It is argued that self-sacrifice in the zombie apocalypse can be read as a cultural signifier for a series of neoliberal deformities such as social immobility, the success/failure hierarchies, corporate nepotism, the illusion of choice and ingrained prejudice. This thesis intends to provide a means of interpreting and categorising audiovisual, subjective, episodic and ludic self-sacrifices. It aims to identify how representations of self-sacrifice exist as a symptom of social hierarchies and ingrained competition. Therefore, self-sacrifice is part of a cultural vocabulary (...) that is constantly pointing out the flaws of the neoliberal state and is not being correctly understood. This study matters because it breaks new ground in the analysis of self-sacrifice and identifies representations of self-sacrifice as part of a cultural language that signifies the twisted values of modern neoliberalism. Case studies examining a range of media will present audiovisually similar accounts of self-sacrifice; however, the cultural impact, resonance and legacies will differ accordingly. The formation of self-identity is therefore reconfigured in both textual and contextual conditions. Furthermore, because society is more frequently subjected to videos, texts, films, series, games apps and other means of information transferral, one of the defining characteristics of modern neoliberalism is its intermediality. It is for this reason that this thesis shares such intermediality. With each shift to the examination of self-sacrifice in a different medium, theoretical critiques of neoliberalism take on correspondent nuances that endeavour to give the upcoming analysis depth and contemporary relevance. It outlines how competition has become ingrained in social constructions. It makes evident how pre-existing socioeconomic hierarchies are reinforced by the internalisation of failure. This thesis argues that representations of survival and the compulsion to survive are not about resourcefulness but a competitive sense of outlasting and gauging self-worth by the failure of others. The illusion of choice is also put forward as another way of interpreting the cultural defects of neoliberalism. Survival and self-sacrifice are both linked in the zombie apocalypse because they present a choice in a situation that removes all aspects of choosing. They depict an impasse that can only be traversed by self-appraisal and self-evaluation. This is because the choice to self-sacrifice is invariably set up by a previous infection or disadvantage and survival is, by definition, operative in scenarios that restrict a character’s propensity to survive. The winners survive and everyone else dies out. Again, this can be related to constructions of social competition and its tendency to reinforce the positions of those at the pinnacle of cultural hierarchies. This thesis also examines the illusion of choice to various degrees in interactive media, weighing up how the concept of self-sacrifice can represent a disruption to reestablished socioeconomic hierarchies through incremental self-enrichment. (shrink)

This paper offers a theoretical reading of the phenomenon and experience of the social networking site, Facebook, through an exploration of how loyally a Facebook profile can represent the essence of an individual, and whether such Platonic notions of essence and loyalty of copy are disturbed by the nature of a social networking site profile, in ways described by Deleuze’s notions of the reversal of Platonism. In bringing a post-structuralist critique to a hugely successful and popular information system, the paper (...) attempts to open up the black box of the ‘user’ and explore how notions of the Self might be reflected through engagement with IS. (shrink)

The concept of “the body without organs” takes up a great part of the oeuvre of Deleuze and Guattari. Yet, it is difficult to answer their question–“How do you make yourself a body without organs?”–or to understand their answer. In this paper I propose that the body without organs is an ethical concept. To support this assertion, I relate, especially, Deleuze’s thought on the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s auto-fictive project, My Struggle, suggesting that My Struggle can be read as (...) a body without organs. By doing so, I aim at two things: first, to illustrate a possible application of Deleuze’s ethic, and second, to show how such an ethic may guide us regarding what we ought to do. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to test the degree to which Deleuze’s philosophy can be reconciled with the subject naturalist approach to pragmatism put forward by Macarthur and Price.

This critical cartography surveys seven moments in critical practice/art pedagogy, which oscillate around the moment of 1968 and diffract the contemporary possibility of art education, which we associate with Halberstam’s notions of evacuation and wildness. Engaging with recent pedagogies of individual and collective self-experimentation this paper reads across Deleuzguattarian schizoanalysis and Baradian intra-action to propose an undercommons concerned with racial justice operating beyond the Neo-Liberal University in tandem everyday practices and addresses the work of Black Lives Matter Bristol, Audre Lorde, (...) Mohamed Melehi, Benjamin Patterson, and Howardena Pindell as indicative of such a pedagogy-to-come. (shrink)

