What does it mean for philosophy to take seriously the chaos that haunts and threatens to undermine the fleetingly static formations that populate our epistemological landscapes? What does it mean to learn, think and know on a plane detached from transcendent truths, from recognition and representation, from the inverted image of falsity? We risk badly mangling our answers to these questions so long as we take for granted the orthodoxal image of thought and its conservative postulates. But critique is not (...) enough, we need reconception, creativity; we need thought. This paper locates in Deleuze's ‘Image of Thought’ precisely these resources in the form of a philosophy of learning, taking as its guiding light the claim that learning ought no longer to name a merely transitory movement between a lack of knowledge and its fulfilment in the apprehension of truth, but the domain from which the transcendental conditions of thought itself are to be drawn. (shrink)

In this article, I draw resources from Deleuze's Difference and Repetition to develop an explanation and critique of invasive policing techniques on certain populations in the United States. First, I analyse recent studies revealing the neighbourhood effects of aggressive policing on those who never directly encounter officers. Second, I use Deleuze's concepts of the virtual, potentiality, the Idea and problems to illuminate the limitations to studying these effects that are inherent in a social scientific approach. I then use Deleuze's discussion (...) of the Image of Thought to theorise a racialised Image of the Human that justifies the aggressive policing policies in certain neighbourhoods. I argue instead for an open, unsettled, in-process category of the human that continues to creatively actualise. Finally, I offer two normative claims that again derive from Deleuze's philosophy: the first is a preliminary strategy for mitigating the non-localisable and virtual effects of policing policy by ‘conjugating’ oneself in a complex set of neighbourhood relations, particularly in response to inequitably distributed spaces of oppression; the second is an attempt to avoid reducing humanity to calculability by ‘fully explicating’ the other. In combination, the goal is to undermine the dogmatic Images of Thought and the Human that ground oppressive policing practices, and to foster an intensive potentiality for newness that might take these Images' place. (shrink)

The Hegel-Deleuze relation has usually been considered as one of opposition, because of Deleuze’s explicit anti-Hegelian statements. This article refutes the main conceptual grounds to this opposition: the critique of the negative and of the circle of return. It aims to present the possibilities offered by considering the Hegel-Deleuze relation as a problematic, productive one. “Hegel-Deleuze” would be a relation prior to the supposed terms. To achieve this, we bind them through the concept of Idea. This traditional concept of philosophy, (...) which crowns the Hegelian system (also known as absolute idealism), appears in a key position in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. It allows Deleuze to consider thought not as an image of the external reality or the condition of possible experience, but as the genetic principle of real experience. Even if Deleuze accuses Hegel of positing his Idea as the ground for the eternal repetition of the same, this article proposes to interpret it as the source of creation of a reality always different from itself. (shrink)

The critique of the dominant image of thought bears important consequences for pedagogical theory and practice. I discuss how Deleuze can help us think about the role of the teacher, the teaching of thinking and the relationship between knowledge and learning. Reading Deleuze's Difference and Repetition as a treatise on thinking and its education, I argue that Deleuze's philosophy challenges and deepens our understanding of what teachers do, how pupils learn and how they learn to think. I show that Deleuze's (...) philosophy can contribute towards the articulation of sceptical but also creative pedagogical responses to the question of teaching, learning and thinking. (shrink)

This paper would attempt to illustrate some possible links between Deleuze’s way of thinking and the practice of modern and post-modern artists. This analogy is defined and explained in the context of Deleuze’s anti-Platonism to see if there is a relation between Deleuze’s struggle to oppose anti-Platonism, his desire to create a new way of thinking, and what modern artists actually did in their practice. Hence, after defining some of the concepts and showing the importance and function of them in (...) modern art, the paper would try to trace the same concepts in Deleuze’s thought. It will then explain Deleuze’s anti-Platonism putting emphasis on the concept of simulacrum; meanwhile, it will briefly answer Badiou’s critique of Deleuze’s anti-Platonism. Finally, it would show that Deleuze, relying on this opposition, and in fact inspired by intellectual processes used by post-modern artists, is trying to find a third way for thinking to a world full of images. He introduces a path that neither goes back and nor, as we find with Baudrillard, sees the world as an apocalyptic world of images in which we wander. (shrink)