Bioethical discourse on organ donation and transplantation medicine covers a wide range of topics, from informed consent procedures and scarcity issues up to transplant tourism and organ trade. Over the past decades, this discourse evolved into a stream of documents of bewildering proportions, encompassing thousands of books, papers, conferences, blogs, consensus meetings, policy reports, media debates and other outlets. Beneath the manifest level of discourse, however, a more latent dimension can be discerned, revolving around issues of embodiment, the moral status (...) of the human body and the concept of bodily integrity. This publication aims to bring these “deeper” questions to the fore. What is envisioned is a “depth” ethics (the moral equivalent of a depth psychology) focussing on the tensions, conflicts and ambiguities at work in bioethical deliberations on organ transplantation, fuelling the viewpoints articulated on the more manifest levels of discourse. Organ donation reopens the question of the status of the body as something which we have, but at the same time are, and as something which constitutes a whole, while at the same time being a set of replaceable elements or parts. (shrink)

The aim of the work is to examine the relationship between the concepts of “immanence” and “politics” in the works of Hegel and Deleuze. Both Hegel and Deleuze are thinkers of immanence and they explicitly think this concept in relation to the problem of political practice. As I show, they attempt to “ground” politics in immanence. The purpose of this work is to prove that there exists an inherent paradox in the undertaking to “ground” politics in immanence. Both philosophers are (...) confronted with a paradox that emerges from this “grounding”. The paradox appears in the form of natural violence. Both authors fail to contain this violence through arguments. In order to show this, I examine the relationship between two further concepts: history and the state. I compare Hegel’s and Deleuze’s formulations of world-history and universal history, tracing the analogies and differences in how they think the relationship of the state to history. Based on the conclusions I then focus on the relationship of politics to immanence. The paradox of natural violence, I show, emerges from the relationship of the state at the “end of history”. (shrink)

This article revisits the controversy over the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s sympathetic, yet critical and provocative, views on Islam and fundamentalist terrorism as developed in his ‘A Glance on the Archives of Islam.’ Žižek, I argue, offers an original reading of the universality of Islam and its political potentiality, by reactualizing the originary impulse in Hegel’s dialectical analysis of Islam as endogenous to the series of monotheistic religions, without falling into the trap of either Hegel’s racist Orientalist, Eurocentric, and Islamophobic (...) views about Islam or their antithetical Islamocentric views. First, I show that Žižek rejects Hegel’s emphasis on both Islam’s temporal incongruity and the Islamic unique conception of an abstract and transcendent God. Instead, Žižek reloads Hegel’s dialectical views and manages to resolve the deadlock in Hegel’s approach to Islam that could not account for the universality of Islam. Second, I draw out the political aspect of Žižek’s philosophical analysis of Islam, by examining his claim that Islam is the most politicized religion today. Grounding the emergence of political Islam in the encroachment of modernization project on the Islamicate world, he notes the ambiguity about sacrifice (martyrdom and terrorism) in Islam and attributes the rise of Islamic extremism (violence) to the contradictions and impasses of the global capitalist system. (shrink)

Deleuze’s philosophy of painting can be seen to pose certain challenges to a phenomenological approach to philosophy. While a phenomenological response to Deleuze’s philosophy is clearly needed, I show in this article how an approach taken in a recent paper by Christian Lotz proves inadequate. Lotz argues that through Deleuze’s refusal to accept the place of representation in art, he is unable to distinguish art from decoration, or to give a coherent account of how the content of art can be (...) represented. I show that this criticism emerges from a misreading of the place of representation in Deleuze’s philosophy. I will argue that by failing to take account of some of the key features of Deleuze’s wider ontology, such as the importance of both the virtual and the actual for his analysis of objects, Lotz’s critique proves unsuccessful. In particular, I want to show that Lotz’s criticisms rest on a failure to attend to the systematic nature of Deleuze’s philosophy, and in particular, the place of Deleuze’s analysis of Bacon within the system as a whole. I will further show that Lotz’s phenomenological defence commits the fallacy of petitio principii, assuming the validity of the phenomenological method in order to justify the phenomenological approach. (shrink)

