Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism” and the “empirical side” of Whitehead’s metaphysics are paradoxical unless placed in the context of their unorthodox readings of empiricism. I explore this context focusing on their engagements with Hume. Both subvert presumptions of a categorical gap between external nature and internal human experience and open possibilities for a speculative empiricism that is non-reductive while still affirming experience as source for philosophical thinking. Deleuze and Whitehead follow Hume in beginning with events of sensation as primary but do (...) not presume the logic of (human) subjects and objects (of nature) as necessary structuring polarities for their interpretation. This challenges a basic distinction (between inner and outer or between self and world) that seems inherent in the ordinary concept of experience, thus earning the moniker speculative. The speculative empiricist studies how these abstractions arise from events of experience prior to their consolidation in representation. This includes a critical component: to what extent do unexamined assumptions about conceptual abstraction hinder, block, or prefigure experiential attention? This critical component has existential implications for how we attend to the affective, intuitive, and preconceptual. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Horwich's metaphilosophical interpretation of Wittgenstein. Specifically, it focuses on Horwich's charge that all philosophy is irrational. First, I coordinate the various aspects of Horwich's metaphilosophical program to make sense of his charge of irrationality against philosophy. Second, I argue that this metaphilosophical program misfires in two distinct ways. However, third, I close by calling attention to what I posit to be a critical insight of Horwich's account.

This article reads a selection of films by Todd Haynes - Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), Velvet Goldmine (1998) and I'm Not There (2007) - through the post-structuralist lens of Deleuzian theorising about the self as a networked singularity rather than an essential subject. The overall aim of the piece is to consider Haynes' films as artefacts that require the participatory audience to be involved in their making. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of the schizo is addressed to (...) investigate how a schizo consciousness can be opened by the Event of viewing art that uses incommensurable extremes of meta-textual referentiality. Further to this productive opening, I examine how such post-structuralist ontology can necessitate ethical concern. I conclude that Todd Haynes' film-making is specifically schizoanalytical in that it opens instances wherein the non-essential non-subject can encounter the vertigo of falling away from representation. I contend that this experience and the post-structuralist world view conveyed through it, is radically ethical because it resists the annihilation of possibility that is inherent to essentialism. (shrink)

Following a trajectory of thinking from the philosophy of Spinoza via the work of Nietzsche and through Deleuze’s texts, this article explores the possibility of framing a contemporary pedagogical practice by an ontological order that does not presuppose the superiority of the mind over the body and that does not rely on universal morals but that considers instead, as its ontological point of departure, the actual bodies of children and pedagogues through what has come to be known as affective learning. (...) When considering the potentiality of a pure ontology, as outlined by Spinoza, I argue that Nietzsche’s critique of higher values and universal morals allows for a deeper understanding of the limitations of a traditional image of thought. Furthermore, I argue that Deleuze’s conception of the dogmatic image of thought can provide a helpful framework when connecting the work of the two aforementioned philosophers and when conceptualizing a possible image of thought based on the body as a singularity harboring flows of power, rather than one where the body is considered a necessary obstacle to be overcome in the quest for higher values that are situated always beyond the reach of the experiencing body.This philosophical discussion is then situated within the field of educational philosophy via the concept of affective learning which enables the incorporation of these ideas into a concrete educational setting. (shrink)

Using Deleuze and Guattari's concept of stratigraphy, it is possible to open the question of the limits and range of the Anthropocene. Geological stratification has enabled a view of time and the earth that has opened new horizons, but this mode of stratification is one among others. Other stratifications are possible, not only those that would be compossible with the story of the Anthropocene, but also incompossible stratifications, at odds with the history of man.

