In this essay I bring Gregory Bateson together with Deleuze and Guattari (primarily with the latter) to show their ecological compatibility, especially with Guattari’s ecosophy. I do this against the backdrop of the Anthropocene which presents us not only with a ‘climate’ of post-truth and political corruption, but also with the so-called climate crisis. In the context of these two broad examinations, I ask what can an artisan-artist-designer do given this problematic context? My reply is to call on ‘speculative design’ (...) by an ‘avant-garde without authority’ to expose the symptoms of the Anthropocene era. (shrink)

This essay explores Badiou's writings on art and inaesthetics. It reviews his notion of the artistic event, comments on his 15 theses on contemporary art and examines his notion of inaesthetics. What follows is then applied to art and its education in terms of his search for a ‘third position’ that would challenge the extremes of capitalist design innovation and Romantic idealism that in his summation define the contemporary landscape.

Tapping into the politics and rhythms of surfing, this paper embodies a “set” of waves that seeks to erode the sedimentation of Hawaii's modern political orders. By foregrounding a more fluvial and dynamic sense of the political, this paper treats surfing not only as a heterotopic site of agency, but also as an opening for an “other” kind of politics.

This article provides an affirmative feminist reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson by reading it through the work of Karen Barad. Adopting such a diffractive reading strategy enables feminist philosophy to move beyond discarding Bergson for his apparent phallocentrism. Feminist philosophy finds itself double bound when it critiques a philosophy for being phallocentric, because the setup of a master narrative comes into being with the critique. By negating a gender-blind or sexist philosophy, feminist philosophy only reaffirms its parameters, and (...) setting up a master narrative costs feminist philosophy its feminism. I thus propose and practice a different methodological starting point, one that capitalizes on “diffraction.” This article experiments with the affirmative phase in feminist philosophy prophesied by Elizabeth Grosz, among others. Working along the lines of the diffractive method, the article at the same time proposes a new reading of Bergson (as well as of Barad), a new, different metaphysics indeed, which can be specified as onto-epistemological or “new materialist.”. (shrink)

Deleuze's Logique de la sensation is not a canonical art historical interpretation of Francis Bacon's painting and even less an illustration of Deleuze's philosophy. It is better read as a prolegomena to a semiotics of plastic art in which the visual image is related to the dialectics of touch and vision. These issues feature strongly in the art theories of Aloïïs Riegl, Wilhelm Worringer and Heinrich Wöölfflin. This article presents a comparative approach to the relation between Deleuze's and these writers’’ (...) conception of the image and attempts to answer the following questions: does a painting appeal strictly to the sense of vision? Does its structure point to a virtual haptic function of vision and if so, does painting overturn the stable hierarchy of senses with vision at the top? Is there a gradual relation between touch and vision? Reading Deleuze reading Riegl, Worringer and Wöölfflin offers an occasion to reconsider the image as a tensive surface grasped with a touching eye and seeing hand. (shrink)

Intersecting authority-language-and-symbolic power, this article tells the story of a group of continental Francophone African youth who find themselves in an urban French-language high school in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Through their narrative, one is confronted by the trauma of one's own language being declared an illegitimate child, hence becoming a ‘deceptive fluency’ in the ‘eyes of power’ thanks to race and post-coloniality. They are fully consciousness of this situation and their ‘linguistic return’, thus gazing back at the eyes of power (...) and declaring themselves ‘subjects’ capable of love and desire. I briefly address questions of hospitality and language ownership and conclude by addressing the need to re-think the connection between race, power and language. (shrink)

Deleuze's references to Woolf's work, and his work on Bergson, allow for a more far-reaching as well as more nuanced and diverse account of her correspondences with Bergson than have been noted. Her early collection of stories, Monday or Tuesday, reveals a powerful, many-sided metaphysical and aesthetic inspiration that bears out in detailed, various and fundamental ways what can be called the Deleuzian or Bergsonian aspects of Woolf's creativity and style at this crucial phase of her development as a writer.