The aim of the work is to examine the relationship between the concepts of “immanence” and “politics” in the works of Hegel and Deleuze. Both Hegel and Deleuze are thinkers of immanence and they explicitly think this concept in relation to the problem of political practice. As I show, they attempt to “ground” politics in immanence. The purpose of this work is to prove that there exists an inherent paradox in the undertaking to “ground” politics in immanence. Both philosophers are (...) confronted with a paradox that emerges from this “grounding”. The paradox appears in the form of natural violence. Both authors fail to contain this violence through arguments. In order to show this, I examine the relationship between two further concepts: history and the state. I compare Hegel’s and Deleuze’s formulations of world-history and universal history, tracing the analogies and differences in how they think the relationship of the state to history. Based on the conclusions I then focus on the relationship of politics to immanence. The paradox of natural violence, I show, emerges from the relationship of the state at the “end of history”. (shrink)

This text has already been published, in La Deleuziana – online journal of philosophy – n. 10 / 2019 – rhythm, chaos and nonpulsed man.: I propose in this text a rhythmic theory of signs drawn from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I name this theory a semiorhythmology. I suggest that the theory of rhythm developed in A Thousand Plateaus can be understood, in part, as the culmination of the diverse set of inquiries into signs that both (...) Deleuze and Guattari - Philosophie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

This thesis attempts to describe and interpret the design practice of an American architect, Frank O. Gehry through concepts developed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator, French psychotherapist, philosopher and activist, Félix Guattari. At the same time, prototyping a website-based interactive project called PLATEAU GEHRY_CONNECTIVES, it explores an alternative form for the Doctoral thesis. In addition to connections with visual arts, such as painting and cinema, the experimental project PLATEAU GEHRY_CONNECTIVES includes references to concepts and phenomena from various (...) areas of knowledge revealing distinctive, unusual qualities of Gehry’s creative approach in the production of design artefacts. The thesis documents and discusses means of representation in architectural design fused into the specific creative culture of Frank O. Gehry. It notices that the discourse in architectural theory and practice, often neglects what occurs on a particular molecular level of the architectural design process. It shows that elements of micro-level of design procedures render Gehry’s idiosyncratic design phenomena intelligible and perceptible in a new way. It claims that it has been possible because Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts become perceptibly operational in the interpretation of such phenomena, at the level of elementary units of Gehry’s design procedures. Moreover, through this close-up perspective, the thesis’ investigations identify certain similarities in the operational modes of the architect and the painter. It demonstrates how Gehry, who has anchored his interest in painting, and specifically in what he defined as ‘immediacy in painting,’ was able to transform the practice of architectural drawing from projective to a cognitive one. It also shows, how the architect re-defines the commonly applied projective geometries from passive, arbitrary role to an active agent, and how the architect links drawing practice with the construction process on a new, almost palpable level. While stressing its the manual character, the thesis demonstrates that Gehry’s explorative culture of challenging means of representation employed in architectural design production facilitates the re-disciplining of architecture culminating in the integration of the CATIA system in the design procedures. This study of Gehry’s design actions and strategies can help the reader to understand the significance of experimental and intuitive design practices. The thesis proposes the Deleuzian interpretation of Gehry’s experiments in the aesthetics of design thinking and acting. It renders perceptions of patterns, according to which, other design practices can operate. (shrink)

This article sketches a new image of musical works, situated beyond the «work concept», critically rethinking existing music ontologies, and grounded on Gilles Deleuze’s central ontological commitments. After situating the problem, the paper discusses current issues in music ontology, explores specific Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian ontological concepts, and argues for a new image of musical works, which are more aptly described as assemblages, as highly complex, historically constructed multiplicities defined by virtual structures, intensive processes, and actual things.

I propose in this text a rhythmic theory of signs drawn from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I name this theory a semiorhythmology. I suggest that the theory of rhythm developed in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) can be understood, in part, as the culmination of the diverse set of inquiries into signs that both Deleuze and Guattari undertook, individually and together, beginning in the 1960s. I first outline Deleuze’s theory of signs as a theory of encounter as (...) developed in Proust and Signs (1964) and Difference and Repetition (1968), following which I sketch Guattari’s engagements with signs and semiotics throughout the 1960s and 1970s, particularly through his notion of “a-signifying semiotics” and the concept of the “diagram” he adapts from the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. I close by showing how these heterogeneous theories of the sign are drawn together in A Thousand Plateaus through the Spinozist reading of the ethology of Jakob von Uexküll and the theorisation of rhythm in the form of the refrain. (shrink)