If the development of assemblage theory does not need to be anchored in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as increasingly seems to be the case in the social sciences, then cannot one say that the future of assemblage theory is an illusion? It is an illusion in the sense that it continues to act as though the concept was invented by Deleuze and Guattari, but because it does not feel obligated to draw on their work in its actual operation (...) or development, it cannot lay claim to being authentic. That this does not trouble certain scholars in the social sciences is troubling to me. So in this paper I offer first of all critique of this illusory synthetic version of the assemblage and accompany that with a short case study showing what can be gained by returning to Deleuze and Guattari. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the relation between problems and the formation and development of concepts in Bergson’s work, as well as in Bachelard, Canguilhem and Deleuze. Building on work by Elie During, I argue that it is not only Bergson but also Deleuze who shares with the French epistemological tradition an “anti-positivist” conception of concept formation, founded upon the posing and solving of novel problems as opposed to the acquisition and verification of empirical facts. Contrary to During, however, I argue (...) that it is not Bergson but Deleuze who furnishes us with an “anti-positivist” conception of problems that is adequate to this anti-positivist conception of concept formation. Deleuze’s anti-positivist view of problems holds, firstly, that genuine problems require the creation of novel terms in which to state and solve them. He shares this view with Bergson, Bachelard and Canguilhem. Secondly, however, Deleuze holds that a problem’s “truth” is not to be evaluated with reference to its eventual solutions, nor with reference to some privileged and contentful experience of reality, but is rather a matter of its purely intrinsic productivity. (shrink)

In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari attribute to Leibniz and Raymond Ruyer a vitalism of ‘a force that is but does not act’. This is a judicious characterisation of Leibniz's vitalism, but not Ruyer's. In The Fold, Deleuze presents Ruyer as a disciple of Leibniz, but if Leibniz's monads have no doors or windows, Ruyer's are nothing but doors and windows, nothing but liaisons actively forming themselves. For Ruyer, there is only one force, a consciousness-force, matter-form in sustained, non-localisable (...) self-formation. In Deleuze's reading of Leibniz's concept of the vinculum substantiale, Deleuze comes close to presenting a notion of force like that of Ruyer's, in that the vinculum inextricably interfolds monads and bodies, but ultimately the separation of the forces of monads from those of bodies prevails in a fashion incompatible with Ruyer's conception of force. Deleuze and Guattari make use of Ruyer's understanding of consciousness and the brain as the auto-overflight of an absolute surface in their concluding remarks on philosophy and the arts in What Is Philosophy?, but they depart from Ruyer in their characterisation of the relation of force to those two domains, ultimately because they reject Ruyer's advocacy of a universal, goal-directed finalism. (shrink)

Through an examination of the geological, political, cultural, industrial and aesthetic aspects of work by Nicholas Mangan and Therese Keogh, this article argues for a reading of these artworks in relation to histories that are both human and nonhuman. In the case of Mangan's various artworks, exploring the mining of phosphate on Nauru, the dynamic encounter activates both the long history and material core connecting colonial legacies to contemporary political events. Works by Keogh and Mangan perform a geo-dermatology, taking up (...) Deleuze's challenge for artists to be symptomologists in that they survey disfigurements, investigate lesions, analyse abrasions and their associated dynamics. In each case they draw on specific geological aspects of a region that connect its topography with historical and economic forces registered in subjective and social assemblages. These works connect multiple forces that make evident that the surface of the earth is not so much a limit as a membrane of exchanges. It is the capacity of this surface to register the passage of forces that these artworks call attention to, a confrontation of forces that the Anthropocene marks. (shrink)

Philosophers have thought more about the nature of thinking than about anything else. After Plato and Aristotle, philosophers’ main concern was to promote good, that is, correct, thinking. Because correct thinking was achieved best in propositional statements, thinking became a matter of logic, and logic became a discipline dealing with the formulation of true predicative sentences.In the twentieth century, many philosophers expressed their dissatisfaction with this view. Some, such as Heidegger, have pointed to the ontological presuppositions of a logic that (...) makes truth a matter of correspondence between predicative sentences and the reality of states of affairs. Other philosophers, such as Deleuze, have .. (shrink)

In this essay Deleuze's concept of intensity is placed into the context of the problem of accounting for the relationship between sense perception and our conceptual categories. By developing the manner in which Kant responds to Hume's critique of metaphysics, this essay shows how Deleuze develops a Humean line of thought whereby the heterogeneous as heterogeneous is embraced rather than, as is done in Kant, being largely held in relationship to an already prior unity.

