I demonstrate that Deleuze's identification of Aion as an empty form offers a fascinating model of temporality that prioritises variation. First, I suggest that Deleuze's identification of time as an empty form is supported by ancient Greek and Gnostic concepts of the relation of Aion and Chronos. From Plato, through Aristotle, to Plotinus the concept of time undergoes substantive revision, in the sense that temporal measurement becomes removed from the measurement of existent entities. This gradual untethering of time from movement (...) gives rise to the development of the concept of eternity as an ontologically comprehensive mode of time that is devoid of content. It is here, with Deleuze's reading of the Platonic cosmology, that we see the first hints of the suggestion that Aion is involved with ontogenesis. Eternity is characterised as: a temporal ‘all’ that is non-reducible to the determinacy implied by any particular temporally localised existent or temporal series ; that which tends towards a diversity of possible states of affairs. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects in the long history of Aion is that – in the ancient world – it was used in magical incantations. For the Gnostics and Oracles, Aion was a deity, and a potent one at that. From the Gnostic papyri, we get a vision of Aion as a force which enjoys eternal realisation. I suggest that the papyri conjure an image of Aion as a deity that is liberated from time, in the sense that it enjoys a neutrality with respect to the movements of any particular entity or group of entities – a form, in the most general sense of the term. Then, to clarify this mercurial aspect of an empty form of time, I elaborate on a complex analogy between Aion and Deleuze's concept of an ‘ideal game’ – an analogy that Deleuze specifies through reference to Fitzgerald and Borges. The claim is that Aion is an analogue of an ideal game in the sense that both share essential properties. Both Aion and the ideal game involve the multiplication of chance. Finally, I suggest that the differential aspects of Aion imply that it is pure variability; something which can be illustrated through a differential equation. These yield the suggestion that Aion enjoys realisation as an ontogenetic force. I further claim that ontogenetic forces may enjoy expression as the content of literature and mathematics. In concrete terms, temporality is involved in the creation of existent entities, which may be illustrated as various types of continuous multiplicity. (shrink)

Nobel-price winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen introduced in 2000 the concept of the Anthropocene as the name for the successor geological period to the Holocene. The Holocene started about 12,000 years ago and is characterized by the relatively stable and temperate climatic and environmental conditions that were conducive to the development of human societies. Until recently, human development had relatively little impact on the dynamics of geological time. Although disagreement exists over the exact birth date of the Anthropocene, it is (...) indisputable that the impact of human activity on the geo-climatic environment became more pronounced from the industrial revolution onwards, leading to a situation in which humans are now widely considered to have an eco-geologically critical impact on the earth's bio-physical system. The most obvious example is the accumulation of greenhouse gases like CO2and Methane (CH4) in the atmosphere and the changes this induces in climatic dynamics. Others are the growing homogenization of biodiversity as a result of human-induced species migration, mass extinction and bio-diversity loss, the manufacturing of new (sub-)species through genetic modification, or the geodetic consequences resulting from, for example, large dam construction, mining and changing sea-levels. (shrink)

While most other works focus on conspiracy theories, this book examines conspiracy panics, or the anxiety over the phenomenon of conspiracy theories. Jack Z. Bratich argues that conspiracy theories are portals into the major social issues defining U.S. and global political culture. These issues include the rise of new technologies, the social function of journalism, U.S. race relations, citizenship and dissent, globalization, biowarfare and biomedicine, and the shifting positions within the Left. Using a Foucauldian governmentality analysis, Bratich maintains that conspiracy (...) panics contribute to a broader political rationality, a (neo)liberal strategy of governing at a distance through the use of reason. He also explores the growing popularity of 9/11 conspiracy research in terms of what he calls the "sphere of legitimate dissensus." Conspiracy Panics concludes that we are witnessing a new fusion of culture and rationality, one that is increasingly shared across the political spectrum. (shrink)

Digital technology has revolutionized connectivity, but it has also overcome spatial obstacles that used to shield people from subjugating gazes and unlimited exercise of power. The home as an auratic space is dead, and this alienation has hindered our democratic capacities and created complex crises. The Death of Home aims to intellectually engage readers via enhancing spatial literacy to critically confront today’s crises.

