A question of line

Gilles Deleuze states in Nietzschian fashion.
Whenever one creates, one resists.
And in this way, both artists and philosophers
engage in shaping change.

All a question of line.
Where no substantial difference is drawn
between these seemingly separate pursuits.
The line drawn between them is for connection,
not separation, and although art and philosophy
are differentiated from each another
by their respective substances, codes and territorialities,
there is no differentiation in the abstract line they trace,
which shoots between them to be shared and to carry both
towards a common fate.

Philosophers are born from something else,
other than philosophy, and their process originates
at its border by the painter, musician or writer in each of us.
Each time a melodic line draws along the sound of an idea
or the written line draws along the articulated voice in a concept,
a line of deterritorialization is drawn, stretching the boundries
of our understanding just a little further. This common line
deterritorializes philosophy by opening it up to new interconnections.
Rather than considering the subject of philosophy
to be a discipline containing the ultimate truth of all others,
it is something else, to practice it at its intersections in such a way
that cuts across borders.

As a Deleuzian footnote to these unfolding texts,
when studying the work of others, begin in the middle,
by placing their ideas in a broader context amidst the collection
of singularities that have intersected with their lives,
to understand the unique assemblage that becomes their humanity.
Their multiplicity shapes who they become and bids us to remember
them with reverence by writing about their ideas without judgment.

"My ideal, when I write about an author,
would be to write nothing that could cause him
sadness, or if he is dead, that might make him weep in his grave. Think of the author you
are writing about. Think of him so hard that he can no longer be an object, and equally so
that you cannot identify with him. Avoid the double shame of the scholar and the familiar.
Give back to an author a little of the joy, the energy, the life of love and politics that he
knew how to give and invent."
(Deleuze and Parnet, 1987).