In 2003, biophysicist and Nobel Laureate Maurice Wilkins published his autobiography entitled The Third Man. In the preface, he diffidently points out that the title was chosen by his publisher, as a reference to the famous 1949 movie no doubt, featuring Orson Welles in his classical role as penicillin racketeer Harry Lime. In this paper I intend to show that there is much more to this title than merely its familiar ring. If subjected to a comparative analysis, multiple correspondences between (...) movie and memoirs can be brought to the fore. Taken together, these documents shed an intriguing light on the vicissitudes of budding life sciences research during the post-war era. I will focus my comparative analysis on issues still relevant today, such as dual use, the handling of sensitive scientific information and, finally, on the interwovenness of science and warfare. Thus, I will explain how science autobiographies on the one hand and genres of the imagination on the other may deepen our comprehension of tensions and dilemmas of life sciences research then and now. For that reason, science autobiographies can provide valuable input for teaching philosophy and history of science to science students. (shrink)

This article is an installment in an ongoing debate between me and Hägglund. Both here and throughout our exchanges, I argue on behalf of Freud and Lacan against Hägglund's Derrida-inspired critique of psychoanalysis. Prior to the appearance of Hägglund's 2012 book Dying for Time, the back-and-forth between us centered primarily around the issue of just how atheistic Freudian-Lacanian analysis really is in light of the Derridean-Hägglundian ‘radical atheism’ delineated by Hägglund's 2008 book of that title. In this piece, which focuses (...) on the final chapter of Dying for Time, I carry out two interrelated tasks. First, I highlight what I allege to be certain limitations to Hägglund's Derridean ‘chronolibidinalism’ preventing it from doing full justice to the multiple dimensions of psychoanalysis both theoretical and clinical. Second, I offer interpretations of Freud and Lacan sharply contrasting with the readings of these two figures presented by Hägglund in Dying for Time as well as his other texts engaging with analysis. Moreover, in the process, I defend my version of Freudian-Lacanian drive theory as per my 2005 book Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive in the face of Hägglund's explicit criticisms of it. (shrink)

From the mid-thirties onwards, Martin Heidegger occasionally speculated about the future possibility of artificially producing human beings. What is at stake in biotechnology, Heidegger claims, is the imminent possibility of the destruction of the human essence. It is unclear, however, how Heidegger can substantiate such a claim given that he consistently denounced attempts to define human Dasein as a living being to which a higher capacity such as reason or language is added. This paper will argue that, in this sense, (...) Heidegger took the radical challenge of biotechnology both too seriously and not seriously enough. Too seriously, because it is unclear why he would fear the annihilation of Dasein’s essence if he is convinced that this essence is not related to man’s biological equipment in the first place. Not seriously enough, because Heidegger at the same time remained convinced that even the most intrusive interventions in the human body will not be able to disrupt Dasein’s ontological essence. (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)

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)

This paper will articulate an underappreciated side of the psychoanalytical Deleuze: his relation to Melanie Klein, particularly as it appears in The Logic of Sense. Deleuze's engagement with Klein largely follows his familiar strategy of re-reading a thinker off of a twist in one or two of that thinker's key concepts. With Klein, this twist involves re-reading her story of psychic development on the basis of disjunction rather than negation, so that the psychic surface that emerges generates a persistent non-correspondence (...) between self and other and between concept and thing. Deleuze thereby makes Klein a central figure in his ontology of sense and his analysis of how the physical surface of bodies generates a metaphysical surface of thought. However, Deleuze's ultimate turn is a Nietzschean one towards overcoming, the thought of eternal return, and the demolition of the Oedipal Law. As this final turn makes clear, even in his early writings that engaged more directly and affirmatively with psychoanalytical thought, Deleuze was already on an anti-Oedipal path. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze (January 18, 1925–November 4, 1995) was one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. Deleuze conceived of philosophy as the production of concepts, and he characterized himself as a “pure metaphysician.” In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition , he tries to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science—a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces essence and virtuality replaces possibility. Deleuze (...) was also well-known for a number of important monographs he published in the history of philosophy (on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Foucault, and Leibniz), as well as for his writings on the various arts, which include a two- volume study of the cinema, books on Proust and Sacher-Masoch, a monograph on the painter Francis Bacon, and a collection of essays on literature. Deleuze considered these latter works as pure philosophy, and not criticism, since he sought to create the concepts that correspond to the artistic practices of painters, filmmakers, and writers. In 1968, he met Félix Guattari, a political activist and radical psychoanalyst, with whom he wrote several works, among them the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia , comprised of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Their final collaboration was What is Philosophy? (1991). (shrink)

