In the contemporary context of environmental crises and the degradation of resources, certain habitats become unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and species extinction. Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between humans and nonhumans, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the other, as an (...) event that distinguishes human from other organisms. Against this background, this article explores how contemporary art—in particular, the series of works The Absence of Alice by Australian new-media and bioartist Svenja Kratz—challenges the normative and human-exceptionalist concept of death. By employing queerfeminist biophilosophy as a strategy that focuses on relations, processes and transformations instead of ‘essences’, the article examines the ways Kratz’s works deterritorialise the conventional concept of death. In this way, it hopes to attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying, and what follows, to reframe ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living. (shrink)

Taking a schizoanalytic approach to audio-visual images, this article explores some of the radical potentia for deterritorialisation found within David Fincher's Fight Club (1999). The film's potential for deterritorialisation is initially located in an exploration of the film's form and content, which appear designed to interrogate and transcend a series of false binaries between mind and body, inside and outside, male and female. Paying attention to the construction of photorealistic digital spaces and composited images, we examine the actual (...) (and possible) ways viewers relate to the film, both during and after screenings. Recognising the film as an affective force performing within our world, we also investigate some of the real-world effects the film catalysed. Finally, we propose that schizoanalysis, when applied to a Hollywood film, suggests that Deleuze underestimated the deterritorialising potential of contemporary, special effects-driven cinema. If schizoanalysis has thus been reterritorialised by mainstream products, we argue that new, ‘post-Deleuzian’ lines of flight are required to disrupt this ‘de-re-territorialisation’. (shrink)

In his final writings Guattari designed a four-functor meta-model with which to map subjective resingularisation against the backdrop of what he saw as the late-modern admixture of ecological collapse, social deterioration and subjective decomposition. I examine here Guattari’s fourfold in neo-structuralist terms and then engage in a discussion on the difference between worlding and deterritorialisation, reassessing in this sense Guattari’s concept of machinic indices in conversation with the works of anthropologists. Further, I show that Guattari’s fourfold is reminiscent of (...) Heidegger’s Geviert, which I place at the very core of Heidegger’s project of overcoming the modern Ge-stell. Lastly, from the fact that Guattari’s fourfold opens onto the question of worlding and that Heidegger points to our incapability to tune in and sing back to the earth’s song, I draw the conclusion that they put forward an eco-cosmo-poetics that points beyond the flat ontology of today’s new materialism and the subtractive logic of speculative realism. (shrink)

Have we reached what Alexander Galloway dismissively refers to as ‘peak Deleuze’? In this essay, I argue that the arrival at end times – with the sense of mass extinction and philosophy's exhaustion – is indeed a moment of ‘peak Deleuze’, but that this gesture of exhaustion is already implicit in A Thousand Plateaus. Recognising the limits and seduction of a text is never as easy as it seems; every attempt to break up with Deleuze and Guattari, though necessary, is (...) fraught with a whole series of difficulties that were already visible in A Thousand Plateaus's own relation to its outside. (shrink)

Dans cet article, l’auteur s’engage dans une courte autobiographie sur un pays qu’il porte en lui, le Liban. Il la conçoit comme une expérience collective du morcellement qui traverse singulièrement tous ceux qui se rattachent au nom de Libanais. L’auteur raconte porter aussi sa propre guerre qui s’essouffle et change de signes, au-delà même du Liban, en vue de transformer le rapport même à la guerre. Il renvoie à quelques textes qui traitent, sous l’angle de la déconstruction, d’une autre politique (...) de la communauté et des frontières, à plus d’une loi. (shrink)

Modern feminist movements run the risk of being appropriated by capitalist agenda and commodified for mass appeal, thus stripping them of their revolutionary potential. I would propose that in order for feminism to challenge this, movements may want to consider the subversion of subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari's notions of becoming-animal and becoming-woman emphasise a subjectivity not confined by rigid identity, such as man/woman. However, feminists have challenged this theory, suggesting it is difficult to both fight for and dispel the very (...) same notion, that is, woman. I argue that in first considering the feminine subject via the Lacanian understanding of ‘Woman’, it can be argued that feminine subjects can engage with becoming-animal to destabilise the notion of ‘Woman’. Riot Grrls, FEMEN and Pussy Riot all demonstrate tactics which could be said to utilise becoming-animal and have had varying success in avoiding commodification. (shrink)

When Guattari defines the unconscious in terms of production rather than representation, when he speaks of enunciative agencement and when, in his latest writings, he approaches it from the point of view of « chaosmosis », he radicalizes the relation between the unconscious and its outside, and he provides a new conception based on proliferation, molecularisation and infinitisation.

