We have synthesized a 582,970-base pair Mycoplasma genitalium genome. This synthetic genome, named M. genitalium JCVI-1.0, contains all the genes of wild-type M. genitalium G37 except MG408, which was disrupted by an antibiotic marker to block pathogenicity and to allow for selection. To identify the genome as synthetic, we inserted "watermarks" at intergenic sites known to tolerate transposon insertions. Overlapping "cassettes" of 5 to 7 kilobases (kb), assembled from chemically synthesized oligonucleotides, were joined by in vitro recombination to produce intermediate (...) assemblies of approximately 24 kb, 72 kb ("1/8 genome"), and 144 kb ("1/4 genome"), which were all cloned as bacterial artificial chromosomes in Escherichia coli. Most of these intermediate clones were sequenced, and clones of all four 1/4 genomes with the correct sequence were identified. The complete synthetic genome was assembled by transformation-associated recombination cloning in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, then isolated and sequenced. A clone with the correct sequence was identified. The methods described here will be generally useful for constructing large DNA molecules from chemically synthesized pieces and also from combinations of natural and synthetic DNA segments. 10.1126/science.1151721. (shrink)

A wide variety of ontologies relevant to the biological and medical domains are available through the OBO Foundry portal, and their number is growing rapidly. Integration of these ontologies, while requiring considerable effort, is extremely desirable. However, heterogeneities in format and style pose serious obstacles to such integration. In particular, inconsistencies in naming conventions can impair the readability and navigability of ontology class hierarchies, and hinder their alignment and integration. While other sources of diversity are tremendously complex and challenging, agreeing (...) a set of common naming conventions is an achievable goal, particularly if those conventions are based on lessons drawn from pooled practical experience and surveys of community opinion. We summarize a review of existing naming conventions and highlight certain disadvantages with respect to general applicability in the biological domain. We also present the results of a survey carried out to establish which naming conventions are currently employed by OBO Foundry ontologies and to determine what their special requirements regarding the naming of entities might be. Lastly, we propose an initial set of typographic, syntactic and semantic conventions for labelling classes in OBO Foundry ontologies. Adherence to common naming conventions is more than just a matter of aesthetics. Such conventions provide guidance to ontology creators, help developers avoid flaws and inaccuracies when editing, and especially when interlinking, ontologies. Common naming conventions will also assist consumers of ontologies to more readily understand what meanings were intended by the authors of ontologies used in annotating bodies of data. (shrink)

Integrating concepts of maintenance and of origins is essential to explaining biological diversity. The unified theory of evolution attempts to find a common theme linking production rules inherent in biological systems, explaining the origin of biological order as a manifestation of the flow of energy and the flow of information on various spatial and temporal scales, with the recognition that natural selection is an evolutionarily relevant process. Biological systems persist in space and time by transfor ming energy from one state (...) to another in a manner that generates structures which allows the system to continue to persist. Two classes of energetic transformations allow this; heat-generating transformations, resulting in a net loss of energy from the system, and conservative transformations, changing unusable energy into states that can be stored and used subsequently. All conservative transformations in biological systems are coupled with heat-generating transformations; hence, inherent biological production, or genealogical proesses, is positively entropic. There is a self-organizing phenomenology common to genealogical phenomena, which imparts an arrow of time to biological systems. Natural selection, which by itself is time-reversible, contributes to the organization of the self-organized genealogical trajectories. The interplay of genealogical (diversity-promoting) and selective (diversity-limiting) processes produces biological order to which the primary contribution is genealogical history. Dynamic changes occuring on times scales shorter than speciation rates are microevolutionary; those occuring on time scales longer than speciation rates are macroevolutionary. Macroevolutionary processes are neither redicible to, nor autonomous from, microevolutionary processes. (shrink)

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap, to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create (...) new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. Through the research activities within the Center, collaborations with the DBPs, and interactions with the biomedical community, our goal is to help scientists to work more effectively in the e-science paradigm, enhancing experiment design, experiment execution, data analysis, information synthesis, hypothesis generation and testing, and understand human disease. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

There is a well known debate between those who defend a traditional (or classical) concept of God and those who defend a process (or neoclassical) concept of God. Not as well known are the implications of these two rival concepts of God in the effort to understand religious experience. With the aid of the great pragmatist philosopher John Smith, I defend the process (or neoclassical) concept of God in its ability to better illuminate and render as intelligible as possible (...) mystical experience. (shrink)