In this paper I argue that the idea ‘becoming-woman’ is an attempt to transform embodied experience but, because it is unable to concern itself with mechanisms, structures and processes of sexual differentiation, fails in this task. In the first section I elaborate the relationship between becoming-woman and Deleuze's ‘superior’ or ‘transcendental’ empiricism and suggest that problems can be traced back to an underlying Humean empiricism. Along with Hume, Deleuze, it seems, presumes a bundle model of the object which dissolves things (...) into episodic objects of perception and leaves the subject unable to distinguish between fanciful objects, erroneous perception and any other thing. The empiricist ontology thus has consequences for epistemology and leaves us unable to question the conservative tendencies of common sense. As an alternative to transcendental empiricism, the second section considers how transcendental realism, with its ontological commitment to the mind-independent character of things, may provide a more fruitful and productive line of enquiry. Given that there is such a choice, in the third section I speculate as to the specific desires that drive such philosophical abstraction; abstraction which culminates in the non sex-specific figure becoming-woman whilst disguising the mind-independent character of the mechanisms, structures and objects that affect the subject. So I conclude that, despite all appearances of radicalism, the philosophical model ‘becoming-woman’ – aligned as it is with schizo-processes and the philosophical loss of mind-independent things – is more of the same and sexual difference remains a hidden term. Due to this, I believe that feminists should view it with suspicion. (shrink)

Producing a properly philosophical theory of capitalism as an open axiomatic system requires adding intensive multiplicities to the mathematical account of set theory, which allows only extensive multiplicities. Doing so enables us to understand pricing as a process of transforming intensive quantities into metric quantities, and thereby develop a diagram of the dynamics of axiomatisation and of the market as the two-sided and asymmetrical recording surface of the capitalist socius whose slope represents the infinite debt owed to finance capital. The (...) capitalist market axiomatises four kinds of flows – flows of liquid capital and abstract labour, of course, but also flows of raw materials and energy and of human populations. At the same time that axiomatisation conjugates these flows in denumerable sets to extract surplus-value, it connects flows in minor, non-denumerable sets that escape axiomatisation and may become revolutionary. Such minor connections would constitute the fabric of a post-capitalist axiomatics. (shrink)

Antony Gormley's Another Place and Olafur Eliasson's Your watercolour machine exemplify passages and combinations of smooth and striated space as beings of sensation on planes of technical and aesthetic composition. They are frames which striate the smoothness of light, water, molten iron, etc., using scientific planes of reference. Smooth and striated mix as boundaries between visitors’ bodies and installation become permeable. Optic becomes tactile, becomes haptic, generative engagement. Both artists experiment with the interface between striated and smooth to encourage visitors (...) to experiment and experience sensation. The installations are liquid spaces; forms of perpetual non-permanence which affect and react with others’ behaviours in processes of co-emergence. (shrink)

Shuzo Kuki is a Japanese philosopher, belonging to the Kyoto school, who lived about a hundred years ago. He learned philosophy in Europe and developed an original theory of contingency, by accommodating the Asiatic way of thinking on the one hand, and Western philosophy on the other. In this article, I show that we can find similarities between his theory of contingency and the philosophy of Deleuze, especially in regard to the subject of temporality and eternal return. Needless to say, (...) the theory of the third time is a crucial theme in Difference and Repetition, and is closely related to the time of eternity, and the original or primitive contingency. Taking into consideration these aspects of time is indispensable in examining in depth the concepts of difference and virtuality. Kuki's theory of contingency, which incorporates early twentieth-century European philosophy, elucidates these concepts in an unexpected way. Therefore, my aim in this article is not to attempt a comparison between Eastern and Western thought by quoting Deleuze, but to illustrate a hidden lineage of thought, which runs from the nineteenth century into the philosophy of virtuality of the twentieth century. This same lineage appears in Japan in Kuki's theory, and Deleuze's thought is, at least in one aspect, a modern manifestation of the same roots. (shrink)

Metamorphosis is a sudden change, a ‘becoming-other’ in life or in philosophical perspective. A revelatory event initiates in a double manner the move from Heidegger's futile search for a transcendental IT that delivers perceptible beings to the confident positing of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, suffused with the IF of incorporeal sense. In the process Deleuze dramatically enacts his personal connection between sense (Sinn) and being (Sein).

In this paper, I seek to extract what I call an empiricist mode of existence through a combined reading of two under-researched vectors of Gilles Deleuze's thought: his ‘transcendental empiricism’ and his ‘affirmative naturalism’. This empiricist mode of existence co-positions Deleuze's empiricism and naturalism as pertaining to a stylistics of life which is ontologically experimentalist, epistemologically open, and immanently engaged in the world. That is, a processual praxis of demystification and organising encounters towards joy.

