Motivated by the question of responsible AI and value alignment, I seek to offer a uniquely Foucauldian reconstruction of the problem as the emergence of an ethical subject in a disciplinary setting. This reconstruction contrasts with the strictly human-oriented programme typical to current scholarship that often views technology in instrumental terms. With this in mind, I problematise the concept of a technological subjectivity through an exploration of various aspects of ChatGPT in light of Foucault’s work, arguing that current systems lack (...) the reflexivity and self-formative characteristics inherent in the notion of the subject. By drawing upon a recent dialogue between Foucault and phenomenology, I suggest four techno-philosophical desiderata that would address the gaps in this search for a technological subjectivity: embodied self-care, embodied intentionality, imagination and reflexivity. Thus I propose that advanced AI be reconceptualised as a subject capable of “technical” self-crafting and reflexive self-conduct, opening new pathways to grasp the intertwinement of the human and the artificial. This reconceptualization holds the potential to render future AI technology more transparent and responsible in the circulation of knowledge, care and power. (shrink)

After a long period of neglect that began in his lifetime, why has Schelling reemerged as an important philosopher, germane to contemporary concerns? In the first part of this essay I offer a brief history of Schelling’s early descent into obscurity and gradual ascent back into the light of philosophical relevance. In the second and final part of the essay, I offer a brief survey of the current Schelling resurgence in the English speaking reception of Continental philosophy.

This paper introduces Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming in a system theoretic framework and proposes an alternative ontological foundation to the study of systems and complex systems in particular. A brief critique of systems theory and the difficulties apparent in it is proposed as an introduction to the discussion. Following is an overview aimed at providing access to the ‘big picture’ of Deleuze’s revolutionary philosophical system with emphasis on a system theoretic approach and terminology. The major concepts of Deleuze’s ontology—difference, virtuality, (...) multiplicity, assemblages, quasi-causation, becoming, intensity and progressive determination are introduced and discussed. Deleuze’s work is a radical departure from the dogma of western philosophy that guides the foundations of science and systems theory. It replaces identity with difference and being with becoming; in other words, it provides systems theory with an ontological ground based on change, heterogeneity and the inexhaustible novelty-producing process that underlies all phenomena. The conceptual tools made available by this philosophy seem to capture the fundamental aspects of complexity and complex systems much better than the current conceptual system that is based on static transcendent ontological entities. (shrink)

What is?Curriculum Theory articulates the problematic of difference, diversity, and multiplicity in contemporary curriculum thought. More specifically, this essay argues that the conceptualization of difference that dominates the contemporary curriculum landscape is inadequate to either the task of ontological experimentation or the creation of non-representational ways for thinking a life. Despite the ostensible radicality ascribed to the curricular ideas of difference and multiplicity, What is?Curriculum Theory argues that these ideas remain wed to an structural or identitarian logic that derives difference (...) from the a priori conditions of the possible. Further, this essay argues that the orthodox conceptualization of difference in contemporary curriculum studies is complicit with the capitalist commitment to quantitative multiplicity, or rather, the proliferation of ‘multiple consumer choices’. Following this problematic, the task of this paper is oriented to the conceptualization of difference adequate to the creation of a people yet-to-come, or rather, a people for which no prior image exists. To accomplish this, What is?Curriculum Theory draws upon Deleuze’s Bergsonism in order to advance a conceptualization of difference that breaks from modes of dialectical negation and contradiction particular to the tyranny of representational thinking. Articulating an image of difference that no longer accords to the possible, this essay composes a thought experiment conceptualizing a pedagogical life in a manner that explicates the transversal relationship between the actual and the virtual. (shrink)

