This paper explores how Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical concepts extend and elaborate discursive and psychoanalytic interpretations of qualitative research findings. Analyzing data from a UK research project exploring young people's engagements with Social Networking Sites (SNSs), Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalytic method is drawn upon to consider complex desire-flows in the social. In particular the notion of ‘affective assemblages’ is developed to explore the relationships between school and online spaces and subjective interfacing with these spaces. The paper suggests online space is (...) heterosexually striated and SNSs create new intensified gendered and sexualized identities and affective relations between young people. Investigating the case study of a teen girl, Louise, who is socially rejected through the affective assemblage of the SNS, then pathologized at school for violently retaliating against being called a ‘fat slag’ online, the paper suggests a Deleuzoguattarian analysis offers new theoretical tools for thinking about discursive subjectification but also for mapping complex desire-flows and micro movements through and against discursive/symbolic norms. (shrink)

What is?Curriculum Theory articulates the problematic of difference, diversity, and multiplicity in contemporary curriculum thought. More specifically, this essay argues that the conceptualization of difference that dominates the contemporary curriculum landscape is inadequate to either the task of ontological experimentation or the creation of non-representational ways for thinking a life. Despite the ostensible radicality ascribed to the curricular ideas of difference and multiplicity, What is?Curriculum Theory argues that these ideas remain wed to an structural or identitarian logic that derives difference (...) from the a priori conditions of the possible. Further, this essay argues that the orthodox conceptualization of difference in contemporary curriculum studies is complicit with the capitalist commitment to quantitative multiplicity, or rather, the proliferation of ‘multiple consumer choices’. Following this problematic, the task of this paper is oriented to the conceptualization of difference adequate to the creation of a people yet-to-come, or rather, a people for which no prior image exists. To accomplish this, What is?Curriculum Theory draws upon Deleuze’s Bergsonism in order to advance a conceptualization of difference that breaks from modes of dialectical negation and contradiction particular to the tyranny of representational thinking. Articulating an image of difference that no longer accords to the possible, this essay composes a thought experiment conceptualizing a pedagogical life in a manner that explicates the transversal relationship between the actual and the virtual. (shrink)

This collective article discusses the philosophy of modern higher education in Iran, which in this case, optimistically, its history dates back to the founding of Dār al-fonūn —if we consider Dār al-fonūn as a university. Otherwise, its origin can be traced back to the University of Tehran. Central to this article is the emphasis on the lack of philosophy of higher education in Iran. Therefore, most of the criticisms in front of us are related to the internal inconsistency in the (...) Iranian higher education system due to the lack of a national-indigenized-official philosophy of higher education in Iran. Furthermore, The Islamic Revolution of 1979 brought about fundamental changes in higher education. Accordingly, several controversial issues including the rapid growth of higher education, the Islamization of universities, cultural narratives in higher education, the increase in students, especially women and the low-income class of the country were also explored. Therefore, in this collection, the political, economic, social, cultural, moral, technological and historical dimensions of Iranian higher education were examined. (shrink)

Activism is defined in this paper as involving local instigations of new series of elements intersecting the actual, generating new collective enunciations, experimentations and investigations, which erode good and common sense and cause structures to swing away from their sedimented identities. By appealing to Spinozism, the paper describes the microphysics of the activist encounter with stable structures and the ways in which activism imposes new regimes of succession of ideas and affective variations in the power of action. Rather than understanding (...) activism as supporting or leading social struggles, the definition of activism pursued here conceives it as an open-ended process and stresses the role of investigation in relation to practices within the social situations to which activism addresses itself. (shrink)

This article examines the role of stories in ecological activism. It first situates stories inside object ecologies, encompassing relationships of reliance, care, and maintenance of things. It suggests that ecologies of this sort work as an extended mind where our cognition takes place and meaning is apprehended, so that what we can think of is always a function of what we have “at hand.” The article then considers how these ecologies are impacted by discourses on climate change and peak oil, (...) which stress the impossibility to keep ordering our lives through the same entanglements that have supported them so far. A dissonance arises between the sort of demands and dependencies we are still subject to on a daily basis and the anticipation that those demands and dependencies shall not be able to endure. Stories of transition, which tread a middle ground between denial and collapse hysteria, dissipate this tension. In so doing, they contribute to the growing of alternative sacred forms, working as attractors that constitute groups as moral collectives. These forms are woven through alternative entanglements of objects, bodies, and other stories, providing determinate implication for action, from the indeterminacy of the unknowns of climate change and peak oil. (shrink)

