I’m reading for and sitting in on Gail Hamner’s Deleuze/Foucault seminar in the department of Religion at Syracuse University.

She began the course with a film about Deleuzian philosophy. The film was full of orthodox Deleuzianism (blah, blah flux, multiplicity, over and over and over) Shamelessly hagiographic, as these kind of films tend to be. Nothing in it about sedimentation. 

Then the discussion got interesting.

Gail is having us read from Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses. On p.11, Braidotti writes about a concept of Woman configured not in negation (i.e. negation of male or of The Feminine, or Big Other). Rather the concept unfolds in its own materiality.

I’m not sure if I’m ready to do without negation, but a lot less of it would do a lot of good. For Jewish philosophy this could mean a rethinking of our own hoary concepts. Let’s escape the trap caught up in principles of opposition (particular/universal, same/other, jew/gentile, god/world, heteronomy/autonomy, etc/etc).  Maybe the point is to let these concepts unfold on their own in-against-through the world without the exigencies of negation that tie up the discourse in knots.