Applies Deleuzian theory to an array of physical phenomena, scientific issues, and political events. Life, War, Earth demonstrates how Gilles Deleuze’s ontology of the virtual, intensive, and actual can enhance our understanding of important issues in cognitive science, biology, and geography. The book offers a unique reading of Deleuze’s corpus and a useful method for applying Deleuzian techniques to the natural sciences, the social sciences, political phenomena, and contemporary events.

Suggests an open system of psychological exploration to cut through accepted norms of morality, language, and politics.

The physical sciences include highly developed fields that investigate intensities in the form of intensive quantities like speeds, temperatures, pressures and altitudes. Some contemporary readers of Deleuze interested in the physical sciences at times attribute to Deleuze a common, contemporary scientific concept of intensive magnitude. These readings identify Deleuze's philosophical conception of intensity with an existing scientific conception of intensity. The essay argues that Deleuze does not in fact lift a conception of intensity from the physical sciences to embed it (...) as the fundamental term in his differential ontology. (shrink)

From the point of view of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Raymond Ruyer's work appears to bear out two distinct tendencies of unequal appeal. On the one hand, Ruyer appears to be an anti-Aristotelian thinker of formation, rejecting any hylomorphic account of the production of reality. However, and notably despite his serious commitment to the work of the sciences of his day, he remains wedded to the ultimately conservative Leibnizian principle of closure. Nowhere is this dichotomy more striking than in (...) his account of human society. The aim of this paper is to show how his positive account of form finds a significant and convincing extension in Deleuze and Guattari's notion of social surface or socius in Anti-Oedipus. (shrink)

The first collaborative effort of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipusis an exemplary critique of orthodox Psychoanalysis which revolutionized postmodernism.