In Virginia Woolf's 1931 novel The Waves, one of Bernard's many becomings – his ‘becoming-savage’ – reveals a point of intersection between Woolfian aesthetics and Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy. Moreover, a triangulation of Woolf's ‘moments of being’, Deleuze and Guattari's ‘worlding’, and coloniality provides a new and productive node for examining the debates surrounding imperialism in these thinkers’ works, and an insistence that Woolf, read alongside Deleuze and Guattari, offers an alternate and precisely ethical way of being in the world.

This essay offers a Deleuzian reading of Drift, a multilingual project by the cross-disciplinary artist Caroline Bergvall. It argues that the text- and performance-project promotes forms of deterritorialization that give radical witness to the contemporary humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean where thousands of people drown each year as they try to reach Europe. In breaking down barriers between languages, the artistic work employs non-representational modes of address to reflect on what it means to lack citizenship and recognition in the context (...) of the crisis. Close readings challenge postcolonial accusations that the writings of Deleuze and Guattari are at best utopian and at worst politically naive and without purchase on the real-life catastrophes of Fortress Europe. Instead, Deleuzian strategies are shown to enable Bergvall to actualize a multilingual politics of speech and performance that points towards the historical and contemporary imbrications of the West in mass-drownings of recent... (shrink)

Following recent work by Eleanor Kaufman, this essay reads Deleuze as a thinker of stasis and immobilization in order to think through the fantasy of the refugee as an exemplary figure of mobility....