Page 122 - Amechanon_vol1_2016-18

Amechanon, Vol. I / 2016-2018, ISSN: 2459-2846

What happens to the traveler in the temple is not structural. He or she cannot expect that
his or her body will react that way. It is vertiginous, surprising, it is an affection. One must

say that the traveler would have to know, structurally, the story of Hephaestus and the
story of the temple in order to feel that. In this case, it would be imagining or supposing a

reaction that has to do with logic, language, with a relation between two information that
make sense inside that structure of thinking the traveler (and us as well) is in. But the

question is: why would that make someone cry?

We prefer to compare that experience with the feeling of eating these delicious Greek

pastries whose names are unknown. Because even not knowing the names and not
remembering exactly the taste of them (because it is much more difficult to remember

tastes than images or concepts), they are part of what that traveler knows or thinks about
Athens. Even though that thing, that intensity cannot fit in any structure, it configures a

map. It is not like the city's map on paper, of course; one cannot point someplace like the
bakery or even the temple in this kind of map. Because it is not an extensive, metric map.

It is an intensity map.

Extensive maps only can refer to structured spaces, with borders, boundaries and
interdictions. For mapping a smooth space or a plane of immanence an intensity map is

162
needed. Deleuze speak about mapping when exploring the concept of the rhizome with
Guattari, but also when he is confronting Freud's analysis of human psyche. Where the
philosopher sees a map of affections, for an example in the case of little Hans that is
impressed with a horse on the street, Freud sees sallow pictures of Hans's father and

mother. Deleuze approaches the idea of a thinking body by using this image, helping us to

think on a traveler's kind of thought.

«The trajectory merges not only with the subjectivity of those who travel through
a milieu, but also with the subjectivity of the milieu itself, insofar as it is reflected in
those who travel through it. The map expresses the identity of the journey and

what one journeys through. It merges with its object, when the object itself is
163
movement» .

162
Deleuze, G., Essays critical and clinical, trans. by Smith, W., D., Greco, A., M., Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

163 Ibid., p. 61.

122