Today’s pornography constitutes a semiotic laboratory capable of meticulously describing some characteristics of the cultures from which it comes and for which it is intended. In it, the role of the face is preeminent and assumes relevance both from a diegetic and a formal point of view. A face which makes itself a sign and is articulated in a dialectic between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic axis, finding expression as an aspectual device, establishing a peculiar semiotic procedure of absentia in (...) praesentia, and highlighting an eminently enunciative dimension of the textual genre. Thus a facial semiotics of pornography becomes to all effects a cultural semiotics, which through the exploration of a transversal genre – both in its mainstream and more niche actualizations – produces significant results in defining how cultures of the face, including extrapornographic ones, delineate themselves. The aim of this article is to verify this peculiar facial semiotics through a case history that stretches from traditional to contemporary pornography, also analysing the “facial pornography” website beautifulagony.com and the visual works of some contemporary artists. (shrink)

I propose in this text a rhythmic theory of signs drawn from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I name this theory a semiorhythmology. I suggest that the theory of rhythm developed in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) can be understood, in part, as the culmination of the diverse set of inquiries into signs that both Deleuze and Guattari undertook, individually and together, beginning in the 1960s. I first outline Deleuze’s theory of signs as a theory of encounter as (...) developed in Proust and Signs (1964) and Difference and Repetition (1968), following which I sketch Guattari’s engagements with signs and semiotics throughout the 1960s and 1970s, particularly through his notion of “a-signifying semiotics” and the concept of the “diagram” he adapts from the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. I close by showing how these heterogeneous theories of the sign are drawn together in A Thousand Plateaus through the Spinozist reading of the ethology of Jakob von Uexküll and the theorisation of rhythm in the form of the refrain. (shrink)

V pričujočem tekstu trdimo, da je univerzalizacija simptoma najbolj vidna na področju politike. Simptom omogoča kontingentnosti, da zajame subjekta à deux, hkrati pa omogoči razkritje njegove razorožujoče ranljivosti. V sedanji konjunkturi se pokaže, da je razmerje med realnim užitka in označevalno strukturo antagonistično, še zlasti zato, ker tako razmerje razkriva subjektovo dvoumnost pri soočenju s problemom svobode z vidika simptoma. Četudi Lacan le redko uporablja ta izraz, svoboda preveva njegove seminarje, natančneje pa je locirana v problematiko psihoanalitičnega dejanja, se pravi, (...) subjekti si le redko želijo osvoboditi se spon njihovega simptoma tako, da se z njim soočijo oziroma da z njim odločno rokujejo. Po drugi strani pa subjekt in dejanje, četudi med seboj prepletena, nista nikdar zares povezana kot eno, ne da bi to vključevalo neogibno spregledanje. Če je mogoče politično dejanje obravnavati kot nedoločno, to velja tudi za političnega subjekta. Tu lahko pokažemo, da za razcepljenega subjekta bližina želje določa dejanje, ki terja pripoznanje, še več, preseženje subjektovega simptoma. Nenavadna, a neogibna iluzija kaže, da je pogoj za to, da subjekt ostane v polju politike, nekakšen notranji glas ali zvestoba fantazmi oziroma vznik folie à deux. V tej konstelaciji ostaja subjektov gon k politiki nekaj izmikajočega se in hkrati neodpravljivega, ker je prav ta gon tisti, ki – prek političnega dejanja – ohranja živo željo po emancipaciji, ki jo implicira simptom. Vzpostavitev povezave med političnim dejanjem in pripoznanjem simptoma zahteva od subjekta, da nosi posledice te identifikacije. Resnično nor pojav pri tem pa nastopi, ko subjekt prepozna sebe edino prek neogibnosti političnega dejanja in njegovega posledičnega spodleta. Simptom je na ta način sicer potrjen, čeprav ni osvoboditev od sintoma nikdar popolnoma dosežena. (shrink)

