This paper leads us in reflections regarding the ontological status of a situation inspired by two main sources: the Zhuangzi--a multifarious compilation from Warring States China (ca. 4th c. BCE)--and José Ortega y Gasset's (1883-1955) Unas Lecciones de Metafísica (Some Lessons in Metaphysics)--the transcripts of a course on metaphysics by a Spanish philosopher of the early 20th century. Much as other ontologically subjective entities and events, situations do not preexist the intentional subject: instead, they are created alongside our act of (...) noticing. In Classical Chinese, shi , commonly rendered "propensity" and the closest the language comes to our concept of situation, denotes a dynamic process that incorporates the conscious subjective agent as well as other entities as constitutive elements. Here a situation is not reducible to the discrete phenomena and events that we can discern within a given space-time; rather, it necessitates our thinking about it to arise. These ontological reflections are important for a philosophy of action. They help us notice the role of attention in the creation of situations--as in the creation of worlds--hence the importance of understanding what the agent notices and fails to notice, what we privilege as worthy of our attention and what passes inadvertent among the world's plural affordances. The relational affordances that we actualize and reify as constituting a situation depend on what we are socialized and educated to see when looking at the world, thus situations and agents co-create one another over time. This acknowledgement is crucial to retrain our agency in order to illuminate our blind spots, overcome our uncritical certainties which generate absolutist tendencies, and move beyond fixed, reduced, and contingent corners from which to interpret the world. (shrink)

Em maio de 1643, Elisabeth da Bohemia endereçou uma questão a Descartes que inaugurou uma Correspondência de seis anos, até a morte do filósofo. Ele dedica à Princesa o seu trabalho de maturidade metafísica (Princípios de Filosofia Primeira, 1644) e redige Paixões da Alma (1649) como um dos resultados do diálogo com a filósofa. O silenciamento dos últimos cem anos de historiografia sobre o legado de Elisabeth da Bohemia nesta troca epistolar causou distorções e, em alguns casos, lastreou o viés (...) como regra e como a história. Uma das consequências dessa distorção está na leitura de que a questão da filósofa consistiria em uma crítica ao dualismo substancial. Neste estudo busco oferecer uma interpretação da natureza da primeira questão, com o intuito de esclarecer o pensamento da filósofa e o seu papel no diálogo, de uma maneira compreensiva, sem subscrever o paradigma literário do solilóquio cartesiano, e seu viés na literatura filosófica. (shrink)

De moderne filosofie lijdt aan muziekvergetelheid. Opvallend is echter dat filosofen, wanneer ze toch aandacht schenken aan muziek, hun aandacht bij voorkeur op één bepaald genre richten, namelijk de opera. Filosofen zoals Søren Kierkegaard en Friedrich Nietzsche lieten hun gedachten over Don Giovanni, Parsifal en Carmen gaan, terwijl omgekeerd de filosofie van Arthur Schopenhauer de opera heeft beïnvloed via Wagner. Diens werk lijkt zich op het snijpunt van het grensverkeer tussen moderne filosofie en moderne muziek te bevinden. Het was zijn (...) ambitie de menselijke existentie en de menselijke geschiedenis in één panoramisch oeuvre te vatten, vanaf het primordiale begin tot en met de dramatische finale die ophanden leek: een catastrofale apotheose die een geheel nieuwe toekomst mogelijk zou maken. Dat is althans de verhaallijn van zijn meesterwerk Der Ring des Nibelungen. Aan het slot van Götterdämmerung lijkt zich een algehele verwoesting te hebben voltrokken: ‘Everything is destroyed and there is an enigmatic kind of hovering over the scene of destruction’ (Badiou 2010, p. 106), een ambivalente stemming van hoop en destructie zette Wagner op muziek. Voor Wagner is dan ook een hoofdrol in deze studie weggelegd: voor zijn muziektheoretische geschriften (waarin hij over een ‘muziek van de toekomst’ filosofeerde), maar meer nog voor de muzikale totaalkunstwerken die hij daadwerkelijk componeerde. (shrink)

There is no consensus regarding whether Gilles Deleuze offers a cogent theory of the Other. Deleuze develops the notion of the Other-structure, but given his scarce remarks on this concept, his treatment of this issue is debated. This article argues that to elucidate Deleuze's philosophy of the Other, his notion of the Other-structure must be analyzed in parallel to Edmund Husserl's intersubjective theory. This comparison, made possible by Natalie Depraz's reading of the Husserlian alterity, reveals nuanced phenomenological traces in Deleuze's (...) Other-structure and its implicated structural moments while substantiating his affirmation of the Otherless world, as an impetus to surpass phenomenology. (shrink)

