Will not be codified

Deleuze electrified me this morning. I need to circle back to this after I finish my OOO binge:

Modern society clearly does not function on the basis of codes. Yet if we consider the evolution of Marxism or Freudianism (rather than taking Marx and Freud literally), we see that they are paradoxically launched in an attempt at recodification: recodification by the state, in the case of Marxism (“You have been made ill by the state, and you will be cured by the state” — but not the same state), and recodification by the family, in the case of Freudianism (“You have been made ill by the family, and you will be cured by the family” — but not the same family). Marxism and psychoanalysis in a real sense constitute the fundamental bureaucracies one public, the other private — whose aim is somehow or other to recodify everything that ceaselessly becomes decodified at the horizon of our culture.

Nietzsche’s concern, on the contrary, is not this at all. His task lies elsewhere: beyond all the codes of past, present, and future, to transmit something that does not and will not allow itself to be codified. To transmit it to a new body, to invent a body that can receive it and spill it forth; a body that would be our own, the earth ‘s, or even something written…

We are all familiar with the great instruments of codification. Societies do not vary much, after all, and they do not have so very many means of codification.

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