Upon first reading, the beginning of Chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition, with its talk of ―contemplative souls‖ and ―larval subjects,‖ seems something of a bizarre biological panpsychism. Actually it does defend a sort of biological panpsychism, but by defining the kind of psyche Deleuze is talking about, I‘ll show here how we can remove the bizarreness from that concept. First, I will sketch Deleuze‘s treatment of ―larval subjects,‖ then show how Deleuze‘s discourse can be articulated with Evan Thompson‘s biologically (...) based intervention into cognitive science, the ―mind in life‖ or ―enaction‖ position. Then I will then show how each in turn fits with contemporary biological work on E. coli chemotaxis (movement in response to changes in environment). (shrink)

Corporate governance is a theme that is important to Business Ethicists for various reasons. It relates to how and for whose benefit corporations are governed, to how important corporate decisions are taken, and to how organizational cultures are “managed.” In this article, it will be argued that in each of these respects, corporate governance relies on particular identity constructs that need to be questioned. In fact, it will be argued that the way in which corporate governance initiatives address the various (...) crises of capitalism, allows us to gloss over some crucial ontological questions that could precipitate a more rigorous questioning of capitalist practices. The article will plot the limitations of the kind of thinking that we encounter within the corporate governance realm, and expose its problematic assumptions by exploring a selection of Deleuzoguattarian concepts. It will be argued that the challenges facing corporate governance relate to the relationship between identity crises and crises of control. We will argue that a better understanding of the nature of capitalism could open new avenues for ethical questioning of contemporary corporate practices, and put the various “crises” that capitalism faces in a new perspective. (shrink)

The notion of “responsibility” can be understood in a number of different ways, namely as being accountable for one’s actions, as a personal trait, or as a task or duty that results from one’s role. In this article we will challenge the assumptions that underpin each of these employments of the word “responsibility” and seek to redefine the concept as such. The main thrust of the argument is that we need to critically interrogate the idea of “identity” and deliberate decision-making (...) that inform the use of all three of these notions of “responsibility”. By drawing on selected concepts emanating from the oeuvre of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, our understanding of agency moves away from “identity” towards “multiplicity”. In fact, it will be argued that our sense of “agency” is a side-product of our own desiring-production as it operates in and through our interactions with other human beings and organizational structures. The article therefore contends that “responsible management” requires ongoing re-articulations of moral responsiveness. (shrink)

This article proposes a reading of the lives of teachers through a Deleuzian-Guattarian materialistic approach. By asking the question ‘what kind of life do teachers live?’ this article reminds us that teachers sometimes welcome the imposed policies, procedures and programmes, the consequences of which remove them from students. This desire is compared to another desire—the desire for children. Teachers are seen as machines rather than singular organisms, so that what helps a teacher in her becoming are her connections to students. (...) Activities are seen in terms of intensities and flows, rather than as actions which crystallise such flows. Roald Dahl's story of Matilda is used as a fictional example of the above. (shrink)

Resumen Este artículo propone una lectura del concepto de lo Natal desde la perspectiva de la ontología de Diferencia y repetición. El estudio de los rasgos ontológicos que esa noción ofrece, en especial en Mil mesetas, arroja una nueva luz sobre el aspecto intensivo de la teoría deleuziana del fundamento. En este sentido, el concepto de lo Natal se vincula especialmente con los conceptos de profundidad y campo de individuación. La consideración conjunta de estas nociones permite postular la novedad de (...) la teoría deleuziana del fundamento en relación con la tradición de la metafísica occidental, que se expresa en el hecho de que el fundamento se presenta como ámbito de la individuación, el devenir y la multiplicidad. En última instancia, el fundamento se ve superado hacia un sin-fondo.This article proposes a reading of the concept of The Natal in the light of the ontology of Difference and repetition. The study of the ontological aspects of this notion in A thousand plateaus brings a new light to the intensive aspect of Deleuze's theory of ground. In this sense, the concept of The Natal is linked with the concepts of depth and field of individuation. The bond between these concepts puts forth the novelty of Deleuze's theory of ground in relation to the tradition of Western metaphysics, expressed in the fact that the ground is presented as a realm of individuation, becoming and multiplicity. The ground is ultimately overcome by an ungrounding. (shrink)