Spatial representations, metaphors and imaginaries have been the mainstay of internet research for along time. Instead of repeating these themes, this paper seeks toanswer the question of how we might understand the conceptof time in relation to internet research. After a brief excursuson the general history of the concept, this paper proposes threedifferent approaches to the conceptualisation of internet time.The common thread underlying all the approaches is the notionof time as an assemblage of elements such as technical artefacts, social relations (...) and metaphors. By drawing out time in this way, the paper addresses the challenge of thinking of internet time as coexistence, a clash of fluxes, metaphors, lived experiences and assemblages. In other words, this paper proposes a way to articulate internet time as a multiplicity. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the relationship that exists between two distinct and seemingly incompatible bodies of scholarship within the field of contemporary philosophy of technology. The first, as argued by postmodern pragmatist Barry Allen, posits that our tools and what we make with them are epistemically important; disputing the idea that knowledge is strictly sentential or propositional, he claims instead that knowledge is the product of a performance that is both superlative and artefactual, rendering technology importantly world-constituting. The second, as argued (...) by Heidegger and his inheritors, is that technology is ontologically problematic; rather than technology being evidence of performative knowledge, it is instead existentially threatening by virtue of the fact that it changes the tenor of our relationship with the world-as-given. Despite the fact that these claims seem prima facie incompatible, I argue that they may be successfully reconciled by introducing a third body of scholarship: the philosophy of photography. For it is the case, I argue, that although we, qua human beings, occupy lifeworlds that are necessarily constituted by technology, technology also induces a kind of phenomenological scepticism: a concern that mediated action precludes us from the possibility of authentic experience. Arguing in favour of the sentiment that photographs serve as a kind of phenomenal anchor—a kind of machine for living—I claim that photographic images provide a panacea to this existential concern: despite being epistemically problematic, it is this selfsame epistemic “specialness” of photographs that forces us to phenomenologically recommit, if only temporarily, to the world in a serious way. Consequently, it is my belief that an analysis of our artefacts and the way they function is fundamentally incomplete without an analysis of the epistemic and ontological problems introduced of the photographic image; as I will demonstrate, the photographic image casts an extremely long shadow over the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

Deleuze said that he detested Hegelianism and dialectics: this paper claims that Deleuze is contra Hegel because he has and proposes a different philosophical system. Thus, I suggest that if we want to understand the reason of such a “disgust,” we need to focus the philosophical question that moves the entire Deleuzian system (§ 1). Then, I explain that if the ground-question of Hegel’s philosophy is “how is it possible that things are surpassed, that they go on?”, the Deleuzian one (...) is “how is it that there is always something new, that things come out?” (§ 2). Finally, I discuss how desire can be considered as a key-example for seeing how the perspectives of the two thinkers diverge (§ 3). (shrink)

The paper argues that the work of Gabriel Tarde on imitation provides a fertile means of understanding how capitalism is forging a new affective technology which conforms to a logic of propensity rather than to means-end reasoning. This it does by drawing together a biological understanding of semiconscious cognition with various practical geometric arts so as to re-stage the world as a series of susceptible situations which can be ridden rather than rigidly controlled. The paper examines the advent of technologies (...) which attend to the variable geometry of so-called animal spirits in the realm of business and then, using Tarde's work as a springboard, considers some alternative means of understanding imitative rays which have less instrumental undertones. The paper is an illustration of the way in which biology and culture have increasingly become intertwined. (shrink)

Deleuze’s philosophical method is analyzed and positioned against the background of the intellectual/religious tradition of practical mysticism that has been traveling the globe across times, places, languages, and cultural barriers. The paper argues that Deleuze’s unorthodox ontology of the virtual enables a naturalistic interpretation of the functioning of mysticism when the triad of concepts, percepts and affects is formed in accordance with the logic of the included middle.

This text was first published in Geografiska Annaler, Series B, Human Geography, vol. 90 , March 2008 : 1–15. We thank gratefully Professor Robert Dodgshon for granting us the permission to reproduce it. ABSTRACT : From the moment it began to engage with time in a considered way, human geography has employed a variety of analytical and conceptual approaches to it. Recent work especially has greatly extended the range of these different approaches by stressing the innate - Géographie – Nouvel (...) article. (shrink)

In this paper we offer a preliminary study of the various ways in which ‘ruin’ has significance for organization studies. One important motif associated with both modern and romantic treatments of ruins concerns the revelatory impressions they make. In this respect the tradition of ruin writing will talk of their ‘beauty’, their ‘strangeness’ or their capacity to ‘intimidate’, which somehow never fails to strike a responsive nerve in us. In order to attend to this elusive phenomenon we must necessarily breach (...) some of the self-imposed boundaries of our ‘discipline’. Taking up this challenge we follow W. G. Sebald in his use of contiguity as both method and textual structuring device, allowing us to drift across iconic ruin images, ruin theories and our own ruinous research experiences. This helps us learn how to ‘dwell’ in the ruin – without any impatient reaching after fact or explaining away ruins in the terms of an established tradition of theorizing in organization – and open up new analytic spaces and associations for organizational researchers. These concern specifically a distinctive approach to time, history and memory; an increased awareness of the multiplicity of forces impinging on organization, forces from which we so easily retreat behind the cordon sanitaire of organization-studies-as-usual; and a cognisance of how the very way we write is a mode of doing organization that is crucial for our ability and willingness to look into ‘all corners of reality’ so that we might better grasp organizational phenomena. (shrink)

