The Zerrissenheit of subjectivity

The paper opens with a small vignette regarding the production of calligraphy at speed on the Tokyo train network. This will serve as a focal point in considerations pertaining to the notion of Zerrissenheit or "tearing" and its intimate relationship with the complicated notion of the "abstract machine." As both (lilies Deleuze and Martin Heidegger have used the idea of "tearing" in various ways, we shall think transversally across these two approaches in terms of disclosing the dangers and possibilities of technological relationships as in Heidegger, and, as in Deleuze (and his collaborator Felix Guattari), in the sense of how tearing impacts on writing and the articulation of calligraphy or what Deleuze designates the "Oriental line" in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. It will become clear that while technology tears the hand away from an essential relation to man and earth through disruption and disorientation, it also engineers "universes of reference" in unheard-of ways, as means to think, produce and live afresh. Man is essentially torn between these two poles. In entwining the aforementioned remarks with the art of Paul Klee (active, spontaneous lines), the notion of sobriety and Asian culture in general, the conclusion, which teases out the ramifications from the mainstay thesis that technology effectively disrupts the purity of style or the simplicity of becoming, suggests that in several ways Deleuze and Guattari's sole and joint writings are an extension, radicalisation and complement of Heidegger's thought.