Introduction -- A concept of bodies politic -- Above, below, and alongside the subject -- Bodies politic -- Bodies politic as organisms -- The organism in Aristotle and Kant -- The anorganic body in Deleuze and Guattari -- Love, rage, and fear -- Terri Schiavo : the somatic body politic -- The Columbine High School massacre : the transverse body politic -- Hurricane Katrina : the governmental body politic -- Conclusion.

Applies Deleuzian theory to an array of physical phenomena, scientific issues, and political events. Life, War, Earth demonstrates how Gilles Deleuze’s ontology of the virtual, intensive, and actual can enhance our understanding of important issues in cognitive science, biology, and geography. The book offers a unique reading of Deleuze’s corpus and a useful method for applying Deleuzian techniques to the natural sciences, the social sciences, political phenomena, and contemporary events.

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In this article I will suggest ways in which adding the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to the mix can complement and extend the 4EA approach to cognitive science. In the first part of the paper, I will show how the Deleuzean tripartite ontological difference (virtual/intensive/actual) can provide an explicit ontology for dynamical systems theory. The second part will take these ontological notions and apply them to three areas of concern to the 4EA approaches: (a) the Deleuzean concept of the virtual (...) will clarify the ontological status of perceptual capacity as sensorimotor skill; (b) the Deleuzean concept of “intensive individuation” will clarify the ontological status of the genesis of perceptually guided behavior; (c) the Deleuzean critique of confusing the actual and the virtual will enable us to intervene in the realism/idealism debate. These aspects will not be addressed sequentially but will be interwoven into an unfolding argument. (shrink)

Draft 13 April 2007. Under review at Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

The essay examines the idea of ―biological space and time‖ found in Evan Thompson‘s Mind in Life and Gilles Deleuze‘s Difference and Repetition. Tracking down this ―new Transcendental Aesthetic‖ intersects new work done on panpsychism. Both Deleuze and Thompson can be fairly said to be biological panpsychists. That‘s what ―Mind in Life‖ means: mind and life are coextensive; life is a sufficient condition for mind. Deleuze is not just a biological panpsychist, however, so we‘ll have to confront full-fledged panpsychism. At (...) the end of the essay we‘ll be able to pose the question whether or not we can supplement Thompson‘s ―Mind in Life‖ position with a ―Mind in Process‖ position and if so, what that supplement means both for his work and for panpsychism. (shrink)

Between Deleuze and Derrida is the first book to explore and compare the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, two leading philosophers of French post-structuralism. This is done via a number of key themes, including the philosophy of difference, language, memory, time, event, and love, as well as relating these themes to their respective approaches to Philosophy, Literature, Politics and Mathematics. Contributors: Eric Alliez, Branka Arsic, Gregg Lambert, Leonard Lawlor, Alphonso Lingis, Tamsin Lorraine, Jeff Nealon, Paul Patton, Arkady Plotnitsky, (...) John Protevi, Daniel W. Smith. (shrink)

The essay attempts to approach some of the critical nuances of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. It takes its lead from Deleuze’s distinction between learning and knowledge. Learning implies a “depersonalization through love,” in mutual presupposition with an “encounter” that moves one to thought, while knowledge is recognition via pre-existing categories. Throughout the article, Deleuze’s encounter with Kant is the guiding thread.

OVERVIEW. The concept of emergence – which I define as the (diachronic) construction of functional structures in complex systems that achieve a (synchronic) focus of systematic behaviour as they constrain the behaviour of individual components – plays a crucial role in debates in philosophical reflection on science as a whole (the question of reductionism) as well as in the fields of biology (the status of the organism), social science (the practical subject), and cognitive science (the cognitive subject).1 In this essay (...) I examine how the philosophy of Deleuze and that of Deleuze and Guattari2 can help us see some of the most important implications of the debate on the status of the organism, as well as prepare the ground for a discussion of the practical and cognitive subject. (shrink)

