This paper examines the intersecting of the themes of temporality and truth in Deleuze's philosophy. For the ancients, truth was something eternal: what was true was true in all times and in all places. Temporality (coming to be and passing away) was the realm of the mutable, not the eternal. In the seventeenth century, change began to be seen in a positive light (progress, evolution, and so on), but this change was seen to be possible only because of the immutable (...) laws of nature that govern change. It was not until philosophers such as Bergson, James, Whitehead – and then Deleuze – that time began to be taken seriously on its own account. On the one hand, in Deleuze, time, freed from its subordination to movement, now becomes autonomous: it is the pure form of change (continuous variation) that lies at the basis of Deleuze's metaphysics in Difference and Repetition (and is explored more thematically in The Time-Image). As a result, on the other hand, the false, freed from its subordination to the form of the true, assumes a power of its own (the power of the false), which in turn implies a new ‘analytic of the concept’ that Deleuze develops in What Is Philosophy? (shrink)

Discusses Derrida's writings on Plato, Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Freud.

Analyzes the relationship of power, bureaucracy, and change in modern society.

In Cinema 1 Deleuze creates the taxonomy of the movement-image by extending Henri Bergson's account of the sensory-motor process in Matter and Memory through the semiotic system of Charles Sanders Peirce. Through this nexus of Bergson and Peirce, Deleuze can account for each image and sign, their impetus and their relationship to one another. In contrast, the taxonomy of the time-image, the focus of Cinema 2, is given no such genesis. Rather, the images and signs appear in situ, as if (...) ready-made. This article proposes that the impetus for the taxonomy of the time-image lies in the account given of the three passive syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition, and that the nine aspects of the passive syntheses can be seen to correspond to the nine proper signs of the time-image. (shrink)

The reversal in the relation of time and movement which Deleuze describes in his Cinema books does not only concern a change in the filmic arts. Deleuze associates it with a wider Copernican turn in science, philosophy, art and indeed modern experience as a whole. Experience no longer consists of an idea plus the time it takes to realize it. Instead, time is implicated in the determination, literally the creation of the terminus of any movement of experience. Deleuze describes this (...) open movement structure as determinable virtuality. Because it is determinable, experience as a whole is neither actual nor actualisable. The whole is virtual. I use the phrase determinable virtuality as a kind of organizational device with which to organise a study of the reversal of time and movement in Deleuze's work. I study the concept of determinability as it appears in Deleuze's reading of the relation of time and movement in Kant's description of the whole of possible experience, or the Transcendental Ideas. In a following section I take up the idea of virtuality which I trace back to Duns Scotus who uses the idea of the virtual to distinguish between univocal and equivocal movements, forms of movement which, I argue, anticipate the kinostructures and chronogeneses, or movement and time-images which Deleuze places at the center of his work on cinema. (shrink)

The paper argues that Hume's philosophy is best described as sceptical materialism. It is argued that the conjunction is not self-contradictory as long as 'scepticism' is understood in its ancient sense, as the denial of knowledge of the essences of things. It is further argued that scepticism (thus understood) and materialism are natural bedfellows, since a thoroughgoing materialism denies any special status to human rational powers. The content of the "Treatise of Human Nature" is then shown to conform to this (...) understanding: the "Treatise" consistently employs an implicitly materialist faculty psychology in order to arrive at its sceptical standpoint. Finally, it is shown that Hume's philosophy can be understood to be a sceptical rewriting of the dogmatic materialism of Hobbes. (shrink)

One establishes oneself within science from the start. One does not reconstitute it from scratch. One does not found it. Alain Badiou, Le Concept de modèle1 [T]here are no crises within science, nor can there be, for science is the pure affirmation of difference. Alain Badiou, "Marque et manque" 2.