The most common corporate reaction to public concern over the ethics of their business practices and the sensitivity of their organization to social expectations is to promote policies and rules designed to bring about a set of socially responsive behaviours and actions. The result of this corporate deontological approach is to create a teleopathic culture that relieves decision makers from the personal responsibil ity for the consequences of their actions and widens the gap between how society expects business to behave (...) and their actual behaviour. The corporate use of a deontological approach effectively allows the substitution of corporate conscience for the moral values of individual decision makers and thus weakens the linkage between individual personal values and behaviour. The creation of teleopathological behaviour in an organization is explored through a juxtaposition of the parables of the Sadhu and the Good Samaritan. The consequences of teleopathic behaviour are then illustrated through an examination of Dow Corning's silicon gel product liability case. (shrink)

This paper examines people's reasoning about identity continuity and its relation to previous research on how people value one-of-a-kind artifacts, such as artwork. We propose that judgments about the continuity of artworks are related to judgments about the continuity of individual persons because art objects are seen as physical extensions of their creators. We report a reanalysis of previous data and the results of two new empirical studies that test this hypothesis. The first study demonstrates that the mere categorization of (...) an object as “art” versus “a tool” changes people's intuitions about the persistence of those objects over time. In a second study, we examine some conditions that may lead artworks to be thought of as different from other artifacts. These observations inform both current understanding of what makes some objects one-of-a-kind as well as broader questions regarding how people intuitively think about the persistence of human agents. (shrink)

One of the lingering questions for development economists is that of economic transition and whether development can be promoted by a strong political leader. Earlier writings on leadership and economic development tend to fall into one of two camps: leaders matter and can contribute positively to economic growth, or leaders seldom have positive effects and, at best, can avoid doing a great deal of harm. This article establishes a third option—a middle-ground position—between these two views. Good leadership can, indeed, have (...) a positive effect on economic growth but only during the initial moment when economic reform is up for grabs. Once the opportunity to implement sweeping reform has passed, interests become entrenched, and the opportunity for growth-enhancing reform passes. Bad leaders, on the other hand, can hamper economic growth in periods well beyond the ideal reform moment. (shrink)

Attentional control theory suggests that high cognitive demands impair the flexible deployment of attention control in anxious adults, particularly when paired with external threats. Extending this...

Cross-situational word learning, like any statistical learning problem, involves tracking the regularities in the environment. However, the information that learners pick up from these regularities is dependent on their learning mechanism. This article investigates the role of one type of mechanism in statistical word learning: competition. Competitive mechanisms would allow learners to find the signal in noisy input and would help to explain the speed with which learners succeed in statistical learning tasks. Because cross-situational word learning provides information at multiple (...) scales—both within and across trials/situations—learners could implement competition at either or both of these scales. A series of four experiments demonstrate that cross-situational learning involves competition at both levels of scale, and that these mechanisms interact to support rapid learning. The impact of both of these mechanisms is considered from the perspective of a process-level understanding of cross-situational learning. (shrink)

A new translation of two essential works on Deleuze, written by one of his contemporaries. From the publication of Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event to his untimely death in 2006, Francois Zourabichvili was regarded as one of the most important new voices of contemporary philosophy in France. His work continues to make an essential contribution to Deleuze scholarship today. This edition makes two of Zourabichvili's most important writings on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze available in a single volume. A (...) Philosophy of the Event is an exposition of Deleuze's philosophy as a whole, while the complementary Deleuze's Vocabulary approaches Deleuze's work through an analysis of key concepts in a dictionary form. This new translation is set to become an event within Deleuze Studies for many years to come. Key Features: Distinguishes Deleuze's notion of the event from the phenomenological, ontological and voluntarist conceptions that continue to lay claim to it today; With an introduction by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith, two of the world's leading commentators on Deleuze, explaining the key themes and arguments of Zourabichvili's work. (shrink)