Reconceptualist and post‐reconceptualist curriculum scholars have drawn upon the notion of a complicated curriculum conversation as a means to describe the imbricated, pluralist, and eclectic character of curriculum theorizing. Insofar as this curriculum conversation is accomplished via language however, it remains wed to a particular representational logic restricting what might be thought. This essay explores the question of what it means to theorize curriculum when the very idea of a complicated curriculum conversation begins to fall into cliché. Mobilizing the philosophical (...) thought of Gilles Deleuze, this essay analyzes three representational commitments of contemporary curriculum theorizing, addressing how each are inadequate for the theorization of difference or the instantiation of the radically new. Against the implicit commitment to conformity alive in the curriculum field, this essay posits an ethics of disidentification exemplified via Bruce McDonald's horror film Pontypool. It is via such a tactic of productive disidentification, this essay claims, that thought might be unfettered from the orthodoxies of common sense, becoming in this way more adequate for opening spaces unanticipated by contemporary representational regimes. (shrink)

This article presents a case study of successful research capacity building in the field of early childhood education in a non-research intensive, regional Australian university. In a context characterised by substantial political, economic and structural constraints, it illustrates a creative, strategic, and to some extent, transgressive approach to research capacity building inspired, in part, by concepts proffered by social theorist Gilles Deleuze.

Following Deleuze’s analysis of expressivity, this article approaches the two opening aphorisms of the Dao De Jing 道德經 as two movements of a triadic differentiation of expressive elements. These aphorisms are further presented within four Deleuzean paradoxes which necessarily accompany linguistic expression. Simultaneously, the opening lines are also analyzed as philosophical problems which constitute the core of the Daoist project itself within which the unthinkable or ineffable must be conceived of not as conditioned by privation or negation, but as being (...) located within the movement of differentiation which is by nature positive and creative. As the paper shows, the linguistic involvement here is not one of discrimination but of a fundamentally dynamic immersion in problematic thought which underlies the mechanism of sense-making. This dynamism is presupposed by the disequilibrium between what expresses itself and its expressions, which is the birthplace of sense as the expressed. Our analysis of the latter is unfolded through an analogy drawn between Daoist and Spinozian expressionism supported by Deleuze’s study on Spinoza. (shrink)

Exploring long-term educational change, we investigate our re/construction of research methodology as we moved from a positivist framework to working with ideas drawn from Deleuze and Guattari. We reveal our becoming rhizomatic in data analysis in the metamodelling of the richness flowing horizontally through our practices. We tell of our struggles to escape hierarchical thinking and relations researching between the smooth and striated. A space of interactions, conversations and writings created relations between polyphonic voices, leading us to an emergent methodology. (...) Our struggle against hierarchies in data analysis yielded rich educational possibilities for becoming that Deleuzo-Guattarian thinking offers us. (shrink)

The article explores the need to eat as a biological and social practice among children in a preschool in Norway. The children in this preschool are aged from one to two years of age, and some of them have just started there. Different events from mealtimes relate to Derrida's concept of touch and Grosz's notion of bodies in‐place and out‐of‐place. How food touches the children and the practitioners is further discussed through a consideration of body/place relations, which are both material (...) and reflect pedagogical discourses. Its overall context is not only touching the food in a concrete sense, but also food as touch seen as a philosophical concept. Analyzing touching relations around the table including movements in materiality, bodies and discourses of eating may empower the youngest children in a preschool setting. (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)

This paper explores how affirming events rather than substances, and difference rather than identities, might affect how one responds to life's exigencies, in particular the act of choosing when to end the life of a dog that was a beloved companion. The paper addresses the concepts of the event and the time of Aion as they are presented in The Logic of Sense, and examines the resonances these concepts have with a notion of learning presented in Difference and Repetition and (...) a notion of essence presented in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. The argument is made that Deleuze presents us with a notion of death that is a part of the creative unfolding of life, and that affirming events rather than substances and difference rather than identities can give us insight into practical questions about how to live one's life. (shrink)