Introduction: Foucault and political philosophy -- Marx: antinormative critique -- Lenin: the invention of party governmentality -- Althusser: the failure to denormativise Marxism -- Deleuze: denormativisation as norm -- Rorty: relativising normativity -- Honneth: the poverty of critical theory -- Geuss: the paradox of realism -- Foucault: the lure of neoliberalism -- Conclusion: What now?

Event of Signature formulates a new philosophical problem which focuses on the handwritten signature as sign of legal identification. Author Michaela Fišerová works with three metaphysical expectations, which are shared in discourses of graphology and forensic analysis. The first expectation tends to reveal the signer's soul: a handwritten signature "naturally" mirrors the unique psychological qualities of the signer. The second expectation tends to guarantee the originality of the signer's trace: a handwritten signature proves physical contact between the signed document and (...) the writing tool "authentically" moved by the signer's hand. The third expectation tends to recognize the signer's legal identity: a handwritten signature is expected to reproduce the signer's personal style, which enables identification by legal authorities. In a methodologically inventive and semiotically-based dialogue with Derrida's deconstruction, Fišerová situates this triple expectation in the interval between life and law. Challenging coverage of this topic finally shows that none of the metaphysical expectations will ever be fulfilled in the event of manual signing. Legal uses of handwritten signature are characterized by the complex aporia of repeating the unrepeatable. (shrink)

How to participate proactively in a process of change and transformation, to shape our path within an uncertain future? With this publication, the State Of The Art Network marks a waypost on a journey which started in 2018, when like-minded Nordic and Baltic art organisations and professionals initiated this network as a multidisciplinary collaboration facing the Anthropocene. Over five years, ten organisations and around 80 practitioners from different disciplines, like the arts, natural sciences and humanities came together, online and in (...) person, for workshops, seminars and discussions. The aim was to find ways to create resilience and concrete actions on how to live through the change in culture, economy and the environment and to find concrete, hands-on methods to deal with the Anthropocene and the environmental crisis. As an outcome of this process, this publication takes a closer look at how we as practising artists, researchers and cultural actors can create elements for critical thinking and doing which can assist us in navigating the complexities of the present. -/- Edited for the State Of The Art Network by Erich Berger, Mari Keski-Korsu, Marietta Radomska and Line Thastum. -/- Produced and published by Bioart Society 2023. (shrink)

In 1967, after a talk Deleuze gave to the Society of French Philosophy, Ferdinand Alquiéé expressed concern during the question and answer session that perhaps Deleuze was relying too heavily upon science and not giving adequate attention to questions and problems that Alquiéé took to be distinctively philosophical. Deleuze responded by agreeing with Alquiéé; moreover, he argued that his primary interest was precisely in the metaphysics science needs rather than in the science philosophy needs. This metaphysics, Deleuze argues, is to (...) be done ‘‘in the style of Whitehead’’ rather than the style of Kant, and in developing this metaphysics Deleuze draws heavily on Spinoza. The present essay examines this Deleuzian-Spinozist metaphysics done in the style of Whitehead, the ‘‘metaphysics science needs’’, drawing on the writings of David Hume and Bruno Latour in the process. This discussion will in turn enable us to situate Deleuze's metaphysics in relation to contemporary debates concerning speculative realism and correlationism, and especially Quentin Meillassoux's critique of the latter. Our conclusion will be that the kind of metaphysics Deleuze pursues is neither correlationist nor straightforwardly realist, but rather charts a course between realism and anti-realism. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze takes up the challenge to create a philosophy of the interesting, the remarkable and the unusual. He does this in what Alain Badiou calls the ‘‘Grand Style’’, the style of Descartes, Spinoza and Kant whose philosophies arise in relation to developments in the natural sciences and mathematics. Grounding himself in the molar-molecular pair, Deleuze sets out a new image of thought. He conceptualises an immanent but still relatively closed, deterministic, atomistic and reversible system that is not immediately reduced (...) to entropic equilibrium because its processes take place on the molecular level, at speeds which he hypothesises are beyond the speed of light. He postulates a manifold, a sphere of immanence that is the entire universe and not merely the Earth or our solar system. It is a system governed by sensitivity to initial starting points and unstable boundaries, thus although it is chaotic as well as probabilistic, it remains a mathematically formal, deterministic system. (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)

This paper is an attempt to implement Gilles Deleuze's theory of the series and the event, and the related function of the empty square (as formulated primarily in The Logic of Sense), in relation to the geopolitical regime comprising ‘Israel proper’ and the system of occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The purpose of this exercise is to help establish a practical access to Deleuze's philosophies, and to offer a clinical account of the Israeli occupation of the (...) Palestinian territories. (shrink)

Challenges the accepted model, and builds a politically sensitive notion of generosity.

