In this article, I rethink the key arguments of my co-authored paper Teaching Pleasure and Danger in Sexuality Education (Author and Co, 2013 Author and Co. (2013). Teaching pleasure and danger in sexuality education. Sex Education, 13(2), 121–132.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]) by bringing the postmodern logic of critical sexuality education theory into conversation with the relational ontology of new materialism. I begin by rejecting the key problem presented in Author and Co’s (2013) paper as (...) a false problem. This false problem is the drawing of an ‘unqualified line’ between positive and negative sexual experience in sexuality education. Instead, I argue that the actual problem is the initial act of drawing a line to separate sexual experience into a binary. My modification of the problem is an ontological move that allows me to consider sexuality education outside the binaries of negative and positive experience. Elaborating on the ontology problem presented in my paper Teaching Pleasure and Danger in Sexuality Education, I explain new materialism and its key task of realizing the interdependence of dualist terms. Drawing on Bergson and Braidotti’s philosophies of difference, I argue that pushing for sex-positive sexuality education strengthens the sex-negativity in sexuality education. I further critique the logic of negation that structures sexuality education by interrogating the contemporary push for pleasure-based sexuality education. Through this process of rethinking my previous scholarship through new materialist logic, I begin the task of reconfiguring the phallogocentric sexual subject as a subject-in-the-process. The conclusion of this article offers a beginning consideration of sexuality as an act of becoming where forces brought into relationship are entangled, creating a new thing. (shrink)

In recent years, the ideas of the mathematician Bernhard Riemann have come to the fore as one of Deleuze's principal sources of inspiration in regard to his engagements with mathematics, and the history of mathematics. Nevertheless, some relevant aspects and implications of Deleuze's philosophical reception and appropriation of Riemann's thought remain unexplored. In the first part of the paper I will begin by reconsidering the first explicit mention of Riemann in Deleuze's work, namely, in the second chapter of Bergsonism. In (...) this context, as I intend to show first, Deleuze's synthesis of some key features of the Riemannian theory of multiplicities is entirely dependent, both textually and conceptually, on his reading of another prominent figure in the history of mathematics: Hermann Weyl. This aspect has been largely underestimated, if not entirely neglected. However, as I attempt to bring out in the second part of the paper, reframing the understanding of Deleuze's philosophical engagement with Riemann's mathematics through the Riemann–Weyl conjunction can allow us to disclose some unexplored aspects of Deleuze's further elaboration of his theory of multiplicities and profound confrontation with contemporary science. This finally permits delineation of a correlation between Deleuze's plane of immanence and the contemporary physico-mathematical space of fundamental interactions. (shrink)

Deleuze’s reversal of Platonism shifted the traditional emphasis on thinking that which participates in a concept to that in which a claim to participation occurs. The first part of this article presents a reading of this reversal that highlights the implications of Deleuze’s ontology for his non-ontological account of participation, highlighting how this ontology builds on aspects of Plato’s philosophy recovered from beneath the later Platonic tradition of philosophy and supports Deleuze’s account of the rival claims of philosophy and opinion (...) to participate in thought. The second part outlines the difficulties presented by philosophy’s constitutive participation in friendship, love, and rivalry for it to be able to achieve its distinctive task of creating concepts that defeat opinion’s rival claims to address the problems that present themselves to thought. (shrink)

This paper juxtaposes Deleuze's notion of the virtual alongside Oyama's notion of a developmental system in order to explore the promises and perils of thinking bodily identity as indeterminate at a time when new technologies render bodily ambiguity increasingly productive of both economic profit and power relations.

This paper juxtaposes Deleuze's notion of the virtual alongside Oyama's notion of a developmental system in order to explore the promises and perils of thinking bodily identity as indeterminate at a time when new technologies render bodily ambiguity increasingly productive of both economic profit and power relations.

Critical responses to Wide Sargasso Sea have seized upon Rhys's novel as an exemplary model of writing back. Looking beyond the actual repetitions which recall Brontë’s text, I explore Rhys's novel as an expression of virtual difference and becomings that exemplify Deleuze's three syntheses of time. Elaborating the processes of becoming that Deleuze's third synthesis depicts, Antoinette's fate emerges not as a violence against an original identity. Rather, what the reader witnesses is a series of becomings or masks, some of (...) which are validated, some of which are not, and it is in the rejection of certain masks, forcing Antoinette to become-Bertha, that the greatest violence lies. (shrink)

