In her paper “Creative Evolution and the Creation of Man,” one of the arguments Colebrook puts forth is that as a means of challenging the mechanistic and teleological conception of Darwinian evolution, creative evolution takes an antihumanist position by positing that there is an absence of end, thus “man” is able to create his own end. But in taking this position, Colebrook points out that creative evolution re-establishes the humanistic discourse on the human that it was attempting to challenge. To (...) elucidate Colebrook's argument, this paper draws on the work of Derrida to “play” with the notion of style in order to reflect on the ways in which philosophical deductive argumentation and reasoning constitute and perpetuate humanist and metaphysical discourses on the human, and the ends of “man.”. (shrink)

We have no interest whatever in minimizing the continuing history of racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise abusive biologisms, or the urgency of their exposure, that has made the gravamen of so many contemporary projects of critique. At the same time, we fear — with installation of an automatic antibiologism as the unshifting tenet of `theory' — the loss of conceptual access to an entire thought-realm. I was left wondering what danger had been averted by the exclusion of biology. What does (...) the nominative `biological or anatomical body' actually refer to? And what secures the separation of its inadmissible matter from the proper purview of Irigaray's textual interventions? When I asked a question to this effect it was met with a certain nervous comprehension. Deciding, perhaps, that I must still be immersed in a precritical understanding of the body, the speaker dismissed me with a revealing theatrical gesture. As if to emphasize the sheer absurdity of my question she pinched herself and commented `Well I don't mean this body'. And so it seemed with a gesture so matter of fact that it required no further comment, the fact of matter was both decided and dispatched. Feminism has been as deeply implicated in routinized antiessentialism as any of our critical procedures. Even though questions of `the body' have become increasingly fashionable in all manner of feminist projects, the schedule of feminism's antibiologism has been little altered. In most of these projects on `the body', the body in question is pursued in its socially, experientially, or psychically constituted forms, but rarely in its physiologically, biochemically, or microbiologically constituted form, the idea of biological construction having been rendered either unintelligible or naive. Despite an avowed interest in the body, there is a persistent distaste for biological detail. These feminist theories have usually been reluctant to engage with biological data: they retain, and encourage, the fierce antibiologism that marked the emergence of second wave feminism. That feminist scholars are particularly prone to a `knee jerk constructivism' helps explain the reluctance of those in the humanities to engage seriously with the claims of science. This book functions primarily as a reminder to social, political, and cultural theorists, particularly those interested in feminism, antiracism and questions of the politics of globalisation, that they have forgotten a crucial dimension of research, if not necessary to, then certainly useful for more incisively formulating the concepts on which they so heavily, if implicitly rely. It is written as a remembrance of what we have forgotten — not just the body, but that which makes it possible and which limits its actions: the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality, a world regulated by the exigencies, the forces, of space and time. We have forgotten the nature, the ontology, of the body, the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency. We have forgotten where we come from. (shrink)

Philosophy and Literature is an internationally renowned refereed journal founded by Denis Dutton at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. It is now published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Since its inception in 1976, Philosophy and Literature has been concerned with the relation between literary and philosophical studies, publishing articles on the philosophical interpretation of literature as well as the literary treatment of philosophy. Philosophy and Literature has sometimes been regarded as iconoclastic, in the sense that it repudiates academic pretensions, (...) insidious jargon and institutional vogue. Dutton, who remains the editor, still writes a regular column. A distinctive feature of Philosophy and Literature was the annual Bad Writing Contest, held from 1995–98, which sought to identify (and publish) the ‘most stylistically lamentable passages’ of academic prose, often to great amusement. (shrink)

Eleven top Deleuze scholars reclaim Deleuzian philosophy as moral philosophy Ethics plays a crucial, if subtle, role in Gilles Deleuze's philosophical project. Michel Foucault claimed that Anti-Oedipus was `a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time'. But what is the nature of the immanent ethics that is developed in Deleuze's thought? How does it differ from previous conceptions of ethics? And what paths does it open for future thought, given (...) the ethical challenges facing humanity in so many domains? Each of the eleven essays in this collection explores the ethical dimension of Deleuze's thought along a new and singular trajectory, and in so doing, attempts to reclaim his philosophy as an ethical philosophy. (shrink)

