Abstracts - Deleuze Conference 2016

11 - 13 July 2016
Keynote Speakers
Abstracts
Panels
Universitá degli Studi Roma Tre
Scuola di Lettere Filosofia Lingue
Via Ostiense 234 - 00146 Roma
info@deleuzeconference2016.org
Committees
Conference Host:
Department of Philosophy, Communication and Visual Arts
Roma Tre University
Conference director and Camp/ Summer School Coordinator:
Daniela Angelucci (Roma Tre University)
Co-director: Ivelise Perniola (Roma Tre University)
Conference Steering Commitee:
Daniela Angelucci (Roma Tre University)
Ian Buchanan (University of Wollongong, Australia)
Roberto De Gaetano (University of Calabria)
David Martin-Jones (University of Glasgow)
Ivelise Perniola (Roma Tre University)
Organizing Committee:
Marta Benvenuto, Lisa Giombini, Nataliya Kolisnyk, Simone Moraldi, Stefano Oliva, Roberta
Paoletti, Enrico Schirò
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Contents
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Keynote Speakers
Braidotti, Rosi
Buchanan, Ian
Perniola, Mario
Pisters, Patricia
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Abstracts A-Z
Adamson, Morgan
Adkins, Brent
Ahmed, Shah
Alldred, Pam
Amaral, Heloisa
Araújo Lima, Elizabeth M. Freire de
Araújo Silva, Juliana
Askin, Ridvan
Atamer, Esra
Aubán Borrell, Mónica
Baldissone, Riccardo
Banalopoulou, Christina
Bandi, Nina
Bang Jensen, Lars
Bankston, Samantha
Bar, Tal
Baranova, Jūratė
Barker, Joseph
Barla, Josef
Batukan, Can
Beaulieu, Alain
Ben-Arie, Ronnen
Bertetto, Paolo
Blenkarn, Patrick
Bogard, William
Bogdanich, Jennifer L.
Bogue, Ronald
Bonai, Julija
Börebäck, Kristina
Borges, Maria Lucília
Boscaggin, Maria Cristina
Boumeester, Marc
Bourassa, Alan
Boyacioglu, Can
Boyer, Amalia
Bradley, Joff P.N.
Braun, Bruce
Breuer, Rebecca Louise
Burchill, Louise
Burkhanova, Sasha
Caille, Antoine Constantin
Camara, Anthony Curtis
Campo, Alessandra
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Carocci, Enrico
Castillo Becerra, Patricia
Chang, Tae Soon
Charitonidou, Marianna
Chen, Hung-Han
Chieffi, Paula
Chiu, Hanping
Chuang, Stephen Shih-Hung
Chuang, Yen-Chen
Colquhoun, Alice
Criton, Pascale
Crossley, Sean
D'Aurizio, Claudio
de Assis, Paulo
de Cock de Rameyen, Jade
Denker, Kai
Deurwaarder, Beau
Di Liberto, Yuri
Dickinson, Susannah
Dobrowolski, Jacek
Dos Santos, Wanderley
Duobliene, Lilija
Erwin, Sean
Fantozzi, Patrizia
Fineman, Daniel
Flieger, Jerry Aline
Ford, Russell
Fox, Nick J
Fransson, Elisabeth
Galesso Cardoso, Sílvia
Garstenauer, Julia
Gatti, Giuseppe
Geyh, Paula
Gildersleeve, Ryan Evely
Gilge, Cheryl
Giudici, Paolo
Golańska, Dorota
Grogan, Mark
Guadagni, Giulia
Guerbo, Maririta
Guercio, Francesco
Guéron, Rodrigo
Gürel, Zeynep
Hansen, Sandrine Rose Schiller
Harmer, Colleen
Harstad, Ola
Hartman, Jan
Hee Pedersen, Christina
Heeney, Catherine
Herer, Michał
Holdsworth, David
Hubatschke, Christoph
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Ibarra Ibarra, Jorge Ignacio
Iscen, Ozgun Eylul
Jacob, Laura
Janning, Finn
Jenkins, Barbara
Jude, Ismaël
Kedem, Nir
Kesdi, Hatice
Kim, Jae-Yin
Klingler, Molina
Klinkova, Katerina
Kokubun, Koichiro
Kotani, Yayoi
Kousoulas, Stavros
Kreps, David
Kuipers, Halbe Hessel
Kuntz, Aaron M.