The aim of this article is to explore how the differences between Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze delineate two different interpretations of the politics of found footage cinema. To do so, the notion of cinematic interval is crucial. While Debord's practice of détournement presupposes a Hegelian-inspired notion of interval that allows for self-awareness to be achieved, Deleuze puts forth a Bergsonian concept of interval that functions as a condition of possibility for creating an ‘image of movement in itself’. To explore (...) these two interpretations, this article uses Guy Debord's 1973 film The Society of the Spectacle as a case study. By focusing on this specific object, the two interpretations of the cinematic interval make it possible to compare two alternative ways of dealing with the representability – or unrepresentability – of capital, and hence to sketch two alternative views on the politics of found footage film practices. (shrink)

A feminist-inspired, Deleuzo-Guattarian conception of love can be a model of designing virtual reality experiences that pursue their liberating rather than enslaving trajectories.

This paper aims to explore the appropriation of Deleuzian literary theory in the Chinese context and its potential for mapping a new global poetics. The purpose of this treatment is thus twofold: first, it will redefine the East–West literary relationship, and second, it will seek a new ethics of life, as endorsed by Deleuze's philosophy of immanence. One finds an affinity between literature and life in Deleuze's philosophy: in short, literature appears as the passage of life and an enterprise of (...) health and thus seeks new possibilities of life, which consists in the invention of a new language and a new people. But what kind of health may such a view provide for a non-Western individual, people, literature and culture? This investigation further appeals to the medium of translation. This paper argues that the act of translation functions as a means of deterritorialisation that displays continuing variations of a language, and through translation, Deleuze's clinical and critical aspects of literature promote a transversal poetics that transcends the binary, oppositional conception of East–West and an immanent ethics of life that overcomes the sentiment of ressentiment. (shrink)

This essay employs Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the capitalist social machine to explore Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert. More specifically, it addresses the psychological struggles of the film's female protagonist, Giuliana, with respect to duelling forces of capitalist deterritorialisation and Oedipal reterritorialisation. The essay also brings together Deleuze's cinema works with his and Guattari's schizoanalysis to show how Antonioni's use of the time-image itself functions as a deterritorialising force, particularly with respect to the film's pivotal island fantasy scene, where, (...) if only momentarily, Giuliana engages in the Deleuzean act of becoming. (shrink)

In front of deterritorialisation / reterritorialisation process one which characterize the globalization, we try to dread the elements of continuance and break which connect among them the Forums of Porto Alegre and Genoa; these two big mobilizations of citizens of world constitute, indeed, the most relevant repository in a debate on the city. By tempting these comparisons, we build an approach of the new cycle of internationalist fights which puts production and constitution of urbanterritories as main stakes in the (...) future developments of the movement. (shrink)

This paper will address the question of the revolution in Gilles Deleuze's political ontology. More specifically, it will explore what kind of person Deleuze believes is capable of bringing about genuine and practical transformation. Contrary to the belief that a Deleuzian programme for change centres on the facilitation of ‘absolute deterritorialisation’ and pure ‘lines of flight’, I will demonstrate how Deleuze in fact advocates a more cautious and incremental if not conservative practice that promotes the ethic of prudence. This (...) will be achieved in part through a critical analysis of the dualistic premises upon which much Deleuzian political philosophy is based, alongside the topological triads that can also be found in his work. In light of this critique, Deleuze's thoughts on what it is to be and become a revolutionary will be brought into relief, giving rise to the question: who really is Deleuze's nomad, his true revolutionary or figure of transformation? (shrink)

La philosophie de Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari est une philosophie du mouvement, en mouvement. De leurs livres émergent de nouveaux territoires, des paysages désertiques ou lunaires, peuplés d'animaux étranges. On assiste ainsi à la naissance d'une géophilosophie, d'une pensée qui met en scène des territoires, des populations, des animaux (philosophie, géographie, éthologie, nomadologie) et qui opère par déterritorialisations et par rencontres.