This research explores the carnal, experienced self as processual and becoming, situating life as zoe (as per Braidotti) in the context of the Western culture, characterized by alienation (Fromm, Foucault). The study first addresses the ontological disposition of the carnal self and then turns to the concepts of life and death (Freud, Fromm), to explicate the tie between materiality and discourse conditions. Erich Fromm’s classical distinction of having and being is restated as a distinction of having and becoming, which are (...) then explored as complimentary ontological, cultural, and characterological directionalities. A genealogy of their mutual dynamics then allows situating the relations of carnal bodies and inorganic prosthesis (e.g. technologies) in the light of life considered as the necessary synthesis of forces of preservation and perpetual change, beyond subject-object duality. (shrink)

In this chapter we argue for biophilosophy as a queerfeminist and posthumanities methodology that attends to the question of life by focusing on multiple differences and transformations, materiality and processuality, as well as relations, intra-actions, and disconnections. By combining both the ontological and ethical concerns that go beyond what is conventionally seen as “life”, biophilosophy offers a critical and innovative approach to the issues of death, extinction, (un) liveability, terminality, and toxicity, among others, which all form the backbone of the (...) environmental crises and changing conditions of life on Earth, often framed as the Anthropocene. In what follows, we first discuss select theorisations and implications of the “life/death” coupling as an ethico-political question; subsequently we elaborate the concept of biophilosophy as a methodology; and finally, we propose two examples where we test biophilosophy as a framework that allows us: (1) to engage with the enmeshment of life and death through the concept of the non/living, and (2) to explore the concept of toxic embodiment as an onto-ethical condition we all (human and non-human) are differentially immersed in. (shrink)

The connections between the fields of queer theory and continental philosophy are strange and strained: simultaneously difficult and all too easy to ferret out, there is no easy narrative for how the two fields interconnect. Both sides of the relation seem either to disavow or simply repress any relation to the other. For example, despite the impact of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume One on early queer theory, current work in queer of color critique challenges the politics and epistemology of (...) placing this text in such a canonical position, particularly for the adamantly anti-foundational field of queer theory. 1 On the other hand, continental philosophy, perhaps in its ongoing beleaguered attempt to form an identity within the analytically dominated discipline of philosophy in the United States, 2 seems largely to ignore the growth of queer theory, despite the provocative and invigorating work on some of continental philosophy's most beloved topics, such as temporality, embodiment, desire, the negative, and radically anti-foundational subjectivity, epistemology, and politics. Setting aside the thorny project of their genealogical connections and disconnections, this essay turns to current trajectories in the field of queer theory, particularly the heated debates about temporality and the future, to indicate how this contemporary scholarship both draws on and exceeds a grounding in continental philosophy. (shrink)

This essay defines and critiques ‘methodocentrism’, the belief that predetermined research methods are the determining factor in the validity and importance of educational research. By examining research in science studies and posthumanism, the authors explain how this methodocentrism disenables research from taking account of problems and non-human actants that are presumed to be of no importance or value in existing social science research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative. Building from a critique of these methods as profoundly anthropocentric, the authors examine (...) three crucial problematics in which methodocentrism functions in educational research: the institutionalization of graduate training, a wide-spread privileging of the visual, and the seeming necessity of ‘data’ in social scientific research methodologies. Ultimately, this article does not reject the necessity of particular studies having methods—rigorous, philosophically grounded approaches to problems in the world—but it argues that the belief that methods must be selected from existing options and assembled before approaching the ‘objects’ of study is not only a form of bad science, it is also deeply implicated in anthropocentric and colonialist politics. Instead, what research requires today is a thorough rethinking of the very distinction between subject and object and a renewed questioning of how agency functions in specific research settings. (shrink)

This article analyses research that has explored the potential of a focus on indeterminate bodies for decision making, policy and politics. Drawing on different ways of conceptualising indeterminacy in scientific and policy domains it describes the Loweswater Care Project, a participatory ‘knowledge collective’ that attempted to avoid converting the complexities of vital cyanobacterial bodies into a purely social or managerial set of questions around water quality. Through a commitment to opening out the nature of ‘things’, participants in this collective honed (...) new questions and avenues of inquiry around cyanobacteria and its relations. The Loweswater Care Project was a kind of ‘open’ in Haraway’s sense, where questions and demands are put to bodies, and to the apparatus that allows us to sense them, in ways that do not shy away from the probabilistic character of entities and their relations. The implications of generating indeterminacies in this setting are explored for environmental decision making, policy and politics. (shrink)