Lai, Chung-Hsiung
Landaeta Mardones, Patricio
Liao, Hsien-hao Sebastian
Lindner, Eckardt
Link, Franziska
Mackenzie, Hollie
Maeng, Hyeyoung
Maїda, Clara
Mijatović, Aleksandar
Miller, Zea
Mohammed, Sideeq
Monteiro, Luis Ricardo Nunes da Costa
Mösenbacher, Rudolf
Mroczkowski, Bartosz
Myserli, Aikaterina
Nakipbekova, Alfia
Negri, Carlo
Nicolini, Andrea
Nóbrega, Diogo
Novo dos Santos, Maria Fernanda
Nuscis, Lorenzo
Pereira, Sílvia
Pezzano, Giacomo
Piatti, Giulio
Pilati, Wilma
Pješivac, Željka
Plotnitsky, Arkady
Pósleman, Cristina
Presa, Elizabeth
Prud´homme, François D.
Radman, Andrej
Rantala, Teija
Richardson, Michael
Richter, Hannah
Rioseco, Macarena
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Roberts, Spencer
Rothermel, Dennis
Rudnicki, Cezary
Saldanha, Arun and Stuart McLean
Sava, Alexandru Vasile
Schleusener, Simon
Shilina-Conte, Tanya
Silberberger, Jan
Skonieczny, Krzysztof
Sokolowska, Ewelina
Sowińska-Fruhtrunk, Iwona
Spicer, Andi
Stępień, Justyna
Sticchi, Francesco
Stivale, Charles J.
Stones, Andrew
Stover, Chris
Svirsky, Marcelo
Szumilewicz, Ewa
Taşkale, Ali Rıza
Tercz, Jakub
The Network Ensemble / Oliver Smith and Francesco Tacchini
Theobalt, Lara
Theofilopoulou, Valia
Thomas, Allan James
Traxler, Tanja
Tsai, Emily Shu-Hui
Tsai, Shan-ni
Unal, Faruk Can
Vasileva, Elizabeth
Vieira da Silva, Cíntia
Voss, Daniela
Wang, Yu-Ching
Wąsik, Elżbieta Magdalena
Wąsik, Zdzisław
Weeks, Samuel
Welchman, Alistair
White, Joel
Wittmann, Martin
Wojtaszek, Marek
Yalcin, Senom
Zaprucki, Józef
Zheng, Lei
Panels
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Countless Life. For a Liberation of Thought Wherever it is imprisoned
A stream edited by La Deleuziana philosophical journal
1. Becoming (A)live(s)
Emilia Marra
Guillaume Collett
Alexander Wilson
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2. Controlling the Living Thought
Anaïs Nony
Gianvito Brindisi
Benoît Dillet
Sara Baranzoni
3. Deterritorializing Nietzsche
Obsolete Capitalism
Fabio Treppiedi
Paolo Vignola
Deleuze in Padua
Gaetano Rametta
Nicolò Fazioni
Giulia Gamba
Simone Aurora
Matteo Settura
Deleuzian Childrenlands:
A Child in Time and the Politicalities of Exocentric Movement
Aleksandar Mijatovic
Anthony Curtis Adler
Aljosa Puzar
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Deterritorializing the Child: Child-Becomings
Anna Hickey-Moody
Markus P.J. Bohlmann
Helen Palmer
Jane Newland
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Ecosophical Aesthetics: Becoming, Life and Art
Colin Gardner
renée c. hoogland
Patricia MacCormack
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The Speculative Paradox in Deleuze and Guattari
Felicity Colman
Elizabeth de Freitas
Anna Hickey-Moody
Janell Watson
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Uses of the Virtual
Sandra Lemeilleur
Oleg Lebedev
Jean-Sébastien Laberge
Catarina Pombo Nabais
Aurélien Chastan
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La Mystique and Le Mystique
Tony Yanick, Yvette Granata, Florin Berindeanu
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Keynote Speakers
Braidotti, Rosi (University of Utrecht)
Affirmative Ethics and Generative Life
This lecture addresses one of the paradoxes that marks all critical thought, namely: how to engage
in affirmative politics, which entail the creation of sustainable alternatives geared to the
constructions of social horizons of hope, while at the same time doing the work of critique,
which implies resistance to the present. The relationship between creation and critique is a
problem that has confronted all activists and critical theorists: how to balance the creative
potential of critical thought with the dose of negative criticism and oppositional consciousness
that such a stance necessarily entails. Central to this debate is the question of how to resist the
present, more specifically the injustice, violence and vulgarity of the times, while being worthy of
our times, so as to engage with them in a productive, albeit in oppositional and affirmative
manner. This paper engages with the contextual and the conceptual aspects of this question.
