The aim of this article is to give an account of a methodological link between drama and political theory. This account is drawn primarily from the early philosophical work of Deleuze. Following Deleuze, we will refer to it as ‘the method of dramatization’. We will argue that dramatization is a method aimed at determining the quality of political concepts by ‘bringing them to life’, in the way that dramatic performances bring to life the characters and themes of a play-script. We (...) demonstrate that this can be specified in relation to the development of this method in Deleuze's early philosophical work as a practical, critical and artistic method and, in relation to the ontological assumptions he articulated and defended in Difference and Repetition, as a process of intensification of the Idea of the political. By way of example, we discuss how the dramatization of the concept of ideology functions in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. We conclude with some lines of inquiry that could be pursued by political theorists looking to investigate further the dramatic nature of method in political theory. (shrink)

Introduction -- Deleuze and Guattari and political theory -- Dramatization as critical method -- Dramatization : the ontological claims -- Language and the method of dramatization -- Cinema and the method of dramatization -- Events and the method of dramatization -- Conclusion.

This paper defends the claim that the critique of ideology requires creative interventions in the symbolic order of society and that those creative interventions must be understood as events. This is what animates the work of both Ricoeur and Deleuze and yet helps to uncover the fundamental difference between them regarding the conditions that make such critique possible: a difference regarding how we understand the nature of events. While Ricoeur is the philosopher of the narrated event, Deleuze is the philosopher (...) of the dramatic event. Instead of pursuing a point-by-point comparison of their respective philosophies of the event, a line of social and political inquiry is constructed that leads from Ricoeur to Deleuze with a view to establishing at what point these two thinkers take different paths. It will be argued that the crossroads is rather neatly signposted by Meillassoux’s critique of strong correlationism in After Finitude .  . (shrink)

Can the public sphere be conceptualised in a manner that is non-reductive and inclusive? In this article, we survey the main literature on the public sphere and demonstrate that, despite apparent diversity, the dominant approaches to its conceptualisation share the same ‘matter and form’ or hylomorphic assumptions. In challenging these assumptions, our aim is to demonstrate that it is the hylomorphic model of the public sphere that prevents non-reductive conceptualisation of its essentially changing nature. Hylomorphic models of the public sphere, (...) we argue, will never yield this result because they perpetuate established identities over emergent differences. We conclude that progress toward non-reductive and inclusive accounts of the public sphere would be best served by foregoing hylomorphic models in favour of ontogenetic ones, when thinking about the changing nature of the public sphere. (shrink)

Speakers routinely rely on a vast store of fixed and semi-fixed institutionalized utterances. In our mother tongue, we know how to combine pre-patterned phrases, complete semi-fixed expressions, and produce deviant versions for humorous effect. There are analogies with the way traditional folk musicians embellish tunes with a largely fixed structure, and the way jazz musicians improvise, and also with oral traditions in which poets composed or improvised tales during performance by using fixed formulas and formulaic phrases (though without the metrical (...) requirements of Homeric poetry). In written literature, the use of ready-made language was long disparaged as the opposite of creativity, but Barthes describes both speech and literature in general as consisting entirely of transformations of words that have already been set in order, and describes individual style as essentially a citational process, and the transformation of earlier formulae. Formulaic language can be shown to underlie much linguistic creativity. (shrink)

Written by experts in their field, this Companion surveys the challenges and provocations raised by the major voices of poststructuralism: Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Guattari, Kristeva, Irigaray, Barthes and Baudrillard. Thematically organised and clearly written, it will guide students and researchers in philosophy, literature, art, geography, politics, sociology, law, film and cultural studies around the nature and contemporary relevance of poststructuralism.