This article explores a theoretical legacy that underpins the ways in which many social scientists come to know and understand obesity. In attempting to distance itself from essentialist discourses, it is not surprising that this literature focuses on the discursive construction of fat bodies rather than the materiality or agency of bodily matter. Ironically, in developing arguments that only critique representations of obesity or fat bodies, social science scholars have maintained and reproduced a central dichotomy of Cartesian thinking – that (...) between social construction and biology. In this article I examine the limitations of social constructionist arguments in obesity/critical fat studies and the implications for ignoring materiality. Through bringing together the theoretical insights of material feminism and obesity science’s attention to maternal nutrition and the fetal origins hypothesis, this article moves beyond the current philosophical impasse, and repositions biological and social constructionist approaches to obesity not as mutually exclusive, but as one of constant interplay and connectedness. (shrink)

Deleuze's theory of time set out in Difference and Repetition is a complex structure of three different syntheses of time – the passive synthesis of the living present, the passive synthesis of the pure past and the static synthesis of the future. This article focuses on Deleuze's third synthesis of time, which seems to be the most obscure part of his tripartite theory, as Deleuze mixes different theoretical concepts drawn from philosophy, Greek drama theory and mathematics. Of central importance is (...) the notion of the cut, which is constitutive of the third synthesis of time defined as an a priori ordered temporal series separated unequally into a before and an after. This article argues that Deleuze develops his ordinal definition of time with recourse to Kant's definition of time as pure and empty form, Hölderlin's notion of ‘caesura’ drawn from his ‘Remarks on Oedipus’ (1803) and Dedekind's method of cuts as developed in his pioneering essay ‘Continuity and Irrational Numbers’ (1872). Deleuze then ties together the conceptions of the Kantian empty form of time and the Nietzschean eternal return, both of which are essentially related to a fractured I or dissolved self. This article aims to assemble the different heterogeneous elements that Deleuze picks up on and to show how the third synthesis of time emerges from this differential multiplicity. (shrink)

Bourdieu suggested that the habitus contains the ‘genetic information’ which both allows and disposes successive generations to reproduce the world they inherit from their parents’ generation. While his writings on habitus are concerned with embodied dispositions, biological processes are not a feature of the practical reason of habitus. Recent critiques of the separate worlds of biology and culture, and the rise in epigenetics, provide new opportunities for expanding theoretical concepts like habitus. Using obesity science as a case study we attempt (...) to conceptualise the enfolding of biological and social processes (via a Deleuzian metaphor) to develop a concept of biohabitus – reconfiguring how social and biological environments interact across the life course, and may be transmitted and transformed intergenerationally. In conclusion we suggest that the enfolding and reproduction of social life that Bourdieu articulated as habitus is a useful theoretical frame that can be enhanced to critically develop epigenetic understandings of obesity, and vice versa. (shrink)

Elizabeth Grosz's interpretation of Darwinian evolutionary theory to ground a feminist ontology of biology has been particularly controversial. Most critics have understood Grosz as supporting her theory with empirical evidence, and they criticize her for being either inaccurate or uncritical of and overly dependent on science. I argue that Grosz reads Darwin as a philosopher in a Deleuzian and Irigarayan sense, and that Grosz's project is therefore better understood in terms of its ethical and political goals rather than in terms (...) of empirical adequacy. Employing this evaluative framework leads to a novel route for critique of Grosz's ontology in terms of its reliance on the Darwinian distinction between organism and environment. I conclude that Grosz's work is valuable for the way it maintains ethical and political considerations in feminist ontological debates, and that introducing a more sensitive understanding of the organism–environment relation will lead us closer to a truly feminist ontology of biology. (shrink)