In this article, we explore how a posthumanist stance has enabled us to work a different consideration of the way in which voice is constituted and constituting in educational inquiry; that is, we position voice in a posthuman ontology that is understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman agents that exceed the traditional understanding of an individual. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Barad, and Bennett, we present a research artifact that illustrates how this (...) posthuman voice is productively bound to an agentic assemblage. The reconfiguration of a posthuman voice with/in an educational research artifact further enables us to explore various analytic questions: What happens when voice exceeds language and is more than vocalized words emanating from a speaking subject? If the materiality of voice is not limited to sound, how do we account for it? That is, how might the materiality of voice be located in the space of intra-action among human and non-human objects? We conclude with implications for thinking qualitative methodology in education differently. (shrink)

The concepts of territory and ritornello cannot be separated from one another, despite the fact that scholarship tends to restrict the former to discussions of politics and the latter to discussions of art. Deleuze and Guattari deploy the combination of territory and ritornello, along with associated notions such as rhythm, milieu, counterpoint and force, as a method to describe and understand the formation, existence and relations of living beings. They understand ‘life’ to also include a variety of nonorganic entities, such (...) as social formations. Territory and ritornello provide a philosophical alternative to understanding the existence of beings in terms of an immutable, unchanging transcendent structure, such as divine revelation, politico-economic ideology or cultural identity. As such, this conceptual pair is a necessary element in translating Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysical commitment to immanence and univocity into ethical and political theory and practice. (shrink)

This essay’s main objective is to develop a theoretical, ontological basis for critical, social justice-oriented science education. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblages, rhizomes, and arborescent structures, this article challenges authoritarian institutional practices, as well as the subject of these practices, and offers a way for critical-social justice-oriented science educators and students to connect with sociopolitical contexts. Through diagramming institutional and community relationships using DG’s theory of assemblages, we envision new ontological spaces that bridge social and material entities. A (...) conceptualization of science education through DG’s philosophy of rhizomes and assemblages allows educators to merge critical, post-foundational perspectives with questions of ontology: not just what exists, but what could exist in terms of human social organizations, inorganic matter, microorganisms, and plant/animal populations. (shrink)

This paper both welcomes and explores the recent article in Nursing Philosophy by Dave Holmes and Denize Gastaldo. Holmes and Gastaldo's paper introduced us to Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical concepts of ‘arborescent thought’ and ‘rhizomatic thought’, respectively. These concepts were used to illuminate and critique certain aspects of contemporary nursing theory and educational practice. Arborescent thought is held to stifle and constrain the development of the discipline of nursing, while rhizomatic thought is presented as a more fitting way forward across (...) a diversity of knowledges and methods of inquiry. We are thus urged to engage in a metamorphosis from an arborescent way of thinking to a rhizomatic one. The paper below, while applauding the introduction of these concepts into nursing thought, raises some questions as to their proposed utility and relationship as given in the paper by Holmes and Gastaldo. This is done in a spirit of collaboration, motivated by a desire to further explore the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (and Felix Guattari). (shrink)

In this article I examine how Deleuzian-inspired assemblage theory allows us to offer a new challenge to the enlightenment categories of thought that have dominated archaeological thinking. The history of archaeological thought, whilst superficially a series of paradigm shifts, can be retold as arguments constructed within distinctions between ideas and materials, present and past, and culture and nature. At the heart of all of these has been the critical issue of representation, of how the gap between people and the world (...) can be bridged. In the last decade or so, however, archaeologists have begun to make a more significant challenge to these ideas, and have attempted to offer a critique of our enlightenment heritage that is ontologically, rather than epistemologically, inspired. Drawing on the manner in which assemblages allow for the vibrancy of matter, are non-anthropocentric, multiscalar and more-than-representational, this article argues that Deleuzian thought offers the best chance to rework our understanding of the past in this manner. This is explored through a case study of three scales of analysis of Neolithic Britain. (shrink)

In what is called the ‘geographic turn’ in contemporary philosophy, David Hume appears not only as a pioneer in using geographic metaphors to describe thinking but also his immanent empiricism had a decisive influence in Deleuze’s work. The aim of this paper is to advance in this double register and to present the geographic metaphors used by Hume to characterize his science of human nature or true philosophy, viz., the sceptic voyage, the conquest of the capital and mental geography.