Deleuze and Whitehead are both centrally concerned with the problem of how to reconcile the emergence of the New with the evident continuity and uniformity of the world through time. They resolve this problem through the logic of what Deleuze calls ‘double causality’, and Whitehead the difference between efficient and final causes. For both thinkers, linear cause-and-effect coexists with a vital capacity for desire and decision, guaranteeing that the future is not just a function of the past. The role of (...) desire and decision can be seen in recent developments in biology. (shrink)

This project retraces activations of Kierkegaard in the development of polit­ical theology. It suggests alternative modes of states of exception than those attributed to him by Schmitt, Taubes and Agamben. Several Kierkegaardian themes open themselves to 'something like pure potential' in Agamben, namely: living death, animality, criminality, auto-constitution, modification, liturgy, love and certain articulations of improbabilities. Attention is drawn to a modal ontology and auto-constitution at work in Kierkegaard's writings, as well as a complicated and indissociable operation between killing and (...) letting-live in legalist exceptionalism, comparable to similar functions found in Foucault regarding the biopowers and necropolitics of territorial and governmental apparatuses. It closes in consideration of Kierkegaard's critique of enumeration, large numbers, and statistical probability alongside contemporary tele-technoscientific social controls via the online datafication of people by surveillance or platform capitalisms. After Kierkegaard, such apparatuses are perhaps suspect as calculated to tranquilize humanity into more docile subhumans as it fools folk into becoming part of its numbers. (*Accompanying file includes only front matter, abstract, and endnotes*). (shrink)

In this chapter we argue for biophilosophy as a queerfeminist and posthumanities methodology that attends to the question of life by focusing on multiple differences and transformations, materiality and processuality, as well as relations, intra-actions, and disconnections. By combining both the ontological and ethical concerns that go beyond what is conventionally seen as “life”, biophilosophy offers a critical and innovative approach to the issues of death, extinction, (un) liveability, terminality, and toxicity, among others, which all form the backbone of the (...) environmental crises and changing conditions of life on Earth, often framed as the Anthropocene. In what follows, we first discuss select theorisations and implications of the “life/death” coupling as an ethico-political question; subsequently we elaborate the concept of biophilosophy as a methodology; and finally, we propose two examples where we test biophilosophy as a framework that allows us: (1) to engage with the enmeshment of life and death through the concept of the non/living, and (2) to explore the concept of toxic embodiment as an onto-ethical condition we all (human and non-human) are differentially immersed in. (shrink)

Part of a series on the question of what is the good life, the essay is structured as a montage. Part 1 contests the received notion that death is exterior to the work of Deleuze. To this end, it gathers together a telegraphic collection of examples – ‘corpses’ in his corpus – that invariably show up whenever the question is raised. Part 2 attempts a Deleuzian move: it puts death to work. If death is not nothing, it argues, it must (...) be productive of something absolutely new. Drawing upon Blanchot's seminal essay, ‘The Two Versions of the Imaginary’, it makes the case that this creation is the cadaver: the first time-image. (shrink)

The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged (...) closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person’s exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes’s mind-body problem, Fanon’s experience of being ‘not-yet human,’ and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy’s most enduring and canonical problems. -/- “Harfouch has written an important book on the intersection of race and the Western construction of the mind-body problem … This book is a significant resource for theorists dealing with race and decolonization issues, but it is more significant for the critique of philosophy itself and the continued teaching of mind-body issues. Readers will need some knowledge of philosophy, but the volume is in general accessible. It should be required reading for scholars of philosophy. Harfouch establishes a logically strong argument and makes a unique contribution to the field.” — CHOICE. (shrink)

This paper pursues two goals. The first concerns clarifying the relationship between Deleuze and the Russian linguist and culturologist, Mikhail Bakhtin. Not only does Deleuze refer to Bakhtin as a primary source for his emphasis on voice and indirect discourse, both thinkers valorise heterogeneity and creativity. I argue Deleuze's notions of ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘reterritorialisation’ parallel Bakhtin's idea of ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘monoglossia’. Clarifying the relationship between Deleuze and Bakhtin leads directly to the second of my two other goals. I will argue (...) that an important difference in their characterisation of voice reveals a strong point in Deleuze's philosophy, one related to the political sphere. At the same time, however, Deleuze's particular way of articulating this point conceals a weakness, one related to the idea of the subject. I will conclude my paper by suggesting a way to address this weakness. (shrink)

Philosophy & Architecture special number of philosophy@LISBON (International eJournal) 5 | 2016 edited by Tomás N. Castro with Maribel Mendes Sobreira Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa ISSN 2182-4371.