This article provides an interpretation of the ecophenomenological dimension of Luce Irigaray's work. It shows that Irigaray builds upon Heidegger's recovery of the ancient sense of nature as physis, self-emergence into presence. But, against Heidegger, Irigaray insists that self-emergence is a material process undergone by fluid elements, such as air and water, of which the world is basically composed. This article shows that this “elemental materialist” position need not conflict with modern science. However, the article criticises Irigaray's claim that men (...) and women inhabit radically different sexuate worlds. Although this claim has some phenomenological basis, ultimately it is undercut by Irigaray's own elemental materialism, which implies that sexuate difference colours our perception but does not cleave it down a radical difference in kind. We can therefore accept and develop Irigaray's contribution to ecophenomenology without her insistence on radical sexuate duality. (shrink)

This paper explores how law might conceive of the injury or harm of endocrine disruption as it applies to an aboriginal community experiencing chronic chemical pollution. The effect of the pollution in this case is not only gendered, but gendering: it seems to be causing the ‘production’ of two girl babies for every boy born on the reserve. This presents an opening to interrogate how law is implicated in the constitution of not just gender but sex. The analysis takes an (...) embodied turn, attempting to validate the real and material consequences of synthetic chemicals acting on bodies—but uncovers that finding a harm in a declining sex ratio depends on a static conception of the human form, based on unfounded assumptions of ‘naturalness’ and ‘normalcy’. Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of ‘becoming’ offers a compelling challenge, essentially pointing to the conclusion that we should find harm where we find illness and suffering and not simply where we find difference. At the same time, we cannot discount the political economy of the pollution: the paper concludes by returning the focus to the role of power, colonialism and the state in the perpetuation of the pollution on the landscape. (shrink)

This essay analyses how Virginia Woolf's critically under-examined children's story about Nurse Lugton connects the becoming-artistic of writing to animal becomings. Examining the links between creativity and the other-than-human via Gilles Deleuze and Elizabeth Grosz, I claim that the ‘animation’ of the stitched animal figures on Nurse Lugton's ‘canvas’ reveals that art is the enlivenment of vibratory and affective qualities, as opposed to a monumentalising of symbols or concepts. Moreover, the curtain in Woolf's story should be read as creative materiality (...) itself, its folds participating in the self-varying dynamism of the virtual and actual. My analysis of the two published versions of the story, and their accompanying illustrations, outlines an affirmative bio-poetics at the heart of Woolf's aesthetic project and suggests that Woolf's creative sources are embedded in inhuman, biological forces. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to the question of how to conceptualise the relationship between theory and practice in feminist scholarship in law. It looks in detail at the implications of different issues raised in a recent debate between Anne Bottomley and Ngaire Naffine on the existence of a “legal feminist orthodoxy”. I critique the dominance of ethics over politics and join Bottomley in her attack upon “the ethics of respect for the other”, albeit from a different position. I then (...) look at the ways in which the problem of “essentialism” is being rethought from a feminist perspective. (shrink)

The widely touted discovery of mirror neurons has generated intense scientific interest in the neurobiology of intersubjectivity. Social neuroscientists have claimed that mirror neurons, located in brain regions associated with motor action, facial recognition, and somatosensory processing, allow us to automatically grasp other people's intentions and emotions. Despite controversies, mirror neuron research is animating materialist, affective, and embodied accounts of intersubjectivity. My view is that mirror neurons raise issues that are directly relevant to feminism and cultural studies, but interventions are (...) needed for the work to be compatible with nonreductionist critical thought. In this article I critique the dominant neuroscientific account of mirror neurons, called embodied simulation theory. I draw from feminist epistemologies as well as alternative interpretations of mirror neurons in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to consider mirroring as situated, embodied perception. (shrink)

After considering core ‘interruptions’ of identity and justice in the post-secularist agonisms of Connolly and Levinas, I mine their views for core practical insights about the possibilities for theist-atheist respect. After considering Connolly on ‘content v. comportment’ and after exploring the virtue of mystery as part of a mystery/contestability/generosity triad, as well as Connolly’s, Levinas’, Nietzsche’s and Bergson’s levels of optimism and pessimism about theism, I end by pointing to cracks in Connolly’s path to pluralism, and I recommend that the (...) ‘open and trembling’ mood of Levinas’ phenomenology serves as an important model for the kind of generous comportment that atheists and theists need on our path to respectful agono-pluralism. (shrink)