The concepts of territory and ritornello cannot be separated from one another, despite the fact that scholarship tends to restrict the former to discussions of politics and the latter to discussions of art. Deleuze and Guattari deploy the combination of territory and ritornello, along with associated notions such as rhythm, milieu, counterpoint and force, as a method to describe and understand the formation, existence and relations of living beings. They understand ‘life’ to also include a variety of nonorganic entities, such (...) as social formations. Territory and ritornello provide a philosophical alternative to understanding the existence of beings in terms of an immutable, unchanging transcendent structure, such as divine revelation, politico-economic ideology or cultural identity. As such, this conceptual pair is a necessary element in translating Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysical commitment to immanence and univocity into ethical and political theory and practice. (shrink)

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

This paper critically examines the materialism that Gilles Deleuze espouses in his oeuvre to the benefit of educational theory. In Difference and Repetition, he presented transcendental empiricism by underwriting Kant with realism (Deleuze, 1994). Later, in Capitalism & Schizophrenia I & II that were co-written with Félix Guattari (1984, 1988) and that they named Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze's philosophical approach is realigned into what I term here as transcendental materialism, and latterly as immanent materialism; that I claim effectively (...) eliminate phenomenology as perceptual input. This essay takes this transformation seriously as a way of understanding educational data, research and practices. The proposition that is central to this paper is that transcendental and immanent materialism give us a means of dealing with educational phenomena without the interference of perception or a stable category of experience, by connecting data with theory and circumventing subjectification. It is argued that this proposition has important consequences for educational research, and the construction of educational arguments that will be illustrated in this essay. Deleuze's debt to French Marxism and in particular to the work of Louis Althusser are also recognised through this writing. (shrink)

The meeting of Deleuze and Guattari in 1969 is generally used to explain how the former's thought became politicised under the influence of the latter. This narrative, however useful it might be in explaining Deleuze's move away from the domain of academic philosophy following the upheavals of May 1968, has had the effect of de-emphasising the conceptual development which occurred between Difference and Repetition and Anti-Oedipus. Worst of all, it has had the effect of reducing the role of Marx's philosophy (...) to the superficial level of political alibi, impoverishing our understanding of its importance with respect to the conceptual assemblage of Anti-Oedipus. This paper attempts to restore Marx's relevance to Deleuze and Guattari's project by understanding Anti-Oedipus through the Marxian categories of production, distribution, surplus-value and consumption, and argues for a conception of schizoanalysis which does not relegate the name of Marx to the garbage heap of poststructuralist intellectual strategy. (shrink)

The rise of the sitar from a limited accompaniment instrument used in the regional courts of Northern India to an internationally recognized cultural icon underscores its importance both as an instrument and a cultural symbol—the sitar mirrors India’s social complexity. This story encapsulates the social, political and economic trauma resulting from the dismantling of Mughal empire to the partition of Pakistan, reflecting contesting social narratives and Hindu/Muslim cultural heritages through the distinctive musical styles modern India. A musical instrument and material (...) object of contested origins, the sitar extends from wood, gourd, wire, and ivory into complex social and cultural networks. I argue that the sitar, as object, cannot be reduced to either an empirical or phenomenological entity; it is a space of potentiality, the actualization of a virtual object. I examine the sitar as both byproduct and narrative, demonstrating how it defies attempts to limit its constantly rupturing borders with imposed cognitive frames, and how materiality and philosophical systems can inform ethnographic practice. (shrink)

