Mise en abyme is a term from literary theory denoting a work that doubles itself within itself, for example a story placed within a story or a play within a play. Proliferating in experimental fiction in midcentury France, this technique had a strong impact on contemporary literary theory, but also, as this book project argues, on post-Heideggerian and post-structuralist philosophy. The Little Crystalline Seed focuses on how three of these thinkers invoke the concept of mise en abyme in order to (...) establish ontologies that deviate from that of Heidegger. Iddo Dickmann demonstrates how the concept served in modeling Derrida's logic of supplementarity, Blanchot's philosophy of "ambiguity" and mechanism of Désouvrement, and Deleuze's philosophy of difference, time and repetition. Exploring the interpretative and generative potential of the mise en abyme for continental thought, Dickmann illustrates points of resonance between various philosophical topics such as aesthetics, ethics, time, logic, mirroring, play, and signification. (shrink)

This is the first book to use complexity theory to open up the 'geophilosophy' developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus and What is Philosophy?.

In this article I will suggest ways in which adding the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to the mix can complement and extend the 4EA approach to cognitive science. In the first part of the paper, I will show how the Deleuzean tripartite ontological difference (virtual/intensive/actual) can provide an explicit ontology for dynamical systems theory. The second part will take these ontological notions and apply them to three areas of concern to the 4EA approaches: (a) the Deleuzean concept of the virtual (...) will clarify the ontological status of perceptual capacity as sensorimotor skill; (b) the Deleuzean concept of “intensive individuation” will clarify the ontological status of the genesis of perceptually guided behavior; (c) the Deleuzean critique of confusing the actual and the virtual will enable us to intervene in the realism/idealism debate. These aspects will not be addressed sequentially but will be interwoven into an unfolding argument. (shrink)

This thesis aims at working out a politics out of the thought of Deleuze and Guattari. The angle taken on this question is ontological. Politics is inseparable from ontology. Every ontology is political and every politics is itself an ontology. The reciprocal relation between ontology and politics has been here identified as the question of their ‘parallelism’. This parallelism of the ontological and the political is first to be found in Spinoza’s thought. Spinoza can only write an ethics and a (...) politics on the basis of his analysis of substance. In this analysis the thesis of ‘parallelism’ occupies a central position. Spinoza’s theory of the univocity of being rests on this principle. This project is rehabilitated by Deleuze and Guattari in their own philosophy as a form of radical materialism. This form of philosophy guided by the principle of ‘parallelism’ has here been called: ontological materialism. Thus, not only is it impossible to understand their politics without grasping their ontology, but the complexities of it will only be understood after a study of Spinoza’s ontology itself. For these purposes the thesis has been divided into two parts. The first part concerns Spinoza’s thought. The second, concentrates on Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalisme et schizophrénie The analysis will concentrate on the passage from the first to the second volume as a translation of the continuities at the ontological level but also on the shifts that from this level necessarily occasion a movement in their conception of politics. This research along the Spinozist lines of the ontology of Deleuze and Guattari allows for their politics to be read as an ethics. In the final outcome the activity of philosophy itself is an ethics. (shrink)

This collection maintains a dialogue between the analytic and continental traditions, while aspiring to situate itself beyond the analytic-continental divide. It divides into four parts, Methodologies, Truth and Meaning, Metaphysics and Ontology, and Values, Personhood and Agency, though there is considerable overlap among the categories. History and temporality are recurrent themes, but there is a lot of metaphysics generally, with some philosophy of language, philosophy of social science, ethics, political philosophy and epistemology. Less prominent is a pragmatic, deflationary attitude, and (...) at a number of points I argue for the virtues of such an approach. (shrink)