As is well known, Deleuze says in Difference and Repetition that ‘the task of contemporary philosophy has been defined: to reverse Platonism’. This task is then continued in Logic of Sense, through its discussion of Stoic logic. Deleuze says there that ‘the Stoics are the first to reverse Platonism’. And, at the same time, in the big Spinoza book, we see Deleuze present Spinoza's ‘anti-Cartesian reaction’. This anti-Cartesian reaction is equivalent to the reversal of Platonism. We can say then that (...) the task of the reversal of Platonism unifies the three books Deleuze published at the end of the Sixties. The thesis of this essay will consist in arguing that ethics we find in Logic of Sense – which we can call ‘the ethics of the univocity of being’ – completes, in a constructive way, Deleuze's early project of the reversal of Platonism. The ethics centres on the idea of counter-actualisation. We shall argue that there are four senses of counter-actualisation. Here is a summary of the four senses of counter-actualisation: beatitude against resentment ; caring for the sense against neglecting the sense ; the embodiment of plural hopings and rememberings against the embodiment of one hope and one memory ; and ‘just enough’ against ‘too much’. Yet, as we shall see, there is a fifth meaning of counter-actualisation, the ultimate meaning. The ultimate sense of counter-actualisation is universal freedom. This is where my essay will end. (shrink)

This essay explores three deconstructive concepts – archive, anthropocene, and auto-affection – across two registers. The first is the register of what counts as readability in general, beyond reading in its narrow and actualized sense.. The second register applies to Derrida today, and what it means to read the corpus of a philosopher and how that corpus is governed by proper names. I want to suggest that the way we approach proper names in philosophy and theory is part of a (...) broader problem of our relation to what it is to read, and how readability intertwines with the human. (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)

Arguably, two of the most important forces affecting contemporary global culture are the growing awareness of ecological crises and the rapid spread of digital media. Félix Guattari's unfinished concept of ecosophy suggests the basis of a theoretical framework for constructing productive syntheses between the ecological and the digital. Moreover, a Guattarian rethinking of the ecological turn in the humanities challenges the philosophical basis of the pedagogy of Nature appreciation that has characterised the eco-humanities landscape since the 1970s. Guattari's ecosophy gestures (...) towards a transversal eco-humanities, which would be rhizomatically rooted in autopoiesis and becoming-other, rather than defined by static allegiance to the ideals of ‘Self-realisation’ postulated by the deep ecology movement. (shrink)

Analyzes the different feelings, drives and instincts we have inherited from other species, to suggest a new understanding of ourselves as part of an eco-political community.

The recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the need to develop more ontological modes of theorising the ethical ‘responsibility’ of the human in its relational encounters with nonhuman bodies and materialities. However, there is a lingering sense in this literature that such an ethics remains centred on a transcendent subject that would pre-exist the encounters on which it is called to respond. In this essay, I explore how Gilles Deleuze's philosophy offers potential opening for (...) a more ontogenetic thinking of a ‘nonhuman ethics’. Specifically, I focus on how his theory of ‘individuation’ – conceived as a creative event of emergence in response to immanent ontological problems – informs his rethinking of ethics beyond the subject, opening thought to nonhuman forces and relations. I argue that if cinema becomes a focus of Deleuze's ethical discussions in his later work it is because the images and signs it produces are expressive of these nonhuman forces and processes of individuation, generating modes of perception and duration without ontological mooring in the human subject. Through a discussion of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's experimental film – Leviathan – I explore how the cinematic encounter dramatises different ethical worlds in which a multiplicity of nonhuman ‘points of view’ coexist without being reduced to a hierarchical or orienting centre that would unify and identify them. To conclude, I suggest that it is through the lens of an ethics of individuation that we can grasp the different sense of ‘responsibility’ alive in Deleuze's philosophy, one oriented not to the terms of the already-existing but rather to the nonhuman potential of what might yet come into being. (shrink)

Progressive educators must find ways of addressing the unconscious investments of desire that subvert free actions if they want to inspire just practices. This essay takes up that challenge, describing what a Deleuzian pedagogy might look like and what it can do by combining an exploration of learning, ethics and autonomy in Difference and Repetition with the activation of Deleuzo-Guattarian thought in contemporary Communities of Philosophical Inquiry.

In this paper, I trace the concept of ‘becomings’, most thoroughly articulated in the tenth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, as it relates to the notion of the writer as sorcerer. More precisely, my aim is to articulate how it is that Deleuze and Guattari conceptualise the writer as really effecting what they understand as ‘becomings’. My thesis is that if the writer is a sorcerer, capable of enabling real becomings, it is because language itself, for Deleuze and Guattari, is (...) bodily and material, and the author, particularly the literary author, has the ability to disrupt language's representational domain of sense, causing language to hum with the intensive vitality that puts it in closest proximity to the body, from whence language emerges in the first place. We shall first look to Bergson and Spinoza, from whom Deleuze and Guattari abstract their intensive conception of the body in A Thousand Plateaus. From here we will outline the apparent progression of becomings in the tenth plateau. Finally, we will look to the Kafka book as outlining the material and affective capacities of literature. (shrink)

Becoming-animal in Franz Kafka has functioned as a conceptual inkblot test, read in practically opposite ways by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the one hand and animal studies on the other. The concept is introduced in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, a text with no particular interest in displacing anthropocentrism. On the contrary, Deleuze and Guattari saw Kafka as an affirmatively anthropocentric writer who needed to have done with animals in order complete his anti-fascist accelerationist project. Yet ecocritical readers (...) of Deleuze and Guattari have nevertheless found in becoming-animal a weapon against anthropocentrism. While Deleuze and Guattari attempt to purify Kafka of animality, animal studies for its part purifies both Kafka and Kafka of anti-fascism. The roots of this strange conceptual chiasmus lie in the manner in which the opposition nature-techne is thought and a certain shared Heidegerrian inheritance. A reading of Kafka’s The Castle focusing on a horse-drawn sleigh provides resources for a concept of animal machine that would ruin the opposition between becoming-animal and machinic assemblage (nature-techne) that governs Kafka and blocks access to crucial resources for countering fascism and anthropocentrism. (shrink)

True to his early Schellingian roots, Slavoj Zizek, in his recent book, Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World describes a virus as “a kind of zero-level life,” invoking Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. Perhaps the closest reference, though Zizek did not mention it, is his second major work on the subject, namely, First Outline of A System of the Philosophy of Nature where Schelling originally propounded the theory of nature’s ‘duplicity’. In the following discussions, we will situate Zizek’s timely intervention within the context of (...) his naturalism that politically mediates the differential flows of the present world and the subject itself, against the background of a space of difference between the two, whereby the virus acts as a kind of deferral mechanism in which something like the future is suspended, finally rendering the relation motionless. The discussions will also briefly situate Zizek’s political naturalism within contemporary political discourse involving some of his direct and indirect engagements with Agamben, Latour, Badiou, Berardi, Deleuze, and others. This critical review stakes out a view of Zizek’s recent intervention as a timely polemics, consistent with his global image as one of the most dependable public intellectuals of our troubled time. (shrink)