Early 20th century philosopher Henri Bergson posited an initial push that propelled the diversity of life forward into a varied, novel future: The élan vital, a necessary force or impulse that animated life’s progress and development. His idea had largely been abandoned by mid-century. Even so, much of the conceptual and explanatory work this impulse targeted is yet in want of an explanation. In particular, Bergson’s derelict ideas on evolution addressed three areas that have once again become relevant in the (...) effort to unite evolutionary genetics, biological development, and ecological context : the purposeful nature of individual organisms and their parts; the integrative, holistic, non-linear emergent dynamics seen in evolutionary processes; and how genuine novelty emerges into the universe :422, 2016; Simondon et al. in On the mode of existence of technical objects. Univocal series, Univocal Publishing LLC, Minneapolis, 2017; Bang, in: Winther-Lindqvist, Bang, Valsiner Nothingness: philosophical insights into psychology, Transaction Publishers, Somerset, 2016; Moreno and Mossio in Biological autonomy: a philosophical and theoretical enquiry. History, philosophy and theory of the life sciences, Springer, Dordrecht, 2015). In this paper I argue that Bergson’s ideas may yet be relevant to these questions, and his work warrants a reexamination in light of current problems in evolutionary biology. This is not a call to ‘return’ to Bergson, nevertheless his notions about complexity suggest ways of looking at current biological problems in ways that offer a heuristic insight worth entertaining. Bergson’s Nobel Prize-winning book, Creative Evolution, provided a strikingly prescient early 20th century framework for understanding how Darwinian evolution acts as an engine for generating new forms, University Press of America, Lanham, Bergson 1911). (shrink)

Biomedicine is today transforming the human condition, but how such transformation is to be understood is a matter of debate. I seek to contribute to the debate by focusing on recent developments within a relatively novel subfield of gerontology which is engaged in the bio-molecular and bio-demographic characterization of the processes associated with the development of the organism from birth to death. I argue that these developments aid understanding of the conceptual difficulties confronting neo-Darwinian biological thought and poststructuralist social theory (...) as one decentres the organism and the other the subject. (shrink)

The article defends the importance of metaphysical inquiry in feminist philosophy and interrogates possible directions for such a project. A key aim is questioning the possibility of revisionary metaphysics as well as emphasising the consequences of the linguistic turn for any such project. I argue that before we can embark on any metaphysical inquiry – feminist or otherwise – we are doomed to repeating Immanuel Kant's monumental question of how is metaphysics possible? I then ask how metaphysics is understood in (...) feminist discussions and focus on one contemporary effort to create feminist metaphysics, namely Christine Battersby's The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (1998). Through a critical analysis of her position I tease out the problems, paradoxes and obstacles that the project of feminist metaphysics faces. Finally, I explicate the politicised conception of reality that I find in Michel Foucault's thought and conclude by considering its consequences for our understanding of feminist metaphysics and politics. (shrink)

Recent ‘new materialist’ readings of evolution by such feminists as Elizabeth Grosz, Claire Colebrook, Luciana Parisi, Susan Oyama and Myra Hird have provided important insights on the openness of evolutionary processes and the emergence of difference by focusing on evolution as a temporal dynamic. Building on Darwin's observations on geographical variation, this article highlights the importance of viewing evolution as not only temporal but also spatial. For this purpose, the article turns to population genetics and its practice of mapping the (...) early human diaspora. The article identifies a spatiotemporal dynamic of evolutionary emergence that posits gender, sexuality and race as ontologically mutually constitutive, as well as shows that such ontology is inseparable from the techniques and technologies that study it. The article argues that this mutual embeddedness of ontology and epistemology provides a site where both the limits and potential of evolutionary emergence may be examined and negotiated. (shrink)

From its earliest beginnings, political thought has grappled with the problem of those who both do and do not belong to the city, those who cannot be exactly included or excluded, that is to say, with the problem of difference. Most often this emerges first as the problem of what to do with women. Communitas is an intense engagement with central figures in the history of political thought – Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau – but also a remarkably efficient avoidance of women (...) and difference. Even as he deals with Augustine, who cannot stop discussing begetting and desire, and Hobbes, who insists on the maternal right of nature, Esposito's attention remains fixed on the fraternal violence rather than parental sex as the founding of community, and the result is a strangely phallic work. (shrink)