You never reach the Body without Organs, you can't reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit. People ask, So what is this BwO? - But you're already on it, scurrying like vermin, grouping like a blind person, or running like a lunatic: desert traveller and nomad of the steppes. On it we sleep, live our waking lives, fight - fight and are fought - seek our place, experience untold happiness and fabulous defeats; on it we penetrate (...) and are penetrated; on it we love. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 150). (shrink)

Most academic publications refer to Parkour as a subversive and embodied tactic that challenges hegemonic discourses of discipline and control. Architecture becomes the playful ground where new ways to move take form. These approaches rarely address the material and embodied relations that occur in these practices and remain on the discursive plane of cultural signifiers. A theory of movement between bodies as the founding aspect of Parkour unfolds alternative concepts of body, space, time and movement beyond the discursive. Movement becomes (...) the leitmotif for a re-conceptualization of the relations between subjects and objects and abandons their division. With the example of Parkour, I will challenge anthropocentric approaches toward embodiment and instead foreground open-ended shifting configurations of places and their relation to movement. Parkour re-shapes rigid concepts of places and their human encounter through movement. Through its encounter with obstacles Parkour activates the silent potential for movement located in the relation between bodies and thus reaches beyond material boundaries (e.g., a wall). As a deterritorializing practice, I will use Parkour to re-consider the relations between different bodies such as architectural configurations, subjects and their urban ecologies to develop a relational model for movement to shape our everyday encounters with matter. (shrink)

When considering spaces of sex-work such as Patpong in Bangkok, Thailand, the inclination is to be drawn into habitual debates concerning the legitimacy of sex-work and the clear objectification of sex-workers. While these concerns are valid and real, there are significant absences in terms of the theoretical mapping of the space, such as the affect of the presence of law, bodies, space and the sexual encounter itself. Law emerges as the most significant presence, since it both forms the transactional surface (...) of Patpong and produces the confusion and revilement that results from the confluence of cold legal exchange with the tactile intimacy of the sexual encounter. This text explores the ethnographic space of Patpong in order to understand ways in which law’s transactional, effective surface is both embodied through subjectivication and spatially emplaced, yet also disrupted through the affective agency of the bodies and spaces it enfolds in order to produce this surface. This exploration will point to the limitations of law’s effective surface and suggest ways in which law might be located within a regime of affect, which returns the law to the body it subjectivises. (shrink)

By tracing the genealogy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's outlandish notion of the fourth person singular and its appropriation in The Logic of Sense, several keys concepts in Deleuze's thought such as the nonpersonal and pre-individual subjectivity can be rendered clearer to the understanding. While there is poetic licence in the use of the term by Ferlinghetti, the fourth person singular is heuristic for exploring the notion of free indirect speech and, more speculatively, the ideas of impersonal death and suicide. The fourth (...) person singular is thus a trope that sheds light on the ideas of humour, irony, lightness and becoming ‘without a verb’ in Deleuze's thought. Under close scrutiny is what Ferlinghetti designates as the ‘cool’ eyes of the fourth person singular. We shall work to differentiate these from so-called mad, Dada-esque ‘unblinking’ eyes. We shall ask how the poet in ‘obscenely seeing’ the impossible possibility of life can envision – perspicaciously – the immanent sense of death-in-life. From what standpoint does the poet gain access to the real? To consider this fully it is necessary to follow the Deleuzian interpretation of singularities as true transcendental events so as to clarify what gives life a ‘non-personal power, above individuals’. (shrink)

This paper examines the affective disorders plaguing many young people and the problem of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in particular. It aims to define the limits of the critique of British educationalist Sir Ken Robinson in terms of his philosophy of ‘creativity’ through a consideration of the ideas of French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, especially the notions of ‘industrial temporal objects’ and stupidity. It makes the case for adopting elements of each distinct research paradigm as a prolegomena to forging a social critique (...) of capitalist-dominated, market-led educational institutions. The former, it will be seen, identifies some of the problems facing teachers in terms of the use and application of technology, the false divide between arts and the humanities, but falls short of explaining the root of the structural and psychic malaise in neo-liberal regimes regarding classroom breakdown in general. The latter, despite the apocalyptic tone of some his pronouncements provides an update and radicalization of Deleuze’s societies of control thesis in terms of what Stiegler designates ‘uncontrollable societies’. Stiegler, it will be seen, presents a critique of technology that is all the more pressing in an age in which the loss of expectation in the lives of young people can lead to a corresponding fall off or destruction in ‘deep attention’. I want to test the hyperbole of Stiegler’s assertion that young people today suffer from a ‘colossal’ attention deficit disorder of unprecedented scale and magnitude. (shrink)