Adopting Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's formulations of the rhizome, this article will examine a dynamic that lies between the film Japón's (Carlos Reygadas, 2002) vernacular specificities, European modernist aesthetics and cosmopolitan spectatorship. The article aims to reveal that Japón, along with other contemporary slow films from around the world, has the potential to reify a deterritorialising and reterritorialising encounter that rethinks a Eurocentric genealogical reading of world cinema and challenges a capitalist code of filmmaking.

This paper offers a comparative analysis of the uses and formulations of speech-act theory in Derrida's and Deleuze/guattari's work. It begins by juxtaposing Derrida's concept/nonconcept of ‘iterability’ to Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the ‘order-word’ and then examines these theories of the speech act in terms of their implications and consequences for a politics of resistance. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari generate a detailed material stratum — an order-word plateau — for exploring the performative in socio-political contexts, Derrida attends to the (...) singular, wholly unique acts that occur when a repeatable formula such as a political declaration is uttered or otherwise takes place. The paper then concludes by drawing a tentative link between iterability and Deleuze and Guattari's notion of ‘deterritorialisation’ via the order-word plateau. (shrink)

In ‘Causes and Reasons of Desert Islands’, Gilles Deleuze presents a mythological and scientific vision in which new islands and new humanity emerge from the opposition between the land and sea in desert islands. However, what Deleuze cannot explain is how such new territory and people are produced and reproduced while rejecting old and conventional generational ways. To break this impasse, which is also present in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze and Guattari intend to retain the absolute movement of deterritorialisation, (...) while acknowledging that deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation always comingle. This theoretical project is found in the critique of Pierre Clastres on counter-state societies, and is taken up by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? In this latter work, by creating concepts and constituting a new plane, Deleuze and Guattari offer some conditions of a third reterritorialisation that, after the second reterritorialisation in the democratic states, presents a new way of forging a political and revolutionary philosophy. In this essay, we criticise the opinions that consider Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy as one version of radical democracy. Their political philosophy should be situated in the post-democratic era to come. (shrink)

Cet article définit l’expérience planétaire comme moment pendant lequel nous sentons, nous pensons, ou nous imaginons la différence plutôt déstabilisante entre être seulement terrestre – situé et agissant sur Terre avec un corps spécifique, au milieu de relations sociales et écologiques – et être aussi planétaire, soumis au cosmos, errant comme une planète, toujours en état de déterritorialisation, de délocalisation, de débordement de frontières. L’expérience planétaire est ce qui se passe lorsque, depuis l’intériorité de notre situation terrestre, nous ressentons notre (...) condition planétaire : un excès cosmologique irréductible à notre incarnation locale, sociale, écologique et géologique. (shrink)

Les mobilisations qui émergent depuis plusieurs décennies dans les quartiers populaires français se font à distance des structures établies d’énonciation de la politique. Ce que nous pourrions considérer avec le vocabulaire de Guattari comme un mouvement de déterritorialisation s’est réalisé dans le cadre de rapports de pouvoirs spécifiques, invisibilisés par la grammaire des conflits politiques. Identifier les lignes de fuite élaborées dans la pratique par des mobilisations souvent considérées hors-radars (« ce n’est pas de la politique »), impose de « (...) sortir de la langue » et contourner les modes de signification qui sont aussi modes de confiscation. Les outils légués par Félix Guattari nous aident à affronter une question qui demeure : réside-t-il dans cette brèche creusée en conflit avec les « données » de la domination, un mouvement irrépressible vers la transformation des rapports sociaux du capitalisme, et donc une cohérence des subjectivations et des pratiques en direction de cet objectif? (shrink)