Ontology is a burgeoning field, involving researchers from the computer science, philosophy, data and software engineering, logic, linguistics, and terminology domains. Many ontology-related terms with precise meanings in one of these domains have different meanings in others. Our purpose here is to initiate a path towards disambiguation of such terms. We draw primarily on the literature of biomedical informatics, not least because the problems caused by unclear or ambiguous use of terms have been there most thoroughly addressed. We advance a (...) proposal resting on a distinction of three levels too often run together in biomedical ontology research: 1. the level of reality; 2. the level of cognitive representations of this reality; 3. the level of textual and graphical artifacts. We propose a reference terminology for ontology research and development that is designed to serve as common hub into which the several competing disciplinary terminologies can be mapped. We then justify our terminological choices through a critical treatment of the ‘concept orientation’ in biomedical terminology research. (shrink)

"The Invention of Modern Science proposes a fruitful way of going beyond the apparently irreconcilable positions, that science is either "objective" or "socially constructed." Instead, suggests Isabelle Stengers, one of the most important and influential philosophers of science in Europe, we might understand the tension between scientific objectivity and belief as a necessary part of science, central to the practices invented and reinvented by scientists."--pub. desc.

This paper addresses the much-debated question about the fate of Kant's race theory in the 1790s by examining his use of the concepts of “germs” [Keime] and “predispositions” [Anlagen] in the Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason of 1793. Following the well-received “anthropological interpretation” of the essay on radical evil that draws productive analogies with his philosophy of history, it proposes a “new anthropological interpretation” that focuses on concepts borrowed from his philosophy of race. Against those who have argued (...) that Kant changed his mind about his race theory in the 1790s, this interpretation of Religion shows that he continued to use its main concepts well into his late period, even introducing them into his moral philosophy for the first time. (shrink)

Deleuze argued that a fundamental mutation in the concept of time occurred in Kant. In antiquity, the concept of time was subordinated to the concept of movement: time was a ‘measure’ of movement. In Kant, this relation is inverted: time is no longer subordinated to movement but assumes an autonomy of its own: time becomes "the pure and empty form" of everything that moves and changes. What is essential in the theory of time is not the distinction between objective ‘clock (...) time’ (or physical time) and the subjective experience of ‘time consciousness,’ since both of them measure movements, whether the movement of extensive objects or intensive states. What is fundamental is rather the relation between time and movement, since time can only assume its own concept when it ceases to be subordinate to movement, whether that movement is objective or subjective. This article examines how Kant inverted the relation between time and movement, and how Deleuze’s own theory of time builds on Kant’s revolution and extends it further. (shrink)

The development of culture-independent strategies to study microbial diversity and function has led to a revolution in microbial ecology, enabling us to address fundamental questions about the distribution of microbes and their influence on Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. This article discusses some of the progress that scientists have made with the use of so-called “omic” techniques (metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and metaproteomics) and the limitations and major challenges these approaches are currently facing. These ‘omic methods have been used to describe the taxonomic structure (...) of microbial communities in different environments and to discover new genes and enzymes of industrial and medical interest. However, microbial community structure varies in different spatial and temporal scales and none of the ‘omic techniques are individually able to elucidate the complex aspects of microbial communities and ecosystems. In this article we highlight the importance of a spatiotemporal sampling design, together with a multilevel ‘omic approach and a community analysis strategy (association networks and modeling) to examine and predict interacting microbial communities and their impact on the environment. (shrink)