The mind-body problem in philosophy is typically understood as a discourse concerning the relation of mental states to physical states, and the experience of sensation. On this level it seems to transcend issues of race and racism, but Another Mind-Body Problem demonstrates that racial distinctions have been an integral part of the discourse since the Modern period in philosophy. Reading figures such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant in their historical contexts, John Harfouch uncovers discussions of mind and body that engaged (...) closely with philosophical and scientific notions of race in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, in particular in understanding how the mind unites with the body at birth and is then passed on through sexual reproduction. Kant argued that a person’s exterior body and interior psyche are bound together, that non-White people lacked reason, and that this lack of reason was carried on through reproduction such that non-Whites were an example of a union of mind and body without full being. Charting the development of this phenomenon from sixteenth-century medical literature to modern-day race discourse, Harfouch argues for new understandings of Descartes’s mind-body problem, Fanon’s experience of being ‘not-yet human,’ and the place of racism in relation to one of philosophy’s most enduring and canonical problems. -/- “Harfouch has written an important book on the intersection of race and the Western construction of the mind-body problem … This book is a significant resource for theorists dealing with race and decolonization issues, but it is more significant for the critique of philosophy itself and the continued teaching of mind-body issues. Readers will need some knowledge of philosophy, but the volume is in general accessible. It should be required reading for scholars of philosophy. Harfouch establishes a logically strong argument and makes a unique contribution to the field.” — CHOICE. (shrink)

While Deleuze and Guattari's passion for certain literature is well known, the nature of a ‘Deleuzian’ literary criticism remains an open question. However, most critics appear to agree that Deleuze and Guattari's comments on meaning and interpretation offer an ontological alternative to the textual focus of deconstruction. Through an interrogation of the difficult style of their books in relation to Plato, Nietzsche and Derrida, this paper offers a different reading of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to literary criticism. Despite appearances, (...) transcendental empiricism and the project of ‘overturning Platonism’ provide a Deleuzian theory of reading that attends to textuality. (shrink)

Baumgarten's Enlightenment Aesthetica provides an important philosophical analogon to Deleuze's alignment of the ‘logic of sense’ and the ‘logic of sensation’. By linking serious reason with its ‘other’, frivolous feeling, the book greatly influenced Herder and the Romantic movement. Baumgarten called aesthetics ‘logic's younger sister’. Like Deleuze he propagates nothing less than the ‘becoming-girl’ of philosophy.

J. L. Austin's claim that language ‘used not seriously’ is ‘parasitic’ upon ‘normal use’ has proved a puzzle to literary scholars, who have often taken this to mean that they are not allowed to apply the insights of speech-act theory to their own object of research. This article explores how, when read together, Michel Serres’ definition of the parasite as a ‘thermal exciter’ and Deleuze's concept of ‘minor literature’ bring out the hidden potential inherent in Austin's claim. More specifically, the (...) article argues that Austin's reference to literature as a parasitic entity might become a promising conceptual gift, allowing us to generate a new model for approaching the world-shaping potential of literary texts. (shrink)

The overall question addressed in this article is,‘What kind of philosophy of education is relevant to educational policy makers?’ The article focuses on the following four themes: The meanings attached to the term philosophy by philosophers themselves; the meanings attached to the term philosophy by policy makers; the difference place and time makes to these meanings; how these different meanings affect the possibility of philosophy influencing policy.The question is addressed using philosophical methods and empirical evidence from conversations and conversational interviews (...) with some philosophers of education and other educational researchers.The argument begins with an investigation of different ways of understanding philosophy and philosophy of education in relation to education and educational policy. It then examines first the current policy context and secondly some evidence about the practices of policy makers in relation to ideas and to research. It goes on to present some of the findings from the conversational evidence.The article is drawn together in the penultimate section where I make some suggestions about possible fruitful relationships between doing philosophy and policy making. Finally, in the concluding section, some further—thorny—questions are raised by the analysis, especially in relationship to ethics and social justice. (shrink)

I consider if and how far it is possible to live an educational philosophical life, in the fast-changing, globalised world of Higher Education. I begin with Socrates’ account of a philosophical life in the Apology. I examine some tensions within different conceptions of what it is to do philosophy. I then go on to focus more closely on what it might be to live a philosophical, educational life in which educational processes and outcomes are influenced by philosophy, using examples taken (...) from published sources and from conversational interviews with philosophers carried out by myself with Kenneth Wain, Bas Levering and Richard Pring. I then outline the directions of current European policy for Higher Education. Finally I discuss how far current policies and trends leave room for doing philosophy of education, concluding that it is possible, but only for individuals who are very much in sympathy with current policy trends or who are creative in constructing smoke screens. (shrink)