This article compares notes on different and new concepts of ‘the Human’, developed both within disciplinary and interdisciplinary academic scientific research and in broader social practices. The main focus is on the shifting relationship between the ‘two cultures’ of the humanities and science in the light of contemporary developments, such as the sophisticated forms of interdisciplinary research that have emerged in the fields of biotechnologies, neural sciences, environmental and climate change research and Information and Communication technologies. These rapid changes affect (...) the very definitions of the human and of human evolution. The question is how and to what extent they have an impact on both the practice of the humanities and on their self-representation. Is humanism challenged or strengthened by these developments? To what extent is anthropocentrism called to task by what is becoming known as posthuman theory? (shrink)

This article deals with sexual difference as a philosophy of subjectivity which, however inspired by poststructuralism, was further developed by feminists. The main features of this philosophy are outlined both in terms of its style and of its vision of woman as subject. The notion of 'difference' is analyzed in details, as the central concept that sustains the feminist nomadic philosophy of a subject that is both complex and situated, politically empowered and epistemologically legitimate.

Drawing on an array of sources, from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy through to non-philosophy, this paper concerns itself with the manifestation of the concepts of hope and despair in utopian thought and continental philosophy and the experience of hopelessness, despair and exhaustion in the contemporary moment. I aim to demonstrate such pressing concerns through a comparison of Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani and Japanese fiction writer Ryū Murakami with the American science fiction-thriller film directed by Michael Bay, The Island. What is (...) explored in these works is the dialectic of exhaustion and possibility. The focus of the paper is on the fecund moment inhering in the incapacity of thought to think the possibility of utopia. In terms of the philosophy of education, this hones in on the perceived lack of vision of such a possibility among youth and the failure of the university qua institution to proffer an alternative world to its cohort. To demon... (shrink)

Rosi Braidotti's contribution to the Deleuze Studies Conference 2016 held in Rome, later transcribed and then revised by the author, points firmly to the current need for an affirmative thinking approach, actively standing to the present, while assessing its becoming and imagining new configurations. Saying yes to the world, being worthy of it, does not entail passive acceptance but rather the activation of transformative and critical thinking. To this aim, Braidotti looks at Deleuze as well as at feminist theory. The (...) ontology of immanence turns into a materialist, collective, vital, embodied and relational ethics. (shrink)

In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze effectively argues that two types of relation between events govern their ‘evental’ or ‘ideal play’, and ultimately underlie determined substances, that is, worldly individuals and persons. Leibniz calls these relations ‘compossibility’ and ‘incompossibility’. Deleuze calls them ‘convergence’ and ‘divergence’. This paper explores how Deleuze appropriates and extends a number of Leibnizian concepts in order to ground the idea that events have ontological priority over substances ‘all the way down’.

This interview, conducted over the span of several months, tracks the respective journeys of Constantin V. Boundas and Daniel W. Smith with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Rather than “becoming Deleuzian,” which is neither desirable nor possible, these exchanges reflect an array of encounters with Deleuze. These include the initial discoveries of Deleuze’s writings by Boundas and Smith, in-person meetings between Boundas and Deleuze, and the wide-ranging and influential philosophical work on Deleuze’s concepts produced by both Boundas and Smith. At (...) stake in this discussion are key contributions by Deleuze to continental philosophy, including the distinction between the virtual and the actual and the very nature of a “concept.” Also at stake is the formative or pedagogical impact of a philosopher, like Deleuze, on those who find and fully engage with his texts, concepts, and project. Cette interview, menée sur plusieurs mois, suit les parcours respectifs de Constantin V. Boundas et Daniel W. Smith avec la philosophie de Gilles Deleuze. Au lieu de « devenir Deleuzien, » ce qui n’est ni souhaitable ni possible, ces échanges reflètent un éventail de rencontres avec Deleuze. Il s’agit notamment des premières découvertes des écrits de Deleuze par Boundas et Smith, des rencontres en personne entre Boundas et Deleuze, et du travail philosophique vaste et in????luent sur les concepts de Deleuze produit par Boundas et Smith. L’enjeu ici étant les contributions clés de Deleuze à la philosophie continentale, y compris la distinction entre le virtuel et l’actuel, et la nature même d’un « concept. » Mais il y a aussi l’impact formateur ou pédagogique d’un philosophe, comme Deleuze, sur ceux qui trouvent et s’engagent pleinement dans ses textes, ses concepts et ses projets. (shrink)