This book offers an extended comparison of the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and David Hume. The book argues that Deleuze's early work on Hume was instrumental to Deleuze's formulation of the problems and concepts that would remain a focus of his entire corpus. Reading Deleuze's work in light of Hume's influence, along with a comparison of Deleuze's work with William James, Henri Bergson and others set the stage for a vigorous defence of his philosophy against a number of recent criticisms (...) and extend the field of Deleuze studies by showing how Deleuze's thought can clarify and contribute to the work being done in political theory, cultural studies, and history, particularly the history of the Scottish Enlightenment. By engaging Deleuze's thought with the work of Hume, this book clarifies and supports the work of Deleuze and exemplifies the continuing relevance of Hume's thought to a number of contemporary debates. (shrink)

This essay responds to Badiou's charge that Deleuze fails to set forth a philosophy that is “beyond Gategorical oppositions.” It is argued that this criticism of Deleuze is founded upon a misreading of the Deleuzean distinction between the virtual and the actual, a reading that carries forward Badiou's misreading of Spinoza and, hence, of Deleuze's Spinozism. With this corrected, we show how the virtual‐actual distinction operates within the experimental philosophy, or pragmatics, that Deleuze, and later Deleuze and Guattari, sets forth. (...) It is this pragmatics that is precisely the philosophy of difference that is beyond categorical oppositions. Through a comparison of Deleuzean pragmatics with the work of Hume and Peirce, we are able to respond to Badiou's further criticism that Deleuze's philosophy fails to understand the conditions for creativity in thought and culture. This criticism is itself resolved once one corrects for Badiou's misreading of Deleuze's virtual‐actual distinction. (shrink)

In this essay I examine the contribution a philosophy of life is able to make to our understanding of morality, including our appreciation of its evolution or development and its future. I focus on two contributions, namely, those of Jean-Marie Guyau and Henri Bergson. In the case of Guyau I show that he pioneers the naturalistic study of morality through a conception of life; for him the moral progress of humanity is bound up with an increasing sociability, involving both the (...) intensification of life and its expansion. In the case of Bergson I show that he also pioneers a novel naturalistic appreciation of morality, one that is keen to demonstrate morality’s two sources and so as to give us a firm grasp of the chances of a moral progress on the part of humanity. I suggest that of the two appreciations of morality Bergson’s is the richer since it contains a set of critical reflections on humanity’s condition that is lacking in Guyau. I conclude by suggesting that Bergson’s idea that modern humanity is confronted with the decision whether it wishes to continue living or not has lost none of its relevance today. (shrink)

Through the philosophies of Bergson and Deleuze, my paper explores a different theory of time. I reconstitute Deleuze’s paradoxes of the past in Difference and Repetition and Bergsonism to reveal a theory of time in which the relation between past and present is one of coexistence rather than succession. The theory of memory implied here is a non-representational one. To elaborate this theory, I ask: what is the role of the “virtual image” in Bergson’s Matter and Memory? Far from representing (...) the simple afterimage of a present perception, the “virtual image” carries multiple senses. Contracting the immediate past for the present, or expanding virtually to hold the whole of memory (and even the whole of the universe), the virtual image can form a bridge between the present and the non-representational past. This non-representational account of memory sheds light not only on the structure of time for Bergson, but also on his concepts of pure memory and virtuality. The rereading of memory also opens the way for Bergsonian intuition to play an intersubjective role; intuition becomes a means for navigating the resonances and dissonances that can be felt between different rhythms of becoming or planes of memory, which constitute different subjects. (shrink)

French philosopher Louis Pierre Althusser (1918 -1990) helped define the politico-theoretical conjuncture of pre- and post-1968. Today, there is a recrudescence of interest in his thought, especially in light of his later work, published in English as Philosophy of the Encounter (Verso, 2006). This has led to renewed debates on the reformulation of conflicting notions of materialism, on the event as both philosophical concept and political construction, and on the nature of politics and the political. These original essays by leading (...) scholars aim to provide a new assessment of Althusser's thought, especially in relation to contemporary debates. Organized in four sections that represent the main currents in Althusser's scholarship, the book discusses materialism and the different formulations of the relationship between politics and philosophy, Althusser's interpretations of political thinkers (including Machiavelli, Deleuze and Gramsci), the resources he provides to critique political economy and politics in post-Marxist thought, and the theorization of ideology and politics. Encountering Althusser is a groundbreaking resource that highlights Althusser's continuing relevance to contemporary radical thought. (shrink)

'Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-theology' provides one of the first comprehensive analyses of the relationship between Badiou's philosophy and theology. Examining the full range of Badiou's writings, this provocative study explores how Badiou's philosophy relies on theology even if he claims otherwise and actively attempts to work against theology. Despite the complex questions discussed - ranging across ontology, the theory of truth and the subject, philosophy and its conditions, and anti-philosophy - this book presents a clear and accessible overview (...) of the theological, religious and biblical themes which animate Badiou's philosophy. (shrink)

A brief synoptic parallel -- Taking the side of the 'modern' in philosophy -- Old and new relations between science and philosophy -- Matrices and principles -- Subtraction and superposition -- Philosophy and mathematics in the mirror -- Ontology and materiality -- Philo-fiction.

The work is significant not only for its illuminating assessment of Kant's thought but also for its elaboration of themes first broached in Being and Time, ...

Deleuze's theory of time set out in Difference and Repetition is a complex structure of three different syntheses of time – the passive synthesis of the living present, the passive synthesis of the pure past and the static synthesis of the future. This article focuses on Deleuze's third synthesis of time, which seems to be the most obscure part of his tripartite theory, as Deleuze mixes different theoretical concepts drawn from philosophy, Greek drama theory and mathematics. Of central importance is (...) the notion of the cut, which is constitutive of the third synthesis of time defined as an a priori ordered temporal series separated unequally into a before and an after. This article argues that Deleuze develops his ordinal definition of time with recourse to Kant's definition of time as pure and empty form, Hölderlin's notion of ‘caesura’ drawn from his ‘Remarks on Oedipus’ (1803) and Dedekind's method of cuts as developed in his pioneering essay ‘Continuity and Irrational Numbers’ (1872). Deleuze then ties together the conceptions of the Kantian empty form of time and the Nietzschean eternal return, both of which are essentially related to a fractured I or dissolved self. This article aims to assemble the different heterogeneous elements that Deleuze picks up on and to show how the third synthesis of time emerges from this differential multiplicity. (shrink)

At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves, with beings formed by nature. This distinction persisted until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of the technical object. This philosophy developed while industrialisation was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of social organisation, which highlighted technology's new place in philosophical enquiry. Bernard Stiegler goes back to the beginning of Western philosophy and revises (...) the Aristotelian assessment, developing a complex argument whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinctive temporality and dynamic of its own. The author engages the ideas of Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore why Deleuze takes up Hamlet's claim that ‘time is out of joint’. In the first part of this paper, I explore this claim by looking at how Deleuze relates it to Plato's Timaeus and its conception of the relationship between movement and time. Once we have seen how time functions when it is ‘in joint’, I explore what it would mean for time to no longer be understood in terms of an underlying (...) rational structure. The claim can be understood as about a relationship between time and action. In the second part of this paper, I want to relate this new understanding of time to Hamlet itself, in order to see how temporality operates within the play. I will conclude by relating these two different conceptions of time out of joint to one another through Nietzsche's eternal return. (shrink)

I am grateful that someone whose work I greatly admire could be the philosopher to so eloquently and succinctly cut to the heart of the problem that I posed in the previous issue of Deleuze Studies. James Williams' critical reply leaves me, prima facie, confronted by a stark alternative: either I have misunderstood Deleuze, or I have illustrated problems and lacunae in Deleuze. I will suggest, however, that this is a false alternative, and that Williams' and my divergent accounts of (...) The Logic of Sense – and even Deleuze's oeuvre as a whole – is better understood as a situation of ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’, and hence that my interpretation of Deleuze isn't wrong, but necessarily iconoclastic. (shrink)