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Glenn Gould as an illustration of the third principle of the rhizome, that of multiplicity: ‘When Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate’ (1987: 8). In an attempt to make sensible their ostensibly modest statement, I proliferate the relationships between Glenn Gould's philosophy of sound recording, Deleuze's theory of (...) passive synthesis, and Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the stutter. I argue, ultimately, that Glenn Gould's radical recording practice stutters and deterritorialises the temporality of the recorded performance. More generally, the Deleuzian perspective broadens the scope of Gould's aesthetic practices that highlights the importance of aesthetic acts in the redistribution of sensory experience. But the study serves a broader purpose than celebrating a pianist/recordist that Deleuze admired. Rather, while his contemporaries began to use the studio as a compositional element in sound recording, Gould bypassed such a step towards the informational logics of recording studios. Thus, it is inappropriate to think of Gould as having immersed himself in ‘technology’ than the broader concept of a complex, one that redistributed the striated listening space of the concert hall. (shrink)

Process philosophies tend to emphasise the value of continuous creation as the core of their discourse. For Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others the real is ultimately a creative becoming. Critics have argued that there is an irreducible element of (almost religious) belief in this re-evaluation of immanent creation. While I don’t think belief is necessarily a sign of philosophical and existential weakness, in this paper I will examine the possibility for the concept of universal creation to be a political and (...) ethical axiom, the result of a global social contract rather than of a new spirituality. I argue here that a coherent way to fight against potentially totalitarian absolutes is to replace them with a virtual absolute that cannot territorialise without deterritorialising at the same time: the Creal principle. (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)

This paper points to significant similarities between the political orientations of Deleuze and Derrida. Derrida's appeal to a pure form of existing concepts (absolute hospitality, pure forgiveness, and so on) parallels Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between relative and absolute 'deterritorialisation'. In each case, the absolute form of the concept is a condition of the possibility of change.

Depuis le milieu des annees 1960, les etudes spinozistes ont pris un nouvel essor sous l'impulsion du courant marxiste qui a vu dans le programme de liberation des collectivites pense par Spinoza le projet politique le plus apte ä assurer une reponse ä la crise de legitimite du marxisme. Dans la foulee de certaines intuitions de Althusser, et ä la lumiere de la conceptualite spinoziste, plusieurs penseurs (notamment Deleuze, Negri, Macherey, Matheron et Virno) ont ainsi propose un nouveau modele d'organisation (...) de la vie en commun. Ces acteurs de la renaissance spinoziste redigent, en quelque sorte, le chapitre conclusif de la derniere ceuvre de Spinoza (i.e. le Tratte politique reste inacheve) en definissant les nouvelles conditions de la democratic ä l'heure de la deterritorialisation generalisee marquee par l'abolition des frontieres nationales (economie mondiale, reseaux informatiques, etc.). Ce contexte offre l'occasion de repenser la politique en radicalisant les propos de Spinoza et en faisant jouer les notions de "puissance" et de "multitude" non seulement contre les concepts de "pouvoir" et de "peuple" qui en sont venus ä dominer le champ de la reflexion en philosophic politique, mais egalement contre les philosophies de l'histoire fondees sur la dialectique et la teleologie. Apres avoir decrit brievement quelques-uns des principaux enjeux de la politique spinoziste et avoir presente les nouveaux ennemis du spinozisme (neo-liberalisme et marxisme ideologique), nous ferons une genealogie de la refondation neo-spinozienne de Marx (Althusser, Deleuze, Negri) avant de repondre ä la question "Que faire?". II s'agira alors de determiner le role de l'Etat et de situer cette pensee politique par rapport ä l'utopie revolutionnaire. Ce parcours contribuera ä mieux definir les fondements et les implications de la democratic non-representative qui est au cceur des revendications de la renaissance spinoziste. (shrink)