The German painter Caspar David Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea, a picture that has played an important role in accounts of the prehistory of twentieth-century abstract art, is significant among other reasons because it bravely refused painting’s narrative vocation and in so doing radicalized the optics characteristic of the contemporary aesthetics of the sublime. Friedrich’s contemporary, the novelist and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist, intuited precisely this in his scintillating comments on the painting at the time it appeared. Invoking the (...) shocking idea that looking at The Monk by the Sea is like seeing through eyes whose lids have been cut off, he recognized that Friedrich had transformed the canvas into the locus not so much of narration and signification as of sensation. This article leans on the terms devised by Gilles Deleuze to explain the paintings of Francis Bacon in order to explore the seminal shift in the relationship between spectator and composition that Friedrich’s canvas dramatizes with such compelling power. (shrink)

In Bergsonism, Deleuze refers to Bergson's concept of an ‘open society’, which would be a ‘society of creators’ who gain access to the ‘open creative totality’ through acting and creating. Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy is oriented toward the goal of such an open society. This would be a democracy, but not in the sense of the rule of the actually existing people, but the rule of ‘the people to come,’ for in the actually existing situation, such a people is (...) ‘lacking’. When the people becomes a society of creators, the result is a society open to the future, creativity and the new. Their openness and creative freedom is the polar opposite of the conformism and ‘herd mentality’ condemned by Deleuze and Nietzsche, a mentality which is the basis of all narrow nationalisms. It is the freedom of creating and commanding, not the Kantian freedom to obey Reason and the State. This paper uses Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: For a Minor Literature, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? to sketch Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the open society and of a democracy that remains ‘to come’. (shrink)

This introductory essay argues that it is a mistake to represent Australian feminist philosophy as a kind of discourse theory that is “downstream” of the French post-structuralists or North American postmodernists. Starting with the local—and the specifically Australian modes of racial exclusion, in particular—and exploring some of the byways of philosophy, what we encounter is a range of ontological, ethical, and political models that allow a reconfiguration of self, community, and social change.

Commentators have claimed that the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze converge upon a spatial field of sensation which is prior to representation. This essay will contest these readings by showing that, for Deleuze, the pre-representational spatial field of intensity is fundamentally split from thought. This “gap” between sensation and thought is, for Deleuze, fundamentally temporal, in that thought is continually open and passive to being violated and transformed by the sensible and the sensible is continually being pushed beyond itself by (...) a certain kind of thought. This violent exchange across the gap between thought and sensibility is found, by Deleuze, in Kant's notion of the aesthetic idea. On the contrary, for Merleau-Ponty, Kant's aesthetics imply a non-conceptual “ground” shared by both thought and sensibility. By contrasting these two readings of Kant's aesthetics, this paper reveals the basic divergence between the philosophies of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

There exist two equally prominent, though seemingly divergent metaphilosophical viewpoints. One takes philosophy to be an essentially revolutionary process. The other sees philosophy as a constructive, collaborative enterprise that seeks increased rigor and consensus. Recent debate in the philosophy of language regarding the relationship of particular languages to the general capacity for language reveals an illuminating structural analogy with these divergent metaphilosophical trends. While neither debate is settled herein, regardless of their eventual determinations, it is concluded that there is little (...) reason to suppose that philosophy will some day become a science, at least not in any metaphilosophically meaningful sense of the phrase. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the on-going debate about self-redescription in the history of African philosophy using the method and theory of redescription. This method and theory of redescription has become the deep concern of not only Western philosophers but of many African philosophers which is markedly present in their agitated pursuits of wisdom. This self-redescription is always resiliently presented in the works of Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Appiah, Gyekye Kwame, Olusegun Oladipo, Wole Soyinka, Sophie Oluwole, Jim (...) Unah, Martin Heidegger and Maduabuchi Duko;r who is the most recent emergence of the problem of theory and method in African philosophy. So, the general purpose of this paperis to enact the intellectual concern of these self-redescription in the history of African philosophy while the specific purpose is to determine the adequacy of humanism and hermeneutics as concepts covering the self-image of African philosophy. This paper will further show the incoherence and incongruence of humanism and hermeneutics with the concrete self-image of African philosophy by redescribing them in the mould of emerging concepts such as the humanness of Orisa intellectual culture, in particular; and orunmineutics as a general philosophical theory. (shrink)