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 essay presents some thoughts on schizoanalysis and visual culture around the proposition that cinema survives in the digital age as a type of image that, after the movement-image and the time-image, could be called the neuro-image. By considering clinical schizophrenia as ‘degree zero’ of schizoanalysis in a more critical sense, a reading of The Butterfly Effect unfolds the temporal dimensions of schizoanalysis as typical for a definition of ‘the neuro-image’. The argument is that the neuro-image speaks from the (always (...) speculative) future. (shrink)

Against the tendency to regard Deleuze as a materialist and a naturalistic thinker, I argue that his core philosophical writings involve commitments that are incompatible with contemporary scientific naturalism. He defends different versions of a distinction between philosophy and natural science that is inconsistent with methodological naturalism and with the scientific image of the world as a single causally interconnected system. He defends the existence of a virtual realm of entities that is irreconcilable with ontological naturalism. The difficulty of reconciling (...) Deleuze’s philosophy with ontological naturalism is especially apparent in his recurrent conception of pure events that are irreducible to their incarnation in bodies and states of affairs. In the last section of this essay, I canvass some of the ways in which Deleuze’s thought might be reconciled with a more liberal, pluralist and ethical naturalism that he identified in an early essay on Lucretius. (shrink)

In this essay I critique a particular reading of Bergson that places an excessive weight on the concept of the ‘virtual’. Driven by the popularity of Deleuze’s use of the virtual, this image of Bergson (seen especially through his text of 1896, Matter and Memory, where the idea is introduced) generates an imbalance that fails to recognise the importance of concepts of actuality, like space or psychology, in his other works. In fact, I argue that the virtual is not the (...) key concept for Bergsonism and that there is a good deal of evidence in Bergson’s other writings, especially those connected with his actualist notion of ‘refraction’, to think of him as a perspectivist philosopher. Moreover, it will be seen that Virtualism resides within an economy of reflection that is subsumed within the broader paradigm of Actualist refraction. Taking these optical metaphors seriously, the virtual becomes a perspectival image seen from an actual position, or rather, an interacting set of actual positions. This interaction is termed ‘virtualization’, denoting the substitution of a substantive conception with a processual one. In the first two parts of the essay, I direct my remarks more towards Deleuzian readings of the actual rather than Deleuze himself (Deleuze is so open about the biases he brings to his reading of Bergson as to be beyond criticism). In the second two sections, I pursue a philosophical argument for the probity of a non-Virtualist position as such within philosophy, based upon the concept of refraction. This is done not only because it is important that we remain open to other readings of Bergson that are not so heavily mediated in one direction, but also in view of the power of refraction as a new concept for reconciling actual modes such as molar identity, the present, and extension, with their virtual opposites. (shrink)

Book II of the Treatise minutely anatomizes the passions Hume dubbed “indirect.” As the account of pride, humility, love, and hatred unfolds, principles are uncovered, causes are exhaustively examined, experiments carried out, difficulties presented and solved. The barrage of detailed description and theorizing threatens to overwhelm even the most devoted of readers. By contrast, Hume’s explicit treatment of the direct passions appears perfunctory. Indeed, Hume states: “None of the direct affections seem to merit our particular attention except hope and fear.” (...) Desire and aversion, though usually mentioned first as examples of the direct passions, receive no separate analysis. (shrink)

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In _Parables for the Virtual_ Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models. Renewing (...) and assessing William James’s radical empiricism and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, _Parables for the Virtual _tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan’s acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument. _Parables for the Virtual_ will interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture, and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the “science wars” and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that the critique of ideology requires creative interventions in the symbolic order of society and that those creative interventions must be understood as events. This is what animates the work of both Ricoeur and Deleuze and yet helps to uncover the fundamental difference between them regarding the conditions that make such critique possible: a difference regarding how we understand the nature of events. While Ricoeur is the philosopher of the narrated event, Deleuze is the philosopher (...) of the dramatic event. Instead of pursuing a point-by-point comparison of their respective philosophies of the event, a line of social and political inquiry is constructed that leads from Ricoeur to Deleuze with a view to establishing at what point these two thinkers take different paths. It will be argued that the crossroads is rather neatly signposted by Meillassoux’s critique of strong correlationism in After Finitude .  . (shrink)