Those familiar with contemporary continental philosophy know well the defenses Husserlians have offered of Husserl’s theory of inner time-consciousness against post-modernism’s deconstructive criticisms. As post-modernism gives way to Deleuzean post-structuralism, Deleuze’s Le bergsonisme has grown into the movement of Bergsonism. This movement, designed to present an alternative to phenomenology, challenges Husserlian phenomenology by criticizing the most “important… of all phenomenological problems.” Arguing that Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness detailed a linear succession of iterable instants in which the now internal to consciousness (...) receives prejudicial favor, Bergsonism concludes that Husserl derived the past from the present and cannot account for the sense of the past, which differs in kind from the present. Consequently, everything on Husserl’s account remains present and his theory cannot accommodate for time’s passage. In this paper, I renew the Husserlian defense of Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness in response to the recent movement of Deleuzean Bergsonism. Section one presents Bergsonism’s notion of the past in general and its critique of Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness. Section two presents a rejoinder to Bergsonism’s critique of Husserl, questioning (1) its understanding of the living-present as linearly extended, (2) its conflation of the living-present with Husserl’s early schema-apprehension interpretation, and (3) its failure to grasp Husserl’s revised understanding of primary memory as a result of (2). In conclusion, I suggest that Husserl’s theory of retention might articulate a notion of the past more consistent with Bergson than Bergsonism itself. (shrink)

In research on organizational environmentalism, there has been a repeated call for ways to go beyond the business case for sustainability frame. While the business case frame assumes that developing eco-friendly solutions can benefit firms financially, this article highlights the importance of challenging established understandings of sustainability. To this end, I introduce Deleuze’s distinction between morality and ethics. Morality involves passing judgements on the basis of values. Ethics provides an immanent evaluation of the principles by which specific solutions are considered (...) sustainable. Analysing interviews with architects, building engineers and business developers, the article shows how these actors reflect on the values that form the basis of their practice, but also try to imagine new ways of working with sustainability. In conclusion, the article suggests that an immanent ethics of organizational environmentalism can allow for the values that inform environmental efforts in organizations to be evaluated as well as alternative visions of sustainability to be created. (shrink)

This essay discusses the role of being and ontology in the work of Gilles Deleuze. Starting from an examination of Alain Badiou's ontology and theory of the event, I discuss the possible opposition of being and the event in Deleuze's work. Though famous for his discussions of the univocity of being, Deleuze does discuss the event as that which is not being. Deleuze's theory of the event is similar to that of Badiou in that he considers the event to be (...) extra‐ontological. The essay closes by considering the differences between Deleuze and Badiou on the subject of the event. (shrink)

J. L. Austin's claim that language ‘used not seriously’ is ‘parasitic’ upon ‘normal use’ has proved a puzzle to literary scholars, who have often taken this to mean that they are not allowed to apply the insights of speech-act theory to their own object of research. This article explores how, when read together, Michel Serres’ definition of the parasite as a ‘thermal exciter’ and Deleuze's concept of ‘minor literature’ bring out the hidden potential inherent in Austin's claim. More specifically, the (...) article argues that Austin's reference to literature as a parasitic entity might become a promising conceptual gift, allowing us to generate a new model for approaching the world-shaping potential of literary texts. (shrink)

A historically feminized profession, education in North America remains remarkably unaffected by feminism, with the notable exception of pedagogy and its impact on curriculum. The purpose of this paper is to describe characteristics of feminism that render it particularly useful and appropriate for developing potentialities in education and music education. As a set of flexible methodological tools informed by Gilles Deleuze's notions of philosophy and art, I argue feminism may contribute to education's becoming more efficacious, reflexive, and reflective of the (...) values of its participants. Its impetus involves ‘feminist imperative(s)’ to help in the sense articulated by Elizabeth Grosz: to provoke thought, challenge, and problematize. (shrink)

The text presents the general cultural-historical thesis that one cannot adequately understand philosophy after the Second World War if one does not understand it in interaction with politics and popular culture. These three spheres find themselves in a variable triangular constellation after the Second World War. Methodologically, the text is guided by the fact that this interplay is also organised in a triangular and variable way, namely according to the options of coexistence, conflict and cooperation. Adorno’s philosophy serves as a (...) challenging example. The principle of coexistence, conflict and cooperation also serves as a framework for the second part of the text, which reformulates Adorno’s socio-critical question about the possibility of change as an ontological question. In the constellation with politics, pop music can in this context express in its own way what in philosophy is called the principle of ontological contingency. (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)