In the late 19th century, a comprehensive semantics of crowds emerged in European social theory, dominated in particular by Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde. This article extracts two essential, but widely neglected, sociological arguments from this semantics. First, the idea that irrationality is intrinsic to society and, second, the claim that individuality is plastic rather than constitutive. By following the destiny of this semantics in its American reception, the article demonstrates how American scholars soon transformed the conception of crowds. (...) Most importantly, the theoretical cornerstone of the European semantics, the notion of suggestion, was severely challenged in the USA. It is argued that this rejection of the suggestion doctrine paved the way for a distinctive American approach to crowds and collective behaviour in which the early European emphasis on irrationality was ignored and crowds were analysed as rational entities. This may have relieved the discomfort of irrationality but it is also entirely disposed of what were in fact crucial sociological insights. The article recalls the semantics of crowds in order to evoke an early branch of social theory that still contains a provocative gesture. (shrink)

When they want to discredit the political relevance of Deleuze's thought, Hallward considers counter-effectuation as a ‘redemptive gesture’, and Rancière describes Deleuze's history of cinema as a ‘history of redemption’. Each time, redemption refers pejoratively to a break ‘out of this world’ and a form of apolitical passivity, in an attempt to reduce Deleuze to be a mere ‘spiritual’ thinker, simply renewing ‘that “Oriental intuition” which Hegel found at work in Spinoza's philosophy’. But is it all that simple? How should (...) we envisage the relationship between creativity and redemption, politics and passivity in Deleuze's work? And in what way does that concern Deleuze's philosophy connection to the Non-West, and namely China? (shrink)

This paper argues that Chris Marker's 1982 film Sans Soleil derives its affective force from doublings and ‘faces’ of horror and beauty that reveal a twofold synthesis of actual and virtual. While a focus upon the material, ever in relation to transient yet lingering sensations, cannot discharge the power and force of the film, this paper endeavours nevertheless to assess and evoke Marker and Deleuze's own interrogative methods that thoroughly explore, in the manner of a revelatory ‘schizoanalysis’ or empiricism, molecular (...) and variable operations beneath our ‘molar’ structures and organisations. As Sans Soleil's voiceover states, ‘If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black’, a provocative remark that invokes indefinable singularities and the darkness of a wound, cracking of time and splitting of self in film, life and death. Considerations of death, consciousness and subjectivity extend this paper's examinations. (shrink)

For well over a decade Inna Semetsky has been at the forefront of an effort to introduce the thought of Gilles Deleuze into educational philosophy and theory. In her (2006) book, Deleuze, Education and Becoming, she set forth a sophisticated reading of Deleuze that drew enlightening parallels between his work and that of John Dewey and his Pragmatist predecessors. In Re-Symbolization of the Self (2011), she linked Deleuze to a very different tradition—that of Jungian psychology—and argued for the integration of (...) Jungian archetypal analysis with the hermeneutic practice of reading Tarot cards. Additionally, through a series of editorial projects, she has brought together scholars from a wide range of disciplines in research initiatives that have significantly enriched both Deleuze studies and educational theory. Now, with The Edusemiotics of Images: Essays on the Art–Science of Tarot (2013), Semetsky extends her previous work in provocative ways, integrating a dazzling array of sources .. (shrink)

When is the future? Is it to come or is it already here? This question serves as the frame for three further questions: why is utopia a bad concept and in what way is fabulation its superior counterpart? If the object of fabulation is the creation of a people to come, how do we get from the present to the future? And what is a people to come? The answers are that the future is both now and to come, now (...) as the becoming-revolutionary of our present and to come as the goal of our becoming; utopia is a bad concept because it posits a pre-formed blueprint of the future, whereas a genuinely creative future has no predetermined shape and fabulation is the means whereby a creative future may be generated; the movement from the revolutionary present toward a people to come proceeds via the protocol, which provides reference points for an experiment which exceeds our capacities to foresee; a people to come is a collectivity that reconfigures group relations in a polity superior to the present, but it is not a utopian collectivity without differences, conflicts and political issues. Science fiction formulates protocols of the politics of a people to come, and Octavia Butler's science fiction is especially valuable in disclosing the relationship between fabulation and the invention of a people to come. (shrink)

Habit is an integral concept for body studies, a hybrid concept and one that has provided the bedrock across the humanities for considering the interrelationships between movement and stasis, being and becoming, and process and fixity. Habits are seen to provide relay points between what is taken to be inside and outside, disrupting any clear and distinct boundary between nature and culture, self and other, the psychological and social, and even mind and matter. Habit thus discloses a paradox. It takes (...) up a unique position in affect modulation, which encompasses both regulation (in the form of discipline) and also extends the body’s potential for engaging the new, change and creativity. In order to understand the basis of the ambivalent duality governing understandings of habit it is argued that a genealogical approach to this question is necessary. This will be located within the recent ‘turn to affect’ and histories of conation within the psychological sciences, particularly taking the writings of William McDougall as a focus. (shrink)