This paper will address the question of the revolution in Gilles Deleuze's political ontology. More specifically, it will explore what kind of person Deleuze believes is capable of bringing about genuine and practical transformation. Contrary to the belief that a Deleuzian programme for change centres on the facilitation of ‘absolute deterritorialisation’ and pure ‘lines of flight’, I will demonstrate how Deleuze in fact advocates a more cautious and incremental if not conservative practice that promotes the ethic of prudence. This will (...) be achieved in part through a critical analysis of the dualistic premises upon which much Deleuzian political philosophy is based, alongside the topological triads that can also be found in his work. In light of this critique, Deleuze's thoughts on what it is to be and become a revolutionary will be brought into relief, giving rise to the question: who really is Deleuze's nomad, his true revolutionary or figure of transformation? (shrink)

In this paper I examine how well Merleau-Ponty's philosophy can respond to Deleuze's challenge to phenomenology. The Deleuzian challenge is double, that of immanence and that of difference; in other words, the double challenge is what Deleuze calls the paradox of expression. I bring together, in particular, Deleuze's 1969 The Logic of Sense and Merleau-Ponty's 1945 the Phenomenology of Perception, and am able to discover a lot of similarities mainly centered around the notion of a past that has never been (...) present. However, this comparison is not decisive; what alone can decide is an interpretation of expression in Merleau-Ponty's final, unfinished The Visible and the Invisible. (shrink)

Judith Butler has built her theory of interpellation through critical engagement with the work of Louis Althusser. For Butler, interpellation explains how the subject emerges in and through language, and her critique of Althusser is meant to open up psychic and discursive space for resisting status quo interpellations and the dominant ideology. In this essay, I argue that Butler’s account of interpellation suffers from two problems: first, she misreads Althusser; second (and more importantly), her account is isolating and politically demotivating. (...) I then show that rereading Althusser provides us both with a criticism (albeit avant la lettre) of Butler’s position, and a new account of the resources at our disposal for resisting (and even opposing) the dominant ideology. (shrink)

This brilliant study of the stages in the mind's necessary progress from immediate sense-consciousness to the position of a scientific philosophy includes an introductory essay and a paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of the text to help the reader understand this most difficult and most influential of Hegel's works.

Althusser believed the Marxist conception of history broke from all previous conceptions of the social whole. Hegel's idealism conflated the knowledge of the object with the object itself. Within his social totality, no practice or thought can run ahead of its time. For Marx, all knowledge is the result of theoretical knowledge, not the revelation of the real. Every structure of a social whole has its own history; there is no central concept of which the various social structures are merely (...) expressions. All of the superstructure affects, and is affected by, the economic infrastructure, although it is the economy that is the determinant in the last instance. Historical materialism seeks to delineate the structural and conjunctural articulation of the various social practices. Marxist philosophy is fully aware of its place and function within the social order, hence of the irreducibly political nature of all philosophical discourse. (shrink)

It is still a widespread assumption that metaphysics and ontology deal with roughly the same questions. They are supposed to be concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and to give an account of the meaning of 'existence' or 'being' in line with the broadest possible metaphysical assumptions. Against this, Markus Gabriel proposes a radical form of ontological pluralism that divorces ontology from metaphysics, understood as the most fundamental theory of absolutely everything. He argues that the concept of existence is (...) incompatible with the existence of the world and therefore proposes his innovative no-world-view. In the context of recent debates surrounding new realism and speculative realism, Gabriel also develops the outlines of a realist epistemological pluralism. His idea here is that there are different forms of knowledge that correspond to the plurality of fields of sense that must be acknowledged in order to avoid the trap of metaphysics. (shrink)

and communicated it is not, if it be not understood. a The first seven Lectures of the of Logic proper. — Ed. Metaphysical Course, {Lectures on $ For some ...