Deleuze's relationship to Kant is intricate and fundamental, given that Deleuze develops his transcendental philosophy of difference in large part out of Kant's work. In doing so he utilises the moment of the sublime from the third Critique as the genetic model for the irruption of the faculties beyond their capture within common sense. In this sense, the sublime offers the model not only for transcendental genesis but also for aesthetic experience unleashed from any conditions of possibility. As a result, (...) sensation in both its wider and more specifically artistic senses (senses that become increasingly entwined in Deleuze's work) will explode the clichéés of human perception, and continually reinvent the history of art without recourse to representation. In tracing Deleuze's ‘‘aesthetics’’ from Kant we are therefore returned to the viciously anti-human (and Nietzschean) trajectory of Deleuze's work, while simultaneously being forced to address the extent of its remaining Idealism. Both of these elements play an important part in relation to Deleuze's ‘‘modernism’’, and to the discussion of his possible relevance to contemporary artistic practices. (shrink)

Felix Guattari was a modernist. He not only liked a lot of modernist artists, but his ‘aesthetic paradigm’ found its generative diagram in modern art. The most important aspect of this diagram was its insistence on the production of the new, the way it produced a utopian projection of a ‘people to come’, and so a politics whose only horizon was the future. Also important for Guattari's diagram of the ‘modern’ were the forces of abstraction, autonomy and immanent critique. Together (...) these elements construct an artwork that is radically singular and separate, composed of a-signifying, a-temporal and invisible forces, sensations that go beyond our human conditions of possibility. In this Guattari's modernism must be understood as being quite different from his co-option by contemporary art theorists influenced by post-Operaist thought. Post-Operaism understands politics as ‘being-against’, a dialectical form of negation that finds its political condition of possibility in what already exists. Because such thought sees modern art as being entirely subsumed by the institutions and markets that contain it, art itself must be negated in order for aesthetic powers to become political. This has lead post-Operaist thought to align itself strongly with the avant-garde positions of institutional-critique and art-into-life, or ‘non-art’. Guattari's modernism takes him in a very different direction, affirming modern art despite its institutional enframing, because art is forever in the process of escaping itself. This makes modern art the model in Guattari's thought for politics itself. (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)

Countering the common assumption in affect theory that deconstruction is incompatible with studies of affect, this essay theorises a deconstructive approach to reading for affect in texts and examines the role affect has always played in deconstructive reading. It reads Derrida alongside Deleuze who has been influential in affect theory in order to explicate what deconstruction adds to existing poststructural theories of affect: namely, how affect functions at the scene of reading, shaping the reading itself and coming into view through (...) textual forms. In its second half, the essay turns to Cixous' ‘Savoir,’ demonstrating through a reading of that text what a deconstructive reading of affect looks like in practice and exploring the ethics of such an approach. (shrink)

Eternal return is the paradox that accounts for the interplay between difference and repetition, a dynamic at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy, and Blanchot's approach to this paradox, even and especially through what it elides, further illuminates it. Deleuze draws on Blanchot's characterisations of difference, forgetting, and the unlivable to depict the ‘sense’ produced via eternal return, which, for Blanchot, is where repetition implicates or ‘carries’ pure difference. However, for Deleuze, difference and the unlivable are also developed by the living (...) repetition or ‘contraction’ of habit, which results in his distinctive characterization of ‘force’, ‘levity’, and sense in eternal return. (shrink)