This article examines the conceptualisation of materialities in feminist theory through two paradigmatic examples: (French) materialist feminism and new materialisms. What can be interpreted as an opposition between different paradigms can also be disrupted as long as we define what matters as a relation or a process rather than a substance or a lost paradise to which we should return. New materialisms indeed help to investigate aspects such as corporeality, human/non-human interaction and textures, but the role of feminist materialism is (...) invaluable in highlighting the social structures of power relations; more than ever, it makes a decisive contribution to the understanding of domination, such as the social relations and hierarchies implied in femosecularism conceptualised in this article. Ultimately, the tool of hybridised materialisms aims to articulate the theoretical perspective of materialist feminism with that of the new materialisms – in order to avoid the binarism between materiality and culture. (shrink)

This is the Introduction to a collected volume.

This article discusses the place that the concept of rhythm occupies within Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. I present a panorama of different ways to conceptualize thought throughout Deleuze’s writings from 1960’s to 1990’s, emphasizing the discussion about the threshold of thought. In the writings in partnership with Félix Guattari, Deleuze understand thought as an act of confronting chaos, what makes the problem of consistency a point of extreme relevance within his philosophical system. In this framework, the concept of thought is described (...) as a tension between consistency and infinite speed. In order to elaborate this concept of thought, Deleuze resumes his conceptualization of the three syntheses of the time and formulates with Guattari the concept of refrain. I will show that the refrain is at the axis of an epistemological shift in the whole program of transcendental philosophy, by affirming a necessarily heterogeneous and aberrant Time, which features the concept of rhythm as the genetic element of difference. Within this conceptual framework, I follow the authors’ suggestion that the logic of schizoanalysis is analogous to the logic of subtractive sound synthesis. The main goal is to demonstrate that rhythm is at the core of Deleuzian concept of difference and sound is at the core of Deleuzian concept of thought. (shrink)

« Esprit de corps » is a now globally uttered phrase, which designates the strong inner cohesion of — and attachment to — a human organized group. Since the Encyclopaedists up until Bourdieu, the term is usually critical and pejorative in French thought, used to fustigate the groupthink of privileged social casts. But in their famous chapter on war machines, Deleuze and Guattari proposed a much less well-known yet promising U-turn in the way esprit de corps was theorized. Far from (...) the now common paranoid idea of discipline, often defended by Foucauldian exegetes, this overseen aspect of nomadology, inspired by Bergson’s ideas on esprit de corps, but also by medieval guilds and oriental martial art communities, reopens the path to what could be called a politics of hieropoiesis, a communal and secular production of the sacred. (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

Studies on Jean Rhys have been fragmentary concentrating on one or two aspects of Rhys’s thematic concern with the alienation of the white creole without laying emphasis on Rhys’s exploration of the Creole’s identity. There has been no attempt to examine if the creole has to struggle harder and more than whites and blacks to come to terms with her personal identity until now. The answer is affirmative because the creole is a composite human being. Indeed, the white creole is (...) the ‘fruit’ of a mixed union. Born into miscegenation, hybridity and creolization, the creole is physically, linguistically, socially and religiously a diverse human being. Within the scope of this paper, the term identity is used in a broad sense. The creole’s personal identity refers to the different identities the Creole can have at different times and in different circumstances. Correspondingly, she must negotiate the white and black elements of her identity. The Creole must deal with the complexity of her identity through a web of tangled relationships with both whites and blacks. Read from this light, the personal identity of the creole is not “either/ or,” but reluctantly “both/ and.” In various ways, the creole is an ‘Everyman.’ The Creole undergoes an awareness, and is eventually, redefined through the image of the ‘other.’ Indeed, her jump toward her black friend Tia reflects Rhys’s basic concern for a Caribbean society in which assimilation and personal identity must blend in a single humane goal, that is, to co-exist beyond the lines of race, gender, class and sex in order to avoid annihilation. (shrink)

We present some ideas on logical process descriptions, using relations from the DIO (Drug Interaction Ontology) as examples and explaining how these relations can be naturally decomposed in terms of more basic structured logical process descriptions using terms from linear logic. In our view, the process descriptions are able to clarify the usual relational descriptions of DIO. In particular, we discuss the use of logical process descriptions in proving linear logical theorems. Among the types of reasoning supported by DIO one (...) can distinguish both (1) basic reasoning about general structures in reality and (2) the domain-specific reasoning of experts. We here propose a clarification of this important distinction between (realist) reasoning on the basis of an ontology and rule-based inferences on the basis of an expert’s view. (shrink)