In the dominant “climate change” imaginary, this phenomenon is distant and abstracted from our experiences of weather and the environment in the privileged West. Moreover, climate change discourse is saturated mostly in either neoliberal progress narratives of controlling the future or sustainability narratives of saving the past. Both largely obfuscate our implication therein. This paper proposes a different climate change imaginary. We draw on feminist new materialist theories—in particular those of Stacy Alaimo, Claire Colebrook, and Karen Barad—to describe our relationship (...) to climate change as one of “weathering.” We propose the temporal frame of “thick time”—a transcorporeal stretching between present, future, and past—in order to reimagine our bodies as archives of climate and as making future climates possible. In doing so, we can rethink the temporal narratives of climate change discourse and develop a feminist ethos of responsivity toward climatic phenomena. This project reminds us that we are not masters of the climate, nor are we just spatially “in” it. As weather-bodies, we are thick with climatic intra-actions; we are makers of climate-time. Together we are weathering the world. (shrink)

In this article, I draw attention to some important points of intersection in the work of Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche. In particular I focus on the overlapping nature of their naturalisms. This proves enlightening for an overall appreciation of their respective philosophical projects but also allows those projects to be inscribed within a broader set of naturalistic traditions to which I think they contribute in interesting ways. I begin by assessing how Bergson's and Nietzsche's general problematics are shaped by (...) the antinaturalistic character of their targets, more specifically the appeals to the immobile and the unconditional that they expose in their critical approaches. I move on to examine the core components of their naturalistic responses, highlighting how both thinkers extend introspective insights about the psyche and the body to make claims regarding broader activity patterns across nature and ground these new monistic continua in their concepts of rhythms and drives. Lastly; I draw out three important consequences on which these moves jointly converge, with particular emphasis on the “quantal” nature of the ontologies they outline. Moving beyond the comparative perspective, I conclude by using these points to situate Bergson and Nietzsche among three different lineages of naturalism: metaphysical antireductionist, and Epicurean. (shrink)

In this paper I explore Henri Bergson’s notion of the meaning of life by focusing on two places where he discusses it in his work. The first is Creative Evolution (1907, CE), where a bio-ontological meaning of life is proposed in terms of the ongoing ‘advance’ of the élan vital. Bergson conceives of this vital tendency towards freer activity in terms of nature’s pursuit of a mechanics that would triumph over mechanism. The second is a lesser-known paper called ‘Psycho-physical Parallelism (...) and Positive Metaphysics’ (1901, ‘PPPM’), where Bergson articulates the same themes concerning the evolutionary relationship between life and matter, only this time gives an ethical rendition of the meaning of life. Discerning the true sense of the distinction between mind and body, he claims, will allow us to understand the reason they ‘unite and collaborate’, and thereby to speculate on thought’s apparent trajectory towards an independence from matter. While the latter position appears to be inscribed within the former, this continuity nonetheless resists reducing the ethical to a biological essentialism. This is ensured by the ‘virtual’ nature he ascribes to life’s movement, which shows that the ethical meaning of life is ultimately grounded in an ontology premised upon the irreducibly open and inventive rather than on the reductively closed and repetitive. In turn, this conception of life’s virtuality further illuminates what Bergson might mean, from an ethical perspective, as regards a progressive independence from matter, which I propose in terms of a withdrawal from the body and the present, with a view to a superior moral activity. (shrink)

In exploring ways to speak about perception and feeling within the framework of a deconstructive cultural analysis, the article contributes to a narration of methodologies for research so as to better their capacity for engaging with the more faint or elusive manifestations of the real. The argument is grounded in a view of affective presence as involving a way of apprehending the world. Based on an exploration of affectivity and perception in a research project on prostitution in North Norway, it (...) argues that the body and its affects form a crucial site of intervention in developing transformative methodologies. An intuition that informs my inquiry is that attending to such subtle realities holds great potential for confronting injustice and suffering in transformative ways. (shrink)