Isabelle Stengers anchors the major stake in Whiteheadian philosophy in the notion of constructivism. In doing so, the relation of this philosophy of becoming — the first anti-substantialist principle of which is stated as `principle of process' — to the ideas of vitalist intuition as the self-expression of the world is announced as eminently problematic. This problematizing opening to Whitehead obliges us to think about the constructivist nature of his concepts because of their irreducibility to the expression of facts of (...) experience since they must necessarily function as a machinic articulation of how things become implied in the `ontological principle' of reason; by the same token, it poses at the heart of the analysis the question of the pragmatic-speculative alterity in Whiteheadian constructivism. (shrink)

Can literature make it possible to represent histories that are otherwise ineffable? Making use of the Deleuzian concept of “the powers of the false,” Doro Wiese offers readings of three novels that deal with the Shoah, with colonialism, and with racialized identities. She argues that Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, and Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing are novels in which a space for unvoiced, silent, or silenced difference is created. Seen through (...) the lens of Deleuze and his collaborators’ philosophy, literature is a means for mediating knowledge and affects about historical events. Going beyond any simple dichotomy between true and untrue accounts of what “really” happened in the past, literature’s powers of the false incite readers to long for a narrative space in which painful or shameful stories can be included. (shrink)

This thesis offers a naturalist revision of Alain Badiou’s philosophy. This goal is pursued through an encounter of Badiou’s mathematical ontology and theory of truth with contemporary trends in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. I take issue with Badiou’s inability to elucidate the link between the empirical and the ontological, and his residual reliance on a Heideggerian project of fundamental ontology, which undermines his own immanentist principles. I will argue for both a bottom-up naturalisation of Badiou’s philosophical approach (...) to mathematics and a top-down naturalisation. Articulating my particular understanding of what realism and naturalism should commit us to, I propose a creative fusion of Badiou’s attention to metamathematical results with a structural-informational metaphysics, proposing a ‘matherialism’ uniting the more daring speculative insights of the former with the naturalist and empiricist commitments motivating the latter. (shrink)

Velika večina sodobnih analiz Platonovega dialoga Menon poskuša osvetliti vzpostavitev kreposti, pri čemer skušajo ugotoviti, kako lahko pridemo do nje, upoštevajoč tri momente, navedene na začetku dialoga: διδακτόν, ᾰσκητόν in ϕύσει. Članek se osredotoča na slavni eristični argument v 80e, ki je znan kot »Menonov paradoks«. Tega razgradi na elemente in skuša razkriti namenoma prikrite pomene v vsakem kosu argumenta, uporabljajoč različne grške izraze, ki označujejo »vednost« v različnih pomenih. Ta filo-loška/filozofska analiza erističnega argumenta omogoča prebiti sofistično/eristično pročelje, ki je (...) številne filozofe napeljalo na misel, da ni mogoče začeti ali napredovati s filozofskim raziskovanjem. Cilj te analize je tudi, da poudari razliko med sofistično ovržbo in pravim filozofiranjem, kolikor je slednje značilnost Platonskih in Aristotelskih besedil. (shrink)

The paper attempts to demonstrate; drawing on the recent experience of Philippine Catholic faith; that the relevance of the Church in the postmodern age is as much a political choice as it is a tolerance of the nihilistic mood of the times. It is a political choice insofar as the Church has nowhere to go in the postmodern except through asserting its relevance; which necessarily means homing in on the growing irrelevance of the organized faith; amidst the secular and liberal (...) currents of the present; in order to thresh out strategic directions for its continued survival; which is recently challenged by stories of sex scandals involving its clergy. The postmodern age also compels the Church to come to terms with the nihilism that accompanies what Nietzsche saw in his own time; and still true today; namely; the ‘death of God’. The ‘death of God’ continues to be a pervasive force behind the historical reaction of the faith toward the secularisation of the modern world; in terms; for instance; of the rise of today’s conservative attitude of Roman Catholicism; which can be considered a throwback of the earlier papal orthodoxy that looked down on temporal powers as a disguised evil. This conservatism entails a certain practice and belief in the purity of the faith and the sacred over and against the secular and the profane. It ignores the actual and objective distinctions between the temporal and the sacred; which betrays a form of nihilism; that is; the forced oblivion of the real ambiguity and the paradox that inform the distinction between the secular and the sacred. This kind of nihilism connotes that no distinction can be tolerated at the expense of the sacred; while certain strategic compromise with the secular in the guise of advancing the aims of faith are tolerated if only to allow for the full maturity of the regime of the sacred. (shrink)