By melodic landscape, this paper points to natural milieus such as mountains whose motifs are caught up in contrapuntal relations. With Merleau-Ponty, the structure of the world is a symphony, and the production of life which implicates both organism and environment as unfurling of Umwelt is ‘a melody that sings itself’. For the Chinese culture, mountains have been deemed virtuous in Confucianism, immortal by Daoists, and spiritual for a Buddhist to reach a substrate level of pure stream of a-subjective consciousness. (...) A Chinese painter-poet within the ‘mountain-water’ genre would consider mountains as performance of events, a concert of vibration of light, shape and sound, movement and rest. Insofar as art is to create energy transfer, Chinese artists of mountains aim at concerting with nature as organised by rhythms and conspecifics, unfolding contrapuntal melodies with all kinds of counterpoints. As Deleuze and Guattari's notion of refrains are the three forces or tempos of chaos, earth and world confronting/converging one another, this paper endeavours to find out, first, how Deleuze and Guattari's geological, organic and alloplastic stratifications can be put alongside mountains, animals, plants and arts, and second, how this notion can contribute to our new appreciation of the way Chinese mountains in arts can give out music. (shrink)

This paper takes Deleuze's idea ‘to green’ as a qualitative predicate which becomes a rhizomatic event where Jesper Hoffmeyer's ‘plant being’ contemplates through waves and rhythms, hence affects and percepts. The article then brings forward an intertwined group of Chinese ideograms which are designed with plant-radicals, making up an ecosystem towards the establishment of a new Chinese ecocriticism under the banner of biosemiotics. Such an effort will, hopefully, widen the scope and dimension of the new field of environmental humanities, with (...) an emphasis on the scenario of affective attuning to the agency of vegetal life. The main purpose is to put Deleuze and Guattari's form-event assemblage within the stratification of regimes of signs in A Thousand Plateaus, in order to establish a ‘natureculture’ continuity not only between science and art, but also between a Western rethinking of language/culture and a Chinese ecosystem/ecocriticism. (shrink)

John McCumber’s new book takes up the current professional crisis in the discipline of philosophy and traces it back to a series of fateful philosophical distinctions that have resulted in an oppressively substantialist disposition and, in so doing, have rendered philosophy pernicious. When humankind thrives, philosophy wanes, but when philosophy thrives, humankind generally wanes. In reviewing McCumber’s timely and important work, I also reflect on philosophy’s current crisis of relevance, both in itself and with reference to this journal.

After a long period of neglect that began in his lifetime, why has Schelling reemerged as an important philosopher, germane to contemporary concerns? In the first part of this essay I offer a brief history of Schelling’s early descent into obscurity and gradual ascent back into the light of philosophical relevance. In the second and final part of the essay, I offer a brief survey of the current Schelling resurgence in the English speaking reception of Continental philosophy.

This paper will articulate an underappreciated side of the psychoanalytical Deleuze: his relation to Melanie Klein, particularly as it appears in The Logic of Sense. Deleuze's engagement with Klein largely follows his familiar strategy of re-reading a thinker off of a twist in one or two of that thinker's key concepts. With Klein, this twist involves re-reading her story of psychic development on the basis of disjunction rather than negation, so that the psychic surface that emerges generates a persistent non-correspondence (...) between self and other and between concept and thing. Deleuze thereby makes Klein a central figure in his ontology of sense and his analysis of how the physical surface of bodies generates a metaphysical surface of thought. However, Deleuze's ultimate turn is a Nietzschean one towards overcoming, the thought of eternal return, and the demolition of the Oedipal Law. As this final turn makes clear, even in his early writings that engaged more directly and affirmatively with psychoanalytical thought, Deleuze was already on an anti-Oedipal path. (shrink)

Inspired by Ursula Le Guin's ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, contemporary feminist writing in the social sciences and the humanities has been characterised by a strong renewal of interest in storytelling, as is evidenced by the works of Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway among others. How can storytelling grow with and beyond its literary origin to become a political and heuristic tool? And how does the Anthropocene – our specific geologic epoch – require the renewal of the means of (...) expression of such an old tool as storytelling, so that it becomes a human and nonhuman process? To answer those questions, Deleuze's and Haraway's takes on ‘fabulation’ are intermingled along three lines: the part played by storytelling in the construction of earthly knowledges, the imbrication of speculation and politics, and the nonhuman dimension of fabulation that allows for the liberation of forces of life repressed by an anthropocentric approach. (shrink)

