'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)

While the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of ‘body without organs’ is developed alongside their critique of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is also developed alongside their critique of Christianity, most poignantly in the sixth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus. Here Deleuze and Guattari quote Antonin Artaud in order to show how ‘the judgment of God weighs upon and is exercised against the BwO’. In order to understand this relationship between judgement of God and the BwO, this essay explores Deleuze's critiques of Christianity (...) in his earlier works and concludes that the BwO, much like Artaud's own poetry, is developed in contrast to an internalised form of Christianity. (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)

This article explores the ethical imperative to dramatise in the work of Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze, two of the most radical thinkers in twentieth-century philosophy, as a peculiar kind of askesis. Whereas askesis is often associated with asceticism or self-denial, in the sense of self-regulation and abstention, Bataille and Deleuze advocate training the self towards intensification of the liminal and extreme, which can rather be understood as a denial of self – its dissolution or laceration. Few attempts have been (...) made to compare their work, even though both share a commitment to resisting the closures that bind our desires and inhibit our full participation in and confrontation with the ebbs and flows of an impersonal, immanent life. Through careful consideration and comparison of their work, I argue that both offer important methods for engendering modalities of ecstatic being characterised by sensitivity to immanence, which have important ramifications for our ability to address phenomena of ethical indifference and resist the constrictions of social control mechanisms that decimate our political imaginations and inhibit our resolve to invent a different future. In the final sections, I interrogate the differences in their invocation of affect and art. (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 draws from resources in the work of Deleuze to critically examine the notion of organicism and holistic relations that appear in historical forerunners that Jung identifies in his work on synchronicity. I interpret evidence in Jung's comments on synchronicity that resonate with Deleuze's interpretation of repetition and time and which challenge any straightforward foundationalist critique of Jung's thought. A contention of the paper is that Jung and Deleuze envisage enchanted openings onto relations which are not constrained by the (...) presupposition of a bounded whole, whether at the level of the macrocosm or the microcosm. Openings to these relations entail the potential for experimental transformation beyond sedentary habits of thought which are blocked by a disenchanting ‘image of thought’ that stands in need of critique. Other examples of enchanted openings in Jung's work are signposted in an effort to counter their marginalisation in some post-Jungian critiques and to signal their potential value from a Deleuzian perspective. (shrink)

What difference does the philosophical revolution of Deleuze and Guattari make to our understanding the early Christianity? In honour of the fortieth anniversary of publication of A Thousand Plateaus, this article argues that the discipline of Christian origins is currently premised on a historically condemned mode of subjectivity, that of subject/object metaphysics. The philosophical processes found in A Thousand Plateaus are particularly apposite to the current dilemma of Christian origins: as a rhizome-book consisting of plateaus, machines, singularities and non-representational concepts, (...) this book models new modes of thinking that can help the discipline rejuvenate itself and accomplish new tasks which are presently beyond its reach – for Deleuzian philosophy privileges the virtual over the actual, becoming over being, machinic transformations over static structures, and semiotics over linguistics. (shrink)

Although it is not clear that Deleuze and Guattari were simply and unambiguously Jungians, they extensively engaged with Jung’s depth psychology in both affirmative and critical ways. It is striking that Deleuze expresses a strong affinity between his work and that of Jung in several texts; Jung’s influence on Deleuze has not tended to be emphasised by scholars, though there is a rapidly growing ‘Jungian turn’ in Deleuze and Guattari studies. This article briefly extracts the influence of Jung on Deleuze (...) and Guattari and, more extensively, explores profound resonances between Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and James Hillman's Re-Visioning Psychology. (shrink)

This paper explores one means of connection between Whitehead and Deleuze through an investigation into the figure of the ‘beautiful soul’. I first examine Deleuze's claim that a philosophy of difference risks a ‘new’ version of the beautiful soul, situating this figure in its historical context in Hegel. I then consider why Whitehead may initially appear to fall into the trap of the beautiful soul before arguing that this is not the case. Seeing how brings Whitehead and Deleuze closer together (...) by showing that their respective insistences on the risks, dangers, and adventures integral to speculative thinking highlight the importance of the intersection between the existential and the metaphysical. (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)

Bu çalışmada, düşünme ile karşılaşmalar arasındaki içkin ilişkinin irdelenmesi amaçlanmaktadır. Karşılaşmalar içinden yaratıcı düşünmenin sahih bir analizini yapabilmek için, antik dönemden modern döneme kadar düşünce tarihi içinden bir güzergah izlenecektir. Bu anlamda, temel amaç olarak, içinde kritik düşünürlerin düşüncelerinin karşılaşarak hep biraz fazlasını açığa vurarak ilerlediği düşünsel bir patikanın izi sürülecektir. Buradaki, biraz fazlası ifadesi önemlidir. Çünkü o, biraz fazlası, kendini hep daha fazla kritik ve üretici karşılaşmalar içinden devam ettirmek isteyen yaratıcı düşünmenin edimsel gücüyle ilgilidir. Bunu açığa çıkarmak adına, (...) trajik diyaloglarda köklenen ve devam ederek Deleuze düşüncesine ve belki de ötesine uzanan eleştirel düşünmenin bir yolu takip edilecektir. Bu yönüyle, iki trajik yazar olan Sophocles ve Euripides’ in düşüncesinden, Nietzsche, Heidegger ve Deleuze düşüncesine kadar kritik düşünürler arasında gerçekleşen her bir kritik karşılaşmanın, yaratıcı düşünmenin edimsel gücü olarak kendini hep yeniden açığa vurduğu iddia edilecektir. Bu iddia ortaya konulurken, öznellik temelli ve akılcı bir eksende hareket eden ve yaratıcı düşünmenin gücünü zayıflatan geleneksel düşünce, Platon düşüncesi merkeze alınarak eleştirilecektir. (shrink)

What does it mean to think? In the following article I will show Gilles Deleuze’s answer to this question. According to him ’to think is to create — there is no other creation — but to create is first of all to engender ' thinking ' in thought ’. To understand what this means, to grasp the radical nature of such an event, we need to see how for Deleuze to engender thinking in thought means a repetition of that genetic (...) process which has brought forth the thinking subject in the first place. In this event that which otherwise subsists beneath normal experience, as life- and consciousness sustaining forces, now become conscious experience. The implication of this is that true thinking means the creation of a new life and consciousness. Via a close-reading of chapter two of Difference and Repetition I show how this leads the thinker into a radical metamorphosis of consciousness, a process of Stirb und Werde. (shrink)