A historically feminized profession, education in North America remains remarkably unaffected by feminism, with the notable exception of pedagogy and its impact on curriculum. The purpose of this paper is to describe characteristics of feminism that render it particularly useful and appropriate for developing potentialities in education and music education. As a set of flexible methodological tools informed by Gilles Deleuze's notions of philosophy and art, I argue feminism may contribute to education's becoming more efficacious, reflexive, and reflective of the (...) values of its participants. Its impetus involves ‘feminist imperative(s)’ to help in the sense articulated by Elizabeth Grosz: to provoke thought, challenge, and problematize. (shrink)

This excerpt from our collective biography emerges from a dialogue that commenced when Noel interjected the concept of ‘becoming-cyborg’ into our conversations about Annette’s experiences of breast cancer, which initially prompted her to interpret her experiences as a ‘chaos narrative’ of cyborgian and environmental embodiment in education contexts. The materialisation of Donna Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg in Annette’s changing body enabled new appreciations of its interpretive power, and functioned in some ways as a successor project to Noel’s earlier deployment (...) of cyborgs in what he now recognises as a ‘posthumanising’ of curriculum inquiry. Noel’s subsequent experiences with throat cancer drew us towards exploring the possibilities that concepts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic assemblage and Karen Barad’s ontoepistemology offer as a mean of thinking the meetings of bodies and technologies in educational inquiry beyond Haraway’s hybrid cyborg. Through both collective biography and playfully scripted conversations with other theorists we explore what it means to perform diffractive interpretations and analyses in posthumanist educational inquiry. Our essay also contributes to contemporary conversations about the uses of collaborative biographical writing as a method of inquiry in educational research. (shrink)

American outlier writer William S. Burroughs was a creative force – an homme de lettres in his own right, yes, but as a cultural theorist as well, particularly his anticipation of what we now regularly call ‘a society of control’ or ‘a surveillance culture’, and, moreover, as a textual embodiment as well. That is, Burroughs was as much a media theorist and performance artist as he was a traditional literary figure, what we generally call a writer, or novelist, although he (...) lauded those latter categories. Through such multimodality he offered critiques of a ‘control society’ and of ‘thought control’ by a media that strips us of volition. In his lectures on Michel Foucault delivered at the Université de Paris VIII in the 1980s, Gilles Deleuze detailed Burroughs's influence on both philosophers with his critique of our ‘control societies’, a term they adopted from him. These critiques of what Burroughs calls ‘thought control’ were and currently remain inseparable from his emergence as a performance artist, such embodiment of his art readily available amid our own image-obsessed electronic revolution. That is, the products of this period are currently being recirculated through commercial media outlets and through multiple open access formats to suggest – to confirm – that the artist whom many another ‘outsider’ has called ‘the Priest’ and who saw himself as a ‘cosmonaut of inner space’ and ‘a technician of consciousness’, this dystopic modernist author, visionary science fiction writer, and aesthetic weapons maker was one of the major media artists, social critics, cultural theorists and literary figures not only of his but of our ‘postpersonal’ time. Michel Foucault closes The Order of Things by imagining a time when ‘man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’. The closing image was crafted some fifteen years before Foucault met Burroughs in New York in 1975, but in the 1960s Burroughs, too, was already imagining and theorising the disappearing author and a post-human, media-dominated world. Such lines of thought suggest parallel trajectories that Deleuze will see as bridging philosopher and artist if not philosophy and art. (shrink)

This article draws upon work by Gilles Deleuze, Sanford Meisner, and William Connolly to argue that the practice of acting helps citizens to encounter unsettling circumstances in daily life; respond to and connect with others in more open, interactive ways; and expand the relatively stable repertoire of selves each person cultivates through life. Considering scenes from the films of Anna Magnani, Ronald Reagan, and Joan Crawford, I argue that acting spaces can be sites where an exploration and decentring of subjectivity (...) can proceed and new modes of democratic interaction and togetherness can be enacted. (shrink)

Engaging with the account of pathic subjectivation developed by Félix Guattari, this article explores the ways in which his thinking about the production of subjectivity takes up and transforms the concept of the pathic dimension of experience that emerges from the rich tradition of existential-phenomenological psychiatry and the thematisation of contact it entails. Explicitly foregrounding the link made within that tradition between aesthetics and existence, this article considers the origins of Guattari’s conception of pathic subjectivation in his work on Proust, (...) the experimental understanding of the semiotic transformations of sensory experience it entails and the practical role it plays in catalysing the creative emergence of new modes of existence. (shrink)

Review essay of Peter Hallward's Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation.

