That’s it, we are entering 2025! What do the last 365 days of this quarter century have in store for us? Impossible to say. The years follow each other according to the well-regulated sequence of the calendars; but they are not alike. “Difference and repetition”, as the title of one of the great works of Gilles Deleuze : what is repeated is never the identical but the difference which creates something new, a novelty which takes reality into an unpredictable future. We can bet that the coming year will hold its share of unforeseen events and surprises.
It is under the sign of the philosopher, to whom we have devoted our last special issuewhat will be placed in 2025: we are in fact celebrating a double anniversary, the centenary of his birth and the thirtieth anniversary of his death. So let’s start the year with him, with the traditional wishes. “Happy New Year, good health!” »
What is a good new year? Deleuze outlines a response during a course at the University of Vincennes: “A happy new year,’is when it balances out, it’when is it, if it amuse you, it m’have fun, and if it’have fun, it’s fun for you »he told his students. A joyful harmony with the world around us, in short.
As for “good health”, Deleuze also has something to say about it. In another course, he says: “It is not good health that makes us say “long live life”. » Striving at all costs to stay in physical shape in order to then enjoy life is to approach things backwards. By trying too hard to stay healthy, we risk an allergic break with the outside world. To live, for Deleuze, is to move, to experience, to encounter beings, things, situations which, if they can sometimes harm us, are likely to increase our power and fill us with joy. What we should wish for everyone is to “understand how things and other bodies disagree with yours” – understand how the world affects us to get the best out of it.
« C’is wisdom” what essentially consists of “know how to age” : There always remains, even where we feel the diminishing effects of time, a myriad of opportunities to increase ourselves. We still have to look for them and, above all, grasp them: get out of ourselves, let ourselves be affected by what happens to us, accept being transformed by the outside and taken in another direction. Embracing the difference which constantly opens us to bifurcations, changes that are sometimes worrying but always exciting. “Only’affirmation comes back, it’that is to say the Different, the Dissimilar. […] Only joy returns. »