Hurricane Katrina was an elemental and a social event. To understand it, you first have to understand the land, the air, the sun, the river and the sea; you have to understand earth, wind, fire and water; you have to understand geomorphology, meteorology, biology, economics, politics, history. You have to understand how they have come together to form, with the peoples of America, Europe and Africa, the historical patterns of life of Louisiana and New Orleans, the bodies politic of the (...) region, bodies you need to study with political physiology. You have to understand what those bodies could do and what they could withstand, and how they intersected the event of the storm. In this paper, simply for the sake of time and space constraints, I will concentrate on New Orleans; the stories of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, or of Saint Bernard, Saint Tammany, and Plaquemines Parishes in Louisiana are complex and dramatic as well. (shrink)

Upon first reading, the beginning of Chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition, with its talk of ―contemplative souls‖ and ―larval subjects,‖ seems something of a bizarre biological panpsychism. Actually it does defend a sort of biological panpsychism, but by defining the kind of psyche Deleuze is talking about, I‘ll show here how we can remove the bizarreness from that concept. First, I will sketch Deleuze‘s treatment of ―larval subjects,‖ then show how Deleuze‘s discourse can be articulated with Evan Thompson‘s biologically (...) based intervention into cognitive science, the ―mind in life‖ or ―enaction‖ position. Then I will then show how each in turn fits with contemporary biological work on E. coli chemotaxis (movement in response to changes in environment). (shrink)

This book examines Derrida's and Heidegger's responses to Aristotle's foundational treatise on time, advancing a notion of generation rather than locomotion as a field for further study of time and exteriority.

The concept of emergence—which I define as the construction of functional structures in complex systems that achieve a focus of systematic behaviour as they constrain the behaviour of individual components—plays a crucial role in debates in philosophical reflection on science as a whole as well as in the fields of biology, social science and cognitive science. In this article I examine how the philosophy of Deleuze and that of Deleuze and Guattari can help us see some of the most important (...) implications of these debates. (shrink)

Francisco Varela’s work is a monumental achievement in 20th century biological and biophilosophical thought. After his early collaboration in neo-cybernetics with Humberto Maturana (“autopoiesis”), Varela made fundamental contributions to immunology (“network theory”), Artificial Life (“cellular automata”), cognitive science (“enaction”), philosophy of mind (“neurophenomenology”), brain studies (“the brainweb”), and East- West dialogue (the Mind and Life conferences). In the course of his career, Varela influenced many important collaborators and interlocutors, formed a generation of excellent students, and touched the lives of many (...) with the intensity of his mind, the sharpness of his wit, and the strength of his spirit. In this essay, I will trace some of the key turning points in his thought, with special focus on the concept of emergence, which was always central to his work, and on questions of politics, which operate at the margins of his thought. I will divide Varela’s work into three periods – autopoiesis, enaction, and radical embodiment – each of which is marked by a guiding concept; a specific.. (shrink)

Once one of the most important philosophical concepts (it is impossible to think of Plato without erôs, or Aristotle without philia, or Augustine without caritas and cupiditas), love doesn't get much philosophical notice nowadays, at least outside psychoanalytic circles. Or so it seems. But couldn't one just as well say that Derrida and Deleuze think about nothing but love? What have they written that isn't linked rather directly to desire, to alterity, to getting outside oneself, even if "love" isn't among (...) their.. (shrink)

I explore Jason Stanley’s notion of ideology. After preliminary remarks on ideology and coercion in social reproduction, I offer a restatement of Stanley’s position on ideology, examining his notion of epistemic harm. I then examine the role of emotion in his thinking as that which binds beliefs to agents, and conclude with an argument for a notion I call “affective ideology” that enables us to connect ideology with the use of force in “coercive social reproduction.”Examino la noción de ideología debida (...) a Jason Stanley. Tras algunas observaciones preliminares sobre ideología y coerción en la reproducción social, ofrezco una reformulación de la posición de Stanley sobre la ideología, examinando su noción de daño epistémico. Examino a continuación el rol de las emociones en su pensamiento, en tanto que son las que vinculan las creencias a los agentes, y concluyo con un argumento a favor de lo que llamo “ideología afectiva”, la cual nos capacita para conectar la idelogía con el uso de la fuerza en la “reproducción social coercitiva”. (shrink)