Guattari looked for crossovers between film and television in a posthumously published ‘Project for a Film By Kafka’. His critical comments on television and the mixed reception of television within the Deleuzo-Guattarian literature provide the occasion for an investigation of what Guattari thought television could do for his project. The auteur model best suits his needs in this regard, with the proviso that it is animated by a modernist aesthetic oriented towards the conjuring of a people to come who would (...) join the Kafka assemblage as part of their viewing experience. (shrink)

In this article I investigate the necessarily interdisciplinary nature of our contemporaneity, from the perspective of works by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour and Michel Serres. While we often find that academia, society and governments push us towards interdisciplinarity, it is also true that those same institutions and powers, distance us from that purpose. Opposing this aporetic situation we come up against the Deleuzian concept of ‘contamination’, or the well-known ‘science of Venus’ concept of Michel Serres. In doing so, (...) we attempt ‘to put the tracing back on the map’, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, and try to see the epistemological becomings that we find in contemporary culture. The main indicators which we use to study these contaminations and hybridisations are cinema and Bio Art. In both cases we observe that the real creative production is closer to ‘contamination’ than to the ‘purification’ and deletion of metabolic and hybrid processes criticised by Bruno Latour. (shrink)

Challenging the formalist critical legacy of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, this essay advocates an alternative philosophical lineage for Modernist painting through a specific focus on Barnett Newman's vertical stripe or ‘zip’. This genealogy is rooted in Newman's own self-confessed interest in painting as a disclosure of the sensation of time and Deleuze's overt break with Kant. In light of the latter, the zip takes on the function of Deleuze's Figure: the material support that generates, sustains and also disperses a (...) precise sensation. (shrink)

Film, Samuel Beckett's 1964 short starring Buster Keaton, dubbed by Deleuze as ‘The Greatest Irish Film’, is a seminal text in the latter's cinematic canon as it helps us to extrapolate the transition from the Bergson-based movement-image of Cinema 1 to the Nietzschean time-image of Cinema 2. Film is unique insofar as its narrative traverses and progressively destroys the action-, perception- and affection-images that constitute the movement-image as a whole, using Keaton's body, and more importantly his face, as a means (...) of attaining a pure intensity or Entity abstracted from all spatio-temporal coordinates, a condition of exhaustion/saturation that Deleuze and Guattari call, ‘non-human becoming’. Beckett's film is predicated on Bishop Berkeley's fundamental philosophical principle, esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) and, using Keaton as its protagonist, raises the question of whether it is possible to escape perception, not only by a third party, but also by oneself. The latter is ‘played’ by the camera itself, which ‘stalks’ Keaton from behind, taking great pains not to exceed a 45-degree ‘angle of immunity’ (lest Buster experience percipi or the anguish of perceivedness) until the film's final close-up when he comes face to face with his own self-perception and affective annihilation. Film's denouement thus deconstructs the very nature of conventional cinematic language, whereby filmic suture – the enfolding of character, camera and spectatorial ‘viewing-views’ into a unified field of vision – gives way to a perspective where, at the very moment that the perceptive/affective body dies, the work of filmic art gives birth to itself as a being of pure sensation, exceeding lived experience. (shrink)

Could it be that Deleuze's most lasting legacy will lie in his ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, a mere 2,300-word essay from 1990? While he discussed computers and new media infrequently, Deleuze admittedly made contributions to the contemporary discourse on computing, cybernetics and networks, particularly in his late work. From the concepts of the rhizome and the virtual, to his occasional interjections on the digital versus the analogue, there is a case to be made that the late Deleuze has not only (...) influenced today's discourse on new media but also proposes an original set of arguments about society and politics at the turn of the new millennium. Focusing on the ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ and a handful of texts that surround it, we will reconstruct an image of what it means to live in the information age. This will have consequences for how we define the digital and the analogue, what the computer means, and ultimately provide some insight into one of the more elusive terms in all of Deleuze, the superfold. (shrink)