Rosi Braidotti is a Philosopher and Distinguished Professor at Utrecht University as well as
director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht. Among her latest book publications: The
Posthuman (Polity Press, 2013); Nomadic Theory. The Portable Rosi Braidotti (Columbia
University Press, 2011); Nomadic Subjects (second edition, revised and enlarged, 2011, Columbia
University Press); La Philosophie, là oú on ne l’attend pas (Larousse, Paris, 2009); Transpositions:
on Nomadic Ethics (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2006); Feminismo, diferencia sexual y subjetividad
nomade (Gedisa, Barcelona, 2004); Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming
(Polity Press, Cambridge 2002). She has edited 5 volumes in Dutch on feminist issues. She also
edited (with Gabriele Griffin) Thinking differently: a reader in European women’s studies, (2002,
Zed Books), (with Nina Lykke) Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs (1996, Zed Books),
and co-authored: Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development (1994, Zed Books).
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Buchanan, Ian (University of Wollongong)
Body without Organs and its Discontents
In my discussion of assemblage theory and its discontents I used George Mallory’s famous
‘because it’s there’ response to the question ‘Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?’ to
illustrate the assemblage’s internal structure (the axes of content and expression). I argued that
the actual physical effort required to climb Mount Everest (content) is the entry price to the
virtual realm of the international esteem (expression) accorded to anyone who has made this
particular climb. I also argued that everyone who heard or read his answer immediately
comprehended it as sufficient – the scale of the climb is such that anyone who wants to be
known as a world class climber as Mallory did would need to ascend Everest in order to assure
their place in the history books. Yet the answer is also insufficient because while it speaks clearly
to the symbolic dimension (expression), it says nothing about the actual bodily effort involved in
climbing Everest, which in 1923 was an extremely hazardous enterprise (as it remains today – 4
people have been killed in the last couple of weeks), save that it was the price that had to be paid
in order to obtain the symbolic status of being the first man to conquer Everest. But if his only
goal was to ink his name into the record books then why climb Everest? Of all the possible
challenges he could have set himself, why that one? Certainly being the first to climb the world’s
highest mountain would have brought him lasting fame, had he succeeded, but it seems doubtful
that this was his sole or even principal motivation because it ignores the specificity of the
challenge itself (the difficulty of the ascent, the cold, the bad weather, oxygen deprivation, and so
on). My point is that even if we can understand the desire to be known as the first person to
climb the highest peak in the world that does not mean we can assume we understand the desire
to put oneself through the rigours and dangers of the actual climb. This is the point, then, where
our thinking about the assemblage needs to be connected to the body without organs.
Ian Buchanan is an Australian cultural theorist, currently serving as Director of the Institute for
Social Transformation Research based at University of Wollongong. He is the founding editor of
the Deleuze Studies journal, as well as a number of important book series dedicated to the work
of Gilles Deleuze. He has been important in the academic study of Deleuze's work and promoted
Deleuze scholarship internationally. Among his publications: Deleuze and Guattari's AntiOedipus, Continuum, 2008; Fredric Jameson: Live Theory, Continuum, 2006; Deleuzism: A
Metacommentary, Duke University Press and Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2000; Michel de
Certeau: Cultural Theorist, Sage, 2000.
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Perniola, Mario (University Roma “Tor Vergata”)
Becoming Deleuzian?
I always perceived a family likeness between deleuzian thought and my texts, but many factors
prevented to be sure of this closeness until now. A thorough study of Deleuze-Guattari’s A
thounsand Plateaus has taken away all my doubts. In fact, becoming more familiar with deleuzian
vocabulary, I could not help noticing that the key-concept of “Body without organs” is not
different from my concept of “Sex appeal of the Inorganic”. Another obstacle was the notion of
“life”, that is a milestone of deleuzian thought. This topic was par excellence the cause of many
misunderstandings, especially of ideological and parasitic usages of deleuzian philosophy, that
trapped it in a form of vitalism, as if it were the upshot of French spiritualism’s tradition! On the
contrary, the process of desubjectivation is a pivot, a fulcrum and a keystone of DeleuzeGuattari’s philosophy. The time has come to consider Deluge’s thought as a creation of new
concepts. In my opinion, it can be drawn like a triangle, whose vertices are three notions:
assemblage, becoming and plane of consistency. They are not distinct moments, but a unique
moment. However this triangle does not create something stable, lasting, enduring forever. But
becoming-deleuzian is absolutely not to imitate Deleuze-Guattari’s style of writing! If today you
wrote in this style, you certainly would be expelled from your universities! This is an issue worthy
of further consideration; in the last forty years, the gap between academy and radical thinking has
become huge!