What and how should individuals resist in political situations? While this question, or versions of it, recurs regularly within Western political philosophy, answers to it have often relied on dyads founded upon dogmatically held ideals. In particular, there is a strain of idealist political philosophy, inaugurated by Plato and finding contemporary expression in the work of Alain Badiou, that employs dyads (such as the distinction between truth and doxa or the privilege of thought over sense) that tend to reduce the (...) complexities of practices of resistance to concepts of commitment. Although these dyads have been challenged by, amongst others, poststructuralist theorists, this has often been at the cost of losing their structuralist heritage. This thesis develops an ontology proper to structuralism that engenders non-idealist and non-dogmatic, yet ethical, practices of resistance against commitment orientated accounts of resistance and the return of classical ontological dyads. The thesis begins with an examination of the extent to which a dogmatic use of idealism grounds the work of a prominent contemporary theorist, Alain Badiou. In developing his neo-Maoist metapolitics, Badiou follows both Platonic ontology and the Marxist tradition of dialectics by claiming that political practice can only be carried out in truth by paying fidelity to an event that ruptures the presented order of things. Chapter one opens with an exploration of Badiou's mathematic meta-ontology to draw out its three foundational dyads (truth/doxa; sense/intelligibility; is/is not). It is argued that although Badiou makes important criticisms of the preponderant trends of political philosophy, he is unable to support his own account of politics due to his dogmatic reliance on idealist principles. Chapter two begins by developing two accounts: first, of the relations between Badiou's work and that of his former teacher Louis Althusser and, secondly, the relations between Althusser's thought and that of Gilles Deleuze, in particular his reading of David Hume. Discussion centres around the importance of the role that time plays within the works of all three authors, particularly in regard to the idea of the void. The chapter concludes with the argument that Hume's temporal idea of human nature is the key to a symptomatic reading of Althusser that accounts for the persistence of ideas in the latter's social theory. In chapter three, Deleuze's reading of Hume's idea of relations is developed to take into account Bergson's theory of time. Read in contrast to Quentin Meillassoux's speculative realism, the chapter argues that Deleuze's account of temporal relations informs Althusser's social theory to create the ontological grounds for non-dogmatic and non-idealist practices of resistance. These practices are developed in chapter four with an unlikely turn to John Stuart Mill's idea of genius, the metaphysical property of the individual that signifies the discovery of new truth. The chapter begins with an argument that there is an under-developed account of ethics in Deleuze's work. Distinguishing the idea of genius from both Mill's moral philosophy, as well as from utilitarian thought more generally, the idea of genius is sutured onto Deleuze's ontological account of individuation. Read alongside Althusser's social theory, which accounts for the non-idealist conceptualisation of situations, this suture creates an ethically oriented structuralist ontology. The thesis concludes with the argument that the idea of genius is the ethical imperative that motivates practices of resistance. When individuals are understood as embodied within situations, practices of resistance are conceptualised not against other components of a situation, but contra them, taking them into account in order to amplify, multiply and transform the individual's potential within a situation. (shrink)

In this essay I bring together Lacan, Žižek, Deleuze and Guattari as mediators and intercessors for one another. The tensions that exist between them still continue to reverberate throughout the academic community. The intent is to query their pedagogies in what they are trying to ‘do’ within the context of capitalism in particular. I have called their pedagogies anomalous in keeping with their thrust of becoming other in their own particular ways through what I take to be three pedagogical conceptual (...) personae: saint, jester and nomad. I try to show how Deleuze and Guattari managed to supplant and perhaps overcome Lacan's own pedagogical project to have psychoanalysis as a way out from capitalism, which has been continued today by Žižek. I do this by showing how Lacan's mathemes, used in his four discourses, can be understood as having been deterritorialised by Deleuze and Guattari to present us with a counter-actualised pedagogy that challenges psychoanalysis as presented by both Lacan and Žižek. Nevertheless, reconciliations between the thought of Deleuze, Guattari and Lacan are possible. The reader will also find that particular door open, yet not fully explored here. (shrink)

How can Deleuzians make his philosophy as accessible as possible to political theorists and democratic publics? This essay provides principles to enter Deleuze's political vision, namely, to research the etymology of words, to discover the image beneath concepts, to diagram schemata using rigid lines, supple lines and lines of flight, and to construct rules that balance experimentation and caution. The essay then employs this method to explicate a fecund sentence about politics in A Thousand Plateaus and presents a case why (...) Deleuze deserves greater visibility in the political theory canon. (shrink)