God has been called many things, but perhaps nothing so strange as the name of “lobster” which he receives in A Thousand Plateaus.1 Is this simple profanation a pendant to the gleeful anti-clericalism of Deleuze2, for whom there is no insult so wretched as that of “priest”?3 Certainly, on one level. But it is also a clue to Deleuze’s ability to use a traditional concern of theology, the name of God, to intervene in the most basic questions of Western philosophy, (...) in this case, the interchange of theology, biology and politics inherent in the question of nature and the organism. (shrink)

Forthcoming in Cognitive Architecture: from bio-politics to noo-politics, eds. Deborah Hauptmann, Warren Neidich and Abdul-Karim Mustapha INTRODUCTION The cognitive and affective sciences have benefitted in the last twenty years from a rethinking of the long-dominant computer model of the mind espoused by the standard approaches of computationalism and connectionism. The development of this alternative, often named the “embodied mind” approach or the “4EA” approach (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, affective), has relied on a trio of classical 20th century phenomenologists for its (...) philosophical framework: Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.[1] In this essay I propose that the French thinker Gilles Deleuze can provide the conceptual framework that will enable us to thematize some unstated presuppositions of the 4EA School, as well as to sharpen, extend and / or radicalize some of their explicit presuppositions. I highlight three areas here: 1) an ontology of distributed and differential systems, using Deleuze’s notion of the virtual; 2) a thought of multiple subjectification practices rather than a thought of “the” subject, even if it be seen as embodied and embedded; and 3) a rethinking of the notion of affect in order to thematize a notion of “political affect.”[2] I will develop this proposal with reference to Bruce Wexler’s Brain and Culture,[3] a work which resonates superbly with the Deleuzean approach. (shrink)

DEFINING THE LIMITS OF THE FIELD. Because 'consciousness and the body' is central to so many philosophical endeavors, I cannot provide a comprehensive survey of recent work. So we must begin by limiting the scope of our inquiry. First, we will concentrate on work done in English or translated into English, simply to ensure ease of access to the texts under examination. Second, we will concentrate on work done in the last 15 years or so, since the early 1990s. Third, (...) we will concentrate on those philosophers who treat both consciousness and the body together. Thus we will not treat philosophers who look at body representations in culture, nor philosophers who examine socio-political bodily practices with minimal or no reference to consciousness. Finally, even with the philosophers we choose to treat, we cannot be comprehensive and will instead make representative choices among their works. With that being said, we will have a fairly liberal definition of continental philosophy, operationally defined as that which makes (non-exclusive) reference to the classic phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Thus we will include the radical.. (shrink)

While Agamben acknowledges the Arendtian and Foucaultian thesis of the modernity of biopower, he will claim that sovereignty and biopolitics are equally ancient and essentially intertwined in the originary gesture of all politics; sovereignty is the power to decide the state of exception whereby bare life or zoe is exposed "underneath" political life or bios. Agamben then finds in the concentration camp the modern biopolitical paradigm, in which the state of exception has become the rule and we have all become (...) [potentially] bearers of exposed bare life in that we are all subject to what I will call a "de-politicizing predication": to use the current American jargon, being named an "enemy combatant.". (shrink)

For Deleuze and for DG, being is production. The production process (intensive difference driving material flows resulting in actual or extensive forms) is structured by virtual Ideas or multiplicities or “abstract machines.”1 Thought, however, is vice-diction or counter-effectuation: it goes the other way from production. It is a matter of establishing the Idea / multiplicity of something – “constructing a concept” – by moving from extensity through intensity to virtuality.