This aim of this study is to investigate the manner in which Deleuze’s individual and collaborative work can be productively understood as being concerned with the question of living well, where it will be suggested that living well necessitates that we not only become aware of, but that we also explore, the forever renewed present possibilities for living otherwise that each moment brings. In particular, this study will make an original contribution to existing Deleuzian studies by arguing that what legitimises (...) this conception of living well, and what can motivate us to engage in such a practice, is that a life that becomes aware of and explores the open field of present possibilities for living otherwise that each moment engenders is a life that reflects, or that is lived in accordance with, the challenging ontological account that can be discerned throughout Deleuze’s individual and collaborative work; a life lived in accordance with his open, dynamic and thoroughly temporal theory of Being or what I will suggest he came to refer to simply as ‘Life’. In addition, I will argue that in so far as each individual human being is to be understood as an ongoing and immanent expression of Life, an immediate expression of Life understood as a universal, impersonal and pre-individual dynamism, then a life that strives to explore the forever renewed present possibilities for living otherwise that each moment brings - a practice that I shall propose also necessitates that each individual strives to resist the diverse ways in which their present possibilities are continually hindered, thwarted and negated - is not only a life that strives to live in accordance with the temporal dynamism of Life, but is also a life lived in accordance with our own dynamic and thoroughly temporal being. (shrink)

Technological augmentation in the field of communication is a new way of controlling and manipulating the interface between current political communications and information. This is because, within the new paradigms of power, political communication is under the influence of netocracy, a new and mythical form of cybertechnological superpanopticism. The general objective of this paper is to analyze the phenomenon of cybertechnological globalization where, according to Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, this new form of political and communicative superpanopticism is the result (...) of netocracy. This is related not just to the undermining of capitalism, but also to the myth of internet transparency as the site for communicational freedom. In theoretical terms, this paper seeks to deconstruct this hypothesis based on Slavoj Žižek’s position on netocracy. He claims this phenomenon is little more than a new and perverse form of capitalism which engages new methods of manipulating political communication. The methodology used in this paper draws on Bard and Söderqvist’s arguments, Žižek’s critique and Gilles Deleuze’s deconstruction. (shrink)

This paper considers the role of myth and phenomenology in Pierre Schaeffer’s research into music and sound, and argues that engagement with these themes allows us to rethink the legacy and contemporary value of Schaeffer’s thought in sound studies. In light of critique of Schaeffer’s project, in particular that developed by Brian Kane and Schaeffer’s own apparent self-disavowal, this paper returns to Schaeffer’s early remarks on the “myth of the seashell” in order to examine the conditions of this critique. While (...) Kane argues that Schaeffer’s recourse to myth, coupled with his adoption of Husserlian phenomenology, leads to a closure of his inquiry and a failure to accommodate the contingency of his position, this paper argues that Schaeffer’s myth of the seashell brings into focus an open-ended, motivating phenomenological problem concerning subjectivity and objectivity that runs through his thought. Drawing on the philosophical work of Gaston Bachelard and Gilles Deleuze, this paper considers the epistemological significance of this moment in Schaeffer’s thought, suggesting a “problematic” account of the myth of the seashell that puts Schaeffer into conversation with contemporary work in epistemology. (shrink)

The continued presence and importance of Christian moral values in our daily lives, coupled with the fact that faith in Christianity is in continual decline, raises the question as to why having lost faith in Christianity, we have also not lost faith in our Christian moral values. This question is also indicative of a more pressing phenomenon: not only have we maintained our faith in Christian values, we fail to see that the widespread collapse of Christianity should affect this faith. (...) To tackle this latter phenomenon, I claim, we have to pose the Nietzschean question of the value of our moral values, so as to see that this value can be a possible object of questioning. In chapter one, I consider different approaches found in the history of moral philosophy that look like potential candidates for this task. I argue that, ultimately, the task requires simultaneously taking our familiarity with Christian moral values as both sui generis and a questionable phenomenon. In chapter two, I articulate in detail the sui generis nature of this familiarity with moral values,in terms of the phenomena of habituation and sedimentation. In chapter three, I consider the possibility of estrangement that is built into our familiarity with moral values, by focusing on the role of cognition. I demonstrate how cognition, in the form of self-consciousness, can disrupt the sedimented, habituated nature of our moral values through a form of ironic disruption. In chapter four, I develop this account by considering the possibility of an appeal to an alternative moral outlook. To do so, I draw upon the structural isomorphism that is present between the process of estrangement and a rite of passage. (shrink)

