This article contrasts the notion of a Deleuzian imaginary with that articulated by various film theorists during the 1970s and 1980s. Deleuze offers us, I argue, a way to conceive of the imaginary in the cinema in a positive way; that is, as something which opens up new expressions of the real. By contrast, for film theorists of the 1970s and 1980s, the imaginary was primarily conceived as a negative concept, as something which offered merely escapes or fraudulent distortions of (...) the real. A Deleuzian imaginary for the cinema can be articulated, I argue, by way of the films of Jean Renoir. (shrink)

Eleven top Deleuze scholars reclaim Deleuzian philosophy as moral philosophy Ethics plays a crucial, if subtle, role in Gilles Deleuze's philosophical project. Michel Foucault claimed that Anti-Oedipus was `a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time'. But what is the nature of the immanent ethics that is developed in Deleuze's thought? How does it differ from previous conceptions of ethics? And what paths does it open for future thought, given (...) the ethical challenges facing humanity in so many domains? Each of the eleven essays in this collection explores the ethical dimension of Deleuze's thought along a new and singular trajectory, and in so doing, attempts to reclaim his philosophy as an ethical philosophy. (shrink)

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari make the claim that ‘[i]t may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion.’ What are we to make of such a calling? The paper explicates why and in what sense this statement is of exemplary significance both for an appropriate understanding of Deleuze's political (...) thought and for a most timely conceptualisation of politics in a world so clearly defined by immanence, and nothing but immanence. I argue that Deleuze's rigorously constructive approach to the world is not beyond politics, as some recent readings have declared (e.g. those of Badiou and Hallward). Rather, we have to appreciate that in Deleuze and Guattari's demand for a ‘belief in this world’ the political intersects with the dimension of the ethical in such a way that our understanding of both is transformed. Only after this ‘empiricist conversion’ can we truly think of a Deleuzian politics that does justice to a plane of immanence ‘immanent only to itself’. (shrink)

In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze effectively argues that two types of relation between events govern their ‘evental’ or ‘ideal play’, and ultimately underlie determined substances, that is, worldly individuals and persons. Leibniz calls these relations ‘compossibility’ and ‘incompossibility’. Deleuze calls them ‘convergence’ and ‘divergence’. This paper explores how Deleuze appropriates and extends a number of Leibnizian concepts in order to ground the idea that events have ontological priority over substances ‘all the way down’.

In this paper, we explore two different approaches to the development of a rhizomatic methodology. In a rhizomatic fashion, we map the connections and disconnections between and across these different pathways. Three connections are described: first, writing a rhizomatic text that is non-linear and self-consciously part of the research method; second, using rhizomatic thought to analyse the discourses operating within data; and third, following Deleuzian lines of flight that connect and link disparate forms of data so that plausible readings can (...) connect analysis of writing, artworks, video, and interview transcripts. The various disconnections are provided to illustrate the impossibility of establishing some kind of formulaic methodology that would neatly answer Buchanan's question of 'how does it work?'. Rather, we are aware of the dangers of 'methodolatory' and offer this paper as one particular and specific reading of the contributions that Deleuzian theories can make to educational research methods. (shrink)

'A Differential Play of Forces' is a study of transcendental empiricism in musical contexts. It presents a reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophical apparatus and explores how music can be thought of as functioning in the operation Deleuze terms transcendental empiricism. Central to transcendental empiricism is the idea of an encounter with intensive difference and the consequent experience of intensive and virtual forces. The thesis sets out to explore this idea in three interwoven steps. First, it develops transcendental (...) empiricism as a philosophical framework, expounding central notions related to time and aesthetic experience. In the context of this philosophical apparatus, music is then discussed as an encounter with intensity and what this may entail for our understanding of musical experience and its potential. The third part of the thesis explores the idea of experiencing intensive forces through music in the thinking and poietic of three composers of the twentieth century: Arnold Schönberg, Olivier Messiaen and Giacinto Scelsi. The thesis develops three ‘images of thought’ corresponding, respectively, to the composers’ expressed theoretical ideas, identifying central concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. A mutual illumination of ideas about music and transcendental empiricism is thus presented, pointing towards a possible convergence between theory and practice, thinking and aesthetic experience as a differential play of intensive forces. (shrink)