Depuis le milieu des annees 1960, les etudes spinozistes ont pris un nouvel essor sous l'impulsion du courant marxiste qui a vu dans le programme de liberation des collectivites pense par Spinoza le projet politique le plus apte ä assurer une reponse ä la crise de legitimite du marxisme. Dans la foulee de certaines intuitions de Althusser, et ä la lumiere de la conceptualite spinoziste, plusieurs penseurs (notamment Deleuze, Negri, Macherey, Matheron et Virno) ont ainsi propose un nouveau modele d'organisation (...) de la vie en commun. Ces acteurs de la renaissance spinoziste redigent, en quelque sorte, le chapitre conclusif de la derniere ceuvre de Spinoza (i.e. le Tratte politique reste inacheve) en definissant les nouvelles conditions de la democratic ä l'heure de la deterritorialisation generalisee marquee par l'abolition des frontieres nationales (economie mondiale, reseaux informatiques, etc.). Ce contexte offre l'occasion de repenser la politique en radicalisant les propos de Spinoza et en faisant jouer les notions de "puissance" et de "multitude" non seulement contre les concepts de "pouvoir" et de "peuple" qui en sont venus ä dominer le champ de la reflexion en philosophic politique, mais egalement contre les philosophies de l'histoire fondees sur la dialectique et la teleologie. Apres avoir decrit brievement quelques-uns des principaux enjeux de la politique spinoziste et avoir presente les nouveaux ennemis du spinozisme (neo-liberalisme et marxisme ideologique), nous ferons une genealogie de la refondation neo-spinozienne de Marx (Althusser, Deleuze, Negri) avant de repondre ä la question "Que faire?". II s'agira alors de determiner le role de l'Etat et de situer cette pensee politique par rapport ä l'utopie revolutionnaire. Ce parcours contribuera ä mieux definir les fondements et les implications de la democratic non-representative qui est au cceur des revendications de la renaissance spinoziste. (shrink)

The score of Piece Four of Sylvano Bussotti's Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor is the most important image in A Thousand Plateaus. It serves as a prefatory image not only to the Rhizome plateau, but also to the work as a whole. It functions as the book's musical score, guiding readers in their performance of the text. Embracing John Cage's graphism and aleatory practices, Bussotti created his own ‘aserial’ new music, one that celebrated passion and Bussotti's open homosexuality. The (...) visual elements of Piece Four include a deterritorialisation of the standard piano score, a diagram of the composition's abstract machine, and a drawing that Bussotti had produced ten years before writing Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor. The drawing itself is a rhizomic artwork, with details that echo visual motifs throughout A Thousand Plateaus. The superimposition of the drawing on the deterritorialised framework of the standard piano score conjoins the visible and the audible, faciality and the refrain, in a single artefact. (shrink)

L'homme, cet être toujours en mal d'orientation, ne peut envisager la question du sens de sa vie sans tenir compte de son enracinement dans l'histoire, et ce, à la croisée des frontières. Cette notion de frontière, tout en assumant la part de déterritorialisation qui caractérise notre monde, indique l'exigence d'un contrat culturel. Ce dernier engage l'homme d'une part dans une traversée des frontières qu'il est lui-même et qu'il expérimente dans la pratique de la langue , et d'autre part dans le (...) ménagement d'une identité clivée, travaillée par une multitude de filiations et d'héritages à gérer, et se refusant à laisser les frontières se muer en murs. (shrink)

Economy, politics and ontology are entered into conjunction; immanency situation discribed by Empire’s authors. Our interrogation will be based on two hypotheses: 1°) immanency is the liberation of an infinity of outsides; 2°) desire of the multitude includes a counter-desire which prefers rest to movement, and reterritorialisation to deterritorialisation. How to deal with such a counter-desire?

L’article analyse une forme de migration en vigueur depuis plusieurs décennies dans la population féminine de Lampedusa (Italie) : une migration à court terme mise en œuvre pour bénéficier d’une assistance hospitalière lors de l’accouchement, assistance absente à Lampedusa. Pour cerner les évolutions de cette émigration pour l’enfantement, ce phénomène est étudié sur plusieurs générations. Après avoir examiné les enjeux socio-culturels, socio-économiques et socio-sanitaires de cette mobilité reproductive chez les femmes de Lampedusa, l’article montre comment les accouchements déterritorialisés dialoguent, ou (...) entrent en conflit, avec l’assistance médicale proposée aux immigrées enceintes accueillies de nos jours à Lampedusa. Cette approche permet d’ouvrir la réflexion sur le lien entre migrations féminines nationales et internationales, expériences d’enfantement et droits reproductifs. (shrink)