The recently rising field of Critical Data Studies is still facing fundamental questions. Among these is the enigma of digital subjectivation. Who are the subjects of Big Data? A field where this question is particularly pressing is finance. Since the 1990s traders have been steadily integrated into computerized data assemblages, which calls for an ontology that eliminates the distinction between human sovereign subjects and non-human instrumental objects. The latter subjectivize traders in pre-conscious ways, because human consciousness runs too slow to (...) follow the volatility of the market. In response to this conundrum Social Studies of Finance has drawn on Actor-Network Theory to interpret financial markets as technically constructed networks of human and non-human actors. I argue that in order to develop an explicitly critical data study it might be advantageous to refer to Maurizio Lazzarato’s theory of machinic subjugation instead. Although both accounts describe financial digital subjectivation similarly, Lazzarato has the advantage of coupling his description to a clear critique of and resistance to finance. (shrink)

Tras elaborar una versión de la Historia Universal motorizada por la producción deseante, Deleuze adoptó un viraje anti-historicista, desplazándose a los devenires no históricos y multiplicando perspectivas negativas sobre la historia. En el marco del debate entre quienes le adjudican posiciones exclusivamente anti-historicistas y quienes le atribuyen una filosofía de la historia o una metodología historicista, proponemos elucidar las críticas deleuzianas a la historia sirviéndonos de la distinción entre la historia como realidad objetiva y la disciplina histórica. Además, analizamos la (...) primacía otorgada a la filosofía sobre la historia a partir de su concepción del acontecimiento y su temporalidad. (shrink)

In the two volumes which make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose new concepts of “machine” and “organism.” The problem of the relationship between machines and organisms has a long philosophical history, and this essay treats their work as a contribution to this debate. It is argued that their solution to this problem is found in their difficult concept of the “body without organs,” a concept that is given some much-needed clarification in the essay. The first section details (...) Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the machine, examining the ways in which it differs from the traditional concept as described by Canguilhem: their machines do not have predictable movements, but instead produce events; they do not have a purpose; they are able to reproduce themselves. The second section details their conception of the organism through their account of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: organisms are bodies which normalize and which create hierarchies; they also do not have a purpose; they have a “unity of composition.” The final section argues that their concept of the “body without organs” shows us how to understand the relation between the two transformed concepts, and defines the body without organs as the becoming-machine of the organism. (shrink)

This is a comprehensively edited reissue of a self-published book, which was partly based on a dissertation I completed in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge many years ago. The book was intended as a personal project to make sense of my own philosophical thinking, rather than as something that would be of interest to the wider academic community. Sometimes philosophy can be done just to fulfil a personal need. I doubt it contains anything that would (...) be of interest to anyone, but I have archived it here in case of curiosity. (shrink)

La matière pensante du corps n'est donc pas une intentionnalité mentale du corps à l'instar de l'intentionnalité cognitive. La pensée n'est plus à définir à partir d'une réflexion consciente par un dédoublement du sujet et de l'objet. Car la matière corporelle produit des processus réflexifs d'intensités différents selon les types d'externalité du corps. Par externalité il faut décrire les éléments non mentaux et non interne au corps qui proviennent du monde extérieur. Le corps est soumis à son extérieur comme organisme (...) tant pour la réalisation de ses fonctions que pour la régulation des informations. (shrink)

In 1886, Nietzsche wrote: ‘I am still waiting for a philosophical doctor in the extraordinary sense of the term’: a doctor who pursues not truth, but an exceptional kind of health. Nietzsche's will to health, his theory of drive organisation, and his insistence that the philosopher put himself at risk, all work together in his overall project, which consists of taking up the very role of the highly revalued physician for whom he is waiting. Deleuze and Guattari engage this same (...) task of a revalued doctoring in the Capitalisme et Schizophrénie books, attacking the disease of oedipality and providing instructions for the deorganisation of the organism as self-cure. Offering tips on this radical treatment, they employ the figure of the hypochondriac to show how it can fail. Both Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari perform a revaluation of health as a condition of chronic critique, a condition that wraps itself around illness to keep itself critical. (shrink)

This essay attempts to address the crucial relation of feminist philosophy to minorities inside and outside of feminism. To do so it turns to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, focusing on their concept of “becoming minoritarian” and related concepts. Aided by close readings of two canonical but ultimately negative assessments of Deleuze and Guattari, Alice Jardine's “Woman in Limbo” and Rosi Braidotti's Patterns of Dissonance, the essay outlines and argues the merits of a “minoritarian” feminism.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 206 Seiten: 181-205.