This article draws upon the Deleuzian/Guattarian idea of territorializing movements to trouble the notion of the identity of the learning pre‐school child, produced by developmental psychology, as an individual, natural and developing child as well as the more recent image of the child characterised by autonomy and flexible behaviour. Accordingly, a child's apprenticeship of walking is associated here with the movements of a surfer. This association disturbs the orthodox thought of recognition and representation that makes us define, include and exclude (...) children who do not fit into pre‐established schemes of development and learning. What is created with the image of the walking child as surfer is a line of flight out of a territory marked by resemblance and error. This line of flight challenges the assumption of a theorist of good will, who with the best intentions knows what is best for children. (shrink)

This article draws upon the Deleuzian/guattarian idea of territorializing movements to trouble the notion of the identity of the learning pre‐school child, produced by developmental psychology, as an individual, natural and developing child as well as the more recent image of the child characterised by autonomy and flexible behaviour. Accordingly, a child's apprenticeship of walking is associated here with the movements of a surfer. This association disturbs the orthodox thought of recognition and representation that makes us define, include and exclude (...) children who do not fit into pre‐established schemes of development and learning. What is created with the image of the walking child as surfer is a line of flight out of a territory marked by resemblance and error. This line of flight challenges the assumption of a theorist of good will, who with the best intentions knows what is best for children. (shrink)

Julia Mahler Lived Temporalities: Exploring Duration in Guatemala. Empirical and Theoretical Studies. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.Arun Saldanha Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Rosario Assunto, an Italian philosopher of aesthetics begins one of his most interesting and dense essays with a terrifying image about the Earth where we live—“calvizie della terra dissacrata” (1983, 15)—meaning that the Earth becomes bald because of the actions of the man and loses every characteristics of beauty and sacredness. According to Assunto’s theory the homo oeconomicus is the author and the promoter of a Promethean, titanic, industrial, and malodorous town where the sense of art, beauty, and the harmony (...) in landscape are forgotten and erased. The Modern homo oeconomicus is satisfied in his thoughts and works with such a desecrated and raped Earth, rather, he desires this kind of landscape as a symbol of his own progress. I remember that when I first red this essay I asked myself what kind of philosophy I could propose in such a horizon and what kind of analysis I could develop. Maybe geophilosophy could now give some answers. Geophilosophy, according to the version I will propose, deconstructs the usual and reductionist grammar about the concept of space and place, suggesting a new expressive, perceptive and, finally, ethic possibility for the relation between human beings and places. In this article I provide my interpretation of geophilosophy, inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s words, the first philosopher of XX century who wrote about this concept. Then I will analyze nonplaces according to the famous definition proposed by the Marc Augé and I will go beyond the French anthropologist’s definition suggesting a new interpretative model for places and non-places by linking my idea of geophilosophy to Deleuze’s concept of rhizome. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the complexity of the concept of place and finally put into evidence that places, which constitute our roots, are all the spaces we have around, even non-places. The Post-modern era mainly producesnon-places: geophilosophy has to explain the philosophical and cultural reasons for this production by pointing out which possible modalities of connection we can find between contemporary human beings and places. (shrink)