In this essay I bring together Lacan, Žižek, Deleuze and Guattari as mediators and intercessors for one another. The tensions that exist between them still continue to reverberate throughout the academic community. The intent is to query their pedagogies in what they are trying to ‘do’ within the context of capitalism in particular. I have called their pedagogies anomalous in keeping with their thrust of becoming other in their own particular ways through what I take to be three pedagogical conceptual (...) personae: saint, jester and nomad. I try to show how Deleuze and Guattari managed to supplant and perhaps overcome Lacan's own pedagogical project to have psychoanalysis as a way out from capitalism, which has been continued today by Žižek. I do this by showing how Lacan's mathemes, used in his four discourses, can be understood as having been deterritorialised by Deleuze and Guattari to present us with a counter-actualised pedagogy that challenges psychoanalysis as presented by both Lacan and Žižek. Nevertheless, reconciliations between the thought of Deleuze, Guattari and Lacan are possible. The reader will also find that particular door open, yet not fully explored here. (shrink)

This paper introduces Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage theory into the contemporary biological context. I begin by laying out at some length what I take to be the defining features of Deleuze and Guattari's theory of assemblage. I consider this to be a worthwhile endeavour in its own right, and so dedicate a large portion of this paper to producing a clear account of what it is that characterises an assemblage. Then I provide a reading of Deleuze and Guattari's critical conception (...) of the organism as a kind of assemblage typified by an especially restrictive, self-regulating form of functional integration. This restrictiveness comprises what I take to be the first pole of organic life. Then I reconsider Deleuze and Guattari's positive comments about ‘non-organic life’ in this context, as a feature internal to the organisation of organic life instead of something to be set against it. I theorise this mostly in terms of symbiosis. I take the significance of symbiosis, consisting in what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘shared deterritorialisation’, to comprise the second pole of organic life. I conclude the paper with a brief discussion of how Deleuze and Guattari's assemblage-based conception of organism might be thought to anticipate and accommodate some of the contemporary research on biological individuality. (shrink)

Le chez-soi a toujours été travaillé par l'autre, et par l'hôte, et par la menace de l'expropriation. Il ne s'est constitué qu'à l'ombre de cette menace. Néanmoins, on assiste aujourd'hui à une expropriation nouvelle, à une déterritorialisation, à une délocalisation, une dissociation si radicales du politique et du local, du national, de l'Etat-national et du local, que la réponse, il faudrait dire la réaction, cela devient - je veux être chez moi, je veux être chez moi, je veux être chez (...) moi enfin, avec les miens, auprès de mes proches. Cela n'est même pas une réponse d'ailleurs, ce n'est pas une réactivité secondaire qui vient en quelque sorte compenser, réagir après-coup, non, c'est le même mouvement. Il appartient à la constitution du propre et relève de cette loi d'ex-appropriation dont je parlais plus haut - pas d'appropriation sans possibilité d'expropriation, sans la confirmation de cette possibilité. Prenons l'exemple de la télévision. La télévision introduit dans le chez-moi l'ailleurs, et le mondial, à chaque instant. Je suis plus isolé, plus privatisé que jamais, avec chez moi l'intrusion en permanence, par moi désirée, de l'autre, de l'étranger, du lointain, de l'autre langue. (shrink)

‘Transversality’ is a key term in the work of Félix Guattari. As a conceptual and pragmatic motor for the generation of heterogeneity, it extends throughout all of his work, including the writing he undertook with Deleuze. It promotes the rupture and redistribution of hierarchical structures, the mobilisation of operations of deterritorialisation across the social and cultural field, and it gains a ‘chaosmic’ dimension in the later writings. Its ‘origins’, however, are to be found in Guattari's early work at the (...) Clinique de la Borde and in militant Marxist movements in the 1950s and early 1960s. This is an initial and necessarily provisional effort to embed the concept in a social and therapeutic pragmatics and thus counter a debateable tendency towards a dilution or diffusion of transversality in theoretical abstraction, where it risks becoming a synonym for a generalised sense of creative differentiation. (shrink)