The aim of this article is to discuss the relation between indigenous and scientific kinds on the basis of contemporary ethnobiological research. I argue that ethnobiological accounts of taxonomic convergence-divergence patters challenge common philosophical models of the relation between folk concepts and natural kinds. Furthermore, I outline a positive model of taxonomic convergence-divergence patterns that is based on Slater's [2014] notion of “stable property clusters” and Franklin-Hall's [2014] discussion of natural kinds as “categorical bottlenecks.” Finally, I argue that this model (...) is not only helpful for understanding the relation between indigenous and scientific kinds but also makes substantial contributions to contemporary debates about natural kinds.to contemporary debates about natural kinds. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 La filosofía de Simondon esboza, sobre la base de las ciencias de su época, una nueva metafísica de la naturaleza que engloba los niveles materiales, orgánicos y antropomórficos. El concepto de naturaleza es objeto de una profunda renovación en ella. La naturaleza ya no aparece como un conjunto de cosas hechas, definidas eternamente por su esencia. Ella es más bien la invención de procesos de individuación encajados los unos en los otros, y los (...) cuales forman tantas dimensiones diferentes. Contrariamente al reduccionismo fisicalista que traza un mismo plano físico y determinista para todas las cosas, la naturaleza aparece en Simondon como multidimensional e inventiva. El conocimiento y la ética también son modificados por una concepción tal de la naturaleza: nosotros no conocemos y no actuamos más que participando en la naturaleza. Esta metafísica de la naturaleza es también una teoría renovada de la Participación. No estamos jamás en superposición, separados de las cosas, sino que participamos con nuestro conocimiento y nuestra acción en el movimiento íntimo de la naturaleza, en la resonancia que se establece entre sus diferentes dimensiones. (shrink)

This research attempts to throw light on and show the fundamental similarities and differences between the African and Western ethical conceptions by examining the foundation of ethics and morality in the two systems, using the Golden rule principle in African ethics and Kant’s categorical imperative in Western ethics as tools of comparative analysis. The African indigenous ethics revolves round the “Golden Rule Principle” as the ultimate moral principle. This principle states that “Do unto others what you want them to do (...) unto you”. This principle compares favourably with Immanuel Kant’s whose main thrust is found in his “Categorical Imperative”, with the injunction for us to “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” The categorical imperative becomes for Kant, the principle of universalizability, which according to Kant, is categorical and must be equally binding on everyone. This idea of Kant, we argue, compares with the “Golden Rule Principle”. Both are rationalistic and social but the limitations of Kant which we hope to point out, make it quite insufficient as the foundation of morality. The Africans’ which is more humanistic describes morality and is better served. The main difference between the two ethical systems lies in the fact that whereas the “golden rule” starts from the self and considers the consequences on the first before others, the universalizability principle on the other hand considers the consequences on others first before self. (shrink)

This paper critically examines Deleuze’s treatment of the Nietzschean problem of nihilism. Of all the major figures in contemporary continental thought, Deleuze is at once one of the most luminous, and practically a lone voice in suggesting that nihilism may successfully be overcome. Whether or not he is correct on this point is thus a commanding question in relation to our understanding of the issue. Many commentators on Nietzsche have argued that his project of overcoming nihilism is destined to failure (...) because of the affinity between the problem of nihilism and the logic of negation. While Nietzsche wants an absolute affirmation of life, Spinoza’s principle that “all determination is negation,” as well as Hegel’s dialectical conception of negation, suggest that affirmation free of negation is not possible. However, some commentators indicate that Deleuze successfully shows how overcoming nihilism is possible because his “logic of difference” allows for an affirmation which is not dialectically reappropriated by negation. This paper argues that beyond such logical considerations, there are metaphysical and existential reasons why Deleuze’s interpretation of nihilism fails to show that it can be overcome. For Deleuze, the overcoming of nihilism hinges not just on a logic of difference, but on a radical interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return as “selective being.” Drawing on recent scholarship and on Nietzsche’s own writings I argue that this is not a tenable interpretation, and also, more importantly, that the metaphysical and existential implications of this understanding of eternal return reinstate nihilism at the very point where it is supposedly overcome. Moreover, I argue that there are attendant ethical and political dangers to Deleuze’s position on nihilism. (shrink)