Purpose. To study the phenomenon of a woman-author as a subject of culture and philosophy from a development of literary aspect in the works both Western and Ukrainian scientists. To define the significance of the philosophical representation of the gender stereotypes to reconsider their place and role in the socio cultural discourse. Theoretical basis. To investigate the theoretical framework in the postmodern philosophy the cross-disciplinary approach is used. The comparative approach is methodologically important to clarify the problems concerning a woman-author (...) as a subject of culture. It is underlined that the boundary line between literature and philosophy is movable, which coincides with the shapes of the human experience. Based on the conviction that gender has integrated into all social relations, that means it is a gender context of any social interaction, it is important to emphasize the productivity of a new scientific methodology of sociocultural constructing of gender. Originality. Is in systematic literary analysis of Ukrainian and Western women’s prose as specific philosophical phenomenon. It was proved that the investigation of women’s literature, its identity is an important focus of both philosophy and culture, which helps find philosophical problems in literary texts. Besides the analysis of gender implications in texts allows to start theoretical dialogue on gender problems, which means the participation in the discussion about the targets of our cultural life. Conclusions. It has been proved that literature of the ХХ th -XXI st centuries is characterized by strengthening interaction between philosophical systems and literary works that reflects mainstreaming of intellectual and thinking bases. It was revealed that women’s philosophical and literary conceptions have created a unique woman’s world of being and an image of "a new woman", thus leading the way towards the new stereotypes based on comprehension that sex differences should not be determining factors both in cultural and social coexistence. (shrink)

In this article, I will try to elucidate the relevance of Deleuze and Guattari’s approaches in the philosophy of education, along the lines of the Deleuzean pedagogy of ‘do with me’ and the absence of pre-established rules for learning or methodological anarchism. To do so, I will consider three important milestones in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought: (i) antihumanism as the matrix of a pedagogy of generosity, (ii) the primacy of functioning over meaning as a vindication of practical learning versus rote (...) learning, (iii) the concepts of ‘deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation’ as the unlearning required by all true learning. (shrink)

Abstract‘Raising aspirations’ for education among young people in low socioeconomic regions has become a widespread policy prescription for increasing human capital investment and economic competitiveness in so-called ‘knowledge economies’. However, policy tends not to address difficult social, cultural, economic and political conditions for aspiring, based in structural changes associated with globalization. Drawing conceptually on the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, Arjun Appadurai and authors in the Funds of Knowledge tradition, this article theorizes two logics for aspiring that are recognizable (...) in research with young people and families: a doxic logic, grounded in populist–ideological mediations; and a habituated logic, grounded in biographic–historical legacies and embodied as habitus. A less tangible third ‘logic’ is also theorized: emergent senses of future potential, grounded in lived cultures, which hold possibility for imagining and pursuing alternative futures. The article offers a sociological framework for understanding aspirations as complex social–cultural phenomena, and for capacitating emergent and hopeful aspirations through school- and community-based research and dialogue. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with an aspect of Deleuze and Guattari's thought which has not been duly analyzed: systematicity. More specifically, it deals with their conception of the system in three co-authored major works: What is Philosophy?, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These works are of renewed interest because they tease out, each in its own way, a particular type of system. Regardless of whether it has a philosophical import, a botanical reference, a social dimension, or a libidinal investment, the (...) system that Deleuze and Guattari advocate is allegedly a hyper-dynamic system that resists closure. Thus, in an interview with Didier Eribon, Deleuze points out that philosophy is 'an open system' and then, referring to A Thousand Plateaus, he further observes that what he and Guattari 'call a rhizome is also one example of an open system'. The purpose of this essay is not merely to explore how the system in the works of these two prominent poststructuralists is conceived, how it is structured, and how it works, but also to show how it is only superficially open. Paying a special attention to Deleuze and Guattari's exegesis on capitalism, I argue that the proposed system is cynical and ultimately untenable. Key Words: capitalism • Gilles Deleuze • Félix Guattari • open system • philosophy • total system. (shrink)