This article examines Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the simulacrum, which Deleuze formulated in the context of his reading of Nietzsche’s project of “overturning Platonism.” The essential Platonic distinction, Deleuze argues, is more profound than the speculative distinction between model and copy, original and image. The deeper, practical distinction moves between two kinds of images or eidolon, for which the Platonic Idea is meant to provide a concrete criterion of selection “Copies” or icons (eikones) are well-grounded claimants to the transcendent Idea, (...) authenticated by their internal resemblance to the Idea, whereas “simulacra” (phantasmata) are like false claimants, built on a dissimilarity and implying an essential perversion or deviation from the Idea. If the goal of Platonism is the triumph of icons over simulacra, the inversion of Platonism would entail an affirmation of the simulacrum as such, which must thus be given its own concept. Deleuze consequently defines the simulacrum in terms of an internal dissimilitude or “disparateness,” which in turn implies a new conception of Ideas, no longer as self-identical qualities (the auto kath’hauto), but rather as constituting a pure concept of difference. An inverted Platonism would necessarily be based on a purely immanent and differential conception of Ideas. Starting from this new conception of the Idea, Deleuze proposes to take up the Platonic project anew, rethinking the fundamental figures of Platonism (selection, repetition, ungrounding, the question-problem complex) on a purely differential basis. In this sense, Deleuze’s inverted Platonism can at the same time be seen as a rejuvenated Platonism and even a completed Platonism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a number of his later works, Derrida makes reference to the concept of the “event.” However, unlike for many of the other concepts developed in this phase of his writing, we do not find one “basic” or “primary” text in which he develops the logic of the concept. We find him alluding to it in different contexts and making use of it in certain ways, but, at least with this concept, he leaves much of the philosophical “work” to (...) readers. The aim of this article is to elucidate Derrida's concept of the event, to lay out as clearly as possible the way in which the concept functions. In the first part, I go through the logic, working out step by step what makes an “event worthy of the name”. In the second part, I deal with the paradoxes that arise when we ask how it is possible to say anything about an event, how one might go about constructing a “name worthy of the event.”. (shrink)

Twenty-five papers presented at University of Nairobi in 2000 cover themes of: African Philosophy, Approaches and Methodologies; Problems of Missionary and Colonialist Thinking; Gender and Culture in Africa; Sage Philosophy; and Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics.

We live in an era where our health is linked to that of others across the globe, and nothing brings this home better than the specter of a pandemic. This paper explores the findings of town hall meetings associated with the Canadian Program of Research on Ethics in a Pandemic , in which focus groups met to discuss issues related to the global governance of an influenza pandemic. Two competing discourses were found to be at work: the first was based (...) upon an economic rationality and the second upon a humanitarian rationality. The implications for public support and the long-term sustainability of new global norms, networks, and regulations in global public health are discussed. (shrink)

Spatial attention and eye-movements are tightly coupled, but the precise nature of this coupling is controversial. The influential but controversial Premotor theory of attention makes four specific predictions about the relationship between motor preparation and spatial attention. Firstly, spatial attention and motor preparation use the same neural substrates. Secondly, spatial attention is functionally equivalent to planning goal directed actions such as eye-movements (i.e. planning an action is both necessary and sufficient for a shift of spatial attention). Thirdly, planning a goal (...) directed action with any effector system is sufficient to trigger a shift of spatial attention. Fourthly, the eye-movement system has a privileged role in orienting visual spatial attention. This article reviews empirical studies that have tested these predictions. Contrary to predictions one and two there is evidence of anatomical and functional dissociations between endogenous spatial attention and motor preparation. However, there is compelling evidence that exogenous attention is reliant on activation of the oculomotor system. With respect to the third prediction, there is correlational evidence that spatial attention is directed to the endpoint of goal-directed actions but no direct evidence that this attention shift is dependent on motor preparation. The few studies to have directly tested the fourth prediction have produced conflicting results, so the extent to which the oculomotor system has a privileged role in spatial attention remains unclear. Overall, the evidence is not consistent with the view that spatial attention is functionally equivalent to motor preparation so the Premotor theory should be rejected, although a limited version of the Premotor theory in which only exogenous attention is dependent on motor preparation may still be tenable. A plausible alternative account is that activity in the motor system contributes to biased competition between different sensory representations with the winner of the competition becoming the attended item. (shrink)

A letter to The Times of London, May 9, 1992 protesting the Cambridge University proposal to award an honorary degree to M. Jacques Derrida.

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari claim that a general theory of society must be a generalised theory of flows. This is hardly a straightforward claim, and this paper attempts to examine the grounds for it. Why should socio-political theory be based on a theory of flows rather than, say, a theory of the social contract, or a theory of the State, or the questions of legitimation or revolution, or numerous other possible candidates? The concept of flow (and the related notions (...) of code and stock), I argue, is derived from contemporary economic theory, and most notably John Maynard Keynes. Deleuze and Guattari remained Marxists, not only because they held that contemporary political philosophy must inevitably be centred on the analysis of capitalism, but also because they held, following Marx himself, that the Marxist analysis of capital must constantly be transformed and adapted to new conditions. Thus, while certain aspects of Marx's analysis disappear from Capitalism and Schizophrenia, they are supplemented by the addition of new concepts adequate to the contemporary state of capitalism. The paper concludes, then, with an analysis of the role played by the concepts of flow, code and stock in Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy. (shrink)

Establishing reasonable, prior distributions remains a significant obstacle for the construction of probabilistic expert systems. Human assessment of chance is often relied upon for this purpose, but this has the drawback of being inconsistent with axioms of probability. This article advances a method for extracting a coherent distribution of probability from human judgment. The method is based on a psychological model of probabilistic reasoning, followed by a correction phase using linear programming.