This introduction to contemporary social and political theory examines the impact of new ideas such as feminist theory, poststructuralism, hermeneutics and critical theory. The innovations brought by these intellectual traditions of Europe and America are outlined and discussed. Rather than focus on individual thinkers, the authors take a "conceptual" approach by examining contemporary theories through themes such as "critique", "rationality", "power", "the subject", "the body", and "culture". Each chapter considers the evolution of a concept and examines the major debates and (...) transformations that have taken place in that area. (shrink)

As austerity measures are put into place the world over and global restructuring is acknowledged by all as an attempt to bolster the economic system that lead to the crash, there is a great need to come to grips with the economic, political and philosophical legacy of Marx. Of particular interest are Marx's analyses of alienation and the cycles of boom and bust thought to be integral to the functioning of capitalism. Moreover, as the Cold War drifts into the history (...) books, it is possible to reconsider the lasting impact of Marx's analyses without the shadows cast by the Soviet version of communism. Equally, though, scholars are increasingly turning to Marx for insight into the rise of religion and the corresponding demise of political ideologies that seems to mark the contemporary age. Are we witnessing 'the return of Marx'? Few scholars have done as much to tease out the intricacies of Marx, ideology and religion and their overlapping concerns as the eminent writer and Marx biographer, Professor David McLellan. This book brings together a group of internationally renowned academics to reflect upon, develop and criticise McLellan's analyses of these three themes with a view to contributing more broadly to scholarly debates in these fields. This exciting and timely analysis will be of interest to scholars of political theory, the history of political thought, Marx and Marxism, sociology of knowledge, religion and theology more widely. (shrink)

Tristan Garcia’s Form and Object has been framed primarily as a contribution to object oriented metaphysics. In this article, I shall explicate and defend four claims that bring it closer to the modern critical tradition: 1) that Garcia’s Form and Object can be read, profitably, within the tradition of reflection upon the nature of possessions, self-possession and possessiveness; 2) that to read the book in this way is to see Garcia as the French heir to C. B. McPherson although it (...) will be argued that what this amounts to is that while McPherson was the anti-Locke, so to speak, Garcia is the anti-Rousseau; 3) that this framing has significant consequences for our reception of Form and Object in that it can be understood as a book that not only marks a moment in debates surrounding speculative realism and object oriented ontology but that it also, and primarily, marks an important moment in debates about the encroachment of things and the culture of possession that, in part, defines modernity; 4) that there is a novel ontological position within Form and Object, one that is neither relational nor individualist, that presents a challenging account of ‘the chance and the price’ of living after possession and how to overcome the deleterious effects of contemporary consumer societies. (shrink)

I take it that (1) the central problem of political philosophy is how to deploy philosophy in the criticism and direction of practice. This paper maps out the basic terrain of the relationship between (A) neo?Kantian Critical Theory (for example, Jürgen Habermas), (B) hermeneutics (for example, Charles Taylor) and (C) constructivism (for example, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari). It contends that this central problem (1) is not met by the arguments of (A) and (B) ? these representing what I call (...) ?the communicative turn in political philosophy?. They assume ?democratic dialogue? is its own justification and that from it spring both truth and right. The key objection is that the communication of opinions is not the same as the demonstration of their validity. I argue that (C) may help to take us beyond the failures of (A) and (B). (shrink)

Gadamer insists that we can never abandon our own ‘horizon’ and transpose ourselves into or reconstruct an artist’s historical context, and re-experience a work’s original meaning. Our context-bound values and beliefs, or prejudgments, are a necessary condition for all understanding, but we can become aware of them in the attempt to understand works of art of the past, and achieve a fusion of horizons. But what of contemporary forgeries of artworks from the past, produced by someone sharing our own horizon? (...) Forgers tend to exaggerate the qualities or properties of a work that their generation particularly appreciates. Only when interpreters are able to recognize the forger’s prejudgments, which render his work different from that of the horizon he seeks to imitate, does the true meaning of the forger’s work become apparent, as – famously – in the case of Van Meegeren’s imitations of ‘Vermeers.’ Contemporary forgeries are a good test of whether we are able to recognize our prejudgments. (shrink)

In the context of a new global order where the logic of the market reigns virtually unopposed, there is a need for thinking that might reinvigorate a progressive political project. This collection of essays brings together the work of a number of leading scholars who are concerned to construct a convincing basis for incisive criticism. These contributors represent such contemporary critical perspectives as egalitarian liberalism, socialism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics and critical theory.