This thesis interrogates Nietzsche's ubermensch, a figure capable of overcoming the universal absence of value, and asks how it might logically be realised in light of postmodern developments in nihilism, capitalism and technology. We argue that in order to exist beyond the nihilistic nature of capitalism, one possible solution might be superintelligent artificial intelligence. We first explore the oft-overlooked problem of the village atheist, who rejects god whilst still clinging to theological values. We next look to nihilism in postmodemity, analysing (...) semiotic and hermeneutic developments and highlighting the forces that dictate contemporary society. We then tum to capitalism, understood as a repetition of Christianity, redefining the village atheist as a figure trapped in the nihilism of semiocapitalism. Finally, we tum to technology and the future, where we reject transhuman narratives as farther repetitions of salvation, instead developing an understanding of superintelligent AI as ubermensch based on its potential to exist beyond the trappings of manmade value. This thesis simultaneously outlines the difficulties of overcoming nihilism through transhumanism whilst highlighting the dangers of embracing ubermensch, instead suggesting that a reclamation of the human posits greater grounds for survival, where the embrace of a hermeneutics of nihilism allows for smaller short-term truths. (shrink)

This essay circles around two ideas. First, I try to answer the ethical question “What is the right thing to do?” through the application of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s affirmative philosophy. Second, I relate Deleuze’s philosophy to mindfulness. I do not wish to suggest that they are identical. They are not. Yet, mixing mindfulness with Deleuze leads to a philosophy of mindfulness. That is a philosophy that makes us less blind to our experiences, but also ethically responsible for what (...) actually happens. Hereby, I move mindfulness from the sphere of psychology into philosophy, or from being primarily a practice of turning inward to one of turning outward, but also make Deleuze’s ethic more operational. The latter I will – briefly – illustrate by touching on elements of feminism. (shrink)

In the plateau November 20, 1923: Postulates of linguistics, Deleuze and Guattari subvert the traditional confrontation between language and music, refusing to look at the latter for the constants that are usually thought to define the first and recognizing in both systems a regime of continuous variation. An example of this regime is Luciano Berio’s Visage, in which «despite what Berio himself says, it is less a matter of using pseudo constants to produce a simulacrum of language or a metaphor (...) for the voice than of attaining that secret neuter language without constants […].» This use of Berio against Berio himself is probably due to the declaration contained in Visage : «When I was composing Visage what attracted me […] was research intended as a way to expand the chances of bringing nearer musical and acoustic processes, and as a means to find musical equivalents of linguistic articulations.» Despite the apparent contradiction, D&G and Berio agree that music is not a form of sui generis language, nor, on the contrary, an expressive form without any relation to language, but rather a deterritorialization of the voice that produces a form of varied repetition of language, now devoid of meaning. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new approach to the performance of Schumann’s music, in particular to his song cycle Dichterliebe op. 48. Starting from the many productive instabilities and inconsistencies that characterize the compositional approach in Dichterliebe, I ask under which conditions we could think a performance practice that embraces these inconsistencies instead of stabilizing them into a finished performance. To do so, I propose the appropriation from music performance of the philosophical notion of “the problem” as formulated by Gilles Deleuze, (...) connecting it with the “pre-individual” in Gilbert Simondon and the notion of “outside,” mostly in the acceptation of Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault. A critique is enacted of what I suggest calling the traditional “image of musical thought.” From this critique can emerge a performance practice that moves away from the “problem of performance,” regarded in its traditional form as a representative practice oriented towards recognition, and that embraces instead the “performance of the problem,” where the problematic dimension of Schumann is enhanced and further dynamized. (shrink)