This text deals with a problem concerning processes of the productive power of knowledge. We draw on so called poststructural theories challenging the classical image of thought – as hinged upon a representational logic identifying entities in a rigid sense – when formulating a problem concerning the gap between knowledge and the object of knowledge. More specifically we are looking at this problem in the contexts of sustainable development and childhood using illustrating examples in order to test the validity of (...) these theoretical accounts. The examples we use range from internationally agreed documents claiming universality concerning environmental protection and childhood to national curricula for the pre-school to a Swedish governmentally produced and distributed TV-series called Needle and Stick save the world, addressing the issue of sustainable development. In short, we wish to problematise the rigid positions of the child and the human being in relation to nature. (shrink)

This article considers the multifaceted concept of ethics and how, despite being a familiar notion within education, it is still much contested within literature and professional practice. Drawing on postmodern, feminist and political literature, the authors explore conceptualisations of ethics and ethicality in relation to ethical identity, professionalism and practice. Applying philosophical and metaphorical tools, such as the rhizome and nomad, the authors suggest there is the potential to accommodate the multiple and often divergent facets of ethics, thereby engaging with (...) different ethical possibilities. It is argued that the propensity for reducing ethics to merely procedural protocols and guidelines marginalises the richness of ethics and, all too frequently, leaves practitioners ill-equipped to navigate the reality of day-to-day ethics.The article is positioned within the field of early years practice and training EY practitioners. This reflects the authors’ own specialism but also celebrates the propensity of the EY practitioner to reflect upon, question and challenge their own practice and ethical identities. This does not reduce the applicability of the subject matter which is relevant to educators of children of any age. The term ‘practitioner’ is used throughout to refer to any adult working with children in an educative role, this includes, but is not limited to nursery nurses, teachers or teaching assistants. (shrink)

In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze effectively argues that two types of relation between events govern their ‘evental’ or ‘ideal play’, and ultimately underlie determined substances, that is, worldly individuals and persons. Leibniz calls these relations ‘compossibility’ and ‘incompossibility’. Deleuze calls them ‘convergence’ and ‘divergence’. This paper explores how Deleuze appropriates and extends a number of Leibnizian concepts in order to ground the idea that events have ontological priority over substances ‘all the way down’.

If the purpose of philosophy is creating concepts that make it possible to think differently, education surely needs philosophical assistance. Sketching a Deleuzian approach to education, this article explores a practice of thinking about and performing ‘school,’ ‘teacher,’ and ‘learning’ differently. A complex social situation such as a school needs routines and clear role expectations, to ensure efficient action. How do we resist, nonetheless, that concepts aimed at thinking education just redouble an already existing practice by submitting to explain everyday (...) and policy-induced practice. Suggesting an understanding of theory and the construction of concepts as a much wider endeavor, the article introduces concepts such as strata, Bodies without Organs, order machines, and desire. With reference to education, it hints at a creative endeavor to explore potential lines of flight, and exploit cracks and inconsistencies in current school regimes, when they no longer appear appropriate. In this spirit, the ‘competence nomad’ is proposed as a conceptual persona that may help thought to connect and plug into new becomings, by means of alternative tactics in current learning environments that are already heavily traversed by existing schooling order machines. (shrink)