Plural expressions of ‘belonging’ in postcolonial and multicultural societies give particular emphasis to a politics of cultural recognition. Within nations, diverse communities call for acknowledgement of their aspirations, for fair representation in public life and for protection of the distinctive cultural practices and beliefs that define and help to sustain minoritarian identities. Recognition is also important for group self-concept and cohesion, and so plays a vital role in the creation of stable platforms for political resistance. This essay explores Deleuze and (...) Guattari's concept of ‘faciality’ and their implied critique of the politics of recognition. I argue that their rejection of the ‘politics of the face’ does not simply dismiss or disregard the pluralist imperatives of the just recognition that is required for postcolonialism. In fact, their preference for ‘dismantling the face’ provides a perspective that can be useful in assisting efforts to rethink recognition in terms adequate to forms of pluralist political engagement and non-imperial forms of subjectivity and sociality. (shrink)

This paper explores the themes of apathy and activism by contrasting the conventionally negative concept of motivational desire-lack with Deleuze and Guattari's positive concept of ‘desiring-production’. I suggest that apathy and activism are both problematically tied to the same motivational force: the conventional negativity of desire, which results in a ‘split subject’ always already ‘undone’ by difference. The philosophy of positive desiring-production provides alternative concepts of motivation and selfhood, not characterised by generative lack or alienation. On the contrary, this alternative (...) ontology describes an identity that is not primarily ‘undone’ by difference, but ‘done’ or ‘made’ through the complex and piecemeal relations it forges with various aspects of the bodies it encounters. Understood as a complex multiplicity, the self or community accordingly has a primary, immediate and active interest in the quality of its multifaceted relations with others. Finally, I argue that some contemporary forms of activism can be read as practices aimed at creating and safeguarding the social conditions that foster the complex relational composition of selves and communities. (shrink)

We want to reconsider and explore the epistemology of student engagement in higher education as part of a democratic and sustainable education, going beyond neo-liberal groundings. In our exploration, we mainly draw on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his co-writers Felix Guattari and Claire Parnet. In contemporary educational systems, teachers are often urged to work with student engagement in various forms due to the connection between academic success and student engagement. Student engagement is being perceived as an important factor (...) in quality measurements – a trend which can be connected to the neoliberal marketization focusing on performance, individualization, competition, goal-rationality and linear progression. This neo-liberal agenda produces new demands on education, changing students’ and teachers’ possibilities to act and become within higher education. In addition, some theories are prioritized which lead to narrowed and limited epistemologies for higher education and accordingly student engagement. Deleuze’s way of thinking challenge linearity and dualistic views of subject/object and process/product when emphasizing becoming, appreciating multiplicities and the unpredictable; what has not yet come into being. When ”doing” Deleuze in teacher education, we have considered ‘pedagogical relations’ to involve both human and non-human relations - assemblages that are both intercorporeal and entangled. Such assemblages open, according to Deleuze, for a rhizomatic thinking about learning where events are created that bear possibilities for all actors involved to become-multiple-others for a while. These processes of becoming runs through on-going affective, entangled and moving relationships and modes of existence. Although our exploration is mainly philosophical, we will connect our exploration to an ongoing project at our university. This attempt to reconsider the epistemology of student engagement, challenges structures, power-relations and epistemological pre-assumptions in higher education by creating disruptions, openings and lines of flight? (shrink)

In this paper we articulate how time and temporalities are involved in the making of living things. For these purposes, we draw on an instructive episode concerning Norfolk Horn sheep. We attend to historical debates over the nature of the breed, whether it is extinct or not, and whether presently living exemplars are faithful copies of those that came before. We argue that there are features to these debates that are important to understanding contemporary configurations of life, time, and the (...) organism, especially as these are articulated within the field of synthetic biology. In particular, we highlight how organisms are configured within different material and semiotic assemblages that are always structured temporally. While we identify three distinct structures, namely the historical, phyletic, and molecular registers, we do not regard the list as exhaustive. We also highlight how these structures are related to the care and value invested in the organisms at issue. Finally, because we are interested ultimately in ways of producing time, our subject matter requires us to think about historiographical practice reflexively. This draws us into dialogue with other scholars interested in time, not just historians, but also philosophers and sociologists, and into conversations with them about time as always multiple and never an inert background. (shrink)

If a machine is something that cuts into a continuous flow, schizoanalysis can be read, quite literally, as an analysis of cuts. In cinematic registers, it is an analysis of montage. Looking closely at a number of modes and moments of montage in the work of Alfred Hitchcock, this paper shows how his strategies of ‘reciprocally presupposing’ actual image and virtual montage relate to a Deleuzian poetics and politics of the cinema.