Theories of cognition and theories of social practices and institutions have often each separately acknowledged the relevance of the other; but seldom have there been consistent and sustained attempts to synthesize these two areas within one explanatory framework. This is precisely what my dissertation aims to remedy. I propose that certain recent developments and themes in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, when understood in the right way, can explain the emergence and dynamics of social practices and institutions. Likewise, the (...) view I construct explains how social practices and institutions shape the character of cognition of their constituent agents. Moreover, I explain both cognitive and social agency under the single explanatory framework provided by Dynamic Systems Theory. Drawing upon the phenomenological tradition, "embodied, "extended", "embedded", "enactive", and "ecological" approaches to cognition, as well as the conceptual resources of Dynamic Systems Theory, I construct a theory of agency that sees cognitive and social agents as far-from-equilibrium, open, recursively self-maintenant dynamic systems. Depending on the specifics of concrete circumstances, such systems, which I call "Dynamic Embodied Agents", may develop and possess emergent capacities for error-detection, flexible learning, normative behavior, representation, self-reflection, various modes of pattern-recognition, a temporal sense of self, and even moral responsibility. Some such systems are also sensitive to perceived social influences ; while reciprocally constituting and causally affecting them. (shrink)

The purpose of this thesis was set against the background of changed expectations on education and teachers’ work in contemporary Western societies, reflecting global educational trends of standardisation and assessment moving further down the ages. The overall aim of the thesis was to explore and gain understandings of how teachers’ work is constituted. The exploration was based on lived experience and philosophical perspectives, and the main research questions were: i) what is the significance of existential dimensions of teachers’ work, and (...) ii) how can they be understood in the light of a globalised and standardised education? The theoretical and methodological basis of the thesis was mainly the philosophy of the life-world as formulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The studies included employed the following methods: drawings with associated oral comments, written teacher responses and follow-up interviews, visual documentation with associated oral comments, and finally, the study of the relevant philosophical literature. In total 50 teachers and 112 children participated in study I, ten teachers in study II and eight teachers in study III. In study IV, the data consisted of philosophical literature.The findings show that teachers’ work involves not only teachers’ intellectual capacities and skills, but also their emotional and embodied being, and intertwined relationships as well. Further, teachers’ work it affected not only by the views of children, knowledge and learning held by teachers, policymakers and society that affect teachers’ work, but also by ontological assumptions and existential dimensions in a wider sense. It emerged that teachers’ views of education and their attempt to appreciate the unpredictable beyond dualistic assumptions are holistic, and multidimensional, in comparison to the rather linear and standardised global agenda.The crossover analysis of the findings suggests that teachers’ work is mainly constituted by ambiguities and intertwinings of an ontological character that have epistemological implications. In this thesis ambiguities are used to describe aspects that at first seem contradictory but are in fact more like irreducible uncertainties – as intertwined and reversible aspects of teachers’ work as a whole. Accordingly, existential dimensions of teachers’ work are ubiquitous within these ambiguities and intertwinings, and appear as significant in mainly two ways – firstly, as closely connected dimensions of the life-world and lived experience, referred to as lived time, lived space, lived body and lived other; secondly, as basic notions mainly about the relationships between i) subject and object, ii) mind and body, iii) human, culture and nature, iv) linear and multidimensional temporality. These existential dimensions of teachers work are discussed as Intercorporeal reversibilities, Intertwinings, chiasm and flesh and A chiasmic being. The ambiguous aspects of teachers’ work seem to derive from a general ambiguity of views on education, in which the rationalistic view tends to dominate since it often reflects the management of education. This overall ambiguity demands a reconsideration of the wider aim of education as well as of different relationships within education beyond dualisms and divides. Particularly, intercorporeal and intertwined relationships are essential, encompassing the significant intertwinings of ‘subjectobject’, ‘mindbody’, and ‘humannatureculture’. It is argued that this rethinking needs to be done in order to create conceptual and operational space for diverse and challenging pedagogical relationships. Thereby, a process of a chiasmic being for teachers in their work and for children’s learning can be enhancedKey words: teachers’ work; teaching; school; early childhood education; lived experience; existential; pluralistic; Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart investigates the ways in which thinking through the contemporary hybrid artistico-scientific practices of bioart is a biophilosophical practice, one that contributes to a more nuanced understanding of life than we encounter in mainstream academic discourse. When examined from a Deleuzian feminist perspective and in dialogue with contemporary bioscience, bioartistic projects reveal the inadequacy of asking about life’s essence. They expose the enmeshment between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, and, ultimately, life and death. (...) Instead of examining the defining criteria of life, bioartistic practices explore and enact life as processual, differential, and always already uncontainable, thus transcending preconceived material and conceptual boundaries. In this way, this doctoral thesis concentrates on the ontology of life as it emerges through the selected bioartworks: “semi-living” sculptures created by The Tissue Culture and Art Project and the performance May the Horse Live in Me by L’Art Orienté Objet. The hope is that such an ontology can enable future conceptualisations of an ethico-politics that avoids the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