So much of what we experience in neoliberal capitalism resembles the operation of the camp. How then can we understand the camp as a political technology of labour control recurrent in historical capitalism, and why would we want to? Driven by the perennial imperatives to govern and to accumulate, the camp as a modulation of social control allows us to explore the role of ‘meta-disciplinary’ technique in the ‘real subsumption of labour’. The aims here are to question the sanguine expectations (...) of a liberal pastorate that is inextricable from the needs of capital; to articulate the ‘techniques of domination’ experienced in the idiom of neoliberal capitalism; and to find inspiration for corresponding counter-conducts and ‘techniques of the self’. This article offers a kind of historical archaeology of ‘meta-disciplinary’ technique by resuscitating Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a surprisingly rich source of insight into the operations of the camp modulation and the counter-conducts it engenders. The analysis to follow works in the space between Marxian and Foucauldian political thought opened up by the new materialisms, and draws upon the recent works of Lordon, Lazzarato, Negri, inter alia, that are currently enriching critical theory. (shrink)

Drawing on Deleuze's early works of the 1960s, this article investigates the ways in which Deleuze challenges our traditional linguistic notion of sense and notion of truth. Using Frege's account of sense and truth, this article presents our common understanding of sense and truth as two separate dimensions of the proposition where sense subsists only in a formal relation to the other. It then goes on to examine the Kantian account, which makes sense the superior transcendental condition of possibility of (...) truth. Although both accounts define sense as merely the form of possibility of truth, a huge divide cuts across a simple formal logic of sense and a transcendental logic: transcendental logic discovered a certain genetic productivity of sense, such that a proposition always has the kind of truth that it merits according to its sense. In pursuit of this genetic productivity of sense, Deleuze applies different models of explanation: a Nietzschean genealogical model of the genetic power of sense, and in The Logic of Sense a structural model combined with elements of Stoic philosophy. This article follows Deleuze in setting up a new and very complex notion of sense, which he radically distinguishes from what he terms ‘signification’, that is, an extrinsic, linguistic or logical, condition of possibility. Rather, sense has to be conceived as both the effect and the intrinsic genetic element of an extra-propositional sense-producing machine. (shrink)

This article explores the affinities between film and philosophy by returning to a shared meditation on death and the nature of time. Death has been considered the muse of philosophy and can also be considered the muse of film-philosophy. But what does it mean to say that to film-philosophise is to learn to die, or a kind of training for dying? Film is an artistic object that reminds us of death’s inevitability; it is a meditation on the transient and finite (...) nature of time. Films as diverse as Mizoguchi’s Tales of Ugetsu, Resnais’s Hiroshima mon Amour, and Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light take an uncanny approach to the subject, expressing the paradoxical coexistence of life and death and of different temporal dimensions. This article explores the philosophical concept of the death-image and time through a Deleuzian approach to cinema, meditating on the flashback, the coexistence of the present and the past, and the emergence of a new type of Lazarean character – one who returns from the dead. The article aims to clarify not simply death’s unquestionable omnipresence in film but also cinema’s role as a contemporary version of the trope of memento mori. (shrink)

In this article the author revisits Carol Smart’s 1989 publication Feminism and the power of law. She engages with Smart’s main claims by way of a number of other thinkers. Following Marianne Constable’s description of contemporary American legal thought as socio-legal, the author tentatively considers if it could be argued that some strains in contemporary legal feminism that adopted a sociological method resulted in a similar absence of justice that concerns Constable. Smart’s caution against the development of a feminist jurisprudence (...) is critically analysed with the benefit of hindsight. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault and Goodrich, the author tentatively considers the becoming of a feminist jurisprudence as a minor jurisprudence. What we most lack is a belief in the world, we’ve quite lost the world, it’s been taken from us. (Deleuze 1995, 176)Sociology takes social creation to be the whole of what is and will be. (Constable 1994a, 589). (shrink)

In his lectures from 1987, Deleuze draws an analogy between Michelangelo's figures and Leibnizian substances by claiming that neither are essences but rather sources of modifications or manners of being. The best way to explore this analogy, I argue, is by focusing on Michelangelo's preference for serpentine shapes. By putting key passages from The Logic of Sensation, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque and What is Philosophy? in resonance with the Leibnizian accounts of corporeal aggregates and possible worlds on the (...) one hand and art history on the other, I will try to develop a Deleuzian concept for the typically Mannerist ideal of the serpentine figure. Although Deleuze usually prefers to speak in musical terms of refrains and counterpoints by which various blocs of sensation resonate with each other, in the visual arts it is the serpentine figure that renders visible sensory becoming as a rhythmic counter-positioning of possible worlds within a single body without organs. (shrink)