While the groundbreaking insights that contemporary theorists have formulated with regards to space---as a multiplicity without essence, as an active event, and as inseparable from subjectivity, power, Otherness and time---have ostensibly purged it of its traditional understanding as absolute, a specific visuality characteristic of Cartesian perspectivalism remains privileged in its theorization which force it to remain so. While the complexity of space cannot be recovered from an abstract contemplation of its visual geometry in a way that reflects these contemporary concerns, (...) there have unfortunately been relatively few attempts to imagine space away from the visual in a way that challenges its traditional absoluteness. To this end, it is argued that because sound and music contain implicit and explicit spatialities, the sonic represents a rich and unexplored area from which to imagine a radical non-visual space that discursively organizes space according to a different economy through which to challenge its assumed visuality. And yet, even when space has been approached through sound, there is a tendency to exteriorize sound into an object or a set of practices that robs it of its defining quality---its own "soundfulness". By breaking down those factors that are considered salient to how space is conceived today along sonic rather than visual lines, the argument is made that the "soundfulness" of sound's physical properties gives it a complex texture of excess that is corporealized within the body and forwards the philosophical possibility of unfolding the spatiality of sound according to vectors beyond the visible in a way that, while reflecting contemporary concerns, prevents its return to absoluteness. To take seriously this "soundfulness" thus allows us to recuperate the sonic as a philosophical and political way of experiencing and knowing the world, including that of space. The arguments, as well as being drawn from the insights of contemporary spatial theory, the physics of sound, the phenomenology of listening, rhizomatic and feminist theory, quantum mechanics and musicology, will be explained through an understanding of space as sound and exemplified in The Disintegration Loops, a post-minimalist musical piece by sonic artist William Basinski. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze (January 18, 1925–November 4, 1995) was one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Deleuze conceived of philosophy as the production of concepts, and he characterized himself as a “pure metaphysician.” In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition , he tries to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science—a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces essence and virtuality replaces possibility. Deleuze (...) was also well-known for a number of important monographs he published in the history of philosophy (on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Foucault, and Leibniz), as well as for his writings on the various arts, which include a two- volume study of the cinema, books on Proust and Sacher-Masoch, a monograph on the painter Francis Bacon, and a collection of essays on literature. Deleuze considered these latter works as pure philosophy, and not criticism, since he sought to create the concepts that correspond to the artistic practices of painters, filmmakers, and writers. In 1968, he met Félix Guattari, a political activist and radical psychoanalyst, with whom he wrote several works, among them the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia , comprised of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Their final collaboration was What is Philosophy? (1991). (shrink)

This thesis seeks to understand the nature of and relation between science and philosophy articulated in the early work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It seeks to challenge the view that Deleuze’s metaphysical and metaphilosophical position is in important part an attempt to respond to twentieth century developments in the natural sciences, claiming that this is not a plausible interpretation of Deleuze’s early thought. The central problem identified with such readings is that they provide an insufficient explanation of the (...) nature of philosophy’s contribution to the encounter between philosophy and science that they discern in Deleuze’s work. The philosophical, as opposed to scientific, dimension of the position attributed to Deleuze remains obscure. In chapter 1, it is demonstrated that this question of philosophy’s contribution to intellectual life and of how to differentiate philosophy from the sciences is a live one in Deleuze’s early thought. An alternative, less anachronistic interpretation of the parameters of Deleuze’s early project is offered. The remaining chapters of the thesis examine the early Deleuze’s understanding of the divergence between philosophy and science. Chapter 2 gives an account of Deleuze’s metaphilosophy, alongside a reconstruction of his largely implicit early understanding of science. The divergent intellectual processes and motivating concerns that account for Deleuze’s understanding of the differentiation of science and philosophy are thus clarified. In chapter 3, Deleuze’s use of mathematical and physical concepts is examined. It is argued that these concepts are used metaphorically. In chapter 4, the association between modern science and the Deleuzian concept of immanence that has been proposed by some Deleuze scholars is examined and ultimately challenged. The thesis concludes with some reflections on the significance of Deleuze’s early work for contemporary debates concerning the future of continental philosophy and the nature of philosophy more generally. (shrink)

