This is the first book to use complexity theory to open up the 'geophilosophy' developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus and What is Philosophy?.

The ‘French reading’ of Nietzsche crystallized almost 50 years ago at the 1972 conference at Cerisy-la-Salle, Nietzsche aujourd’hui. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, with the theme of ‘The Politics of Difference’, Newcastle University, 20–21 September 2018. Nietzsche’s fortunes have since undergone some dramatic shifts in France, but there are signs that he is once again on the ascendency, in particular the 2016 edited collection Pourquoi nous sommes Nietzschéens (a (...) direct riposte to the 1991 Pourquoi nous ne sommes pas Nietzschéens). Taking a bearing from the French readings, I want to explore the question of what ‘Nietzsche today’ might mean for us today. At Cerisy in 1972, the meaning of Nietzsche was centred on the twin critiques of humanism and capitalism. While these issues persist, several articles in the 2016 collection indicate that they are now inflected through the vast contemporary significance of technology. One of the key debates here is Nietzsche’s significance for transhumanism. For Bernard Stiegler, transhumanism is the culmination of nihilism, understood as the reign of big data and the total quantification of the self. In this regard, he alludes to a ‘hypernihilism’ of the contemporary era, characterised by the quantifying effects of information technologies, which work in conjunction with capitalism to produce an ultimate ‘averaging’ force. I will argue that Stiegler gives an essential corrective to the largely critical engagements with neonihilism of the Nietzscheans of the previous generation, but that his emphasis on the value of negentropy risks reaffirming the logic of the transhumanism he critiques. Nietzscheanism today, I will argue, requires an appreciation of the dual tendencies of nihilism – identified here as neonihilism and hypernihilism – such that we must draw on contributions from both generations of French Nietzscheans in order to think and respond to the problems of our contemporary era. (shrink)

This article attempts to understand the reconstitution of the `present' in modern societies. I argue that this reconstitution is the result of work done on `bare life', which I associate with that little space of time between action and performance. The article goes on to consider the ways in which this reconstitution of the present is taking place, using examples from the economic sphere. Throughout the article, I argue that operations on bare life are not only instrumental but also open (...) up new spaces of biopolitical practice based on a greater recognition of the value of slowness in a world commonly figured as fast. (shrink)

Nietzsche attributes 'will power' to all living things, but this seems in sharp conflict with other positions important to him-and implausible besides. The doctrine smacks of both metaphysics and anthropomorphizing, which he elsewhere derides. Will to power seems to be an intentional end-directedness, involving cognitive or representational powers he is rightly loath to attribute to all organisms, and tends to downplay even in persons. This paper argues that we find a stronger reading of will to power-both more plausible and more (...) consistent with Nietzsche's other views-by developing his affinities with Darwinism. By seeing will to power as an 'internal revision' to Darwinism, opposing the latter's stress (as Nietzsche thinks) on 'survival', but assenting to its uses of natural selection, we can ground or naturalize that notion, congenially to Nietzsche and to us. (shrink)

This essay engages with Heidegger’s attempt to re-think the human being. It shows that Heidegger re-thinks the human being by challenging the way the human being has been thought, and the mode of thinking traditionally used to think about the human being. I spend significant time discussing Heidegger’s attempt before, in the final section, asking some critical questions of Heidegger’s endeavour and pointing out how his analysis can re-invigorate contemporary attempts to understand the human being.

While Jacques Derrida’s influence on posthumanist theory is well established in the literature, given Martin Heidegger’s influence on Derrida, it is surprising to find that Heidegger’s relationship to posthumanist theory has been largely ignored. This article starts to fill this lacuna by showing that Heidegger’s writings not only influences but also has much to teach posthumanism, especially regarding the relationship between humanism and posthumanism. By first engaging with Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics and related critique of anthropocentrism, I show that, while (...) rejecting Heidegger’s conclusions for being too humanist, posthumanism shares, and indeed is largely unreflectively defined by, Heidegger’s critique of the binary logic underpinning anthropocentric humanism. With this, posthumanism aims to go beyond Heidegger by overcoming all forms of humanist understanding, an attempt that brings us back to the relationship between humanism and posthumanism and Heidegger’s notion of trace. With this, I not only show that Heidegger influences posthumanism through his destruction of metaphysics, critique of anthropocentrism and notion of trace, but also point towards an understanding of posthumanism that distinguishes it from humanism and transhumanism. (shrink)