Background: Studies have found that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are more likely to make errors in appropriately producing referring expressions (‘the dog’ vs. ‘the black dog’) than are controls but comprehend them with equal facility. We tested whether this anomaly arises because comprehension studies have focused on manipulating perspective-taking at a ‘generic speaker’ level. Method: We compared 24 autistic eight- to eleven-year-olds with 24 well-matched neuro-typical controls. Children interpreted requests (e.g. ‘Can I have that ball?’) in contexts which (...) would be ambiguous (i.e. because the child can see two balls) if perspective-taking were not utilized. In the interlocutor-specific perspective-taking condition, the target was the particular object which was new for the speaker. Children needed to take into account what the speaker had played with before and the fact that they were now expressing excitement about something new. In two control ‘speaker-generic’ conditions we tested children’s ability to take the visual perspective of the speaker (where any speaker who stood behind a particular barrier would have the same perspective). Results: The autistic group were significantly less likely to select the target and significantly more likely to request clarification in the ‘interlocutor-specific’ condition. Performance in the ‘interlocutor-generic’ (visual) perspective taking conditions did not differ between groups. Conclusion: Autistic children, even those who are not intellectually-impaired, tend to have more difficulty than neuro-typical peers in comprehending referring expressions when this requires understanding that people comment on what is new for them. (shrink)

Difference and Repetition might be said to have brought about a Deleuzian Revolution in philosophy comparable to Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Kant had denounced the three great terminal points of traditional metaphysics – self, world and God – as transcendent illusions, and Deleuze pushes Kant’s revolution to its limit by positing a transcendental field that excludes the coherence of the self, world and God in favour of an immanent and differential plane of impersonal individuations and pre-individual singularities. In the process, he (...) introduces numerous conceptual innovations into philosophy: the becoming of concepts; a transformation of the form of the question; an insistence that philosophy must start in the middle; an attempt to think in terms of multiplicities; the development of a new logic and a new metaphysics based on a concept of difference; a new conception of space as intensive rather than extensive; a conception of time as a pure and empty form; and an understanding of philosophy as a system in heterogenesis – that is, a system that entails a perpetual genesis of the heterogeneous, an incessant production of the new. -/- Keywords: concepts, becoming, multiplicity, singularity, the middle [au milieu], difference, intensity, time, system, the new. (shrink)

This paper will attempt to assess the primary differences between what I take to be the two primary philosophical "traditions" in contemporary French philosophy, using Derrida (transcendence) and Deleuze (immanence) as exemplary representatives. The body of the paper will examine the use of these terms in three different areas of philosophy on which Derrida and Deleuze have both written: subjectivity, ontology, and epistemology. (1) In the field of subjectivity, the notion of the subject has been critiqued in two manners, either (...) by appealing either to the transcendence of the other (Levinas, Derrida) or to the immanent jlux of experience itself, in relation to which the Ego itself is trancendent (Deleuze, Foucault, Sartre, James). (2) In the field of ontology, a purely "immanent" ontology would be an ontology in which there is neither a "beyond" or an "otherwise" Being, nor "interruptions" in Being, both of which would require an appeal to a formal element of transcendence (Deleuze). Such a "transcendent" and aporetic structure, which can never appear or be present as such within Being, is what lies at the basis of the project of deconstruction, with its attendant aporias (Derrida). (3) This distinction, finally, finds parallels in Kant's epistemology, for whom the possible experience is conditioned by purely immanent criteria (Deleuze), whereas what goes beyond the limits of possible experience is transcendent (Derrida). Drawing on these three thread of analysis, the paper concludes with an assessment of what is at stake in the ethical differences between the two traditions. The question of "transcendence" is "What mast I do?", which is the question of morality (a duty or obligation that is beyond being, an "ought" beyond the "is"). The question of "immanence" is "What can I do?" (my power or capacity as an existing individual within being). For Levinas and Derrida, ethics precedes ontology because it is derived from an element of transcendence (the Other); for Deleuze, ethics is ontology because it is derived from the immanent relation of beings to Being at the level of their existence (Spinoza). (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)