This article is intended to work on a number of different levels. First it is concerned with the brain-become-subject as hypothesized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book What is Philosophy?. It is concerned with demonstrating the convergence between Deleuze and Guattari's work and the claims of some contemporary neuro-biological theories of consciousness. In particular, I will be comparing Deleuze and Guattari's hypothesis to the work of Gerald Edelman and Daniel Dennett. Second, it is my contention that the (...) shared themes of this convergence amount to the renewal of a paradigm in the understanding of human consciousness and its relationship to the body, which I have elsewhere called `the new Bergsonism'. The emphasis in the text on themes such as duration, material connectedness and immanence, Becoming, multiplicity, selection and so on, is taken to be self-evidently Bergsonian. The primary task of this particular article is, then, to establish a careful technical demonstration of the existence of a shared set of themes and concepts. I have made this demonstration more concrete by placing it within the context of a discussion of the affective dimensions of the experience of social idiosyncrasy (as defined by Adorno and Horkheimer). My wider agenda is that this demonstration of shared themes in poststructuralism and neuro-science should contribute towards a more general attempt to establish a neo-Bergsonian paradigm at the heart of a new sociology of affect. (shrink)

Deleuze and Guattari's work opens theoretical and political possibilities for us by demonstrating that the boundary between ‘the West’ and the ‘non-West’ is itself a historically unstable epistemological inscription on the surface of the earth, but one that nevertheless retraces itself over and over again. They show us that our political possibilities exist precisely in the ‘non-West’, so long as we understand this term not in the sense of an existing supposedly ‘non-Western’ territory or ‘substance’, but rather as a ‘line (...) of flight’ beyond the nation-state, the form in which the ‘original division’ and creation of the social relation called ‘the West’ continues to produce itself. They thus demonstrate that the way out of the Eurocentric epistemological order lies precisely in clarifying how ‘the West’ was created as an effect of the capitalist axiomatic and maintained by the repetition of this paradoxical ‘commencement’ in the form of the ‘anthropological difference’, congealed into the modern nation-state. In the pursuit of this moment, we will investigate the question of how the social surface is territorialised and enclosed for capitalist accumulation, how the purely heterogeneous topology of the social comes to be inscribed with the traces of the apparatus of capture. (shrink)

This paper intends to verify the extent and effectiveness of the transforming appropriation of the Derridean concept of ‘differance’ by Stiegler with respect to the problems that, according to Stiegler, make this creative critical operation necessary; in particular with respect to the most recent question concerning the possibility of thinking about and putting into practice a ‘neganthropological différance’ capable of facing the ecological crisis that today seems to threaten the very existence of life on earth. The paper goes back to (...) Technics and Time 1. to analyze the distinction between ‘vital difference’ and ‘noetic difference’ that constitutes the condition of possibility of the ‘neganthropological différance.’ In this perspective, the distinction proposed by Stiegler seems to re-propose the hierarchically oriented oppositional structure that characterizes metaphysical thought and in particular the opposition between man and animal, attributing to the human being the ability to free himself from the constraints of his biological-natural condition. Finally, the paper attempts to account for the repercussions of this approach on the very possibility of an effective response to the ecological crisis, concluding with a provocation regarding the role that theory can and must play with regard to such an urgent and far-reaching problem. (shrink)

In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, nomadism works as an approach to the creation of concepts that favour space: geophilosophy. Nomadism is the way in which one crosses the plane of immanence and the many becomings; in fact, nomadism exceeds the ancient rhetoric of the subject because its disposition belongs to the multiple and to the environment in which it can unfold. In this sense, the disorientation in the present appears less disturbing; it is rather a shift in perspective, (...) certainly difficult to understand in the time in which the mega-machine of power is becoming more and more persecutory. Lines of flight, movements of slippage, becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-minor refer not only to the exercise of criticism, but also to the production of assemblages that intend to resist the present. (shrink)

The paper aims to describe the stakes of a Nietzschean influence on Deleuze's reflections on the transcendental and conversely to highlight the Deleuzian operation of politicising Nietzsche by ‘minorising’ him. In order to further understand such a complex relationship of becoming between Deleuze and Nietzsche, the first objective of the paper is to focus on active and reactive forces, which seem to be the core of this very relation. Thus, the paper suggests that micropolitics has its conditions of possibility in (...) the Nietzschean corpus and, in particular, in the symptomatology of decadence, resentment and nihilism. In this sense, now the title of the paper reveals its meaning: the whole Deleuzian operation could be summarised as the passage from the criticism and questioning of an image of Nietzsche ‘forbidden to minors’, typical of the interpretations of the first half of the twentieth century, to a becoming-minor of these very same Nietzschean concepts. It is precisely through such a becoming-minor that Nietzsche's diagnosis and concepts are translated in a political and emancipatory key, in order to give power to minorities. (shrink)