This article examines how colonial mentalities of subjectifying the people are reinstated in postcolonial Northeast India through the media. Using the Bodos as a context of the argument, the paper studies The Assam Tribune news headlines during the 2021 Assam Legislative Assembly election. By studying both micro- and macrostructures of news headlines, using critical discourse analysis, the article argues that the media continue to reify the subjective consciousness of the population as a discourse that dominates the conflicting ground of social, (...) cultural, and political coexistence across the multi-ethnic populations. While deflecting the government’s divisive policies, the media portrays the government as the source of ‘solution’. Although the technique of governance differs from colonial to postcolonial regime, the objective to constantly subjectify the multi-ethnic population within their realm of subjective consciousness for the purpose of governance remains the same. (shrink)

This article investigates the complex object of the political book. Mobilising Deleuze and Guattari's typology of the book, the article assesses the material properties of four specific books (or sets of books): Mao Zedong's ‘Little Red Book’, Russian Futurist books, Antonin Artaud's paper ‘spells’, and Guy Debord and Asger Jorn's ‘anti-book’ Mémoires. Highly critical of the dominant mode of the political book, what they call the ‘root-book’, Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the troubling religious structures and passions that order (...) its field. Here the book internalises the world as the origin and source of truth and authority – a mode of existence as dear to the avant-garde as it is to religious formations: ‘Wagner, Mallarmé, and Joyce, Marx and Freud: still Bibles.’ But the book also features in Deleuze and Guattari's counter-figure of the ‘rhizome-book’, where they foreground the dynamic materiality of this medium: ‘A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.’ The rhizome-book is an enticing concept for assessing the political book, yet Deleuze and Guattari pay little attention to the specific, concrete attributes of this medium. In focusing on the properties of particular books this article seeks to address that absence, and so contribute to an understanding of the political book that is fully engaged with its material forms. (shrink)

This article addresses the new conditions under which teachers are making the choice to teach. Our core contention is that the reorganisation of schools according to the logic of the corporation, as described in Deleuze's ‘Postscript’, is changing the flows and forces on the primary surface of ‘the classroom’. These changes block the usual movements of teaching to discipline, normalise and individualise, which was the role of the school as precursor to the factory. Blocked from repeating, or returning, teaching as (...) it has always been done, teachers must actively re-will to teach; teachers cannot use order words to name themselves and direct flows and forces as they have usually been done. While many choices to teach will be undertaken, the most popular being that of choosing to teach toward the corporation, the repetition of teaching toward enclosed spaces becomes less compelling. Like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, teachers, who have the courage to actively choose, face a new dawn in which teaching cannot be what it once was. In that moment they must choose to repeat that choice an infinite number of times, the choice of eternal return, and it is from here that new times might begin. (shrink)

This article follows Deleuze in investigating the ways in which the symptom as a form of representation can be collapsed into immanence. Exploring the symptoms of schizophrenia and autism, it examines what implications such a collapse may have for the production of the symptom in its double articulation as representation and immanent production. The argument follows Deleuze and Guattari in asserting that symptoms hold an implicit limit for the social forms that deploy them. Arguing that schizophrenia, as one such limit, (...) has been successfully appropriated and deferred by postmodern capitalism, it is proposed that the proliferating symptom cluster of autism may indicate a new form of limit and that ‘‘becoming autistic’’ thus may have potential as revolutionary practice. (shrink)

Contemporary theorizations of neoliberalism are framed by a false dichotomy between, on the one hand, studies influenced by Foucault in emphasizing neoliberalism as a form of governmentality, and on the other hand, inquiries influenced by Marx in foregrounding neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology. This article seeks to shine some light on this division in an effort to open up new debates and recast existing ones in such a way that might lead to more flexible understandings of neoliberalism as a discourse. (...) A discourse approach moves theorizations forward by recognizing neoliberalism is neither a ‘top-down’ nor ‘bottom-up’ phenomena, but rather a circuitous process of socio-spatial transformation. (shrink)