The paper identifies three recent lines of interpretation of the politics that can be derived from Deleuze and Guattari, all of which share a way of reading the dualisms in their work that can be traced back to how they understand the actual/virtual partition, and to an alleged pre-eminence of the virtual over the actual. It is argued that this reading is not only inaccurate, but obscures the political dimension of Deleuze and Guattari's work. Clarifying the latter requires a reinterpretation (...) of the dualisms involved (as dyads rather than binaries), of the relation between virtual and actual (as a formal distinction where one acts back upon the other), and the drawing of a clear distinction between what Deleuze calls a ‘transcendent exercise’ of thought and sensibility and the properly metaphysical exercise that sets up the distinction between virtual and actual. What then appears is an image of Deleuze's and Guattari's thought that is far more concerned with practical questions and with a situated political practice of intervention. (shrink)

This paper aims to argue how education might be considered and practised if not under the logic of the formation of childhood. As such, it puts into question the traditional way of considering children as representing adults’ opportunity to impose their own ideals, and considering education to be an appropriate instrument for such an end. More specifically, it considers how the purposes of practising philosophy with children might be affirmed as other than in the service of the social and political (...) education of childhood. This complex issue calls for a redefinition, not only of philosophy and education, but also of childhood itself. Several ancient (Heraclitus) and contemporary (Deleuze, Lyotard) philosophical contributions are offered in order to reflect on new concepts and vocabularies for childhood. What they have in common is a non-chronological concept of childhood—one that considers the child under the sign of aión rather than chrónos, and therefore as something inherently constitutive of human life, which therefore could never be abandoned, forgotten or overcome. As an example of this deterritorialisation of the relation between childhood and education, a practical project undertaken in a couple of public schools in the environs of Rio de Janeiro and its environs is presented, in which a strong emphasis is placed on the concept of the ‘experience of philosophical thinking’. The paper unpacks each of these three terms—experience, philosophy, and thinking—appealing to Foucault, Deleuze and Hadot for conceptual reconstruction. In addition, some basic pedagogical assumptions that informed this project are presented in the context of two philosophers who inspired it—Socrates and Jacques Rancière. The last section of the paper reflects on how the practice of mainstream schooling seems actually hostile to the experience of philosophical thinking, thus challenging the practitioners to encounter the pedagogical space of the mainstream as if it were possible to establish a new educational relationship to childhood there, and to work fully expecting what cannot be predicted. (shrink)

This paper argues that in daycare centres in France, where children are cared for from four months to age three, the competence of female staff members is usually denied and unvalued vis à vis the expert opinions. The paper highlights empirical research on early childhood and gender, providing pragmatic access to children's languages of desire, a language mostly ignored. Incorporating the ideas of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, the paper draws upon the conceptualization of Fernand Deligny who took care of autistic (...) children in mapping what he called ‘lines of wandering’, an idea that shows how desire can become accessible. In the present ‘society of control’ which Deleuze analyses and which coexists with Foucault's discipline and biopower, such lines of flight enable the emergence of a new narrative for young children's desire, and for the competence of the female staff members in their departure from the highway of normalization. (shrink)

I introduce and compare Russian and Japanese notions of community and space. Some characteristic strains of thought that exist in both countries had similar points of departure, overcame similar problems and arrived at similar results. In general, in Japan and Russia, the nostalgia for the community has been strong because one felt that in society through modernization something of the particularity of one's culture had been lost. As a consequence, both in Japan and in Russia allusions to the German sociologist (...) Ferdinand Tönnies' book Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft are frequent. In the end I associate the Japanese as well as the Russian ideas with neo-Darwinian versions of the theme of evolution as it has been developed by Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. (shrink)

Within continental philosophy of biology the work of Michel Serres has not received a lot of attention. Nonetheless, this chapter wants to argue that Serres was part of a group of thinkers – together with Jacques Monod and Henri Atlan – that started to think about biology in terms of second-order cybernetics and information theory. Therefore, this chapter aims to do four things. First of all, it maps the relation between Serres and Canguilhem, one that was mediated by authors such (...) as Louis Althusser or Jacques Monod. Secondly, it fleshes out Serres’s own ‘biophilosophy’. I label this alternative tradition as a ‘biophilosophy without a subject’. Finally, this chapter explores the consequences of this alternative biophilosophy through a brief examination of two authors whose work lies in the line of this tradition: René Girard and Bruno Latour. Though at first sight different, they both draw inspiration from this biophilosophy to develop a framework that, paradoxically, ‘jumps over’ the subject. Hence, the reason why biology is neither a prominent theme in Girard’s nor in Latour’s work. This is not because of a lack of biophilosophy, but because of an implicit one: a biophilosophy without a subject. (shrink)