Paul de Man calls for rhetorical reading attentive to the materiality of language and the metaphorical nature of all words and concepts. He insists that tropes are purely cognitive and devoid of any aesthetic function, and describes language as mechanical and non-human. He contests Schiller’s account of aesthetic education, in which the ‘aesthetic state’– enjoyment of beauty or pure aesthetic form – leads man to truth and moral freedom. He links Schiller’s advocacy of pure form with the idea in Kleist’s (...) short story about marionette theatre that human perfection in dance can best be achieved by mechanization and mutilation. Schiller argued that the ideal man is represented by the State; de Man quotes Goebbels on how the statesman is an artist who ‘mechanizes’ the masses and shapes an aesthetic State out of the people, just as artists shape their material. But even though the Nazis aestheticized politics, the essence of fascism remains power rather than language or form. Whether or not the late de Man’s account of the aesthetic is a consequence of his wartime espousal of an implicitly fascist notion of aesthetic totality, the aesthetic is not as inherently dangerous as he describes it. (shrink)

Drawing on Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, our initial focus in this article will be on the role of institutions within societies of control, an analysis which brings Deleuze into the orbit of Ervin Goffman’s famous ethnographic work on total institutions. This cross-comparative analysis of Deleuze and Goffman will allow us to show how institutions of control function by sequencing ‘dividuals’ across institutional domains in a continual process of totalization. Inspired by James Williams’s recent work on the ‘process philosophy of (...) signs’, we then argue that a critique of totalizing institutions can be positively articulated as a process-oriented challenge to algorithmic technologies and as a counter-sequencing of institutional control. We conclude with some reflections on the emergent modes of resistance that challenge both institutional and technological control, and we will proffer criteria for assessing such practices in relation to the two-sided nature of critique they enact, both processual and counter-sequential. (shrink)

Wittgenstein asserts that aesthetic responses are not causal. They name the objects or targets of feelings rather than their causes, and are not open to experimental revision. One cannot break the object down into distinct components and match particular parts to the response. Changing a work of art produces an entirely new object and a new response; changing so much as a word in a text changes its meaning and effect. But many critics do respond to expressive, affective or connotative (...) aspects of particular words (and contemplate ‘merely’ stylistic changes), and our response to artworks can change even without the work changing, such as when we learn who the author is, or that a painting is a forgery. Critics can identify the targets of their aesthetic responses, which makes their responses causal hypotheses, although these are valid only for the particular critic and the particular occasion, and do not rest on any causal aesthetic norms. (shrink)

This article addresses the relationship between art, politics and resistance by focusing on the following question: on what basis can artistic practices and practices of resistance become mutually sustainable as forms of resistance to ‘integrated world capitalism’? The question arises from understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s account of schizoanalysis as ‘an incomplete project’ (Buchanan) and from within current debates about the relationship between art, politics and resistance. We argue that current understandings of the art-politics relationship tend towards two dominant motifs: the (...) contributory and the constitutive. Although both of these approaches provide considerable insight into the increasing areas of overlap between art and politics they nonetheless run the risk of instituting a hierarchical relationship between art and politics. We propose instead that the common space of contemporary art and politics is defined precisely where artistic practices and practices of resistance meet. This is demonstrated through a schizoanalytic reading of Johnny’s famously rebellious question in The Wild One (1953): ‘Whaddaya got?’. We present a reading of this question as a call for immanent and singular (rather than transcendent and universal) forms of resistance. We argue that resistance understood as an immanent and singular intervention in the world is best expressed as a form of artistic practice, and only when expressed as a form of artistic practice will practices of resistance have the theoretical resources to sustain themselves. The article concludes with the claim that schizoanalytical method is the artistic practice of creating sustainable forms of resistance within integrated world capitalism. (shrink)

Occupying a space in-between conventional scholarship and imaginative storytelling, The University in Crumbs: A Register of Things Seen and Heard is an experimental work that dramatizes the everyday life of the academy.