Side Note on Schizophrenia in Cap and Schiz
Ok, so Schizophrenia is a prevalent theme in Anti-Oedipus and 1,000 Plateaus. But what is it? This is not D&G's interpretation, but my own, so bear with me for a second.
I realize that schizophrenia causes suffering in millions of people world wide. It may be caused by genes or social conditions, but there is also a disjunction of language, a "stammering of language" as Deleuze said somewhere I can't remember at this time....Perhaps schizophrenia is the product of a particular conception of "truth" as veritas that has been unreflectively passed on in the West since the Romans. The Greeks posited truth as a-letheia (un-concealment) and when the Romans colonized Greece they took over their conception of "truth" supplanting it with their word, Veritas, meaning "correspondence between mind and thing"... and there we see the origin of 2,000 years of dull philosophy devoted to discussing the nature of sense-data, perception, judgment, as well as deduction and induction, out of this came very real conceptions of rationality - irrationality, and subsequently with the advent of the social sciences such as sociology and psychology... "sanity and insanity"... but it all makes sense this way, schizophrenia shows symptoms where the mind does not correspond to the thing. The language produced by the schizophrenic (that is if they are manic and not catatonic) shows no correspondence to a thing, it is not easily distributed, circulated, disseminated. It is an isolated language, but since there is no correspondence between the words produced and the thing, or signifier, the person is considered mad.
Perhaps our conception of what is schizo is a product of unreflectively accepting this conception of truth as veritas and if Heidegger was correct, this veritas-truth conception has been passed on through the ages as the Onto-theo-logical tradition. So accepting truth as veritas, not only makes for extremely dull philosophical pursuits, it also may produce a certain conception of thought which is "untrue"... i.e. does not represent a correspondence between mind and thing, and is therefore a derivative sort of truth, and is relegated to the ghetto of thought known as madness or irrationality.
I realize that schizophrenia causes suffering in millions of people world wide. It may be caused by genes or social conditions, but there is also a disjunction of language, a "stammering of language" as Deleuze said somewhere I can't remember at this time....Perhaps schizophrenia is the product of a particular conception of "truth" as veritas that has been unreflectively passed on in the West since the Romans. The Greeks posited truth as a-letheia (un-concealment) and when the Romans colonized Greece they took over their conception of "truth" supplanting it with their word, Veritas, meaning "correspondence between mind and thing"... and there we see the origin of 2,000 years of dull philosophy devoted to discussing the nature of sense-data, perception, judgment, as well as deduction and induction, out of this came very real conceptions of rationality - irrationality, and subsequently with the advent of the social sciences such as sociology and psychology... "sanity and insanity"... but it all makes sense this way, schizophrenia shows symptoms where the mind does not correspond to the thing. The language produced by the schizophrenic (that is if they are manic and not catatonic) shows no correspondence to a thing, it is not easily distributed, circulated, disseminated. It is an isolated language, but since there is no correspondence between the words produced and the thing, or signifier, the person is considered mad.
Perhaps our conception of what is schizo is a product of unreflectively accepting this conception of truth as veritas and if Heidegger was correct, this veritas-truth conception has been passed on through the ages as the Onto-theo-logical tradition. So accepting truth as veritas, not only makes for extremely dull philosophical pursuits, it also may produce a certain conception of thought which is "untrue"... i.e. does not represent a correspondence between mind and thing, and is therefore a derivative sort of truth, and is relegated to the ghetto of thought known as madness or irrationality.