Published in 1972, Anti‐Oedipus was the first of a number of collaborative works between the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and the French psychoanalyst and political activist, Felix Guattari. As the first of a two‐volume body of work that bears the subtitle, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti‐Oedipus is, to say the least, an unconventional work that should be understood, in part, as a product of its time – created as it was among the political and revolutionary fervour engendered by the events of (...) ‘May 1968’. However, this paper will suggest that Anti‐Oedipus – as a critique of psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex, as well as being a study of the relationship between capitalism and schizophrenia – should also be understood in a less ‘time‐bound’ fashion. In particular, the paper will examine Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of a concept of ‘desire’ and its employment in relation to subjectivity, time, capitalism, representation, and the radical ‘therapeutic’ practice that they refer to as ‘schizoanalysis’. Moreover, nearly 40 years after the events of May 1968 and against possible doubts concerning the contemporary relevance of psychoanalysis, it will be suggested that psychoanalysis and the Oedipus complex are to be understood as symptomatic of a wider ‘malaise’ that can be discerned within psychiatry, psychotherapy, and contemporary capitalist society itself, and that it is this that forms the broader target of the book’s critique. Accordingly, by providing an accessible and critical introduction to Anti‐Oedipus, the paper also hopes to stimulate further discussion and research regarding both the critique and the contribution that the work can make to contemporary psychiatry, psychotherapy, and mental health nursing generally. (shrink)

Feminist and trans theory challenges "the" binary sex/gender system, but can create a new binary opposition of subversive transgender versus conservative transsexual. This paper aims to shift debate concerning bodies as authentic/real versus constructed/mutable, arguing that such debate establishes a false dichotomy that may be overcome by reappraising scientific understandings of sex/gender. Much recent biology and neurology stresses nonlinearity, contingency, self-organization, and open-endedness. Engaging with this research offers ways around apparently interminable theoretical impasses.

Like most goods‐producing sectors in the West, modern health‐care systems have been profoundly changed by globalization and the neoliberal policies that attend it. Since the 1970s, the role of the welfare state has been considerably reduced; funding and management of health systems have been subjected to wave upon wave of reorganization and assimilated to the private sector. At the same time, neoliberal policy has imposed the notion of patient empowerment, thus turning patients into consumers of health. The literature on nursing (...) has accordingly reported on the significant repercussions on all aspects of the profession, from delivery of care and treatment, through training for new nurses, to legislated policy reforms regarding the role and responsibilities of modern nurses. In light of these developments, this paper analyses and theorizes about the way the injection of neoliberal policy is linked to and affects the practice of nursing. Drawing on a number of Nietzschean arguments, we begin with an exploration of the complex effects of neoliberalism, bureaucratization, and technocratization on the health system and the practice of nursing. Our main theoretical point here is that neoliberal policy engenders and promotes a neoliberal tide, which results in the conversion of the values that drive modern nursing practice. We then examine this tide in the light of Nietzsche's concepts. Starting with an analysis based on the ontology of the will to power, we show that nurses are dominated by neoliberal values embedded in technocratic and bureaucratic ideologies. Finally, we argue that the application of neoliberal policy constitutes a form of domestication from which one might potentially be freed through the Nietzschean concept of transvaluation of values. This transvaluation, as its freeing from some of the neoliberal tide, may be accomplished in accordance with a hierarchy of specific life‐affirming values for nursing culture and practice. (shrink)

This article examines the role of the alien as the ultimate outsider and considers the challenges it poses to feminist theory. I argue that these challenges are based on the need to continue developing an ethics of relationality in which neither love nor relationality itself is deemed to be the answer; on rethinking agency and ontology in terms of becoming and the limitations of becoming; on a critique of representationalism which limits us to figuring the alien in rather than as (...) feminist theory and thereby invokes the archetypal story in which alien and human, monster and human switch sides; and finally on reconsidering modes of communication that resonate with their theme and emphasise the performativity, conceptual risk taking and creativity that might enable feminist theory itself to become alien again. (shrink)

Today professionals have to deal with more uncertainties in their field than before. We live in complex and rapidly changing environments. The British philosopher Ronald Barnett adds the term ‘supercomplexity’ to highlight the fact that ‘we can no longer be sure how even to describe the world that faces us’ (Barnett, 2004). Uncertainty is, nevertheless, not a highly appreciated notion. An obvious response to uncertainty is to reduce it—or even better, to wipe it away. The assumption of this approach is (...) that uncertainty has no advantages. This assumption is, however, not correct as several contemporary authors have argued. Rather than problematising uncertainty, I will investigate the pros and cons of embedding uncertainty in educational practice of professional higher education. In order to thoroughly explore the probabilities and challenges that uncertainty poses in education, I will dwell on the radical ideas on uncertainty of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) he recognises two forces: the Apollinian, that is the pursuit of order and coherence, and the Dionysian, that is the human tendency to nullify all systematisation and idealisation. Uncertainty is part of the Dionysian. I will argue that when educators take Nietzsche's plea to make room for the Dionysian to heart, they can better prepare students for an uncertain world. If, and only if, students are encouraged to deploy both tendencies—the Apollinian and the Dionysian—they can become professionals who are able to stand their ground in an uncertain and changing (professional) world. (shrink)