The present PhD dissertation aims to examine the relation between modality and change in Aristotle’s metaphysics. -/- On the one hand, Aristotle supports his modal realism (i.e., worldly objects have modal properties - potentialities and essences - that ground the ascriptions of possibility and necessity) by arguing that the rejection of modal realism makes change inexplicable, or, worse, banishes it from the realm of reality. On the other hand, the Stagirite analyses processes by means of modal notions (‘change is the (...) actuality of what is virtual insofar as it is virtual’). In other words: to grasp what change is, one has to resort to the modal idiom of potentialities, while the fact that there is change is indicative of the fact that nature is full of modal properties. -/- Aristotle’s modal and kinetic realism finds a negative in the figure of the Megaric Diodorus Kronus. The polemical situation of Greek philosophy has indeed the dialectical advantage of not opposing the Aristotelian position to a sui generis straw man. Both in its reduction of modal judgements to temporal quantifications and in its dissolution of the reality of the state-of-being-in-motion in favour of a cinematographic view of processes, the philosophical figure of reductionist antirealism embodied by Diodorus constitutes an alternative that takes the opposite view of Aristotle’s realism. -/- The present study is structured as a discussion between these two positions. In the face of Diodorus’ antirealist challenges, Aristotle articulates modal and kinetic considerations: the answers he gives to Diodorus’ puzzles thus provide valuable insight into his metaphysics. Moreover, the examination of Aristotle’s and Diodorus’ metaphysics, because of their insight and originality, will not fail to interest the philosopher concerned with the metaphysical foundations of modern physics, insofar as the entanglement between modalities and processes is nowadays at the core of mechanics (phase spaces, path integrals, etc.). (shrink)

The Catholic concept of “sanctity” can be thought of as a “cultural unit” (Eco) composed of a wide variety of “grounds” (Peirce) or distinctive features. The figures of individual saints, i.e., tokens of sanctity, are characterized by a particular set of grounds, organized and represented in texts of different genres. This paper presents a semiotic study of texts seeking to offer an encompassing view of “sanctity” by listing all the saints and supplementing their names with a short description of their (...) lives emphasizing the grounds characterizing each of them. The analysis focuses on a seminal liturgical text, the Martyrologium Romanun (1584–2004), and the first official encyclopedia of saints, the Bibliotheca Sanctorum (1961–2013), as well as a sample of digital texts and media such as websites and mobile apps. While the first text offers a dogmatic perspective on sanctity and saintly figures and the second offers a historical and culturological one, websites succeed in reconciling the two paradigms into a single syncretic form of interactive fruition in which the more up-to-date encyclopedic model subsumes the traditional calendar one and, in the case of apps, adds a glocal dimension, enhancing situated cognition. The analysis shows that the introduction of the encyclopedic genre and subsequent proliferation of digital repertoires is connected to a shift in the Catholic “episteme” (Foucault) of sanctity and a growing tendency to consider saints as not (only) religious characters and objects of cult, but (also) as historical individuals and components of a culture and, consequently, as suitable objects of critical discourse. (shrink)

In the deep joint work Deleuze-Guattari there is the demand of consider it as a political theory of literature, a literary politics. The following paragraphs, to some extent respond to that demand, enroll the Deleuze-Guattari micropolitics in a concatenation between the revolutionary and artistic machines, in this case, literary. Considering this conjecture, in this article we propose to address the relationships between the concept of minor literature, the spatial dynamics and the informative order.

In this article I propose a semiotic investigation of images of jobs. The aim is not to analyze the social representation of the job, but to explore if there remains a present-day image of the job, and what are its historical and social conditions of existence. The problem is to study the relation between social structure and the image of the job. First, following Foucault’s studies on disciplinary society, the relation between disciplinary society and the image of labour in the (...) factory will be described. This is followed by an account of the problematic passage from disciplinary society to what Deleuze called a “society of control”. Giving particular consideration to Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge relations and Deleuze’s semiotic reading of this theory,the new social organization of jobs, activities and times will be investigated. Social structure is changing from disciplinary and striated space, such as the space of the factory, to the smooth space of dispersion, like the space of the market. The image of the job changes from the image of the workforce to the image of human capital. Finally, rethinking Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, the relation between the market and hu- man capital will be analyzed. My hypothesis is that it is not possible to have an image of the job as human capital in the present: the concept of human capital coincides with the human being and its capability, but there is no longer any specific space for the market, given that the market permeates every space of life. (shrink)

Animal camouflage is said to be a mode of being negative, implying a setback visibility. On the contrary, we try here to restore all its aesthetic positivity considering the singularity of extremely varied forms it produces. It soon becomes apparent that the camouflage forces us to question the privilege of individuality and traditional drawdown on singularity. The disruptive camouflage, especially, that crushes the individual formal unity provides the argument in favor of an individuation with the environment, and more with the (...) world: the animal camoufleur disappears under only an individual visibility; it appears on the contrary in all its pre-individual splendor when it involves with environment components to make them the most expressive. (shrink)