The aim of my article is to relate Roberto Esposito’s reflections on Europe to his more recent proposal of instituent thought. I will try to do so by focusing on three theoretical cornerstones of Esposito’s thought: the first concerns the evidence of a link between Europe, philosophy and politics. The second is deconstructive: it highlights the inadequacy of the answers of the most important contemporary ontological-political paradigms to the European crisis, as well as the impossibility of interpreting this crisis through (...) theoretical-political categories such as sovereignty. The third relates more directly to the proposal of a new political ontology, which Esposito defines as instituent thought. Esposito’s discussion of political theology is the central theoretical nucleus of this study. This discussion will focus, in particular, on the category of negation, from which any political ontology that is based on pure affirmativeness or absolute negation is criticized. In his opinion, philosophical theories developed on the basis of these assumptions have proved to be incomplete or ineffective in relation to the current European and global philosophical and political crisis. Esposito therefore perceives the urgent need to propose a line of thought that is neither negatively destituent, nor affirmatively constituent, but instituent, capable of thinking about order through conflict. Provided that we do not think of the institution statically–in a conservative sense–but dynamically, as constant instituting in which conflict can become an instrument of a politics increasingly inspired by justice. (shrink)

:It is now well over a decade since the artist Matthew Barney's epic work the Cremaster Cycle was completed. This essay returns to the post-human becomings of man that populate Barney's elaborately cross-referenced, aesthetic pluriverse, in particular addressing how the man-form labours amidst and on his environment-worlds, inclusive of the architectural augmentations that assist in the production of such worlds. Revisiting Barney's Cremaster Cycle now offers the opportunity to ask what becomes of the exclusionary and exhaustive world-making performances of the (...) Anthrop once he has placed extreme stress on himself and his mental, social and environmental ecologies, so that any mutual support system is brought to the threshold of exhaustion. (shrink)

This article offers an account and defence of constructionism, both as a metaphilosophical approach and as a philosophical methodology, with references to the so-called maker's knowledge tradition. Its main thesis is that Plato's “user's knowledge” tradition should be complemented, if not replaced, by a constructionist approach to philosophical problems in general and to knowledge in particular. Epistemic agents know something when they are able to build (reproduce, simulate, model, construct, etc.) that something and plug the obtained information into the correct (...) network of relations that account for it. Their epistemic expertise increases with the scope and depth of the questions that they are able to ask and answer. Thus, constructionism deprioritises mimetic, passive, and declarative knowledge that something is the case, in favour of poietic, interactive, and practical knowledge of something being the case. Metaphilosophically, constructionism suggests adding conceptual engineering to conceptual analysis as a fundamental method. (shrink)

Event of Signature formulates a new philosophical problem which focuses on the handwritten signature as sign of legal identification. Author Michaela Fišerová works with three metaphysical expectations, which are shared in discourses of graphology and forensic analysis. The first expectation tends to reveal the signer's soul: a handwritten signature "naturally" mirrors the unique psychological qualities of the signer. The second expectation tends to guarantee the originality of the signer's trace: a handwritten signature proves physical contact between the signed document and (...) the writing tool "authentically" moved by the signer's hand. The third expectation tends to recognize the signer's legal identity: a handwritten signature is expected to reproduce the signer's personal style, which enables identification by legal authorities. In a methodologically inventive and semiotically-based dialogue with Derrida's deconstruction, Fišerová situates this triple expectation in the interval between life and law. Challenging coverage of this topic finally shows that none of the metaphysical expectations will ever be fulfilled in the event of manual signing. Legal uses of handwritten signature are characterized by the complex aporia of repeating the unrepeatable. (shrink)

Can the brain become mind? If the question seems strange, aberrant even, it is perhaps due to the way the problem brain–mind is commonly presented, where what's repeatedly asked is whether the brain is or isn’t ‘mind’. Yet, if we take Deleuze and Guattari's provocation seriously, in the Conclusion of What is Philosophy?, the problem is radically recast: even if speculatively, that is, properly philosophically or conceptually, the brain, for them, involves its own becoming, both in terms of its ‘becoming-subject’ (...) and ‘becoming-mind’, as ‘Thought-brain’. I will explore references within Deleuze's philosophy in relation to the brain, namely in The Logic of Sense and his work on cinema, as I try to work out what this fantastic story (with necropolitical undertones) may in fact look like, the one where the brain not simply is but becomes, and in becoming, becomes mind…. (shrink)

The popularity of Deleuze and Guattari is an undeniable precedent in current theoretical exchanges, and it could be stated without much contention that one's theoretical positioning must at some point deal with the salient conceptual offerings of Deleuze and Guattari, especially their double-opus, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus wherein a wealth of critique abounds. However, the significant trends concerning Deleuze and Guattari ‘scholarship’ may be jeopardised by the use of certain conceptual themes and methods in their work that are distorted (...) and employed by big business looking to secure their legacies of power by means of a control mechanism that looks to subjugate an entire world by means of ‘globalitarianism’. Our aim here will be to use McDonald's Corporation as an example of how the theoretical offerings of Deleuze and Guattari have been indirectly and hastily deployed for corporate ends, how these attempts are counter-Deleuzian, and to answer at least one of Žižek's criticisms against Deleuze. (shrink)