This essay challenges the thesis that the modern world is a ‘disenchanted’ one. I contend that enchantment has outlasted the Enlightenment; that it endures despite the demise of the ontology that allowed it paradigmatic expression in the sixteenth century writings of Paracelsus. I present two post‐medieval pictures of an enchanted world: the first appears, of all places, in Kant's Critique of Judgment, where a peculiar magic is required of nature if humans are to gain access to the ‘supersensible’ realm of (...) freedom and rational ideas; the second focuses upon the strange beauty of late modernity's admixtures of animal and human, organism and machine, the given and made. Here I use a little Kafka and lot of Deleuze to explore these hybrids as ‘technoenchantments’ operative in a world that fascinates without being expressive of a design or a will. I spotlight contemporary sites of enchantment in order to intensify the experience of them, and thus perhaps to erode the conviction that an undesigned universe calls above all for a cold‐eyed instrumentalism. (shrink)

This article investigates the place that habit occupies in different ‘architectures of the person’, focusing particularly on constructions of the relations between habit and other components of personhood that are marked by time. Three such positions are examined: first, the relations between thought, will, memory, habit and instinct proposed by post-Darwinian accounts of ‘organic memory’; second, Henri Bergson’s account of the relations between habit, memory and becoming; and, third, the temporal aspects of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus understood as a (...) set of hereditable dispositions. These different ‘architectures of the person’ are considered with regard to the role they accord habit in trans-generational mechanisms of inheritance; the historicised forms of embodied personhood that they propose; and the manner in which they account for the emergence of a capacity for freedom that can (partially) offset the weight of the inherited past. It is argued that the imputation of such a capacity to some forms of personhood, but not others, is both shaped by and provides the conditions for the operation of liberal forms of government. The manner in which the conduct of those who exhibit such a capacity for freedom is brought under the direction of varied ‘authorities of freedom’ is given particular consideration. (shrink)

The arguments of the Stoic Chrysippus recorded in Cicero's De Fato are of great importance to Deleuze's conception of events in The Logic of Sense. The purpose of this paper is to explicate these arguments, to which Deleuze's allusions are extremely terse, and to situate them in the context of Deleuze's broader project in that book. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on the Stoics, I show the extent to which Chrysippus' views on compatibilism, hypothetical inference and astrology support Deleuze's claim that (...) the Stoics developed a theory of compatibilities and incompatibilities of events independent of corporeal states of affairs. (shrink)

In 1967, after a talk Deleuze gave to the Society of French Philosophy, Ferdinand Alquiéé expressed concern during the question and answer session that perhaps Deleuze was relying too heavily upon science and not giving adequate attention to questions and problems that Alquiéé took to be distinctively philosophical. Deleuze responded by agreeing with Alquiéé; moreover, he argued that his primary interest was precisely in the metaphysics science needs rather than in the science philosophy needs. This metaphysics, Deleuze argues, is to (...) be done ‘‘in the style of Whitehead’’ rather than the style of Kant, and in developing this metaphysics Deleuze draws heavily on Spinoza. The present essay examines this Deleuzian-Spinozist metaphysics done in the style of Whitehead, the ‘‘metaphysics science needs’’, drawing on the writings of David Hume and Bruno Latour in the process. This discussion will in turn enable us to situate Deleuze's metaphysics in relation to contemporary debates concerning speculative realism and correlationism, and especially Quentin Meillassoux's critique of the latter. Our conclusion will be that the kind of metaphysics Deleuze pursues is neither correlationist nor straightforwardly realist, but rather charts a course between realism and anti-realism. (shrink)

Benedict de Spinoza, C.S. Peirce, and Gilles Deleuze delineate a trajectory through the history of ideas in the dialogue about the potentials and limitations of panpsychism, the view that world is fundamentally made up of mind. As a parallel trajectory to the panpsychism debate in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology, this approach can inform and enrich the discussion of the role and scope of mind in the natural world. The philosophies of mind developed by Deleuze and Peirce are (...) Spinozistic in their natural monism but move beyond Spinoza to explain mind as a part of the natural world in semiotic terms. (shrink)