Philosophical counselling, a relatively new field in practical philosophy, offers to potentially edify the layperson’s everyday life with the help of philosophy. This lofty ideal is upheld by philosophical practitioners introducing various contemporary philosophies to its growing literature. However, many philosophical traditions beyond contemporary philosophy still somewhat suffer from an unwarranted neglect. Presently, African philosophy faces an almost complete absence in the philosophical counselling literature. It is thus a given that a prevalent lack of inquiry exists regarding its use in (...) philosophical counselling. Despite this silence, fertile grounds exist for innovative contributions to further advance the development of African philosophy in philosophical counselling. -/- In this talk, I will introduce a novel reading of African philosophy to the literature of philosophical counselling. This understanding of African philosophy is greatly inspired and influenced by the work of Tsenay Serequeberhan and Jonathan Chimakonam. More specifically, the notion of African philosophy gathered from these philosophers seek to advance the critical interpretation/hermeneutic actualised from a specific philosophical place or lifeworld through the method of conversationalism. Furthermore, the very rootedness of this notion of philosophy, stemming from a concrete lifeworld, actively problematises philosophies that reproduce a supposed and untenable value neutrality. -/- Developing this understanding of African philosophy in a philosophical counselling context, I offer an initial critique of uncritical applications of philosophies originating from distinct philosophical places under the guise of a value neutrality. In maintaining this unwarranted silence on different philosophical traditions, philosophical counsellors might promote the use of philosophies as if universally applicable. And secondly, I propose that following from this understanding of African philosophy, philosophical counselling as such can begin to foster an environment in which new concepts can be co-created. Consequently, and in conjunction with conversationalism, radically new ways of being/becoming can be explored which might hold greater contextual significance. (shrink)

Method in philosophical counselling is still a contentious topic. That is, there is no consensus on whether the philosophical counsellor should have a method in her practice to help the counsellee resolve philosophical problems. Some philosophical counsellors claim that there should not be any rigid adherence to method(s) as this will render philosophy too dogmatic. Philosophical counselling, in light of this view, promotes a kind of mutual philosophising sans definite goal with the counsellee. What I call "dissentient philosophical counselling" takes (...) this claim even further: the philosophical counsellor lives/practices her philosophical counselling, that is, she embodies and practices philosophy as a way of life. This view is posed as a response to contemporary conceptualisations of philosophical counselling where the philosophical counsellor might stand in a disembodied relationship with her method(s) and tries to have a conversation "from nowhere". Dissentient philosophical counselling, even though more focused on living philosophically , still suffers from certain shortcomings. In this paper, I firstly showcase how even the seemingly innocuous but important question "How might one live?" suffers from a lack of much needed nuance. And secondly, I introduce, via a fictional narrative, a provisional way of practicing this reworked dissentient philosophical counselling. I do this by, firstly, introducing African conversational philosophy, via its method of conversationalism, and secondly, I introduce a peculiar version of Pyrrhonian scepticism especially regarding the notion of bios adoxastōs (life without dogma). (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)

The aim of this article is to sketch the procedural nature of the modus in which Deleuze reads the other philosophers. The hermeneutical problem indicated by the indecision to consider his books on different authors as an authorized interpretation or as fantasist utilization may be scattered if we understand his hermeneutical attempts both as interpretation and construction. In addition, this indecision affects the guild of Deleuzian exegetes in respect to the directory idea which could point out the general strategy of (...) his philosophy. (shrink)

This thesis explores the restoration and cultivation of mutually constitutive relationships between technique and identity. I begin by establishing the framework of practice that will be used throughout the thesis, in which I define practice by the methodological conditions of open-endedness, repeatability, intuition, situatedness and autonomy. I critique the practices of classical vocal pedagogy, the field of my own training and one about which critical scholarship is distinctly lacking. I argue that these practices effect a violentseparation between technique and identity (...) by means of the fetishisation of technique, ideologies of transcendence, structural whiteness and the reification that structures spaces of training and practice. I establish a theoretical framework, grounded in the work of Ben Spatz, for understanding the relationships between the repetition and sedimentation of technical knowledge and the always ongoing formation of identity, and explore the defetishisation of technique and the objects and practices in which it is encoded both in the university’s practice-as-research context and in the work of two artists and collaborators, Ragnar Kjartansson and Monia Sander Haj-Mohammed. Grounded in an intertextual reading of philosophies of immanence, philosophical pragmatism and feminist epistemology, I articulate the notion of situational emergence in processes of technical development and explore the broader scope and significance of lifelong transformation through technique. With this basis, I give an account of the works in the portfolio, exploring methodologies of defetishisation and situated making, and highlighting the ways that forms emerge in and through durational processes that are always specifically situated in time and place. (shrink)