In the two volumes which make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose new concepts of “machine” and “organism.” The problem of the relationship between machines and organisms has a long philosophical history, and this essay treats their work as a contribution to this debate. It is argued that their solution to this problem is found in their difficult concept of the “body without organs,” a concept that is given some much-needed clarification in the essay. The first section details (...) Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the machine, examining the ways in which it differs from the traditional concept as described by Canguilhem: their machines do not have predictable movements, but instead produce events; they do not have a purpose; they are able to reproduce themselves. The second section details their conception of the organism through their account of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: organisms are bodies which normalize and which create hierarchies; they also do not have a purpose; they have a “unity of composition.” The final section argues that their concept of the “body without organs” shows us how to understand the relation between the two transformed concepts, and defines the body without organs as the becoming-machine of the organism. (shrink)

The “Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine" is one of the most important and innovative chapters in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's book, A Thousand Plateaus. It is a highly original text in political philosophy whose implications have yet to be fully mined—or even partially mined, for that matter. This short text analyzes the "noumenal" status that Deleuze assigns to the nomadic war machine, and analyzes the fundamental role that the nomadology plays in Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy.

This paper examines the intersecting of the themes of temporality and truth in Deleuze's philosophy. For the ancients, truth was something eternal: what was true was true in all times and in all places. Temporality (coming to be and passing away) was the realm of the mutable, not the eternal. In the seventeenth century, change began to be seen in a positive light (progress, evolution, and so on), but this change was seen to be possible only because of the immutable (...) laws of nature that govern change. It was not until philosophers such as Bergson, James, Whitehead – and then Deleuze – that time began to be taken seriously on its own account. On the one hand, in Deleuze, time, freed from its subordination to movement, now becomes autonomous: it is the pure form of change (continuous variation) that lies at the basis of Deleuze's metaphysics in Difference and Repetition (and is explored more thematically in The Time-Image). As a result, on the other hand, the false, freed from its subordination to the form of the true, assumes a power of its own (the power of the false), which in turn implies a new ‘analytic of the concept’ that Deleuze develops in What Is Philosophy? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 8-21MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Klossowski's Reading of Nietzsche Impulses, Phantasms, Simulacra, StereotypesDaniel W. SmithIn his writings on Nietzsche, Pierre Klossowski makes use of various concepts—such as intensities, phantasms, simulacra and stereotypes, resemblance and dissemblance, gregariousness and singularity—that have no place in Nietzsche's own oeuvre. These concepts are Klossowski's own creations, his own contributions to thought. Although Klossowski consistently refused to characterize himself as a philosopher ("Je (...) suis une 'maniaque,'" he once said, "Un point, c'est tout!"),1 his work in its entirety was marked by an extraordinary conceptual creation. From this point of view, his Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle can be read as a work in philosophy—at least in the idiosyncratic sense given to this term by Gilles Deleuze, who defined philosophy as the creation or invention of concepts [Deleuze and Guattari 2]. No doubt, Klossowski remains an almost unclassifiable figure—philosopher, novelist, essayist, translator, artist—and attempting to analyze his work through the prism of philosophy may seem to be a reductive approach that belies the complexity of his exceptional oeuvre. Reading Klossowski as a conceptual innovator, however, at least has the advantage of allowing us to chart a consistent trajectory through his difficult and often labyrinthine text, without denying its other dimensions (affective, perceptive, literary, and so on). In what follows, then, I would like to examine three of Klossowski's most characteristic and important concepts—impulses and their intensities, phantasms, and simulacra and their stereotypes—as well as the precise interrelations he establishes among them. Taken together, these three concepts describe what Klossowski terms the tripartite economy of soul, which constitutes the implicit model through which he interprets Nietzsche's thought.1Impulses as Fluctuating IntensitiesKlossowski describes his books on both Nietzsche and Sade as "essays devoted not to ideologies but to the physiognomies of problematic thinkers who differ greatly from each other" ["Postface" 137, emphasis added]. This emphasis on the "physiognomy" of thinkers reflects Nietzsche's insistence on taking the body rather than the mind as a guide for philosophy since the body is a more accessible phenomenon, less surrounded by myth and superstition. "The body and physiology as the starting point," Nietzsche wrote. "Why?... The phenomenon of the body is the richer, clearer, more tangible [End Page 8] phenomenon.... Belief in the body is more fundamental than belief in the soul" [WP §§492, 489, 491]. Klossowski himself, however, when writing of the intensive status of the impulses, frequently makes use of the term "soul" (âme), owing in part, no doubt, to his interest in the theological literature of the mystics, such as Meister Eckhardt and Teresa of Avila. For the mystics, the depth of the soul is something irreducible and uncreated: it eludes the exercise of the created intellect, and can only be grasped negatively.2 Nonetheless, if one can find a similar apophaticism (or "negative theology") in Klossowski, it is related exclusively to the immanent and chaotic movements of the soul's intensive affects, and not to the transcendence of God. What is incommunicable in the soul (or body) are its "impulses"—their fluctuations of intensity, their rises and falls, their manic elations and depressive descents, which are in constant variation.Nietzsche himself had recourse to a highly varied vocabulary to describe what Klossowski summarizes in the term "impulse": "drive" (Triebe), "desire" (Begierden), "instinct" (Instinke), "power" (Mächte), "force" (Kräfte), "impulse" (Reize, Impulse), "passion" (Leidenschaften), "feeling" (Gefülen), "affect" (Affekte), "pathos" (Pathos), and so on.3 Klossowski frequently employs the musical term tonalité to describe these states of the soul's fluctuating intensities—their diverse tones, timbres, and changing amplitudes—which can take on various forms ("aggressiveness, tolerance, intimidation, anguish, the need for solitude, the forgetting of oneself" [NVC 6]). At bottom, what these impulses express are what Klossowski calls the "obstinate singularity" of the human soul, which is by nature noncommunicable; they constitute "the unexchangeable depth" (le fond inéchangeable) or "the unintelligible depth" (le fond unintelligible) of the soul. What makes every individual... (shrink)