This thesis presents a social ontology. It takes its problem, the emergence of social structure and order, and the relationship of the macro and the micro within this structure, from social theory, but attempts a resolution from the perspectives of contemporary French philosophy and complexity theory. Due to its acceptance of certain presuppositions concerning the multiplicity and connectedness of all life and nature it adopts a comparative methodology that attempts a translation of complexity science to the social world. It draws (...) both this methodology and its inspiration from the work of Michel Serres. After explaining this methodology, it presents a critique of the work of those prominent philosophers of multiplicity who have written on the social: Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Manual DeLanda. Having argued for the need of a ‘non-unit’ of social organisation, it then unsuccessfully surveys the work of Michel Foucault and Gabriel Tarde in search of such a ‘non-unit’. It produces one by extracting elements from different theorists and then proceeds to offer a novel explanation of how these expectations first emerge from the ‘social noise’ and then go through a complex process of self-organisation to produce social structure. Apart from complexity theory, this explanation draws on the temporal ontologies of both Serres and Deleuze. In doing so, it argues that the social replication necessary for this self-organisation cannot be achieved through direct imitation. Instead, it draws on an idea from Stuart Kauffman and argues that this is achieved through autocatalysis. Finally, it argues that social structures and what is perceived to be social order are the effect of the codification, to varying degrees, of these emergent expectations. It concludes that this structure is at its most creative when on ‘the edge of chaos’, when at a point of social chaosmos. (shrink)

In this study, I propose a reading of Derrida as a Cartesian thinker. The mode of reading is closely textual and not historical; and the analysis focuses on the methodological or dispositional affinities between a sceptical Descartes in cogitation and a deconstructive Derrida, to the exclusion of the onto-theological aspects of their arguments. I locate the source of such epistemological affinities between them in the self-reflexivity of philosophical self-doubt or self-criticism, and highlight, in the course of analysis, the formatively self-referential (...) aspects of both Cartesian scepticism and Derridian deconstruction; The point of contention is that, in both cases, the starting point of thinking is the self that self-reflects. Standard interpretations tend to view Derrida as an anti-Cartesian thinker; Against this reading, I advance the following two points of contention. Firstly, I argue that Derrida can be read as a Cartesian thinker in that his reflexive tendency is indicative of his implicit commitment to the methodological or epistemological Cartesianism, i. e. the reflexive mode of cogitation. The claim here, limited to such an extent, is that there is a structural resemblance between the reflexive form of Descartes's cogilo and that of Derrida's deconstructive move in that both thinkers follow performatively reflexive, and reflexively repeated moves; The Derridian move is only one "step" beyond, and in this sense derivative from, the Cartesian. Secondly, I argue further that Derrida can be read as a radical Cartesian. For this, I present a reading of Derrida's reflexive hauntology as a sceptical radicalisation of Descartes's reflective ontology. By bringing to the fore a structurally Cartesian dimension which underlies the Derridian economy of writing and thinking, I argue, against Derrida's self-understanding of his (non-)project, that deconstruction is to be read as a conservative intra-metaphysical trajectory rather than as a transgressive endeavour to go beyond metaphysics. In highlighting the traditional aspects of deconstruction as opposed to the revolutionary sides of it, my aim is both to explicate the significance of Derrida's deconstructive project and, at the same time, to expose its constitutive limits, deconstruction taken as a meta-critical, reflexive endeavour to transcend the limits of philosophy by philosophy. The critical point I raise against Derrida is the following: Insofar as the logic or strategy of his deconstruction remains structurally locked in, and at the same time exploitative of, the implicit binarism of Cartesian scepticism, i. e. the logic of either-or, the deconstructive gesture that attempts to think "the Other" by reflecting critically upon its own condition of thinking, is bound to be self-reflexive or self-referential, therefore, self-corrosively ineffectual. Part I sets out to articulate the aforementioned two contentions of thesis. It aims to discover the recursively self-reflexive movements in the writings of Derrida. For this, chapter 2 offers an analysis of some of Derrida's central terms of hauntology that are descriptive of the movements and moments of meta-reflection, viz. double, mark, fold, interest, and law. Although Part I deals mainly with Derrida, the reflexive dimension of Descartes's cogito argument is also analysed in an early stage [1.31] to the extent that it can set the terms for the subsequent reading of Derrida as a Cartesian [1.32 -2.3]. Part II elaborates the key points made in Part I, first by providing a detailed account of the Cartesian economy of self-reflexivity [Chapter 4], and second, by closely reading selected passages from Den ida's essay on Descartes, 'Cogito et histoire de lafolie' [Chapter 5]. Derrida's defensive and sympathetic reading of Descartes's madmen against Foucault's, the last chapter argues, exemplifies a case of Derrida as a committed Cartesian with a mind bent on methodic meta-reflection. (shrink)