Šiame straipsnyje keliamas ir nagrinėjamas klausimas: koks santykis yra tarp Kanto transcendentalinio idealizmo ir Deleuze’o transcendentalinio empirizmo. Šis tyrimas suponuoja ir kitus klausimus: jeigu kartotė galima, kodėl tai negalėtų būti moralės dėsnis? Kaip nutinka, kad dogmatizmo filosofas Kantas tampa dogmatinės minties ženklu Deleuze’o tyrime? Kodėl vidinės proto iliuzijos sukuria prielaidas minties dogmatikai įveikti? Kaip transcendentalinė logika oponuoja formaliajai logikai Deleuze’o prasmės koncepcijoje? Kokia prielaida remdamasis Deleuze’as priešpriešina champ transcendentalkonceptą Kanto ir Husserlio transcendentaliniam idealizmui? Kaip yra įmanoma preferuoti bedugnę transcendentaliniam idealui (...) ir priešpriešinti Kantui Antoniną Artaud? (shrink)

This article argues that we can construct a complex interpretation of the nature of time by linking Aciman’s gnostic thread to aspects of twentieth century theory, from philosophy and psychoanalysis. In brief, it attempts to demonstrate the roles of dislocation, deferral, and Otherness in constituting human temporality. The essay begins by surmising the conceptual history of time, touching on key ideas put forward by Augustine and Bergson. The second section takes a psychoanalytic turn after exploring Homo Irrealis to describe the (...) significance of desire and fantasy. Thirdly, we develop a unique and temporal application of difference and deferral, building off of Deleuze and Derrida. The fourth section will consider how the psychoanalytic concept of the Other is inhered within time. We conclude that an Acimanic analysis of time is the means by which we can understand existence not as a series of moments, but a rich progression of dissimilitude and Otherness defined moreso by its lack of cohesion and directness of being than by a unified and self-identifying subject. (shrink)

In the novel A Burnout-Out Case, Graham Greene argues for an intimate relationship between burnout and happiness. The novel claims that a life worth living is a continuous balancing between something painful, e.g. burnout and something desirable, e.g. happiness. In this essay, I try to make a case for the happiness of burnout. By examining the case story of a young artist, who suffered from burnout, I describe how such suffering might open up for a necessary reevaluation of the values (...) that actually make sense. Such creation of new values is what eventually leads to more happy moments, not happiness per se. This essay provides a philosophical reflection regarding the relationship between happiness and burnout in order to say something regarding which life is worth living. (shrink)

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In Against the Day, Pynchon is obsessed with twoness, double worlds, as well as dual realities, and like Deleuze’s concept of repetition, these duplications and twinships are not merely repetition of the same, rather they allow for creativity, reinvention, and becoming. Pynchon’s duplication of fictional and spectral characters intends to critique the notion of identity as does Deleuzian concept of repetition. Not attached to the representational concept of identity as the recurrence of the same, Pynchon’s duplications decenter the transcendental concept (...) in favor of a perpetual becoming and reproduces difference and singularity. Like Deleuze, Pynchon eschews an identity that is always guaranteed, and shows that the repetition of an object or a subject is not the recurrence of the original self-identical object or person. Moreover, Iceland spar, the mystifying calcite, with its doubling effect provides the reader with a view of a world beyond the ordinary, actual world, which is quite similar to what Pynchon’s novel does per se. (shrink)

This article is a response to Peter Dahlgren’s review of The discursive-material knot: Cyprus in conflict and community media participation. Dahlgren’s engagement with the DMK book consisted of four questions, with an invitation to respond to them. These questions were not so much critiques, but more like invitations to clarify, and – more importantly – to expand into a few territories that were insufficiently addressed in the DMK book. This article starts with explaining the platform structure of the DMK book (...) and the strategy that was used to write it. This then allows to focus on the first platform, explaining the basics of the DMK, the supporting role of the structure/agency dimension, and the difference between the concepts of ideology and discourse. This is also a good opportunity to think through the opportunities for discourse critique. In the next part, the issues related to high theory, ontology and metaphysics are addressed. The last part returns to the DMK book’s case study and the interdependence of the different platforms, arguing that empirical research can also feed into non-essentialist ontological reflections, while these reflections also provide support for the research itself. (shrink)

Through an analysis of the film The Cry of Jazz, the Afro-Futurism of Ed Bland is contrasted with the schizoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari to demonstrate both the application of schizoanalysis to jazz theory and the application of Afro-Futurism to schizoanalysis. In the first part, Bland’s critical race theory of jazz is outlined through the dialogue provided by the protagonist Alex in The Cry of Jazz demonstrating the dialectical Hegelianism of Bland’s analysis. Bland’s theory of jazz is sifted through a (...) reading of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition as a critique of Hegelianism. Through an elaboration of jazz theory,the Deleuzian concepts of difference and repetition develop further Bland’s jazz theory leading to the death of jazz and the potential becoming of a new America. The survival of the spirit of jazz after death is demonstrated through the body without organs. Here, Bland’s Afro-Futurist critical race theory comes into focus as a pure affectivity that decomposes the boundaries of musicality and the social condition simultaneously. (shrink)