The principal concern of this paper is to track the first wave of criticism directed against Deleuze's relation to Hegelianism as it has appeared in the English-speaking world. To this end, we assess the criticisms offered by Stephen Houlgate, Judith Butler, and Catherine Malabou, each of whom, in their respective ways, accuse Deleuze of misreading Hegel, claiming that his rejection of Hegelianism merely reinforces a secret or unacknowledged Hegelianism inherent in his own critique. Despite the brisk treatment Houlgate grants Deleuze, (...) his charges are by far the most serious, and hence it is to these that much of the discussion is dedicated; but the aim is to show how each of these claims concerning Deleuze's misreading of Hegel themselves involve a misreading of Deleuze. (shrink)

In an attempt to reaffirm Deleuze's Nietzschean affinities, this article argues that it is possible to detect in his thought an alternative concept of the political which gives ontological priority to difference. In order to map this out, a Deleuzian reading of the Zapatista experience will be provided, with particular attention given to the manner in which power is re-conceptualised, resistance strategised, subjectivities recast, and political solidarities formed anew. Once this has been established, the paper will argue that not only (...) does Deleuze provide us with a meaningful basis for political action, he offers us possibilities for creating new forms of political solidarity that no longer take Hegelian inspired dialectical enmity or dangerous Kantian unfulfilment as their point of theoretical departure. (shrink)

The cosmology of Deleuze and Guattari emphasises the new. I raise the question of whether this emphasis cancels out two other political virtues, solidarity and heterogeneity, and thereby amounts to a fascism of the new. I reply that what Deleuze and Guattari say about cosmological unity and difference suggests that they can avoid this negative designation. I support this conclusion by considering their statements on ethics and politics and by translating their cosmological philosophy into the more immediate ethico-political context of (...) the alloplastic stratum. The latter effort is abetted by elaborating the two thinkers’ use of the term ‘voice’, for example, in Deleuze's statement that Being is the ‘single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple … a single clamour of Being for all beings’ or in the two authors’ notion of a ‘constellation of voices’ that makes up the ‘molecular’ or ‘unconscious’ collective assemblage of enunciation. This elaboration is pertinent because political ethics is essentially which voices are heard, and which not, or at least their relative levels of audibility in the alloplastic regime. I further clarify this treatment of Deleuze and Guattari's political ethics by linking it to the idea of parrhesia, courageous speech and hearing. (shrink)

This paper pursues two goals. The first concerns clarifying the relationship between Deleuze and the Russian linguist and culturologist, Mikhail Bakhtin. Not only does Deleuze refer to Bakhtin as a primary source for his emphasis on voice and indirect discourse, both thinkers valorise heterogeneity and creativity. I argue Deleuze's notions of ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘reterritorialisation’ parallel Bakhtin's idea of ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘monoglossia’. Clarifying the relationship between Deleuze and Bakhtin leads directly to the second of my two other goals. I will argue (...) that an important difference in their characterisation of voice reveals a strong point in Deleuze's philosophy, one related to the political sphere. At the same time, however, Deleuze's particular way of articulating this point conceals a weakness, one related to the idea of the subject. I will conclude my paper by suggesting a way to address this weakness. (shrink)

Transversality occupies a central place in Guattari's thought, appearing in his early writings on institutional analysis and on through to his final work, Chaosmosis. Transversality is thus particularly pertinent to understanding Guattari's critique of semiocapitalism and his goal of re-imagining forms of institutional subjectivisation as a way to free the unconscious from structures of lack and the desire for punishment, the very structures upon which capitalism relies for its reproduction. If there is one institution that has taken advantage of semiocapitalism's (...) ability to mask its role in the reproduction of capitalist subjectivity, however, it is the contemporary neoliberal University. This essay thus brings transversality to bear upon the question of the University in semiocapitalism, focusing on the discourses that speak in defence of the humanities. Though defences of the humanities are intended to argue for the humanities’ usefulness in contemporary society, transversality exposes such discourses as the speech of a ‘subjugated group’ whose only effect is to reinforce existing structures of lack and punishment. (shrink)

