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fucktheory:

Obligatory Post on Gay Squid

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“Such studies as this, which define bodies, animals, or humans by the affects they are capable of, founded what is today called ethology.  The approach is no less valid for us, for human beings, than for animals, because no one knows ahead of time the affects one is capable of; it is a long affair of experimentation, requiring a lasting prudence, a Spinozan wisdom that implies the construction of a plane of immanence or consistency.  Spinoza’s ethics has nothing to do with a morality; he conceives it as an ethology…For example, given an animal, what is this animal unaffected by in the infinite world?  What does it react to positively or negatively?  What are its nutriments and its poisons?”

 - Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 125 (trans. Robert Hurley)