Exploring the evolution of the conceptual persona of the idiot from the philosophical idiot in Deleuze to the Russian idiot in Deleuze and Guattari, this article suggests that their use of the figure of Antonin Artaud as a model for an idiocy that is freed from the image of thought is problematic since Artaud in fact evinces a nostalgia for the capacity for thought. The article invites the writings of Kathy Acker and argues that Acker makes possible a more successful (...) way of thinking of the event of thought beyond the Image and thereby a new conceptual persona of the post-Russian idiot. (shrink)

I use Jonathan Bennett’s, Gilles Deleuze’s and Pierre Macherey’s interpretations of Spinoza to extract a theory of time and duration from Spinoza. I argue that although time can be considered a product of the imagination, duration is a real property of existing things and corresponds to their essence, taking essence (as Deleuze does) as a degree of power of existing. The article then explores the relations among time, duration, essence and eternity, arguing against the idea that Spinoza’s essences or Spinoza’s (...) eternity are atemporal. Essences and eternity both involve necessary references to time, but the time involved is not that of the “fortuitous sequence of events” apprehended through sensory experience. Rather, the “time” is that implicit in the necessity of God’s self-determination through God’s differentiation into natura naturans and natura naturata, which is involved in the production and differentiation of eternal essences. (shrink)

It has gone largely unnoticed that when Deleuze opposes the “private thinker” to the “public professor,” he is invoking the existential thought of Lev Shestov. The public professor defends established values and preaches submission to the demands of reason and the State; the private thinker opposes thought to reason, “idiocy” to common sense, a people to come to what exists. Private thinkers are solitary, singular and untimely, forced to think against consensus and “the crowd.” Deleuze takes from Shestov and Kierkegaard (...) the idea that genuine thinking manifests itself in a thinking which rebels against rational necessity, a theme central to Shestov’s leading French interpreter, Benjamin Fondane. Although Deleuze at first expresses doubts as to whether Shestov’s critique of reason can overcome the legislative reason of Kant, or whether it is entirely free of ressentiment, I argue that Shestov and Fondane’s anti-rationalism is more radical than Deleuze sometimes admits, and show how Deleuze’s attitude toward Shestov became more unreservedly positive over the years. On the other hand, against Shestov and Fondane, I agree with Deleuze that the private thinker is in solidarity with the “strange powers” which can remake the world, and thus with “the people to come.” Nonetheless, I argue that Deleuze’s philosophy cannot form the basis of a politics of egalitarian consensus, but that “the people to come” can only be a “broken chain” of untimely and singular exceptions. (shrink)

Digital media seem to be marked by process. The digital image itself is produced by software processes and the constant flux of code. Further this, interaction with digital systems involves a constant process by which a so-called 'user' comes into contact with various machinic occasions. It seems that in light of these processes it is impossible to maintain an aesthetic or media theory that pictures a self-contained and psychologised subject interacting with a static and inert object. How then can we (...) begin to think about digital aesthetics through a process philosophy rather than the traditional and reductive subject/object distinction found in so much aesthetic theory? This paper seeks to address this problem by enacting Alfred Whitehead's process philosophy, informed by Gilles Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers and Steve Shaviro and work it through several examples of recent manifestations of interactive media art, including work by Martin Wattenberg, Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. I work Whitehead's process philosophy through these artworks to illustrate the performative nature of software processes and the manner in which these processes affect the aesthetics of interaction. I also use these works to illustrate a concept of interaction that privileges process and events rather than a concept that focuses upon an individual human user. In this paper I propose to view the 'user' as a set of occasions – as a particular condition that is produced by various user-initiated actions – rather than an enduring subject that is able to distance herself from the object of aesthetic contemplation. By doing this I move toward a theory in which user-occasions, machine-occasions and their interpenetration actualise the aesthetics of media art. Whitehead allows me to think outside of the binary oppositions that divide the world into knower/known or subject/object relationships. Throughout the argument I unpack Whiteheadian concepts such as actual entities, the unison of immediate becoming and, in general, the primacy of the event, bringing these concepts to bear on individual case studies of interactive media art. Whitehead's general thesis is that materiality and permanence are created by a continual process. Viewing the digital encounter through this theoretical framework I position the aesthetic experience of interaction as that which emerges from the fluctuations of process. The event of interaction is a necessarily hybrid process in which human occasions become supplemented by technology and the aesthetic event becomes innately coupled to the processes of the machine. In this paper I am not interested in any notion of consciousness or a psychologised human 'user', rather I am interested in a particular condition that takes place as user-initiated processes work with machine-initiated processes. This is because, for Whitehead, process comes before consciousness; it is the process of actual entities that prompt the consciousness into being. In this paper I thus propose interaction with digital systems as the commingling of contemporary actual occasions, shifting emphasis from a conscious human user and instead focusing on the process of the encounter that precedes this conscious experience. (shrink)