Following bell hooks’ submission that theory making is “a location for healing” “The Shape of Humidity: Performing Black Atlantic Theory Making” riffs upon the historically critical and widely circulated subject of the black body politic and Atlantic waters informing but non-exclusive to performance, art history, and visual cultural discourses. The theory making performed here alternatively frames the black Atlantic body in relation to humidity, illustrating what Deleuze and Guattari might call the “possibles” evoked through “a contraction of earth and humidity”. (...) The theory is shaped upon a discussion of Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream, included in Kara Walker’s cultural-political opus, Kara Walker: After The Deluge, mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Theory making confronts the painting’s adherence to the hegemonic tradition of rendering the black Atlantic body as a perennial form in peril, whose destiny in this instance is as matter consumed by the thermodynamic sublimity of the waters. Alternatively, the action of theory making here collapses space-time separations among black Atlantic flora, the healing processes of artists Lygia Clark and Wangechi Mutu, and modes of breath activation, to access states of limitlessness actualized through bodily openness to humidity’s grace. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to explore some thoughts regarding how different kinds and levels of expectation might construct being in music education. The philosophical lenses through which this is analysed consist of a combination of a Deweyan pragmatism, the possibilistic parts of the philosophy of the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss who draws on Spinoza and finally parts of the philosophy of Deleuze & Guettari. A claim made in the article is that it is important in arts educationto challenge the (...) expected and for the world to be created in an eternally wide, and at the same time claustrophobically narrow set of pathways to experience. To learn a communicative art could in other words imply to learn how to consciously adapt to conventions and expectations of musical parameters and at the same time break with them in ways which are functional in aesthetic communication. An important task in arts education must therefore be to train and develop the skill to imagine as rich a web of possible outcomes to any musical situation at the same time as being aware of the conventions that are at stake and their expected uses in order to understand as well as to play with them. That way music education can help pupils become interesting musicians, composers and listeners who are also critical, creative and happy. As an added benefit, these kinds of possibilistic skills, attitudes and modes might actually be beneficial for both learner and society in most parts of life. (shrink)

What does it mean to think? In the following article I will show Gilles Deleuze’s answer to this question. According to him ’to think is to create — there is no other creation — but to create is first of all to engender ' thinking ' in thought ’. To understand what this means, to grasp the radical nature of such an event, we need to see how for Deleuze to engender thinking in thought means a repetition of that genetic (...) process which has brought forth the thinking subject in the first place. In this event that which otherwise subsists beneath normal experience, as life- and consciousness sustaining forces, now become conscious experience. The implication of this is that true thinking means the creation of a new life and consciousness. Via a close-reading of chapter two of Difference and Repetition I show how this leads the thinker into a radical metamorphosis of consciousness, a process of Stirb und Werde. (shrink)