This essay investigates thought as an event of “multiplicity.” French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou pose this as a concept of change (political and otherwise). Both philosophers propose that multiplicity means thinking happens as an event by engaging a theoretical impasse, or “un-thought.” Un-thought opens up and changes ideas into complex varieties or multiplicities. This dynamic is examined through the example of May ‘68, an actual event that gives context to how multiplicity expresses “radical change.” The aim of this (...) article is to see how both thinkers’ theories overlap. For Badiou, multiplicities are “truths” that happen whilst making a decision, engaging a notion of “point.” For Deleuze, multiplicities are concepts that happen materially in life as metaphysical forces, or “lines.” Multiplicity is critically approached as a complex variety of ideas that change in the forms of art, politics, and science. (shrink)

This text explores the problem of transcendental stupidity in Sigmund Freud, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida’s works, seeking to combine it with the paradoxical figure of Oedipus in psychoanalytical and philosophical tradition and the symptomatic situation of some important animals in analyses and therapies. The case of the Man of the Wolves, the case of Mr. Sergei K. Pankejeff described in Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose, a fundamental dream in contemporary culture history, would be the point of departure.

While any number of topics would serve to compare and contrast Deleuze and Badiou, this article will focus on the event. Focusing on the event serves several purposes. First, it provides a vantage point from which to elucidate a number of key topics in both philosophers. Second, while Badiou’s most recent work is already organized around his conception of the event, Deleuze’s discussion of the event is more diffuse. Thus, a discussion of the event in Deleuze will serve as heuristic (...) to relate several of Deleuze’s (Deleuze and Guattari’s) texts. Finally, focusing on a single issue will clarify what is at stake in each conception of the event. (shrink)

Against those who wish to marginalise Deleuze's political relevance, this paper argues that his work – including and especially that produced before his collaborations with Guattari – is not only fundamentally political but also profoundly engaged with Marx. The paper begins by focusing on different possible strategies for contesting the claim that Deleuze is apolitical, attempting to debunk this claim by briefly considering Deleuze's work with Guattari. The bulk of the paper is concerned with a close examination of the appearance (...) of Marx in both Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, establishing that the ‘pre-Guattari’ Deleuze was fully engaged with both politics and Marx and demonstrating that the concepts and arguments of the Marxist politics of the Deleuze–Guattari books can be traced back to Deleuze's own work. It is argued that an analysis of Deleuze's work on Marx is significant not only for deepening our understanding of Marx, but also for understanding the possibilities for Deleuzian politics. (shrink)

:In this essay I will look at four recent films that have organ transplantations “at their heart”: 21 Grams, L'Intrus, Dirty Pretty Things and Heart of Jenin. Each film in its own way shows how Nancy's concept of the intruder balances in a different dynamics between biopolitical and biophilosophical concerns and proposes in various ways a changed concept of sacrifice, transforming sacrifice from religious offering into political or ethical resistance and allowing a-religious strivings to persist.

Revisiting Guattari's visits to Japan in the 1980s during the country's ‘bubble economy’, this paper investigates from a personal perspective the Radio Homerun mini-FM station as well as other stops on Guattari's Tokyo ‘pilgrimage’. Guattari's reception and influence in Japan is contextualised through the writer Kõbõ Abe and philosopher Kiyoteru Hanada, in addition to the groundbreaking work of Tetsuo Kogawa, against the backdrop of the rise of postmodernism. Similarities between Guattari's sense of Japan and Brazil are then broached.