The goal of this essay is to sketch, in broad form, Deleuze and Guattari’s militant critique of civilization in general and the capitalist mode of production production specifically. It will be shown that the development of civilization is framed in historico-temporal terms, and as such grappling with this structure is vital for posing any sort of escape from it. Concentrating on the strange time-structure embedded in the design of their book A Thousand Plateaus, it will be shown how exceedingly abstract (...) meditations take on a material depth that allow Deleuze and Guattari to sketch not only the development of civilization, but find the cracks and fissures within it that allow the possibility of a new world to emerge. Such a new world would be the realization of a new form of temporality, a “no-longer-alienated history”, to quote the Marxist theorist Moishe Postone. Arriving in the near-present, it will be seen how Deleuze and Guattari's analysis converges with the anti-work tendencies in Marxist thought, and the way in which the rejection of labor – understood as an organization or “economy of time” – serves as the ground for the destruction of historical time. What emerges, then, is the charting of a passage from “pulsed time” to “non-pulsed time”, through which a new articulation of ‘history’ can emerge. (shrink)

The paper aims to give an insight on various concepts created and developed within the Caribbean literary context, in order to find some strategic elements capable of allowing us reframe the idea and meaning of locality. The necessity of such an operation lies in the urgency of rethinking the political dimension of locality due to its reactionary and repressive use by alt-right and fascist movements, in particular in Europe and the US. In this vein, concepts such as “polyrhythm”, “metaarchipelago”, “tidalectics”, (...) “poetics of relation”, “creolization”, “transnation” and “commonplace”, become of strategic use as a way of opening up the idea of locality, which we aim to conceive precisely as a kind of social openness. Beside this conceptual reframing of locality, developed through the analysis of Benítez Rojo and Kamau Brathwaite’s rhythmical concepts, the reader can find, on the one hand, the concept of performance as the very engine of such a reframing, and, on the other end, an attempt to show how the concepts we analyse are deeply intertwined with those of Deleuze and Guattari, in particular multiplicity, difference and repetition, and rhizome. This article has been produced in the context of the International Research Project Real Smart Cities, which has received funding from the European Union Marie Sklodowska Curie Action, program RISE/Horizon 2020, agreement n. 777707. (shrink)

In his Difference and Repetition Deleuze reveals an aporia: repetition is singular, solitary, it is torn away from any original or source; nevertheless it preserves a genetic tie with certain event to which it is a repetition. This solitariness of the repetition is not, however, confined to mere difference between the act of repetition and the repeated source that cancels the original just to differentiate two performative procedures. An act of repetition is solitary only when it evolves in specific time-regime, (...) which even ontically diverges from the regular ontology of time. Deleuze calls such temporality “empty”, Nietzsche defines it as amor fati, Heidegger sees in it convergence of eternity and an instant. The stake in this case is a specific kind of repetitive regime which unfolds as the performative syndrome of ‘dying’ – a “repetition into death” which paradoxically executes itself as performative plenitude. But who is the Subject undergoing such a syndrome and what should have happened to her/him so as to impose the regime of dying on any act of repetition? (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss and compare the possibility of thinking that which is most worth our thought in Deleuze’s What Is Philosophy? and Heidegger’s course lectures in What Is Called Thinking?. Both authors criticize the history of philosophy in similar ways in order to reconsider what should be taken as the nature and task of philosophical thinking. For Deleuze, true thinking is the creation of concepts, but what is most worth our thought in fact cannot be thought. For Heidegger, (...) Being calls on us think, and to think rightly is to be underway toward thinking itself, a grateful heeding of Being. In this paper I explore the very possibility to think that which is most worth our thought. I will argue that although for both authors proper thinking as such is possible, thinking what is most worth our thought seems remarkably both possible as impossible. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the possibilities for an immanent ethics for business. The paper has three parts. In the first part, I make some general and critical comments about the nature of business ethics. In the second part, I outline the immanent ethics as presented by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Then, I positioning immanent ethics within business, primarily in relation to the terms "best practice" and "best fit." The main claim here is that an immanent (...) ethics encourages a shift from a merely reactive approach toward an active. This shift opens up the field for an affirmative practice that aims at enlarging the discussion within business ethics as such. (shrink)