The Strain

"For many people, philosophy is something which is not ‘made’, but is pre-existent, ready-made in a prefabricated sky. However, philosophical theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object. It is no more abstract than its object. It is a practice of concepts, and it must be judged in the light of the other practices with which it interferes."

"Bring something incomprehensible into the world!"

"Philosophers ought also to say “not the just ideas, just ideas” and bear this out in their activity. Because the just ideas are always those that conform to accepted meanings or established precepts, they’re always ideas that confirm something, even if it’s something in the future… While “just ideas” is a becoming-present, a stammering of ideas, and can only be expressed in the form of questions that tend to confound any answers."

"some of the general guidelines offered by Deleuze, Lyotard, and Foucault are consonant with a political perspective that emphasizes the local, intersecting, and contingent nature of political relationships. These guidelines include the call for social, personal, and political experimentation, the expansion of situated freedom, the release of subjected discourses and genres, and the limitation and reorientation of the role of the intellectual. …the activity of political reflection must have as a primary goal the freeing of an individual (be that individual a person, a group, or a practice) for new practices, practices that change, undermine, or abandon the power relationships that keep old practices in place."

"Lyotard, Deleuze, and Foucault share a refusal to view power as solely a negative, repressive force; alongside that refusal—and intertwined with it—they share a rejection of subjectivity as a viable source of political action. …This new anarchism retains the ideas of intersecting and irreducible local struggles, of a wariness about representation, of the political as inventing the entire field of social relationships, and of the social as a network rather than a closed holism, a concentric field, a hierarchy."