This paper develops a response to the ethical conception of the human Other formulated by Gilles Deleuze in his review of Michel Tournier’s 1967 novel Friday. The central contention here is that although Deleuze develops a compelling notion of intensive ethics in response to Tournier’s novel, that ethics also remains deeply problematic in refusing to ascribe a positive role to the human Other. My wager is that some of these problems can be brought to light by placing Deleuze’s philosophy in (...) dialogue with that of Emmanuel Levinas. As I seek to show, Levinas’s philosophy of alterity not only reveals that Deleuze is mistaken in failing to ascribe a positive ethical role to the human Other, but also begins to point the way toward a more positive conception of ethics that does not oppose the Other to the intensive realm that Deleuze so much values. (shrink)

The works of the sixteenth-century Venetian painter Jacopo Tintoretto present us with a radicalised idea of the cosmos that challenges both the humanist centring of the world on man and the hierarchy of divine authority that dominate the artistic traditions to which he is heir. In their place, Tintoretto confronts us with a ‘machinic’ staging of forces in which man, nature, religious figure and artificial element are integrated within an extended material plane. With this pictorial immanence, Tintoretto presents a ‘cosmic (...) materialism’ unprecedented in Venetian painting. In this, his work gives provocative expression to Deleuze and Guattari's ontology of the artwork as ‘cosmic’ construction, and to their conception of the artist as ‘cosmic artisan’. Via readings of the art historical reception of Tintoretto's work by the art historian Arnold Hauser, and the artistic reception of Tintoretto's work by Paul Cézanne, I explore this expression, and attend to questions of modernity, temporality and art history as they are inflected in Deleuze and Guattari's thought. (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)

That philosophy exists, that it is possible, and that it has (and could still have) a future depends first and foremost on the existence of philosophers (necessarily considered in the plural). If the presence of philosophers is fundamental for the existence of the philosophical enterprise, then it can be easily deduced that, without philosophers, there would be no philosophy. If they come necessarily in the plural (as more than one), how should they, however, interact? Is philosophy a mere interaction among (...) philosophers, or is it a cooperation of philosophers? But maybe it is something different still. The concept of philosophy, in its original Greek understanding, reveals how this interaction can be understood in a provocative but very interesting way: as friendship. Philosophy as philo-sophy, as friendship of wisdom. Said differently, philosophy as a community (of friends) that gather around the question of wisdom and knowledge. This essay attempts to think philosophy according to its being φιλεῖν τὸ σοφόν. (shrink)

This article has two parts. The first one compares the ontological and epistemological implications of two main philosophical stances on how reality relates to appearance. I call the first group the “plane of superficiality,” where reality and appearance are the same; there is no gap between what a thing is and how it manifests itself. I call the second group “volume of representation,” in which reality is beyond appearances; there is an insurmountable gap between the thing and its phenomena. The (...) second part of the article focuses on Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as the second group’s contemporary position. Within the OOO epistemological model of “knowledge without truth,” Harman’s schema of the observer’s participation in the object’s knowledge production is questioned. Alternatively, based on the notion proposed here of “flat representativity” in which each appearance is equally valuable to represent different aspects of the object, I argue for the full spectrum of the sensual as the basis for “knowledge without truth.” In particular, the aesthetic method, excluded from Harman’s concerns about knowledge, is suggested as another contribution to the episteme. (shrink)

The figure of the desert features extensively throughout the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia and is a recurring motif in Deleuze's sole-authored works. While recent book-length studies place geophilosophy at the forefront of Deleuze and Guattari's thought, the theme of the desert is mentioned in these studies only in passing, if at all. Understanding the role of the desert in the evolution of Deleuze and Guattari's collaborative enterprise is, however, important for a number of reasons: firstly, it allows us (...) to track the relationship between schizoanalysis and the wider project of geophilosophy and why the one necessary implies the other. Secondly, it helps us to position Deleuze and Guattari's work relative to other key figures such as Nietzsche and Heidegger who employ images of deserts and wastelands in their critique of modernity. Thirdly, and most importantly, it gives us a framework for theorising the Anthropocene – and the forms of capitalist spatiality that dominate it – as an epoch of both physical and metaphysical desertification in which the relationship between life and its material ground becomes ever more uncertain. The article concludes by relating Deleuze's remarks on desert islands to our contemporary environmental condition. (shrink)