How we read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has a huge influence on how convincing we find the parts of which it is composed. This thesis will argue that by taking its arguments and concepts in isolation we neglect the unifying architectonic method that Kant employed. Understanding this text as a response to a single problem, that of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgement, will allow us to evaluate it more fully. We will explore Kant's attempts to relate the (...) a priori and the synthetic in the Introduction, Metaphysical Deduction and Analytic of Principles of the Critique of Pure Reason. Having developed this reading at length we will be able to reassess Kant's relation to the work of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze's critique of Kant and his tendency to make selective use of his work has so far characterised their relations. However, by reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in terms of its unifying method we will open up a new means of relating these two thinkers. Whilst Deleuze rejects many key Kantian concerns and concepts he embraces his methodological concern with the ability of problems to unify our thought. The problem-setting and forms of argument that emerge within Kant's architectonic method will be related to Deleuze's account of experience. This thesis will contribute to both Kant and Deleuze studies on the basis of the reading of the Critique of Pure Reason it will present. By showing how Kant's text is to be read as a whole we will be able to challenge the conclusion that the arguments he makes ultimately rely upon a notion of 'subjective origin'. The problem of accounting for 'the actual' through its relation to 'the virtual' in Deleuze's thought will be re-assessed on the basis of his newly established relation with Kant. Understanding Kant's method in the Critique of Pure Reason will be shown to strengthen both his own account of experience and that offered by Deleuze. (shrink)

This aim of this study is to investigate the manner in which Deleuze’s individual and collaborative work can be productively understood as being concerned with the question of living well, where it will be suggested that living well necessitates that we not only become aware of, but that we also explore, the forever renewed present possibilities for living otherwise that each moment brings. In particular, this study will make an original contribution to existing Deleuzian studies by arguing that what legitimises (...) this conception of living well, and what can motivate us to engage in such a practice, is that a life that becomes aware of and explores the open field of present possibilities for living otherwise that each moment engenders is a life that reflects, or that is lived in accordance with, the challenging ontological account that can be discerned throughout Deleuze’s individual and collaborative work; a life lived in accordance with his open, dynamic and thoroughly temporal theory of Being or what I will suggest he came to refer to simply as ‘Life’. In addition, I will argue that in so far as each individual human being is to be understood as an ongoing and immanent expression of Life, an immediate expression of Life understood as a universal, impersonal and pre-individual dynamism, then a life that strives to explore the forever renewed present possibilities for living otherwise that each moment brings - a practice that I shall propose also necessitates that each individual strives to resist the diverse ways in which their present possibilities are continually hindered, thwarted and negated - is not only a life that strives to live in accordance with the temporal dynamism of Life, but is also a life lived in accordance with our own dynamic and thoroughly temporal being. (shrink)

Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart investigates the ways in which thinking through the contemporary hybrid artistico-scientific practices of bioart is a biophilosophical practice, one that contributes to a more nuanced understanding of life than we encounter in mainstream academic discourse. When examined from a Deleuzian feminist perspective and in dialogue with contemporary bioscience, bioartistic projects reveal the inadequacy of asking about life’s essence. They expose the enmeshment between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, and, ultimately, life and death. (...) Instead of examining the defining criteria of life, bioartistic practices explore and enact life as processual, differential, and always already uncontainable, thus transcending preconceived material and conceptual boundaries. In this way, this doctoral thesis concentrates on the ontology of life as it emerges through the selected bioartworks: “semi-living” sculptures created by The Tissue Culture and Art Project and the performance May the Horse Live in Me by L’Art Orienté Objet. The hope is that such an ontology can enable future conceptualisations of an ethico-politics that avoids the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)