This paper comments on Vilém Flusser’s essay on new nomadism as an epochal change. The author takes a slightly critical viewpoint of Flusser’s definition of nomadism as a practice of archaic as well as of mediacentred life nowadays and discusses the rather traditional sedentary form Flusser adopts for his composition. The author bases his critique upon questions such as: is it really the Information Revolution and not the Industrial Revolution that leads to the end of the Neolithic Age? Is it (...) only a virtual nomadism that came about in 1990 or does the epochal change concern also physical “nomadic” movement? In discussing Flusser’s essay the author points out the differences of meaning evident in Flusser’s original German text and the English translation. This leads to different possible interpretations of Flussers essay. The author closes by discussing the concepts of the idiot and the nomad. He clarifies how these concepts are relevant in a post-modern society and presents the possibility that the wisdom of idiocy is a survival strategy. (shrink)

In this essay two photographs taken during the events at Dale Farm and at Meriden—both involving issues of gypsy and traveller settlement in rural areas—are analysed and interpreted in some depth. Use is thereby made of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler . This book, as is argued in this contribution, includes, in embryonic form, a whole imaginary of forms of sovereignty which, it could be said, is still to a significant extent structuring conflicts between gypsy and traveller communities on the (...) one hand, and rural residents on the other. The exploration of Walton’s imaginary in which supposed compleat contemplators are pitched against intransigent, dogmatic, pertinacious schismaticks, enables us to tease out images of nomadism and sovereignty and allows us to argue how the clash of imaginary sovereignties both at Dale Farm and at Meriden is, at the core, a clash of irreconcilable forms of life which, each, rest upon what existentialists would call an original, radical choice. We conclude with some notes on the need to acknowledge but also to interrogate, in and during conflicts between gypsies and travellers and rural residents, the radical nature of the existential choices that underpin such conflicts. Without any such acknowledgement, and without any meta-communicative interrogation of the choices that underpin imaginary forms of life, one may not hope to be able bridge the chasm between radically chosen, diametrically opposed forms of life. (shrink)

The collection Virtual Mathematics: the logic of difference brings together a range of new philosophical engagements with mathematics, using the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as its focus. Deleuze’s engagements with mathematics rely upon the construction of alternative lineages in the history of mathematics in order to reconfigure particular philosophical problems and to develop new concepts. These alternative conceptual histories also challenge some of the self-imposed limits of the discipline of mathematics, and suggest the possibility of forging new connections (...) between philosophy and more recent developments in mathematics. This component of Deleuze’s work has, to date, been rather neglected by commentators working in the field of Deleuze studies. One of the aims of this collection is to address this critical deficit by providing a philosophical presentation of Deleuze’s relation to mathematics; one that is adequate to his project of constructing a philosophy of difference and to the exploration of some of its applications. This project developed as a result of encounters with an increasing number of researchers who have been working on the mathematical aspects of Deleuze’s work and the key role that these play in his philosophy. By bringing this work together for the first time, this collection makes an important contribution to the emerging body of work that endeavours to explore the broad range of Deleuze’s philosophy. (shrink)

This paper sets out a series of critical contrasts between Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze's philosophies of the event. It does so in the context of some likely objections to their positions from a broadly analytic position. These objections concern problems of individuation and location in space-time. The paper also explains Deleuze and Badiou's views on the event through a literary application on a short story by John Cheever. In conclusion it is argued that both thinkers have good answers to (...) the objections, but that they diverge on the ontological commitments of their definitions of the event. (shrink)

This article reads Monique Wittig's Le Corps lesbien through Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of le corps sans organes and devenir-femme, devenir-animal in order to illuminate both Wittig's formal and figurative concerns and her larger literary objectives. The dismembered and dismember-ing lesbian lovers that Wittig describes in Le Corps lesbien illustrate a process of becoming-woman, becoming-animal and becoming-other that leads to a becoming-minoritarian and a renunciation of stratification and subjectification in the body without organs. This process is a celebration of dispersed, (...) multiplicitous identity that exists in haecceities. Wittig's lesbian lovers undergo various becomings in the text to illustrate the multiplicity of possibilities as they move towards the BwO, and the text as a whole uses this BwO to resist and dismantle the hetero-patriarchal order. (shrink)