« Un coworking sans communauté n’existe pas. » Qu’est-ce qui sépare les nous du tiers-lieu de ceux de la start-up (plus ou moins nationalisée)? Qu’est-ce qui distingue les bretelles (d’un nous relativement dilaté, diffracté ou bifurquant) des autoroutes (du je au cœur du développement personnel comme du nous des team buildings et atelier de we design)? L’auto-affectation d’un soi mis au pluriel tente, par un simple jeu pronominal, de cacher son intention de relier tout le monde. À travers les reflets (...) de ces belles âmes dans leurs variations esthétiques, cet article se propose de penser les réactualisations de la standardisation psychique mondiale en montrant comme elles brouillent de quel entre-nous ça parle. On part d’une série de citations des stars de la république des lettres. Direct, on multiplie les formes de déterritorialisations énonciatives comme autant de traversées d’un nous attaché à son incertitude d’échelle et excité par ses anachronismes : expérience originelle de l’autre comme soi, atelier alter-constructiviste, méditation auto-décentrante, réunion anti-facilitatrice, contre-point sur la situation actuelle. (shrink)

‘Creative Involution’ posits something of a philosophical genealogy, a line of flight that has neither need for nor interest in the periodisation of Modernism, a line of which Beckett (even reluctantly) is part. Murphy, among others, is deterritorialised as much as Beckett's landscapes are, and so he/they become a ‘complexification’ of being that manifests itself in Beckett not as represented, representative or a representation, since so much of Beckett deals with that which cannot be uttered, known or represented, but whose (...) image the works (and its figures) have become, a thinking through of negativity, becoming, and multiplicity through non-Newtonian motion, of being as becoming, where every movement brings something new into the world, but in something of a reverse Darwinism that moves from complex to simple organism, from Murphy to Worm, or Watt to Pim, or among the nameless figures in the short prose, a ‘becoming-animal’, in something not so much of a creative devolution but rather a ‘neoevolution’, or to adopt another term from Deleuze and Guattari, an ‘involution’, which ‘is in no way confused with regression’ (1987: 238), becomings creating nothing less than new worlds. Writing casually to his post-war confidant Georges Duthuit on 26 July 1951, Beckett noted in the midst of gardening chores, ‘Never seen so many butterflies in such worm-state, this little central cylinder, the only flesh, is the worm’ (2011: 271). The observation comes after the writing but before the premiere performance of Waiting for Godot in which Gogo tells Didi, ‘You and your landscapes! Tell me about the worms!’ (1954: 67). Such ‘becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short a multiplicity’ (1987: 239), Deleuze and Guattari tell us. For Beckett it defines creativity as well, only possible through such un-tethered selves or beings, amid the generation of varieties and differences, accessible through moments of deterritorialisation, characterised by, ‘A fearsome involution calling us toward unheard-of becomings’ (240). (shrink)

This paper offers a comparative analysis of the uses and formulations of speech-act theory in Derrida's and Deleuze/Guattari's work. It begins by juxtaposing Derrida's concept/nonconcept of 'iterability' to Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the 'order-word' and then examines these theories of the speech act in terms of their implications and consequences for a politics of resistance. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari generate a detailed material stratum — an order-word plateau — for exploring the performative in socio-political contexts, Derrida attends to the (...) singular, wholly unique acts that occur when a repeatable formula such as a political declaration is uttered or otherwise takes place.The paper then concludes by drawing a tentative link between iterability and Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'deterritorialisation' via the order-word plateau. (shrink)

Lacan himself ends up missing the opportunity to relate his notion of the objet petit a to Marxist ideas about production, reproduction and consumption in political economy, and therefore scotomises the possible forms of « social enunciation » that could act as vehicles for political agency precisely during periods of technological revolution. Industrial capitalism, once set in motion, generates deterritorialised subjects, and through the very process of constant de-skilling and re-skilling, engenders new, in principle universal, machinic forms of subjectivity. Lacan (...) had discovered the mechanism, but had not yet unfolded its historical conditions and political implications. Guattari suggests that the entire direction of social institutions has been radically transformed as a result of the capitalist expropriation of the results of the industrial revolution. (shrink)

As of 2017, 65.6 million individuals have been displaced from their homes, fleeing their homelands in search of refuge from the violence, oppression, and chaos of civil war. The mass movement of people across internal and external borders only proves that there are certain aspects of the human condition that cannot be confined within the strict idea of territories and nation-states, that the political and legal approach in organising the interaction and relationships between people is deficient. I argue that there (...) is a need to recalibrate all existing ideologies in relation to the interactions and relationships between peoples coming from different parts of the world. In order to do this, I intend to examine the current legal norm and connect it to cosmopolitan ethics that are grounded on the idea of spatiality. Elucidating on the ideas presented by thinkers such as Seyla Benhabib, Anthony Kwame Appiah, Gloria Anzaldua, and Tetsuro Watsuji, I argue that to fully actualise cosmopolitan ethics we must investigate how space operates in the existence of man—a deterritorialised existence found in the borders. (shrink)

