Trust

The university of unconditional welcome … The university of hospitality …

W. reminds me of Deleuze’s seminars. Anyone could come to them! You could just wander off the streets. Vagrants twitching in the audience … Alcoholics shouting abuse …

You have to trust the author you’re studying, Deleuze used to tell his audience. You must silence the voices of objection within you. You must let the author speak for himself, analyse the frequency of his words, the style of his own obsessions. His thought invents coordinates and develops along its own axes …

Deleuze would speak for hours, lost in his cloud of cigarette smoke. Sometimes, he’d pause to take questions from the floor – mad questions, vagrants’ questions … Sometimes, Deleuze would pause in his analysis of Spinoza to let the hubbub die down. He’d look up, with his tender eyes, surveying his audience, half-amusedly, half-lovingly. And then he would begin again, as though he hadn’t been interrupted.