The role of mathematics in the development of Gilles Deleuze's (1925-95) philosophy of difference as an alternative to the dialectical philosophy determined by the Hegelian dialectic logic is demonstrated in this paper by differentiating Deleuze's interpretation of the problem of the infinitesimal in Difference and Repetition from that which G. W. F Hegel (1770-1831) presents in the Science of Logic . Each deploys the operation of integration as conceived at different stages in the development of the infinitesimal calculus in his (...) treatment of the problem of the infinitesimal. Against the role that Hegel assigns to integration as the inverse transformation of differentiation in the development of his dialectical logic, Deleuze strategically redeploys Leibniz's account of integration as a method of summation in the form of a series in the development of his philosophy of difference. By demonstrating the relation between the differential point of view of the Leibnizian infinitesimal calculus and the differential calculus of contemporary mathematics, I argue that Deleuze effectively bypasses the methods of the differential calculus which Hegel uses to support the development of the dialectical logic, and by doing so, sets up the critical perspective from which to construct an alternative logic of relations characteristic of a philosophy of difference. The mode of operation of this logic is then demonstrated by drawing upon the mathematical philosophy of Albert Lautman (1908-44), which plays a significant role in Deleuze's project of constructing a philosophy of difference. Indeed, the logic of relations that Deleuze constructs is dialectical in the Lautmanian sense. (shrink)

From a position informed by the philosophical legacy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this paper examines the idea of ‘care’ in nursing theory and philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari make a distinction between, on the one hand, ‘concepts’, which are the proper domain of philosophy and, on the other, ‘functives’ which are the domain of science and all other empirical matters. At first blush, this distinction and use of the word concept appears rather odd, but Deleuze and Guattari hold it (...) to be important for reasons that go beyond the acknowledged and obvious differences between philosophy and science. In Deleuzian terms, a ‘functive’ is any proposition that makes a verifiable truth-claim about actual states of affairs, whereas a ‘concept’ is a philosophical tool that, although it is used in statements that make claims and that seek to affect our thinking on states of affairs, is not a representation of them in any verifiable (functive) sense. In this respect, philosophical concepts, and the statements in which they are used, are neither true nor false. I argue that the way in which the word ‘care’ is used in much nursing theory and philosophy conflates concept (neither true nor false) with functive (either true or false) with less than productive results. I seek to persuade that if we can gain more clarity between the use of care as a would-be functive and its use as a philosophical concept, this would strengthen the purpose of the use of the idea of care in nursing theory. This is to say that I take the view that the role of ‘care’ as a philosophical concept is to be used in statements that ‘think the event’ called nursing; that seek to be ‘worthy of the event’, but without being an actual part of the event. Finally, I show how the concept of care in nursing philosophy has been, and can continue to be, reworked to achieve the permanent task of surveying the ever-shifting planes of the event and how it is described. (shrink)

This article discusses the way in which a group of contemporary cultural theorists in whose work we see a “new materialism” (a term coined by Braidotti and DeLanda) at work constitutes a philosophy of difference by traversing the dualisms that form the backbone of modernist thought. Continuing the ideas of Lyotard and Deleuze they have set themselves to a rewriting of all possible forms of emancipation that are to be found. This rewriting exercise involves a movement in thought that, in (...) the words of Bergson, can be termed “pushing dualism to an extreme.” By this movement, Deleuze has stated, “difference is pushed to the limit,” that is, using Colebrook’s words, “difference is shown differing.” The article addresses the ways in which modernity’s dualisms (structured by a negative relation between terms) are traversed, and how a new conceptualization, and ontology , of difference (structured by an affirmative relation) comes to be constituted along the way. New materialism leaves behind all prioritizations (implicitly) involved in modern dualist thinking since a difference structured by affirmation does not work with predetermined relations (e.g., between mind and body) nor does it involve a (counter-)hierarchy between terms. The article makes explicit the methodology of the current-day rise of non-dualist thought, both in terms of its non-classificatory mode of (Deleuzian) thinking and in terms of the theory of the time of thought thus effectuated (Lyotard’s notion of ‘rewriting modernity’ is not a post-modernism). Throughout the article we will engage with an example in order to demonstrate the ontology that is being practiced following this methodology: How does a new (feminist) materialism traverse the sexual dualisms that structure modernist (feminist) thinking? This example also shows how a feminist post-modernism (found in the canonical work of Butler) has remained dualist, and what makes new materialism “new.” Freed from a dualist methodology, the modernist emancipatory project comes to full fruition in new materialism. (shrink)