This dissertation shows how initial conditions play a special role in the explanation of contingent and irregular outcomes, including, in the form of geographic context, the special case of uneven development in the social sciences. The dissertation develops a general theory of this role, recognizes its empirical limitations in the social sciences, and considers how it might be applied to the question of uneven development. The primary purpose of the dissertation is to identify and correct theoretical problems in the study (...) of uneven development; it is not intended to be an empirical study. Chapter 1 introduces the basic problem, and discusses why it has become especially salient in debates concerning uneven development. Chapter 2 develops an argument for the importance of initial conditions in the philosophy of science, developed specifically in the context of the Bhaskar/Cartwright ‘open systems’ (and by extension, ‘exogenous factor’) emphasis on the ubiquity of contingency in the universe and rejection of explanation based on laws of nature (regularity accounts) of causation. Chapter 3 makes three claims concerning the concept of contingency, especially as related to the study of society: 1) that there are eight distinct uses of the word contingency, and its many meanings are detrimental to clarity of discussion and thought in history and the social sciences; 2) that it is possible to impose some order on these different uses through developing a classification of contingency into three types based on assumptions concerning possible worlds and determinism; 3) that one of the classes is a special use of the word without relevance to the social sciences, while the two remaining classes are nothing more than a variety of the ‘no hidden factors’ argument in the debate on indeterminism and determinism (and thus related to the concept of spacetime trajectories caused by initial conditions and the interference of these in the form of ‘exogenous factors’ with ‘open systems’). Chapter 4 The concept of explanation based on initial conditions together with laws of nature is widely associated with determinism. In the social sciences determinism has frequently been rejected due to the moral dilemmas it is perceived as presenting. Chapter 4 considers problems with this view. Chapter 5 considers attitudes among geographers, economists, and historians towards using geographic factors as initial conditions in explanation and how they might acceptably be used, in particular their role in ‘anchoring’ aspatial theories of social processes to real-world distributions. Chapter 6 considers the relationship of the statistical methods common in development studies with the trend towards integrating geographical factors into econometric development studies. It introduces the statistical argument on ‘apparent populations’ that arrives at conclusions concerning determinism consistent with Chapters 2 and 3 of the dissertation. The need for the visual interpretation of data with descriptive statistics and maps and their utility in the study of uneven development is discussed with a number of examples. Chapter 7 applies these concepts to the ‘institutions versus geography’ debate in development studies, using Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson’s 2002 ‘reversal of fortune’ argument as a primary example. Chapter 8 considers possible directions for future work, both theoretical and empirical. Chapter 9 concludes with a discussion of additional possible objections to the use of initial conditions as exogenous factors in explanation. (shrink)

The essay examines the idea of ―biological space and time‖ found in Evan Thompson‘s Mind in Life and Gilles Deleuze‘s Difference and Repetition. Tracking down this ―new Transcendental Aesthetic‖ intersects new work done on panpsychism. Both Deleuze and Thompson can be fairly said to be biological panpsychists. That‘s what ―Mind in Life‖ means: mind and life are coextensive; life is a sufficient condition for mind. Deleuze is not just a biological panpsychist, however, so we‘ll have to confront full-fledged panpsychism. At (...) the end of the essay we‘ll be able to pose the question whether or not we can supplement Thompson‘s ―Mind in Life‖ position with a ―Mind in Process‖ position and if so, what that supplement means both for his work and for panpsychism. (shrink)

John Kinsella’s twentieth volume of poetry is laden with a poetics of attention to time, water and heat. Climate inheres in simplified topographical sketches, surveys and encounters with animals; water is ambiguous: a solid presence that is also fluid, subject to evaporation and often modelled as multi-dimensional motion; universalised western seasons are used rhetorically and symbolically to bring into relief little seasons within seasons, the more spatially and temporally localised markers of change. All these speak directly to the function of (...) the image and terrestrial matter,and how poetry is alert to such conditions. Kinsella has conceived of this as a “clash between linguistic anomaly and environmental exactness.”. (shrink)

The aim of the work is to examine the relationship between the concepts of “immanence” and “politics” in the works of Hegel and Deleuze. Both Hegel and Deleuze are thinkers of immanence and they explicitly think this concept in relation to the problem of political practice. As I show, they attempt to “ground” politics in immanence. The purpose of this work is to prove that there exists an inherent paradox in the undertaking to “ground” politics in immanence. Both philosophers are (...) confronted with a paradox that emerges from this “grounding”. The paradox appears in the form of natural violence. Both authors fail to contain this violence through arguments. In order to show this, I examine the relationship between two further concepts: history and the state. I compare Hegel’s and Deleuze’s formulations of world-history and universal history, tracing the analogies and differences in how they think the relationship of the state to history. Based on the conclusions I then focus on the relationship of politics to immanence. The paradox of natural violence, I show, emerges from the relationship of the state at the “end of history”. (shrink)

OVERVIEW. The concept of emergence – which I define as the (diachronic) construction of functional structures in complex systems that achieve a (synchronic) focus of systematic behaviour as they constrain the behaviour of individual components – plays a crucial role in debates in philosophical reflection on science as a whole (the question of reductionism) as well as in the fields of biology (the status of the organism), social science (the practical subject), and cognitive science (the cognitive subject).1 In this essay (...) I examine how the philosophy of Deleuze and that of Deleuze and Guattari2 can help us see some of the most important implications of the debate on the status of the organism, as well as prepare the ground for a discussion of the practical and cognitive subject. (shrink)