Why has comedy become one of our most abiding ethical preoccupations as well as a dominant mode of political critique? It is suggested that comedy appeals to contemporary persons because it provides an apt social-aesthetic form through which to face up to living with others at a time when it is hard to bear others or otherness. The article outlines an ethics of modern individuality by developing a theory of comedy as more about building social bonds and finding out what (...) could be shared knowledge and experience than the toppling of dominant modes of thought or repudiating our mutuality with others. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s ‘The Law of the Individual’, the article develops a Simmelian reading of Freud’s Jokes to argue that comedy is one solution to resolving our mutual un-alikeness by way of forging knotted paths toward recognising how we could be alike. (shrink)

This paper considers the structure of the ethical subject found in Foucault’s late works on ethics, and gives an account of his two major ethical concepts: “care of the self” and “aesthetics of existence.” The “care of the self,” it is argued, gives Foucault a way of conceptualising ethics which does not rely on juridical categories, and which does not conceive the ethical subject on the model of substance. The “care of the self” entails an understanding of the ethical subject (...) as a process which is always in a relation, specifically in a relation to itself. Using his essay “What is an Author,” it is argued that the subject of the “aesthetics of existence,” like the author of a text, is understood to be fully immanent to the “object” which it is usually considered to be opposed to and separated from. Rather than aiming at a true expression of an “authentic” inner substance, Foucault’s “aesthetics of existence” leads instead to practices of “creativity,” whose form cannot be given in advance. (shrink)

The Kurdish movement has revitalised the idea of democracy. Under the most difficult of circumstances – squeezed between ISIS on one side and the Turkish armed forces on the other – a radical form of democracy has been implemented that has inspired many both inside and outside the region. Introducing the special issue “Rethinking Democracy in Kurdistan”, this article explores the ingenious challenge to the nation-state system posed by this new democratic theory and practice, focusing on the prison writings of (...) Abdullah Öcalan. These remarkable texts are read as proposing a new philosophy of world-history which decisively breaks with Marxism, displaces the central place of Europe, and drastically extends the point in time at which philosophies of history typically begin. (shrink)