/lit/ - Literature

>>14273085
I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make, but basically Deleuze, like Nietzsche and Bergson among others, was focused on relations (connections, forces, durations) over substance as a kind of persistent identity. It's sometimes described with the more general term of new materialism to indicate that it's processual.

>>13996325
>>13996344
Nihilism wasn't always a known philosophical concept (even though it can be retroactively used to describe many philosophers). It meant different things in a Russian context where it was used to criticize the founding beliefs of institutions and another thing in the West when Jacobi first used it against fatalistic atheism and the like. Most importantly, it means different things in different contexts:

>Nihilism (/ˈnaJ(h)JlJzəm, ˈniː-/; ) is the philosophical viewpoint that rejects, denies, or lacks belief in any or all of the reputedly meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism, which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.[1] Moral nihilists assert that morality does not exist at all. Nihilism may also take epistemological, ontological, or metaphysical forms, meaning respectively that, in some aspect, knowledge is not possible, or reality does not actually exist.

Inb4 quoting wikipedia, it explains it well enough and I'm lazy and nihilistic :^)

Nietzsche uses it mostly in the sense of existential nihilism which applies to values, namely the fact that, for a typical Christian at least, existence as such (on its own) has no intrinsic value as it needs to be thought of on the basis of transcendent meaning. There is something that Christianity has in common with Nietzsche's philosophy, namely that it works on the basis of some things that function for their own sake and not something extrinsic, but what those exact things are differs from one to the other, but there is more overlap than many on either side would admit. We have to keep in mind Nietzsche's perspectivism and pluralism (and therefore lack of a substantial singular cogito or ego or soul in the regular sense) along with all its conflicts and differentiations between values in each "individual" that this presupposes (which is what will to power is). It's not that existence has no value, but rather that it has competing values. So active nihilism is forging "one"'s own values by connecting to the "material" (forces, flows) parts that sustain said values (and not others) and proliferating those connections. One can still be a Christian in such a world, but it is no longer under a transcendent signifier, for better or worse.