This paper develops the concept of _bioheritage_. It does so by considering the work of a local and distinct breed of sheep, the Sambucana, detailing how this sheep has enabled the integration of otherwise centrifugal relations between markets for the meat, cheese, and wool derived from the many other sheep that have traversed the same locality over the past three centuries. Such integration binds bodies, memory, and consumption in a manner that illustrates the distinctiveness of bioheritage and advances understanding of (...) wider social and cultural processes. (shrink)

There is no consensus regarding whether Gilles Deleuze offers a cogent theory of the Other. Deleuze develops the notion of the Other-structure, but given his scarce remarks on this concept, his treatment of this issue is debated. This article argues that to elucidate Deleuze's philosophy of the Other, his notion of the Other-structure must be analyzed in parallel to Edmund Husserl's intersubjective theory. This comparison, made possible by Natalie Depraz's reading of the Husserlian alterity, reveals nuanced phenomenological traces in Deleuze's (...) Other-structure and its implicated structural moments while substantiating his affirmation of the Otherless world, as an impetus to surpass phenomenology. (shrink)

Group sex among men who have sex with men may be understood as a ‘radical’ practice insofar as it transgresses dominant social discourses around appropriate sexual relations—prioritizing heteronormative, monogamous and risk‐averse sex. These practices are generally defined as steeped in risk, most commonly due to the potential for transmitting human immunodeficiency virus and sexually transmitted infections and accompanied by the possibility of legal and social repercussions. Our ethnographic research study explored the desires, practices and contexts of group sex participants (n (...) = 10) within a popular group sex party destination located in the United States. We employ a poststructuralist perspective (utilizing the work of Deleuze and Guattari) to understand group sex events with the pretext that bodies have no inherent ethics, meaning or essence: they are ‘bodies without organs’. We identify group sex as a form of boundary play, in which participants pursue new limits to what their bodies can do but within a carefully constructed environment that establishes norms of interaction meant to secure trust and safety between participants. A variety of risk reduction practices are shown to be promoted and honoured within these eventful sexual(ized) spaces. The application of poststructuralist concepts of ‘boundary play’ and ‘bodies without organs’ helped to depict the construction and navigation of pleasure, safety and risk among group sex participants. (shrink)

The present paper traces some of the main articulations of the book Marcel Proust and the signs (1964), in which the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze affirms the superiority of literature on classical rationalist philosophy in the search for truth. Proust’s work rivals the philosophy itself, since it brings into play the involuntary nature of memory and intelligence – a condition which lies at the beginning of every thought – which can grasp the truth only solicited and forced by chance encounters. (...) Classical rationalist philosophy as a methodical exercise, induced by the good will of the thinker, can instead reach only abstract and conventional truths. The paper underlines how, according to Deleuze, Proust’s work will represent the model of authentic philosophy, the one that comes to produce with violence new concepts forced by problems and urgencies that impose themselves from outside. In fact, in Difference and Repetition (1968), the characteristics ascribed to the Proustian Recherche are explicitly attributed to a philosophy of Difference, which is posited by the author as the real need of his own time. In 1991, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari posed the question: What is philosophy? The attributes previously assigned to the literature, reappeared in the answer to such a question. A paradoxical necessity – reached through contingent encounters on one side, and the involuntary nature of thought on the other side – will appear at the center of the book that closes the theoretical trajectory of Deleuze: such a paradox shows itself as the only condition for the “invention of concepts”, which is at the same time the definition and ultimate task of philosophical practice. (shrink)