The Academy seems to operate with a swarm consciousness; suddenly we find ourselves on a new landscape laden with new percepts and affects to be deciphered as signs, as Deleuze and Guattari might a...

This article investigates the role of ‘anarchy’ in state securitisation. First, we discuss state hierarchies’ struggle with active and reactive anarchic networks, theorising a state in existential crisis, which exploits anti-anarchist discourses to respond to network threats. In the second part, we illustrate with examples the use of fear of anarchy in hierarchical productive structures of securitisation. As an ‘antiproduction assemblage’, the state treats logics stemming from the ‘social principle’ as a repressed Real, the exclusion of which underpins its own (...) functioning. The scarcity and fear resulting from state terror ensure responses to this structural violence by reactive networks, while paradoxically also exacerbating reactive tendencies within social movements. In the concluding part, we discuss visions of desecuritising society, breaking away from majoritarian logics of control and the coming of other worlds counterposed to the hierarchies producing and reproducing an eternal loop of state and ne... (shrink)

This paper considers the trajectory of Althusser's Spinozism pre- and post-May ‘68. Where Althusser's application of Spinoza would often lead him into unknown or non-Marxist territory, one alternative way to think this relation is through the figure of Mao, whose concept of non-antagonistic contradiction I propose to read in terms of Spinoza's “determinate negation.” Although not going so far as to suggest that a certain combination of Mao and Spinoza would have enabled Althusser to “complete” Marx, this paper speculates on (...) this omission from his work and what positive insights we can draw from it retrospectively for developing Althusser's political philosophy. (shrink)

My intention is to consider Bernard Stiegler’s concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’. Open Humanities Press, 2020) and to explore how one might rethink the knowledge-creating potentialities of information itself. This has become all the more apparent in the time of lockdowns, physical distancing during the pandemic but the primary purpose of the paper is to look at the distinction between knowledge/information and the role of the teacher in using technology pharmacologically to safeguard the savoirs and to stem the proletarianization of (...) knowledge or stupidity as such. The point is that the pandemic is bringing home the question of the role of the teacher, the role of the school and the necessity of the co-production and co-creation of knowledge. It seems essential to understand the concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ in the time of the pandemic as students are left at home without a journey to voyage upon. As such, there is a lack of futurally-bound collective protentions, an absence of any vision projection into the future. What is there in the concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ that demonstrates how to use the Internet in bifurcatory ways, to produce what Stiegler calls negentropic knowledge or new forms of knowledge, or what I want to designate as experiments with truth-telling. What does it mean to produce negentropic knowledge without the teacher to guide, curate and care? With the above in mind, and by writing out of the wound of thinking, it is by rethinking the concept of curation in a different way that it is hoped one can contribute to educational research to produce unheard-of bifurcations of knowledge, to invoke Deleuze’s sense of the incomprehensible and Stiegler’s sense of the impossible, the improbable and the incalculable in educational concerns, to pave a path out of the aporia of the present—a present which is without decision and epoch. (shrink)

This thesis seeks to understand the nature of and relation between science and philosophy articulated in the early work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It seeks to challenge the view that Deleuze’s metaphysical and metaphilosophical position is in important part an attempt to respond to twentieth century developments in the natural sciences, claiming that this is not a plausible interpretation of Deleuze’s early thought. The central problem identified with such readings is that they provide an insufficient explanation of the (...) nature of philosophy’s contribution to the encounter between philosophy and science that they discern in Deleuze’s work. The philosophical, as opposed to scientific, dimension of the position attributed to Deleuze remains obscure. In chapter 1, it is demonstrated that this question of philosophy’s contribution to intellectual life and of how to differentiate philosophy from the sciences is a live one in Deleuze’s early thought. An alternative, less anachronistic interpretation of the parameters of Deleuze’s early project is offered. The remaining chapters of the thesis examine the early Deleuze’s understanding of the divergence between philosophy and science. Chapter 2 gives an account of Deleuze’s metaphilosophy, alongside a reconstruction of his largely implicit early understanding of science. The divergent intellectual processes and motivating concerns that account for Deleuze’s understanding of the differentiation of science and philosophy are thus clarified. In chapter 3, Deleuze’s use of mathematical and physical concepts is examined. It is argued that these concepts are used metaphorically. In chapter 4, the association between modern science and the Deleuzian concept of immanence that has been proposed by some Deleuze scholars is examined and ultimately challenged. The thesis concludes with some reflections on the significance of Deleuze’s early work for contemporary debates concerning the future of continental philosophy and the nature of philosophy more generally. (shrink)

The goal of this essay is to sketch, in broad form, Deleuze and Guattari’s militant critique of civilization in general and the capitalist mode of production production specifically. It will be shown that the development of civilization is framed in historico-temporal terms, and as such grappling with this structure is vital for posing any sort of escape from it. Concentrating on the strange time-structure embedded in the design of their book A Thousand Plateaus, it will be shown how exceedingly abstract (...) meditations take on a material depth that allow Deleuze and Guattari to sketch not only the development of civilization, but find the cracks and fissures within it that allow the possibility of a new world to emerge. Such a new world would be the realization of a new form of temporality, a “no-longer-alienated history”, to quote the Marxist theorist Moishe Postone. Arriving in the near-present, it will be seen how Deleuze and Guattari's analysis converges with the anti-work tendencies in Marxist thought, and the way in which the rejection of labor – understood as an organization or “economy of time” – serves as the ground for the destruction of historical time. What emerges, then, is the charting of a passage from “pulsed time” to “non-pulsed time”, through which a new articulation of ‘history’ can emerge. (shrink)

В статті розглядається спекулятивний постгуманізм як актуальний підхід у дослідженні умов людської істоти. В статті досліджується вплив критичного постгуманізму та спекулятивного реалізму на спекулятивний постгуманізм і водночас доводиться оригінальність спекулятивного постгуманізму, який полягає в становленні дивергентних життєформ та їхніх подій. Напрямки, що значно вплинули на критичний постгуманізм і стали його складовими частинами, як-от деконструкція, дельозіанська концепція тощо, розглядаються в статті як засади спекулятивного постгуманізму, а також натуралізуються та віталізуються. Наприклад, ризома розуміється як біологічна мережа загалу людських нащадків, які апроприюють як (...) людські, так і не-людські риси,. Такий принциповий надлишок проживання в його іманентності розглядається як спектр або повнота, яка протистоїть будь-яким метафізичним межам. Замість метафізичного віталізму застосовується стратегічний віталізм, у контексті якого багатоманіття структурується фрактально та алеаторно, змішуючи людські та нелюдські, дигітальні та тваринні тощо риси. Так, в статті порівнюються філософський натуралізм та вітальний реалізм, який в контексті об’єкт-орієнтованої онтології має справу навіть з не-живими істотами. Акселерація та сингулярність у цьому разі мають на увазі диссипацію інтенсивностей в русі смертельного потягу, який розуміється як цілесність і плексивність від темплексивності до телеоплексивності. Таким чином, проживання постає як буття-нічим, формою форм, творенням творення. У статті окреслюється сучасна концепція постлюдини в контексті спекулятивного постгуманізму як принципово онтологічно невизначена. Стаття може стати в нагоді для розвитку теоретичного лаштування усвідомлення постлюдської істоти. (shrink)