"L'homme raconte dieu en se racontant lui-même et vice versa. Il l'explore en s'explorant lui-même. Il le territorialise en limitant son propre territoire. Dieu est un territoire exploré et raconté, c'est-à-dire un récit d'explorateur et une exploration racontée. La théologie territoriale n'est pas une théologie du territoire mais, dans sa nature et sa méthode propres, elle possède une structure territoriale. Comme mode de penser dieu, elle le déterritorialise et le reterritorialise à travers un langage nouveau, en modifiant la carte linguistique (...) du territoire. C'est une théologie de l'hérésie, de l'expérience particulière et singulière que quiconque a dans son territoire propre et selon son récit. Dieu est toujours explorable, abordé en lettres minuscules, sinon il ne serait pas dieu. Le personnage d'Al Khalil (ou l'ami) est l'explorateur, le théologien par excellence, qui conduit ses divers interlocuteurs vers l'accouchement expérimental et existentiel d'eux-mêmes. Enracinés dans l'amour et la vérité, ses dialogues territoriaux relèvent pourtant d'une dimension kérygmatique. Saturés d'un symbolisme tantôt implicite, tantôt explicite, ils donnent à penser." --. (shrink)

This chapter explores the notion of territory in the works of both Gilles Deleuze and Martin Heidegger. It examines whether race and its minor theatre want a dwelling place and investigates whether there is a political potential within the body without organs which offers a resistance to the homely conception of dwelling. It provides a contextualisation of this future theatre in the Deleuzo-Guattarian project of minor literature as a whole and questions the practicality of the schizo-stroll and the BWO. It (...) also discusses the notion of Heideggerian deterritorialisation. (shrink)

Guattari’s prescient final text, Chaosmosis, argues that the conditions of Capital responsible for the current social-psychic-ecological crisis of migration demand modes of analysis capable of grasping their complexity, ones grounded in the ethico-aesthetic. It is a text that draws directly from the therapeutic practice that he, Tosquelles, Oury, and others in the Institutional Psychotherapy (IP) movement developed in their clinics. This work entailed the inclusion of aesthetic practices that work to deterritorialise the institution, shifting from carceral sites and creating therapeutic (...) spaces of care and refuge. This article explores the centrality of an ethico-aesthetic approach to the understanding of therapeutic space within the sites and clinical practice of Institutional Psychotherapy. Looking especially at daily life and the inclusion of aesthetic practice, it examines the particular notion of asylum that emerged in these sites that so informed the clinical and critical work of Guattari and Deleuze, and draws connections to the current global crisis of migration in the necessity of such sites to the forced segregation between those deemed mad and sane. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, dans L’Anti-Œdipe, se contentent-ils de décrire le capitalisme comme « déterritorialisation », ou portent-ils par là un jugement devaleur à son sujet? Autrement : quel type de valorisation l’ouvrage...

The mass popular dissent which has marked the early twenty-first century, from al-Qaeda to the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, can be read as expressions of collective, subjective, existential mutation. This reading is inspired by Félix Guattari, who described the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Polish Solidarity movement and the 1989 Chinese student demonstrations as demands for subjective singularisation. In each of these examples of social discontent, past and present, demands vary widely even within the same movement, spanning economics, lifestyle, (...) religion and politics, and ranging from cries for liberation to conservative returns to ancient tradition. In order to perform a schizoanalysis of such amorphous movements, Guattari developed a four-part ecosophic object, composed of existential Territories, Universes of value, material-energetic Flows and machinic Phyla. Assemblages can be dynamically mapped along these four dimensions. Of crucial importance in the age of extreme deterritorialisation is the existential Territory, which could potentially take the form of a homeland based on poetry or music rather than on ethnicity or even place. Such portable homelands would characterise the dissensual processual post-media era for which Guattari longed. (shrink)