This paper explores the idea that Deleuze’s oeuvre is best understood as a philosophy of the wound, synonymous with a philosophy of the event. Although this wound/scar typology may appear to be a metaphorical conceit, the motif of the wound recurs frequently and perhaps even symptomatically in many of Deleuze’s texts, particularly where he is attempting to delineate some of the most important differences (transcendental, temporal, and ethical) between himself and his phenomenological predecessors. I raise some some potential problems for (...) this trajectory, most of which revolve around Deleuze's use of transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

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)

: Henri Bergson's philosophy has attracted increasing feminist attention in recent years as a fruitful locus for re-theorizing temporality. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's well-known critical description of metaphysics as phallocentrism, Hill argues that Bergson's deduction of duration is predicated upon the disavowal of a sexed hierarchy. She concludes the article by proposing a way to move beyond Bergson's phallocentrism to articulate duration as a sensible and transcendental difference that articulates a nonhierarchical qualitative relation between the sexes.

Henri Bergson's philosophy has attracted increasing feminist attention in recent years as a fruitful locus for re-theorizing temporality. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's well-known critical description of metaphysics as phallocentrism, Hill argues that Bergson's deduction of duration is predicated upon the disavowal of a sexed hierarchy. She concludes the article by proposing a way to move beyond Bergson's phallocentrism to articulate duration as a sensible and transcendental difference that articulates a nonhierarchical qualitative relation between the sexes.

This paper critiques the rise of scientific approaches to central questions in the humanities, specifically questions about human nature, ethics, identity, and experience. In particular, I look at how an increasing number of philosophers are turning to evolutionary psychology and neuroscience as sources of answers to philosophical problems. This approach constitutes what I term a biological turn in the humanities. I argue that the biological turn, especially its reliance on evolutionary psychology, is best understood as an epistemology of ignorance that (...) contributes to a climate of hostility and intolerance regarding feminist insights about gender, identity, and the body. (shrink)

After a time dominated by nature-phobia, a naturalistic turn is emerging within feminist theory. Welcoming this new theoretical embrace of nature and sympathising with its insistence that nature is not feminism’s enemy, this article nevertheless points to some problematic features of this turn. Focusing on Elizabeth Grosz’s postmodernist readings of Charles Darwin, I suggest that their emphasis of nature’s dynamic, indeterminate and enabling qualities both implies a politically unmotivated glorification of the dynamic and unruly, and as such obscures the important (...) fact that nature also works as a constraining factor on societies. I demonstrate, from the point of view of a Marxist-realist perspective, why an acknowledgement of nature’s limiting force is crucial for the coherence of any theoretical account of the workings of social systems. The article also addresses the feminist imperative to transcend the dualism between nature and culture, and shows how the concept of emergence offers a solution to dilemmas that tend to appear in connection to such efforts of transcendence. (shrink)

The study of world politics in theoretical and empirical terms has recently witnessed an upsurge of interest in the question of complexity, drawing upon complexity theory; particularly, renewed interest in emergent properties and the aleatory nature of the political. This article seeks to demonstrate, primarily via an exploration of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda, the possibilities for a type of thinking about the ‘international’ that utilises the notion of social complexity as its primary mode of enframing the (...) major dimensions to world politics. As such it argues for a theoretical reconceptualisation of the system of states, markets and societies as individual and overlapping scale-entities, each possessing causal agency, with overlapping and enmeshed boundaries, situated in their historical and concrete manifestations. The reified concepts of polity, economy and society are re-cast in the language of assemblage theory as ordering, exchanging and cohering, thus highlighting process in world politics and providing a theoretical base better equipped to cope with complex social processes and practices. And this I conclude clears the way to re-situate international space theoretically as a complex adaptive system. (shrink)