A post-modernist analysis of human-centred technology (HCT) suggests the ideology which informs the theoretical and practical development of HCT resonates with ideological representations of machine intelligence portrayed in science fiction (sf) films. It is argued that such an ideology reflects and reinforces ontological dualisms which constrain our ability to imagine and realise our future relations with technology. This paper invites proponents of HCT to meet their shadows, to transgress, the cultural and discursive borders constructed in the name of modernism, and (...) to reflect on what is taken-for-granted and peripheralised within their own work. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to conceptualize and evaluate the transhumanist movement by applying a Nietzschean critique to its techno-progressive agenda of human enhancement. The investigation itself is divided into three distinctive, yet methodologically intertwined steps: first, I will present an exegetical approach by circumscribing the discussion concerning the alleged similarities and disparities between the transhumanist notion of transforming the human into a posthuman being and Nietzsche’s concept of education, understood as self-overcoming; secondly, in a more practical and future-oriented (...) manner, I will consider some of the major aporias for conceptualizing a ‘Nietzschean transhumanism’ by confronting the techno-progressive idea of morphological freedom with Nietzsche’s critical approach to the commerce- and consumer-oriented mentality of the non-creative modern individual; finally, I will employ Nietzsche’s complex treatment of nihilism in order to formulate a critical evaluation of transhumanism’s cultural implications. My fundamental conclusion will be that the techno-progressive agenda does not strive to overcome human limitations by coping with the tragic nature of life in a Nietzschean sense, but merely promotes the nihilistic dream of Zarathustra’s ‘last human’ to establish a common happiness by eradicating the Dionysian reality of all existence. (shrink)

The recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the need to develop more ontological modes of theorising the ethical ‘responsibility’ of the human in its relational encounters with nonhuman bodies and materialities. However, there is a lingering sense in this literature that such an ethics remains centred on a transcendent subject that would pre-exist the encounters on which it is called to respond. In this essay, I explore how Gilles Deleuze's philosophy offers potential opening for (...) a more ontogenetic thinking of a ‘nonhuman ethics’. Specifically, I focus on how his theory of ‘individuation’ – conceived as a creative event of emergence in response to immanent ontological problems – informs his rethinking of ethics beyond the subject, opening thought to nonhuman forces and relations. I argue that if cinema becomes a focus of Deleuze's ethical discussions in his later work it is because the images and signs it produces are expressive of these nonhuman forces and processes of individuation, generating modes of perception and duration without ontological mooring in the human subject. Through a discussion of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's experimental film – Leviathan – I explore how the cinematic encounter dramatises different ethical worlds in which a multiplicity of nonhuman ‘points of view’ coexist without being reduced to a hierarchical or orienting centre that would unify and identify them. To conclude, I suggest that it is through the lens of an ethics of individuation that we can grasp the different sense of ‘responsibility’ alive in Deleuze's philosophy, one oriented not to the terms of the already-existing but rather to the nonhuman potential of what might yet come into being. (shrink)

This article analyzes computer security rhetoric, particularly in the United States, arguing that dominant cultural understandings of immunology, sexuality, legality, citizenship, and capitalism powerfully shape the way computer viruses are construed and combated. Drawing on popular and technical handbooks, articles, and Web sites, as well as on e-mail interviews with security professionals, the author explores how discussions of computer viruses lean on analogies from immunology and in the process often encode popular anxieties about AIDS. Computer security rhetoric about compromised networks (...) also uses language reminiscent of that used to describe the “bodies” of nation-states under military threat from without and within. Such language portrays viruses using images of foreignness, illegality, and otherness. The security response to viruses advocates the virtues of the flexible and adaptive response—a rhetoric that depends on evolutionary language but also on the ideological idiom of advanced capitalism. (shrink)

Apocalypse as a literary genre, as well as a political and religious agenda, has been criticized by writers such as Lee Quinby and Katherine Keller for its formula, which tends toward punishment for transgression and salvation of an elect. These same writers critique postapocalypse for its propensity for nihilism and portrayal of a human species ‘beyond redemption’. But perhaps it is precisely this refusal to redeem that endows postapocalypse with dangerous possibilities. The postapocalypse does not have to be considered via (...) the same moral underpinnings that structure apocalypse. This paper frames postapocalypse not as a literature of pessimism or warning but as a radical context to explore dangerous possibilities without rehearsing apocalypse’s characteristic damnation, salvation and enforcement of a horizon of revelation that simultaneously works to obliterate aberrant possibilities. In order to explore these claims, the process of thinking beyond revelation in apocalypse is defined here as ‘the postapocalyptic imagination’. Its expressions are found in postapocalyptic texts, but also in other kinds of texts that respond to, and in some cases resist, the teleological drive of late capitalist narratives of endless progress. The postapocalyptic world is host to mutations, amalgamations and strange appropriations of forms and ideas left in the wreckage beyond the end. It is the task of the postapocalyptic imagination to explore what possibilities these ‘abominations’ might offer. This paper considers the motifs, characters and settings of postapocalyptic texts, alongside some of the anxieties and critiques they express. (shrink)

