaus. The idea for these works came from a request to run an hour-long seminar on the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I decided to concentrate entirely on A Thousand Plateaus, and found very quickly that I couldn't decide on which section to teach. Each plateau is so philosophically generous that it felt wrong to select one at the expense of all others. Moreover, each plateau runs into the next, and often blurs with those that precede it. In lieu of a preference, I decided to search for a way to teach the entirety of A Thousand Plateaus at once, and importantly, in a single sitting. What emerged was a year long experiment in philosophy that I referred to broadly as Flat Multiplicities: a series of works and performances that condensed A Thousand Plateaus into exactly one thousand sentences. Each sentence was extracted from the text faithfully as a citation, and rearranged alongside other citations in a manner that served the work's overarching narrative. In this way, each citation was selected and reassembled in an order that was not random, but rhizomatic. It was my intention with this work to retell A Thousand Plateaus in a way in which the original body of work would change, in accordance with the sentences selected, their composition, and the detail that was omitted. My hope with this work was to place the words of A Thousand Plateaus into a state of becoming, in line with the philosophical intentions of Deleuze and Guattari's work itself. For the first incarnation, presented in late 2013, Flat Multiplicities took approximately 72 minutes to read in a single, uninterrupted sitting.1 Akin to the text it was abridging, the delivery of Flat Multiplicities was designed to be exhausting, to both the audience members and the speaker himself. In many ways, I consider A Thousand Plateaus to be a work of delirium. With the length and conceptual scope of Flat Multiplicities, I hoped to replicate this feeling. In 2014 I presented Flat Multiplicities again at a small arts festival in Canberra. This time I performed the work alongside a visual piece, where I captured all one thousand sentences in scrawling handwriting across a single sheet of paper.2 With this large text piece, also titled Flat Multiplicities, I was hoping 1 Flat Multiplicities was first presented at the Non-Knowledge philosophy collective in Perth, Western Australia, on 20 November 2013. Non-Knowledge was a monthly philosophy and arts seminar hosted by the Paper Mountain ARI in Northbridge, directed by Eva Bujalka and Francis Russell.
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