Mario Perniola (www.marioperniola.it) taught as full professor at the University of Roma “Tor
Vergata” from 1983 to 2011, where he founded the Center “Linguaggio e pensiero”. He is
director of the magazine “Ágalma. Rivista di Studi Culturali e di Estetica” from 2000 until now
(http://www.agalmaweb.org /, https://www.facebook.com/agalmarivista). Visiting Professor in
many universities and research centers in France, Denmark, Brazil, Japan, Canada, USA and
Australia, he is author of several books translated into many languages. In English: Enigmas. The
Egyptian Moment in Society and Art, Verso, 1995; Ritual Thinking. Sexuality, Death, World,
Humanity Books, 2000; Art and Its Shadow,, Continuum, 2004; The Sex-appeal of the Inorganic,
Continuum, 2004; 20th Century Aesthetics: Towards a Theory of Feeling, Bloomsbury, 2013.
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Pisters, Patricia (University of Amsterdam)
Ship of Theseus: Becoming and Transindividual Lives
Is a ship that has all its components replaced still the same ship? This is the fundamental paradox
of Theseus’ ship from Greek mythology which has been taken up by filmmaker Anand Ghandi in
his first feature film that deals with the modern problem of organ donation Ship of Theseus
(2012). In my lecture I will look at the ways in which Anand’s film enquires into contemporary
technoscientific developments and new materialists processes of becoming, thus dealing with
complex bio- and geopolitical questions of inter-connection, inter-nation and inter-operativeness.
Bringing philosophy and film practice together, I argue that they are both important forms of
mircropolitical negotiations about the posthuman condition.
Patricia Pisters is professor of film at the Department of Media Studies of the University of
Amsterdam and director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is one of
the founding editors of the Open Access journal Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies and
the author of The Neuro-Image: A Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford
University Press). See for other publications, her blog, audio-visual essays and other information
also www.patriciapisters.com
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Abstracts A-Z
Adamson, Morgan
Enduring Images: Deleuze’s Time Image and a Materialist Philosophy of Cinematic
Resistance
Keywords: Cinema, Resistance, History
The paper comes from my current book project, Enduring Images of New Left Cinema, which
attempts to generate a concept of resistance in and through cinema, specifically cinematic
movements that emerged within and alongside the New Left social movements of the 1960s and
1970s. In it, I argue against the predominant theories of cinematic resistance that come from the
philosophy of Guy Debord, namely that neo-platonic understanding of the cinematic image as
false and that détournement is the only viable strategy to evaluate and produce utterances of
cinematic resistance.
I develop the concept of the enduring image as a way relate Deleuze’s statement in his work on
Foucault, “the final word on power is that resistance comes first,” to his philosophy of the
cinema. In his forthcoming essay, “Grammars of Conatus; or On the Primacy of Resistance in
Spinoza, Foucault, and Deleuze,” Cesare Casarino argues that the key to understanding Deleuze’s
enigmatic statement on the primacy of resistance actually lies in his oblique reading of Spinoza’s
philosophy, particularly his concept of conatus, or a mode’s striving to persevere in its being.
Drawing on Casarino’s work, I read Cinema 2: The Time Image to argue that accumulated within
cinematic images of resistance is a density of time, which opens the image up to the political,
spatial, and temporal dimensions that unhinge it from linear temporality. To say that the image
endures does not simply suggest that it persists. The enduring image, like Deleuze’s time image, is
a direct image of time; it opens time and, like the crystal image, exposes multiple temporalities.
How do images of resistance endure and how do enduring images resist? Which is to say, how do
cinematic images continue to produce material effects, participating in the constant relay between
actual and virtual in a state of constant becoming? In exploring these questions, I argue that the
cinematic image has a unique capacity to transmit the affective qualities of resistance that endure
across historical eras. To illustrate this point, I read an image of police brutality against an
African-American man from the League of Revolutionary Black Worker’s film Finally Got the
News (1971). In this reading, I explore the political consequences of how images of resistance
endure and continue to matter by examining its relationship to the contemporary Black Lives
Matter movement in the US.
Morgan Adamson is Assistant Professor in Media and Cultural Studies at Macalester College.