An avid reader of Nietzsche, the German radical feminist Helene Stöcker referred in 1893 to the Verfrühung of the modern woman, her prematurity. She used references to Mill, Bebel, Darwin, Galton, and Nietzsche among others to develop a concept of women's untimely modernity. This paper considers how a number of concepts of time, transformation, biological futurity, and putative agency over nature became, for Stöcker, the basis for a feminist claim to autonomy, agency, and reproductive rights. The paper goes on to (...) ask how some of these concepts and their context could also have provided the implicit resources to resist their conversion by Stöcker. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the materialism that Gilles Deleuze espouses in his oeuvre to the benefit of educational theory. In Difference and Repetition, he presented transcendental empiricism by underwriting Kant with realism (Deleuze, 1994). Later, in Capitalism & Schizophrenia I & II that were co-written with Félix Guattari (1984, 1988) and that they named Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze's philosophical approach is realigned into what I term here as transcendental materialism, and latterly as immanent materialism; that I claim effectively (...) eliminate phenomenology as perceptual input. This essay takes this transformation seriously as a way of understanding educational data, research and practices. The proposition that is central to this paper is that transcendental and immanent materialism give us a means of dealing with educational phenomena without the interference of perception or a stable category of experience, by connecting data with theory and circumventing subjectification. It is argued that this proposition has important consequences for educational research, and the construction of educational arguments that will be illustrated in this essay. Deleuze's debt to French Marxism and in particular to the work of Louis Althusser are also recognised through this writing. (shrink)

This article proposes that the French performance artist Orlan, has, by undertaking a series of surgical interventions on her face and body, radically challenged current standards of beauty. By engaging with Judeo-Christian iconography, Greek mythology and French literature in her operations/performances, she has established an oeuvre that aligns her not only with corporeality and the abject body through images of the sacrificial, but also with aberrant body forms associated with the carnival. Although seduced by the rhetoric that surrounds the body (...) in technology, she has turned to excess as a strategy against the benign and controlled nature of the screen, and the media's homogenization of body images. Her new identity, although not extreme, is a site of resistance in a society bent on eliminating forms that threaten the status quo. (shrink)

Notions of complexity, non-linear dynamics and self-organization in the natural sciences seem to resonate with certain literary and social scientific traditions of thinking about cosmopolitan life in a sense that may be more than merely metaphorical. Just as science speaks of forms and patterns which come into being spontaneously, unpredictably and `from below', so too is there a resurgent interest in a `baroque' vision of modernity which foregrounds chance encounters and `underworld' associations. The parallels are still stronger if we take (...) a consider the life-world of embodied cosmopolitans as including not only other human beings and human artifacts, but also the many non-human life-forms that make themselves at home in our built environments, in our networks, and inside our own bodies. Contra theorists of risk society, fusion of complexity theory with cosmopolitan aesthetics raises the possibility of conceiving of runaway biological and technological events as both creative and destructive. (shrink)

The relationship between Epicurus and Nietzsche is an increasingly popular research topic. There are a number of publications that attempt to detail the nature of this relationship by investigating specific aspects of their writings that interrelate. Such research is valuable because it reveals an otherwise hidden dynamic to Nietzsche studies, however, all previous discourse on Epicurus and Nietzsche are limited because they fail to recognise both thinkers as philosophers of immanence. This thesis proposes that ‘immanence’ is the central concept that (...) allows the influence of Epicurus upon Nietzsche’s thought to be revealed most appropriately. Furthermore, it proposes to account for the development of ‘immanence’ within the works of Epicurus and Nietzsche in order to disclose the nature of immanence itself. By following Nietzsche’s genealogical method, this thesis will demonstrate that Epicurean immanence emerged through the conceptualisation of all existence within the cosmos and nature. Moreover, immanence developed as an atomistic response to the transcendent philosophies of Socrates and Aristotle which opposed Democritean materialism. Nietzsche recognised that the increasing popularity of Platonism in late antiquity led to the event of Christianity, which dominated Western thought until its success eventually destroyed the conditions that maintained it. Nietzsche predicted that in the light of Christianity’s demise, mankind would be plunged into a state of crisis and unparalleled nihilism. In response, he proposed that the body and spirit must be reunited in an act of overcoming, and those capable of that act would ‘inherit the earth’. Immanence for Nietzsche is this unifying act and inheritance, and he demonstrates that redemptive doctrines such as Epicurus’ ataraxia, modelled on nihilism, must be rejected and overcome by a philosophy modelled on ‘cheerfulness’. It is in this respect that his philosophy from The Gay Science onwards can be recognised as a discourse on immanence. (shrink)