Listening, seeing and reading Gilles Deleuze has had an influence on my thinking more than most of the economic writings I have consulted over the past quarter of a century. This discovery and furtherance of knowledge enriched my reflection and also allowed me to go beyond the general philosopher, as a philosopher opening the way to new horizons. It makes the researcher aware that the most important thing is not the philosopher man but the man philosopher, i.e. the one who (...) writes something that touches a human being at his deepest level and concerns him in his life every day. New generations of economists should meditate on this by going beyond the chapel quarrels coming from the Schumpeterian dichotomy 'science versus ideology'. To quote one of Deleuze's main ideas, no thinking against anything has been important over a long period; what counts are thoughts for something new that affect people's lives, and which are produced with rigor. This opens the way to a thought for life and not against life, which is in line with the progress of research in methodology, where it is a question of giving more importance to social ontology as a level of analysis and not focusing solely on epistemology in the narrowest sense. (shrink)

This article presents some issues about the relations between epistemology and education. From an analysis of The formation of the scientific spirit, by Bachelard, The structure of the scientific revolutions, by Kuhn and A discourse upon the Sciences, by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, we try to understand how the scientific procedures can determinate some educational aspects. We study, thought, in which measure the epistemological concepts of formalization, paradigm and social construction of science are pertinent to understand the educational processes and (...) to orient the pedagogical practices. We cans see then how science can be considered, in its procedures and in its historicity, as a fecund reference to education. We hope by this investigation to reveal some interesting characteristics of education as a preparation to the scientific activity and as an exercise of approach to the reality through the participation of the new generations in the world’s conceptions which came before their arising. (shrink)

Straipsnyje svarstoma galimybė, ar ritmo konceptas, funcionuojantis Gillesio Deleuze’o ir Félixo Guattari tekstuose, negalėtų padėti atsekti minties judėjimo linijų nuo filosofijos link skirtingų meno formų ir atgal. Pradedant nuo dinaminės problemų ir sąvokų kartografijos, kurią kaip tinkamą tokiems minties eksperimentams įžvelgė Anne Sauvagnargues, Jamesas M. Buchananas, Ronaldas Bogue, Stephenas Zepke, šiame tyrime siūloma sąvoka ritmas yra tinkama kaip siejamoji galimų filosofijos ir įvairių menų sankabos jungtis. Ritmas Deleuze’o ir Guattari tekstuose tampa filosofine sąvoka ir įgauna ontologinį statusą, transcenduojantį siauras filosofijos (...) ir meno apibrėžtis. Ji funkcionuoja tarpinėje teritorijoje: tarp minties, garso, žodžio ir vaizdo, meno kūrinio, filosofijos, gyvenimo. Būtent žvelgiant iš tokios ontologinės perspektyvos, ši sąvoka įgauna galią atverti ne horizontaliuosius, o vertikaliuosius, genealoginius meno kaip tapsmo aspektus. (shrink)

This paper presents the first results of an ongoing semiotic research over TV series targeted to early childhood in Italy. In particular, it focuses on discussing and explaining the great success of the animated series Peppa Pig aired in Italy on the thematic channel Rai YoYo, by comparing it with other series available in the same channel, in the period of its first launch. Most of the programs taken into account refers to animals with the purpose of using them as (...) a mean to speak about manhood, in a simplified and appealing way. Nothing new. Fairy tales have always been filled with animals to mean vices and virtues of the humans. Aim of the paper is to reveal the complexity of such reference to animals in Peppa Pig’s stories. This goal will be achieved by comparing it to another series which references to pigs aired simultaneously in the same Italian network. Moreover, this paper will consider other animals embodying the bouquet of meaning proposals offered by Rai YoYo: a dog and some shapeless creatures known as Barbapapas. As a conclusion of such enquire a synthetic model which positions each of the series analyzed will be presented. (shrink)

This article discusses the conceptualisation, organisation and philosophical orientation of academic history culture in UK higher education. It problematises the extent to which a dominant history culture in UK universities implies and uncritically reproduces normative understandings about the subject; about its epistemological standing, sociopolitical functions, and the presumed cultural value of the discipline practices that students learn to perform. We suggest that current conceptions of history degree curricula are overly thin and organised around a dominant managerialist discourse of skills, personal (...) development and learning outcomes. In a historicised world, in which history-focused behaviour has a crucial, ideological, affirmatory role, and in which historical narratives have a privileged cognitive function, we argue that it is critical for university history students to be able to deconstruct the processes by which history legitimises itself, and reinforces matrices of power in our societies. The positioning of history in higher education as a form of technocratic managerialism closes down spaces in which students can explore the potential of historical practices as a means of engaging with issues of current sociopolitical and ethical concern. We ask in this article, is this what we want an academic history culture to do? (shrink)