This article addresses the problematic perspectives of drone culture. In critiquing focus on the drone’s apparent ‘autonomy’, it argues that such devices function as part of a socio-technical network. They are relational parts of human–machine interaction that, in our changing geopolitical realities, have a powerful influence on politics, reputation and warfare. Drawing on Žižek’s conception of parallax, the article stresses the importance of culture and perception in forming the role of the drone in widening power asymmetries. It examines how perceptions (...) of autonomy are evoked by drones, to claim that this misperception is a smokescreen that obscures the relational socio-technical realities of the drone. The article therefore argues that a more critical culture of the drone emerges by shifting the focus and perception from autonomy to anonymity. This allows us to engage more fully with the distributed agency and decision-making that define how drones are developed and deployed. Rather than focusing on the drone as a singular, fetishised, technical object, a relational approach to the drone assemblage is proposed that highlights the competing human interests that define and resist drones in global politics and culture. (shrink)

Since the mid-twentieth century the concepts ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ have become increasingly significant within a host of fields, such as education, medicine, engineering, technology and science. Moreover, such terms appear to have become ubiquitous, if not hegemonic, within the contemporary discourses that inform debates that surround the allocation and cultivation of the social capital that is native to education, both tertiary and otherwise. Given that the thinking of creativity appears increasingly to be possible only within the contemporary logics of utility (...) and productivity that inform the discussion of the ‘knowledge economy’, the philosophical works of Gilles Deleuze are perhaps now more vital than ever, at least insofar as he is able to provide the possibility of approaching an ‘otherwise’ to the contemporary thinking of ‘creativity’. This paper discusses the possibility for Deleuze's discussion of rhythm – as can be located in his text A Thousand Plateaus and his work on the twentieth-century painter Francis Bacon – as providing the means for better posing the question of the conditions for the emergence of a fundamentally creative approach to teaching creativity to be conceptualized within our present situation. (shrink)

Building from recent attempts in the humanities and social sciences to conceive of creative, entangled ways of doing interdisciplinary work, I turn to Braidotti’s ‘nomadic ontology’ to (re)vision the human body without a brain. Her exploration of the body as a ‘threshold of transformations’ is put into conversation with Deleuze’s comments on neurobiology to consider what a brainless body might do, or undo, in neuroscientific practice. I ground discussion in a case study, detailing the practices of brain decoding or ‘mind (...) reading,’ re-interpreting Rose’s account. Therein, I argue that the technical-social configurations of brain decoding are unlikely to usher in a radically new ontology, as Rose suggests. To better match Rose’s vision and align with new ontologies in cultural theory, I argue that neuroscience must become nomadic and embrace a body without a brain. I then conclude with six recommendations towards a nomadic neuroscience. (shrink)

Technological augmentation in the field of communication is a new way of controlling and manipulating the interface between current political communications and information. This is because, within the new paradigms of power, political communication is under the influence of netocracy, a new and mythical form of cybertechnological superpanopticism. The general objective of this paper is to analyze the phenomenon of cybertechnological globalization where, according to Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist, this new form of political and communicative superpanopticism is the result (...) of netocracy. This is related not just to the undermining of capitalism, but also to the myth of internet transparency as the site for communicational freedom. In theoretical terms, this paper seeks to deconstruct this hypothesis based on Slavoj Žižek’s position on netocracy. He claims this phenomenon is little more than a new and perverse form of capitalism which engages new methods of manipulating political communication. The methodology used in this paper draws on Bard and Söderqvist’s arguments, Žižek’s critique and Gilles Deleuze’s deconstruction. (shrink)

:This article outlines three possible ethical injunctions underlying three different educational projects related to the self: “become what you are”, “be what you are”, and “be what you become”. While differing on many levels, these three injunctions all assume connections between self, education, and some form of determinism and/or developmentalism. Although relatively autonomous, determinism and developmentalism are often linked together in the sense that they both presuppose that function precedes form, determining in advance how something ought to develop, mature, or (...) change. As an alternative, the essay concludes with a parodic fourth injunction which suspends the relationship between self, education, and determinism and/or developmentalism: an injunction to be “less than you are.”. (shrink)

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has successfully combated modern-day slavery by transforming the ways that over a dozen major brands, including Taco Bell, Subway, and Wal-Mart, manage their supply chains. The CIW’s efforts over more than 20 years have effectively stopped enslavement practices, including abuses such as wage theft and peonage indebtedness. We conducted a field ethnography, interviews, and archival analyses to understand this success. We find that the CIW employs a decentered, egalitarian, and ensemble approach to their multiplicities (...) of alliances by collectively “animating” themselves and their partners through ensemble leadership. This combination of alliances, along with worker-driven monitoring, brings life to the CIW motto “We are all leaders.” Translating this motto into daily practice is how the CIW virtually eradicates enslavement practices in corporate supply chains. (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)

