The article examines work by contemporary American artist Kiki Smith, who proposes a future in which human and nonhuman bodily borders merge. The artist’s contribution to the more-than-human artistic entanglements is juxtaposed with Joseph Beuys’s artistic manifesto from 1974 which proposes, among other things, an attempt to get outside of the represented human towards the asignified ahuman. In Kiki’s sculpture, both human and nonhuman animals undergo constant morphogenesis, becoming hybrid forms far beyond the human-social paradigm, implying that the human and (...) nonhuman binary, due to the exchange of affective entanglements, is no longer valid in the heyday of techno-scientific development. The analyzed work shows that both human and nonhuman bodies are raw materials not separated from one another but always interconnected with the world and its ongoing material processes. Thus, the article emphasizes that it is only through the transgression of the human and nonhuman border that one can acknowledge the more ethical and political ways of cooperation needed for the appreciation of the multispecies dimension of our world and its survival. (shrink)

Process philosophies tend to emphasise the value of continuous creation as the core of their discourse. For Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others the real is ultimately a creative becoming. Critics have argued that there is an irreducible element of (almost religious) belief in this re-evaluation of immanent creation. While I don’t think belief is necessarily a sign of philosophical and existential weakness, in this paper I will examine the possibility for the concept of universal creation to be a political and (...) ethical axiom, the result of a global social contract rather than of a new spirituality. I argue here that a coherent way to fight against potentially totalitarian absolutes is to replace them with a virtual absolute that cannot territorialise without deterritorialising at the same time: the Creal principle. (shrink)

This article brings together and compares my own artistic practice of drawing/painting and the eighteenth-century novel Tristram Shandy. In both cases, there is a free play of lines, textual or graphic, which sets ‘all things out of rule’. A whole typology of lines is woven throughout Sterne’s text and reappears, alter-inscribed, in the artworks. The article presents an account of these lines: rectilinear, hylomorphic, fractal and nomadic, as well as the line of incision (or the cut). Each is explored as (...) a specific mode of line with differing effects. To follow these lines is to enter a world of material expressivity, to be exposed to an ontology of becoming and change, of flows and transformations, that overturns the traditional ontology of being and stable identity. Sterne’s use of wild digression, doodles and graphisms, establishes certain proximity between writing and drawing. Both may be seen as types of ‘figured metaphysics’ and as ways of bringing something new into the world. The article concludes with some philosophical observations on the strange event of drawing a line, with reference to the work of Heidegger and Deleuze and Guattari. (shrink)

In Cinema 2 Deleuze conceptualises the time-image as a cinema of infinite variation, opening the stable forms of the movement-image to an unformed and virtual outside. Five years later he would develop a similar analysis in the short ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, arguing that a new system of organisation was expanding the disciplinary formations that had reached their peak in the first part of the twentieth century. In both works Deleuze explores a world in the process of systemic (...) deterritorialisation that has profound implications for the way that society is organised and in which the world is thought. This essay argues that the ungrounding discussed in both of these later works should be understood as part of a similar shift in the ordering of the world, where a new regime of thought has emerged. The relationship between these two concepts in Deleuze's thought has important implications with respect to our understanding of his work on cinema. I argue that this connection reveals the political dimensions of Deleuze's focus on the intolerable in the cinema books. An impoverished life, through lack of access to capital, protection and education, offers less access to life-chances and potential social transformations. I focus on cinematic depictions of poverty and powerlessness in two films by Béla Tarr to account for the significance of poverty in Deleuze's overlapping thought on cinematic creation and media control. (shrink)