A process philosophical interpretation of Deleuze's theories of time encounters problems when formulating an account of Deleuze's portrayal of temporality in The Time-Image, where time is understood as having the structure of instantaneity and simultaneity. I remedy this shortcoming of process philosophical readings by formulating a phenomenological interpretation of Deleuze's second synthesis of time. By employing Deleuze's logic of affirmative synthetic disjunction in combination with his differential calculus interpretation of Spinoza's and Bergson's duration, this phenomenological interpretation portrays time as given (...) to our awareness in immediacy rather than through a continuous process of unfolding. The viability of this alternate approach calls into question the claims that Deleuze is strictly a process philosopher and anti-phenomenologist. (shrink)

Conflicts between bioethicists and disability theorists often arise over the permissibility of euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. Where mainstream bioethicists propose universalist guidelines that will direct action across a range of effectively disembodied situations, and take for granted that moral agency requires autonomy, feminist bioethicists demand a contextualisation of the circumstances under which moral decision making is conducted, and stress a more relational view of autonomy that does not require strict standards of independent agency. Nonetheless, neither traditional nor feminist perspectives (...) have fully engaged with the critique of disabled people that they are consistently subjected to discriminatory, even life-threatening, practice and policy in biomedical and health care. The paper revisits some of the issues that drive the often highly polarised debate between bioethicists and disability theorists around the question of end of life decisions involving disabled people. While many bioethicists have doubtless been indifferent to the difference that disability makes, I am also concerned that the very proper demand of disability activists and theorists to scrutinise all end of life decisions for signs of discrimination and even violence has segued into something damagingly restrictive that silences internal dissension and stifles external debate. Given that euthanasia and physician assisted suicide may be issues where conventional argument on either side will founder on deeply felt convictions, I make the radical move to speculate on an entirely different, quasi-Deleuzian, approach to the value of life in order to shake up entrenched positions, and begin to think differently. (shrink)

This essay interprets the meaning of one of the cards in aTarot deck, "The Magician," in the context of process philosophy in the tradition of Alfred North Whitehead. It brings into the conversation the philosophical legacy of American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce as well as French poststructuralist Gilles Deleuze. Some of their conceptualizations are explored herein for the purpose of explaining the symbolic function of the Magician in the world. From the perspective of the logic of explanation, the sign of (...) the Magician is an index of nonmechanistic, mutualist or circular, causality that enables self-organization embedded in coordination dynamics. Its action is such as to establish an unorthodox connection crossing over the dualistic gap between mind and matter, science and magic, process and structure, the world without and the world within, subject and object, and human experience and the natural world, thereby overcoming what Whitehead called the paradox of the connectedness of things. The Magician represents a certain quality that acts as a catalytic agent capable of eliciting transmutations, that is, the emergence of novelty. I present a model for process∼structure that uses mathematics on the complex plane and the rules of projective geometry. The corollary is such that the presence of the Magician in the world enables a particular organization of thought that makes pre-cognition possible. (shrink)

This article is part of alarger project exploring the continuity betweentwo philosophical positions – that of Frenchpoststructuralist Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995)and John Dewey – that appear at first sight tobe separated by time, place and culture. Thescope of the present paper is necessarilylimited and focuses on one aspect of theproject, namely: the problematics ofsubjectivity, or subject formation, inDeleuze's philosophy. Deleuze's position isestablished as pragmatic by virtue of itssharing the value allotted by Dewey toexperiential and experimental inquiry inphilosophy. By drawing initial parallels (...) with anumber of selected Dewey's excerpts, this paperaims to open up a space for the imaginarydialogue between two philosophical thoughts soas to consider a possibility for applyingDeleuze's philosophy to educational theory andpractice in the context of current debates andin a manner continuous with the Deweyan legacy.The paper concludes by affirming Deleuze'splace in the contemporary scholarship on Dewey. (shrink)