Normal 0 21 false false false ES X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Sin duda, la preocupación básica del pensamiento de Gilles Deleuze es la ontología. Siempre basado en una reflexión ontológica este filósofo abordará otros campos como la política y la estética. Sin embargo, poco se ha atendido al papel que el lenguaje desempeña con respecto al tema ontológico en esta obra. De hecho el lenguaje parece no ser una de las preocupaciones centrales de Deleuze, a pesar de que los casos en (...) que lo considera con cierta exclusividad son muy significativos, pues terminan constituyendo lo que podría considerarse una teoría sobre el lenguaje que lo pone en una relación esencial con la ontología. En este escrito trataré de reconstruir este cuerpo teórico sobre lenguaje y ontología recurriendo, en primer lugar, a Lógica del sentido y luego a la formulación perfeccionada de “Postulados de la lingüística” y Foucault. (shrink)

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)

We may understand natural science as part of the attempt by human beings to understand themselves and their place in the world in which they find themselves. In this sense, as Karl Rahner has suggested, natural science flows naturally into anthropology. Consciously or unconsciously, science is always part of the drive to self-understanding. In an age of religious pluralism like ours, Christian faith in Asia is also brought face to face with the living reality of other religions, and that, too, (...) cannot but affect how we understand our shared humanity. (shrink)

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

The premise of this article is that the political import of Deleuze and Guattari’s “micropolitics of desire” has been obscured and as such remains underdeveloped. The micropolitics of desire is here reproduced to provide a Nietzscheo-Marxian critique of capitalism and resistive politics of the future. This entails an entirely different understanding of the nature of power and resistance, as compared to prevalent views. Power is not negative or anti-energy, but a socially productive force operating on, with and through the productivity (...) of desire, delineating an immanent, quantitative and “fusional multiplicity” of a producing-production. Resistance is a matter of recomposing this producer-produced relationship in a manner problematic to and in excess of the very productive core of capitalism. In terms of praxis, this amounts to experimental practices that resonate into a viral though non-teleological “revolutionary-becoming”, delineating a form of a-systematic and post-identity resistance. The underlying thesis is that we must change our “desire”, before we can hope to change our politics. (shrink)

Science fiction is often used as a tool with which to think about actual science. While often this is depicted in terms of imaginary future potential, science fiction has also shown itself to be a poignant critique of existing science and a means of exploring our collective anxieties regarding the continued logic of current scientific development. This article explores the science fiction of organ transplantation, as mapped against scientific and medicolegal developments in actual organ transplantation. Explored through the lens of (...) Adorno’s work on cultural criticism, it is argued that science fiction serves as a tool with which we address (and critique) the ethical boundaries (and fears, often colonial in nature) of actual organ transplantation. Science fiction works such as Larry Niven’s Known Space Universe and Repo! The Genetic Opera are examined, demonstrating that in critiquing the science of organ transplantation, fictionists ultimately come to examine changing cultural understandings of selfhood and embodiment. (shrink)

Beginning from the hypothesis that Slavoj iek's recent 'theological' writing really concerns issues in political theory — historicity, modernity and freedom — 'polemical ambivalence' uses a fundamental structural ambiguity in his recent book, The Puppet and Dwarf, to interpret his larger project as split about the utopian aspect of modernity. The Puppet and the Dwarf is riven by modernity, with the text's central argument demonstrating the importance of the modern perspective but with the framing material demanding that we reverse this (...) appraisal. Modernism elicits both a basic allegiance from iek and a basic opposition. Since for iek it is the only way that political theory can remain true to the utopian demands of freedom, such 'ambivalence' about modernity is the unacknowledged ground of iek's thought, and my paper moves toward a consideration of its value in explaining some of the elusive elements of his work — the role and limits of 'science' in politics, the necessity and impossibility of utopian imagination, the problem of belief and faith in revolutionary movements. (shrink)