more a “procedure” – as painstaking, literally, as any surgical procedure – to produce a Body without Organs – comprising habits, traits, potentials hidden in the actual body, i.e. a virtual body – and manufacture desire continuously. Less the “exorcising” of anguish to indulge one’s taste for masochistic pleasures. I have it

you will never catch a flux all on its own – Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 91 the great ruptures, the great oppositions, are always negotiable; but not the little crack – Ibid., p. 99

I believe that even the greatest works of literature have a little tail of human frailty which, if one is on the lookout for it, begins to wag slightly and disturbs the sublime, godlike quality of the whole… – Franz Kafka in a letter to Felice Bauer, quoted by Nicholas Murray

Study of a passion would necessitate a study of masochism. …the masochist assemblage: the organisation of humiliations and suffering in it appear less as a means of exorcising anguish and so attaining a supposedly forbidden pleasure, than as a procedure, a particularly convoluted one, to constitute a body without organs

– Francis Bacon, Study from the Human Body, 1949. What is it that the K. character says about curtains in RJF project? It’s about the children, replacements for him, miniatures, his mother has inside her: I’m sure they would imagine themselves exactly as I am… day in, day out,

When we hear of a thing as stupid as the supposed death drive, it is like seeing a shadow theatre, Eros and Thanatos. We have to ask: could there be an assemblage so warped, so hideous, that the utterance ‘Long live death’ would be an actual part of it and