Šiame straipsnyje siekiama atsakyti į klausimą, kas galėtų susieti filosofiją ir vizualiuosius bei žodinius menus. Ar įmanoma ir jei taip, tai kaip įmanoma reflektuoti visus menus kaip vieno kūrybinio įvykio momentus? Siekiant atsakyti į šį klausimą, pirma, aptariamas logikos ir kūrybiškumo susikertant menui ir filosofijai susidūrimas, antra – žodžio ir vaizdo nebendramatiškumas, surastas / išrastas belgų siurrealisto René Magritte’o ir reflektuotas Michelio Foucault. Čia sugrįžtama prie klasikinio F. Niezsche’s disputo su Sokratu apie logikos ir kūrybiškumo priešpriešą ir siekiama atsakyti į (...) klausimą, kurią pusę – Sokrato ar F. Nietzsche’s – paremia šioje diskusijoje Gilles’is Deleuze’as ir Félixas Guattari. Atrodytų, kad jie suderina logiką ir kūrybiškumą, pastebėdami, kad menas nėra nei mokslinio mąstymo, nei filosofijos koreliatas ar papildas, kad trys minties formos – menas, mokslas ir filosofija – turi po nepriklausomą specifinę kryptį, Kita vertus, interpretuodamas I. Kantą, G. Deleuze’as pastebi disharmoniją tarp vaizduotės, supratimo ir proto, ir, sekdamas Antonino Artaud’o įžvalgomis, jis išskiria naują minties tipą kaip tarpinę teritoriją tarp žodžio ir vaizdo. (shrink)

This paper considers the trajectory of Althusser's Spinozism pre- and post-May ‘68. Where Althusser's application of Spinoza would often lead him into unknown or non-Marxist territory, one alternative way to think this relation is through the figure of Mao, whose concept of non-antagonistic contradiction I propose to read in terms of Spinoza's “determinate negation.” Although not going so far as to suggest that a certain combination of Mao and Spinoza would have enabled Althusser to “complete” Marx, this paper speculates on (...) this omission from his work and what positive insights we can draw from it retrospectively for developing Althusser's political philosophy. (shrink)

Straipsnyje svarstomas laiko išsišakojimo į tris modusus klausimas, kuris aktualus klasikinėje filosofijoje, fenomenologijoje, literatūroje, struktūruojamas kino mene ir modernaus kino filosofijoje. Straipsnyje tiriamos kelios šio laiko išsišakojimo įvaizdinimo ir jo filosofinio reflektavimo trajektorijos: Tarkovskio įvaizdintas laikas, apokaliptinis laikas bei jo virsmas į laiko kristalus Deleuze’o modernaus kino filosofijoje.

Part of a series on the question of what is the good life, the essay is structured as a montage. Part 1 contests the received notion that death is exterior to the work of Deleuze. To this end, it gathers together a telegraphic collection of examples – ‘corpses’ in his corpus – that invariably show up whenever the question is raised. Part 2 attempts a Deleuzian move: it puts death to work. If death is not nothing, it argues, it must (...) be productive of something absolutely new. Drawing upon Blanchot's seminal essay, ‘The Two Versions of the Imaginary’, it makes the case that this creation is the cadaver: the first time-image. (shrink)

Dramatization has been conceived by some Deleuze scholars as ‘dramatizing’ the mode of existence of a subject. This paper argues, on the contrary, dramatization involves the very creation of a viewpoint on the world. The ethical significance of dramatization is not the ability to ‘evaluate’ certain subjective modes of existence, but to produce ways of unfolding the world in which we do not ‘imprison’ others and in which multiple perspectives are allowed to unfold. Love is incapable of such a truly (...) ethical comportment, because the lover is always thrown back onto their own world, trapped within subjectivity, unable to see from two viewpoints at once. A world is most precisely a set of signs, a set of relationships between ‘things’ and ‘meanings’ ; therefore, in order to produce more ‘ethical’ worlds, worlds in which we do not ‘explicate’ or imprison ourselves and others too much, we must turn to art. Art is precisely a ‘unity’ in which multiple perspectives are allowed to unfold at their own rhythm. Language perfects this insofar as the creation of new modes of grammatical relation in writing is nothing more than the unification of a multiplicity of relationships between meaning and things. (shrink)