Given Time and the Gift of Life explores the following nexus in Derrida's thought: the gift, the mother, and life. The first section examines life within the trajectory of the gift, the excess of gift over return in the gift of life, and the rewriting of Aristotelian generation in differantial species-being. The second section shows the quasi-transcendental nature of Derrida's thought. The conclusion sketches some of the political consequences of the gift of life thought as the quasi-transcendental gift of differantial (...) species-being. (shrink)

But first, let me note that these two are terms derived more or less directly from the collaborative work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Now I think it’s important that analytic and continental philosophers learn to talk to each other, and I’m convinced that Deleuze and Guattari’s work, when properly explained, provides a common ground for this discussion. That’s because they provide the ontology and epistemology for a world that is able to yield the results we (...) find in using nonlinear dynamical modeling, as is common practice in quite a few scientific fields today, among them some of special interest to philosophers, such as brain studies. (Varela et al., “The Brain Web” Nature Reviews. Neuroscience 2001 is a review article covering one hundred or so studies of the 1990s that used non-linear dynamics for modeling brain function.). (shrink)

• 1791 pact with the devil? • 1804 declaration of independence? • 1806 US trade embargo? • 1825 French demand for reparations? • 1915 US occupation? • 1947 last payment to France? • 1957 Duvalier re-indebts Haiti? • 2004 Aristide demand French reparation? • 2010 IMF cancels Haitian debt ?

This paper brings Georges Canguilhem and Gilles Deleuze together with the contemporary biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard. I examine the concepts of adaptation and adaptivity in Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological in light of West-Eberhard’s notion of “developmental plasticity,” which is, I claim, adaptivity in the developmental register. In turn, I interpret Canguilhem’s notion of “comparative physiology” and West- Eberhard’s notion of an “eco-devo-evo” approach to biology in terms of Deleuze’s notion of multiplicity.

In 2005 Mike Wheeler published a very nice book with MIT entitled Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step. Wheeler writes about – and is at the forefront of – a group of researchers calling attention to what we can call 4EA cognition: "embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, affective." The philosophical resource for Wheeler’s “next step” is Heidegger. I think it's time we use Deleuze to take another next step.1 I’m going to use Deleuze’s essay on Lucretius as a lead. There, (...) Deleuze writes about naturalism as demystification. For the 4EA schools, the fight is against myths of the subject. (shrink)

In this paper I try to bring together two contexts in which the term “gene” is used. Perhaps this is overly hasty. But I’m trying to bring a term from an evolutionary context (“unexpressed genetic variation”) together with one from a developmental context (“constructed functional gene”).

Both Deleuze in DR and Thompson / Jonas can be fairly said to be biological panpsychists. That‘s pretty much what ―Mind in Life‖ means: mind and life are co-extensive: life = autopoiesis and cognition = sense-making. Thus Mind in Life = autopoietic sense-making = control of action of organism in environment. Sense-making here is three-fold: 1) sensibility as openness to environment; 2) signification as positive or negative valence of environmental features relative to the subjective norms of the organism; 3) direction (...) or orientation the organism adopts in response to 1 and 2. (―Sense of the river‖ is archaic in English, but ―sens unique‖ for ―one-way street‖ is perfectly clear in French.). (shrink)

In looking at Derrida’s career, many people claim to see a “political turn” with the 1989 essay “Force of Law.” So on this reading, the early Derrida is concerned with metaphysics and literature and the later Derrida with politics and ethics. I disagree. The concerns have always been metaphysical/literary and political/ethical at once, but the “methodology” changes: from deconstruction to aporia.

Dans cette présentation je vais essayer de vous montrer comment les principes deleuzoguattariens de la géophilosophie peuvent être mis en contact avec ce que j’appelle la « physiologie politique ». Ces deux domaines de recherche sont les mieux pensés par rapport aux « sciences de complexité », c’est-à-dire, par rapport aux modelages accomplis par les techniques mathématiques dans le domaine de la dynamique non-linéaire.