Educational philosophy in English-speaking countries tends to be informed mainly by analytic philosophy common to Western thinking. A welcome alternative is provided by pragmatism in the tradition of Peirce, James and Dewey. Still, the habit of the so-called linguistic turn has a firm grip in terms of analytic philosophy based on the logic of non-contradiction as the excluded middle. A body∼mind approach pertains to the edusemiotic turn that this article elucidates. Importantly, semiotics is not illogical but is informed by the (...) paradoxical logic of the included middle. The process of reasoning is however indirect or mediated; it involves active interpretation (in a variety of forms) versus direct representation; it is analogical and connects what are otherwise doomed to remain isolated substances of body versus mind with a separation of knowledge and action. Analysing and synthesising the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Gilles Deleuze, together with a brief excursion into the cutting-edge science of coordination dynamics, this article will demonstrate how the body∼mind assemblage is created in practice, and what may be the implications of such a stance for educational philosophy and pedagogical practice. (shrink)

This paper situates moral education in the context of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and as embedded in lived experience qualified by three dimensions, namely critical, clinical, and creative (‘3C’). The construct of ‘3C’ education will be enriched by reference to the theoretical corpus of Nel Noddings, specifically her 2006 book Critical Lessons: What our schools should teach. The paper argues that only as embodying all three ‘C's in experience can education become genuinely moral and bring the missing element of values into (...) quality teaching (cf. Lovat, 2006a). The novel concept ‘pedagogy of values’ is proposed, analysed and synthesized alongside Deleuze's unorthodox ‘pedagogy of the concept’. (shrink)

There are two focal points to this article. One is to address Julia Kristeva’s theoretical corpus in the context of philosophy of education. Kristeva’s notion of subject in process problematises education with its habitual emphasis on ‘product’. Another is to consider her impact from the perspective of edusemiotics. Edusemiotics is a new direction in educational philosophy and theory, and Kristeva represents one contemporary French intellectual who implicitly inspired the creation, research and development of edusemiotics. The article will briefly address the (...) distinguished features of edusemiotics, the central of which is process ontology in contrast to the old Cartesian paradigm of substance dualism that continues to haunt education. The article will also address the role of presymbolic dimension in the process of self-formation and, as a follow up, reformulate the concept of lifelong education and teacher training. (shrink)

Professor Bogue is one of the major commentators on Gilles Deleuze, whose philosophical legacy constitutes an important influence on my scholarship. I am grateful to Bogue for acknowledging my usage “of Deleuze, and of so many other thinkers across a host of disciplines, [as] intriguing and powerful”. My book not only aims to demonstrate that Tarot represents edusemiotic pedagogy, but also to achieve a new understanding of its functioning. Early in the Prologue I quote Gettings (1973): “no-one has ever been (...) able to explain how it works”. So, while the value of Tarot in terms of being a counseling tool or educational aid was addressed in the prequel called Re-Symbolization of the Self, its naturalistic grounding becomes fully explicated in the present book. And this is what faces Bogue’s criticism who objects to my use of the word natural arguing that Deleuze emphasized “unnatural participation”.Precisely: a semiotic perspective problematises nature as reduced to its classical descripti .. (shrink)

This paper addresses the unconscious dimension as articulated in Carl Jung's depth psychology and in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy. Jung's theory of the archetypes and Deleuze's pedagogy of the concept are two complementary resources that posit individuation as the goal of human development and self-education in practice. The paper asserts that educational theory should explore the role of the unconscious in learning, especially with regard to adult education in the process of learning from life-experiences. The integration of the unconscious into consciousness (...) becomes a constitutive part of subject-formation and self-knowledge, which in turn serves as a basis for experiential self-education. (shrink)

Richard Rorty, in his ‘Consequences of Pragmatism’ (1982), acknowledging the pragmatic direction taken by both modern and postmodern philosophy, declared that ‘James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling’ (Rorty, 1982, p. xviii). This paper does not aim to establish who traveled the farthest along the road posited by Rorty. Instead, its purpose (...) is to trace a common direction as a sort of pragmatic trajectory that will map a territory constituting Gilles Deleuze’s new image of thought, or rather as he put it, a thought without image. By addressing some of Deleuze’s ideas on thinking and learning, especially with regard to the problematics of sources of knowledge, this paper posits the convergence between his philosophical position and Dewey’s philosophy of education despite the two being seemingly separated by time, place and culture. The paper further shifts the focus from the factual knowledge to an experimental and experiential process of knowing and asserts the latter’s far-reaching implications for education as a developing and generative practice. (shrink)

