Achim Szepanski about Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze made the choice to end his own life. A last inaccessible event that mostly leaves
the survivors only with traces of desperation and loneliness. And yet it is this last absolutely
unique moment that allowed him to become his own judge and, from one moment to another, left us
only with the power of a non organic life that is found in his work. Perhaps it was not the kind
of suicide which Foucault spoke of as an act which should be thought about, that illuminates life,
but more the radical refusal to wait with his illness for death, and in the end to find his body
shut in the technical surroundings of a hospital ...

Deleuze himself thought of life, the energies that life releases within itself and the act of
forcing writing, as a great experiment to overcome the possibilities of existence and the ways of
life of which one is a prisoner. He spoke of those artists and philosophers with poor health whose
biological forces are often so weak, but who are nevertheless attacked, not by death, but by the
fascinating diversity of life that they see and think. Life that is beyond the biological force,
that nevertheless, in every moment creates new constructions by opening the lines of resistance.
Bringing a curve into the lines, creating diverse productions of subjectivity, allowing life to
wander on the plateaux - one sees that life is spread out in regions, that are filled with
singularities, and that have to be repeatedly recreated and strung together. Just as thought means
the discovery of new terms and setting itself free of the self to be able think of the new, so
must life draw vanishing lines, withdraw from the mechanisms of being shut in, avoid the permanent
control and hyper-information. As part of the masses life is in danger of perishing in random
samples, data, markets or computer nets, or of suffocating in the gigantic tautological machinery
of the media industry, that continuously sends back the opinions of the masses, that they, as
media, formulated. The relevance to the present in Gilles Deleuze's thinking also lies in having
given a first great non-communicable answer to the information machinery. He discovered the
minority, the differential, that neither communicates or thinks strategies, but carries out the
games of disguise, draws active disappearing lines in the fields of society. It is the streams of
desires that meet and produce machine complexities. Their movements - linking, coupling, are
defined through forces that repeatedly construct new networks. The rhizome is such a labyrinth, a
rich ensemble of relations; diversity, connection and heterogeneity, breaks and unexpected links.
They show the vision of a life that opens the ways of production of subjectivity to art, and
allows the horizon of resistance to light up. The right to variety, the right to difference.
Desire is an affirmative energy, it functions in relating fields, it makes it's mechanical
syntheses, - and don't worry, it functions - writes Deleuze in 'Anti-/dipus', that Foucault later
termed an introduction to the non-fascist life. A construction of machines that is more than the
world of technology, an in-between world, a mediation without extremes, because the poles of that
which is to be mediated are again interlaced by lines; it is enlivened by the production
subjectivity. The machines themselves are interlaced by various currents and they don't function
by technologically defined precision ideals, but rather they continuously produce unpredictable
effects by multiplying themselves and creating interfaces for new currents. Sound machines are
also more than synthesisers, they represent more a kind of structure, they are desire machines.
They are created by linking heterogeneous elements and the immersion in form changing
transversality, the sound currents break open the customary channels and bring the sound molecules
to oscillation. A machine music that withdraws from interpretation because no analytical thought
and absolutely no memory pushes itself between the music and the nervous system. Because
electronic music makes the interfaces to an issue, the operationality of the technological music
can be turned against itself. 'Music is never tragic, music is joy. But there are times it
necessarily gives us a taste for death; not so much happiness as dying happily, being
extinguished.... Whenever a musician writes IN MEMORIAL, it is not so much a question of an
inspiration motif or a memory, but on the contrary of a becoming that is only confronting its own
danger, even taking a fall in order to rise again: a becoming child, a becoming woman, a becoming
animal as far as they are the content of the music itself, and continue to the point of
death......' Becoming, so that the music goes beyond itself, this is the search for the forces of
the minority that the label MILLE PLATEAUX is part of. In a letter Gilles Deleuze welcomed the
existence of such a label.