Despite his position as one of the first philosophers to write in the “post- Darwinian” world, the critique of Darwin by Friedrich Nietzsche is often ignored for a host of unsatisfactory reasons. I argue that Nietzsche’s critique of Darwin is important to the study of both Nietzsche’s and Darwin’s impact on philosophy. Further, I show that the central claims of Nietzsche’s critique have been broadly misunderstood. I then present a new reading of Nietzsche’s core criticism of Darwin. An important part (...) of Nietzsche’s response can best be understood as an aesthetic critique of Darwin, reacting to what he saw as Darwin having drained life of an essential component of objective aesthetic value. For Nietzsche, Darwin’s theory is false because it is too intellectual, because it searches for rules, regulations, and uniformity in a realm where none of these are to be found – and, moreover, where they should not be found. Such a reading goes furthest toward making Nietzsche’s criticism substantive and relevant. Finally, I attempt to relate this novel explanation of Nietzsche’s critique to topics in contemporary philosophy of biology, particularly work on the evolutionary explanation of culture. (shrink)

This thesis interrogates Nietzsche's ubermensch, a figure capable of overcoming the universal absence of value, and asks how it might logically be realised in light of postmodern developments in nihilism, capitalism and technology. We argue that in order to exist beyond the nihilistic nature of capitalism, one possible solution might be superintelligent artificial intelligence. We first explore the oft-overlooked problem of the village atheist, who rejects god whilst still clinging to theological values. We next look to nihilism in postmodemity, analysing (...) semiotic and hermeneutic developments and highlighting the forces that dictate contemporary society. We then tum to capitalism, understood as a repetition of Christianity, redefining the village atheist as a figure trapped in the nihilism of semiocapitalism. Finally, we tum to technology and the future, where we reject transhuman narratives as farther repetitions of salvation, instead developing an understanding of superintelligent AI as ubermensch based on its potential to exist beyond the trappings of manmade value. This thesis simultaneously outlines the difficulties of overcoming nihilism through transhumanism whilst highlighting the dangers of embracing ubermensch, instead suggesting that a reclamation of the human posits greater grounds for survival, where the embrace of a hermeneutics of nihilism allows for smaller short-term truths. (shrink)

The thesis is written in the pursuit of true difference. Its contention is that true difference has been obscured by a model of difference which is dialectical in nature. Western thought has been largely informed by a metaphysic in which difference has been subordinated to the One and the Identical and which can only ever return as the Same. In utilising the writings of Foucault, Deleuze, Deleuze-Nietzsche, Deleuze-Bergson and Bergson, this thesis strives to find for a new image of thought, (...) that can go beyond representation through which true difference can be known. The thesis is framed in the context of the problematic of 'the death of man' as that which Foucault formulates as eternally returning as the Same. Foucault raises the question of Man's disappearance and in doing so also opens up the question of what might come after Man. It will be argued, that what comes after man, that which Nietzsche has named the Overman, is the becoming-woman of man. The aim is to show that becoming-woman, once freed from the representational system, can be thought of as an active, affirmative death through which difference can be thought in-itself as the continual movement of vital life The nature of a Becoming-woman is, in turn, framed in the context of Deleuze's search for difference in-itself and, Bergson's philosophy of nature. It will be argued, in conclusion, that becoming-woman is the rebirth of the eternal return of difference which, in man, reaches into the consciousness of self. (shrink)

This thesis aims to explore Nietzsche's concept of individuality. Nietzsche, a radical and innovative thinker who attacks Christian morality and proclaims the death of God, provides us with a self-interpreting way to understand humanity and affirm life through self-overcoming and self-experimentation. Nietzsche's concept of individuality is his main philosophical concern. I first compare his perspective on human nature in Human, All Too Human, Daybreak and Beyond Good and Evil with Charles Darwin's, Sigmund Freud's and St Augustine's in order to examine (...) how his thinking differs from theirs with regard to the concept of human nature. Second, I turn to his On the Genealogy of Morals, in comparison with the thought of John Stuart Mill, analysing their criticism of Christian morality and discussing their different conceptions of individuality and the development of the self. The last chapter compares Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ, Twilight of the Idols and Ecce Homo with Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy of self-development, using this comparison to highlight the way in which Nietzsche expounds his concept of individuality and sets himself as a living example of an individual with autonomy and responsibility. Nietzsche attacks Christianity and argues that humanity can potentially be developed not through Christian morality but reflective self-interpretation. We shall not forget that being a self-developing individual is Nietzsche's chief aim although his arguments are too circuitous and controversial to be easily comprehended. His aim is not to offer some final, authoritative solution to these issues of the self and morality. In contrast, he offers us a new, uneven and perhaps dangerous way to understand humanity and modern culture. In order to achieve this, we need to interpret what he says from our own standpoints and also to interpret ourselves through self-reflection. Nietzsche's radical but insightful perspective is a means for guiding us to open our minds and affirm our lives through interpretation and experimentation. Then we might potentially overcome nihilism and become what we are: self-reflective individuals with free spirits. (shrink)