This article draws on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to consider, from an ethical perspective, the current transparency and accountability agenda in Australian schooling. It focuses on the case of the My School website and the argument that transparent publication of comparative performance data via the website provides a basis for making things better in schooling. The article argues that while technologies of accountability may have potential benefits, they cannot provide a basis for this ethical project. Instead, the ethical experience (...) described by Levinas arises from an encounter with opacity in the face-to-face relation with the Other, who is harshly illuminated by the transparency promised through calculation and comparison. Such encounters with opacity hold the potential to disrupt the politics of visibility promoted by transparency agendas and provide an alternative to the growing practice of 'accountability at a distance' based on performance data. (shrink)

This article proposes a situated reading of maternal love, loss and lovelessness in Donna Hemans’ novel River Woman, locating her text in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. I argue that the complex affects that her representation of ‘child-shifting’ produces, can be articulated both in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her, and in the context of the plantation, where ruptured (...) ties at the level of community and culture continue to be reproduced in the personal, emotional and family spheres. I use the concept of marronage, developed in the work of Glissant and Depestre, to define strategies of survival that necessitated actual and imaginative flight or escape, to contextualise the complex affects of the plantation that are repeated and reproduced in the novel's present—the late twentieth-century Caribbean. (shrink)

The way individuals embody their homeland has been addressed by several scholars. However, this article questions how female refugees embody transnational settings while seeking a new home and homeland. The tales of bodies are traced through the writings of three Iranian female refugees living in Europe. The article analyses their autobiographies through a critical reading of Thomas Csordas’s phenomenology of body–world relations and then diverges from him to draw inspiration from Deleuzian becoming. The study attempts to offer an anthropology of (...) becoming to highlight how corporeality is the realm of bodies becoming. (shrink)

Finding myself writing this introduction on the same day that Greta Thunberg is addressing the United Nations, it seems impossible not to understand her parrhesia concerning the biospheric crisis a...

Gilles Deleuze and Hannah Arendt are two thinkers who have theorised the exceptionalism of the revolutionary moment. For Deleuze, it is the moment of the people to come. For Arendt, it is the moment of the freedom of political action. In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall there has been extensive debate on how to remember the German Democratic Republic (DDR) and how to understand the events leading up to its demise. Arendt's analyses of totalitarianism, natality and (...) the public sphere provide points of orientation in an attempt to clarify the nature of the DDR, the dishonesty of its evaluation in the West as well as the transitory purchase of its legitimating discourse on later generations of its citizens. Deleuze's reinvigoration of the revolutionary sense of the term ‘people’ sets it in defiance of prevalent notions of popular sovereignty and therefore facilitates a different reading of the protests against the so-called people's republic of the DDR: something else was at issue besides the substitution of one state form for another. (shrink)

This paper is an experiment in collective writing conducted in Autumn 2019 at the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University. The experiment involves 12 international masters' students readi...

This article responds to Philippe Mengue's claim that Deleuzian political philosophy is fundamentally hostile to democracy. After outlining key elements of the attitude towards democracy in Deleuze and Guattari's work, it addresses three major arguments put forward in support of this claim. The first relies on Deleuze's rejection of transcendence and his critical remarks about human rights; the second relies on the contrast between majoritarian and minoritarian politics outlined in A Thousand Plateaus; and the third relies on the antipathy of (...) philosophy towards opinion as outlined in What is Philosophy? After responding to each of these arguments in turn, I outline an alternative and more positive account of Deleuze and Guattari's critical engagement with opinion by way of a contrast with Rawls. (shrink)

Deleuze and Foucault shared a period of political activism and both drew connections between their activism and their respective approaches to philosophy. However, despite their shared political commitments and praise of each other's work, there remained important philosophical differences between them which became more and more apparent over time. This article identifies some of the political issues over which they disagreed and shows how they relate to some of their underlying philosophical differences. It focuses on their respective approaches to the (...) state, to ‘actuality’ and to the analysis of the present. (shrink)