The present is, in fact, made out of the residue of the past.For here the question is nothing less, I venture to say, than the problem of man, of man's humanity, and of humanism. But situated where language no longer lets itself be effaced.A note to readers, an apologia: this is an experimental critical theory essay, a performative piece of academic writing that attempts to wrestle with the porous zones, the hiccups, slips and falls between languages, translations, and between writing (...) and genre. Some readers may find it obscure, dense, in parts; open and too free, too vulnerable, too self-revealing or narrative–too variable in its intensities, its modalities, its genres. But that is also the point. It is in part... (shrink)

ABSTRACTWeaving between anecdote, memoir and ‘empty time’, this fictional conversation with the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich, stages another genre of philosophy that would be, like her polyphonic style of documentary writing, not heroic as much as intimate. Set in Athens, while reaching towards Siberia, the conversation moves between the wartime 1940s and the late 2010s, gently broaching taboos of philosophical discourse: confession, ‘personal life’, memoir, love, family relations, doubt, fear, audience, and the time (...) and place of writing, to arrive at a bare space of philosophical address, where nothing much happens except time passing. At once classically philosophical in its search for a form of life truthful to the Heraclitean dictum to search oneself, and to Rousseauvian and Cartesian gestures of meditation and reverie, the essay also offers a language for thinking the textures and movements of thought – its quiet choreography. (shrink)

"The unconscious is not a theatre, but a factory," wrote Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, instigating one of the most daring intellectual adventures of the last half-century. Together, the well-known philosopher and the activist-psychiatrist were updating both psychoanalysis and Marxism in light of a more radical and "constructivist" vision of capitalism: "Capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies because it has no exterior limit itself. It works well as long as it keeps breaking down."Few people at the (...) time believed, as they wrote in the often-quoted opening sentence of Rhizome, that "the two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together." They added, "Since each of us was several, that became quite a crowd." These notes, addressed to Deleuze by Guattari in preparation for Anti-Oedipus, and annotated by Deleuze, substantiate their claim, finally bringing out the factory behind the theatre. They reveal Guattari as an inventive, highly analytical, mathematically-minded "conceptor," arguably one of the most prolific and enigmatic figures in philosophy and sociopolitical theory today. The Anti-Oedipus Papers are supplemented by substantial journal entries in which Guattari describes his turbulent relationship with his analyst and teacher Jacques Lacan, his apprehensions about the publication of Anti-Oedipus and accounts of his personal and professional life as a private analyst and codirector with Jean Oury of the experimental clinic Laborde. (shrink)