Her work engages film and media theory, documentary and avant-garde cinema, and visual
culture from the perspective of critical political economy. She has published on the topics in a
number of scholarly and popular venues, including South Atlantic Quarterly, Film-Philosophy,
and Ephemera. She is currently working on a manuscript, Enduring Images on New Left
Cinema, which is a comparative and critical evaluation of films emerging from New Left social
movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
madamson@macalester.edu
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Adkins, Brent
Glass Harmonica: Time and the Refrain
Keywords: Time, Refrain, Intensity
Throughout his career, Deleuze continually returned to the topic of time. Time plays a crucial
role in earlier works such as Difference & Repetition and The Logic of Sense, as well as the later
Cinema books. In fact, some commentators have argued that time is the concept that connects
Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole. In distinction from this I would like to pursue Deleuze and
Guattari’s little remarked on discussion of time in A Thousand Plateaus where they subordinate
time to the refrain. They write, “Time is not an a priori form; rather, the refrain is the a priori
form of time, which in each case fabricates different times” (TP 349). The advantage of
subordinating time to the refrain is that it reinforces the focus on “the intensive” throughout all
of Deleuze’s work.
The refrain, of course, holds a special place in Deleuze’s work. When asked in an interview what
concept he (and Guattari) had created, he replies, “How about the ritornello [refrain]? We
formulated the concept of the ritornello [refrain] in philosophy” (TRM 381). The primary
purpose of the refrain in A Thousand Plateaus is to provide a concept for thinking consistency
without resorting to hylomorphism. A refrain selects intensities and provides contingent
consistency to them. A refrain has territorial and semiotic components, and it also has temporal
components. Importantly, though, these temporal components are a function of the refrain,
rather than its ground.
The refrain thus produces different times. The time of a revolution differs from the time of a
child singing in the dark because the refrain is different in each case, because the intensities
selected are different in each case. Here Deleuze and Guattari do not reduce time to space; they
treat time as the result of making intensities consistent.
Brent Adkins is Professor of Philosophy at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, USA. He is the
author of numerous books and articles on Deleuze including Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand
Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide and Death and Desire in Hegel, Heidegger, and
Deleuze.
Department of Religion & Philosophy Roanoke College 221 College Lane Salem,
VA 24153 USA
adkins@roanoke.edu
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Ahmed, Shah
Pre-personal lives? Deleuze, Gombrowicz and literature revisited
Keywords: immanence, singularity, multiplicity
Despite the growing body of secondary literature, the matter of Deleuze and Gombrowicz, and
generally Deleuze and literature, is far from settled. This is partly due to the, appropriate, nonidentity within Deleuze's own forays into the literary; but, it is contended that the heart of the
problem lies within the transcendent tendencies in the usage of philosophy or 'theory' in literary
studies. Remarkably, we can discover an axiomatic machinery at work here, ironically rendering
such applications arguably non-Deleuzean in some respects. Thus, it is not enough to show
Deleuzean motifs within a literary work, nor is naming one's approach 'symptomatological' or
'schizoanalytic' adequate enough.
Jacques Derrida confessed in a late interview: “I dream of a writing that would be neither
philosophy nor literature, nor even contaminated by one or the other, while still keeping the
memory of literature and philosophy.” (‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’). We claim
that Gombrowicz achieved this type of writing, and it is due to his intense engagement with both
literature and philosophy that have led to overdeterminations on both sides in reading him: either
he is too literary, or he is too philosophical.
Taking Gombrowicz's novels as the concrete cases in point, we will first briefly show how a
number of the applications of Deleuze hitherto suffer from the aforementioned problems. In
opposition to the axiomatic, non-immanent tendencies, we will then argue that a Deleuzeaninspired approach should also take as its impulse the pre-personal. Any identifiable 'method'
always already operates at too high a level of abstraction or complexity. It is serendipitous that
Gombrowicz, also, was a thinker-creator of the pre-personal – perhaps hinting at his secret
appeal to the French philosopher. At the same time, though, this is also a potential trap: we do
not want to represent Gombrowicz as merely an (inferior) literary repetition of Deleuzean
conceptions. We will focus on a number of problems from Gombrowicz's novels, which still
remain somewhat cryptic. First, we will explore the manifestation of inhuman life in Ferdydurke,
Cosmos and Possessed. Next, we will try to understand what the use of brackets in Pornografia is
symptomatic of. Finally, we will try to show how trans-individual forces govern a number of
elements in Trans-Atlantyk.
Shah Ahmed defended in 2015 his PhD titled ‘The Functions of Nonsense in the Novels of
Witold Gombrowicz’ at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow. The concept of nonsense mobilized
here was largely inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze. Over a decade prior to this, he
completed an MA in Continental Philosopy at the University of Warwick. He decided to emigrate
from Britain to Poland in 2002, primarily to learn the Polish language and understand more about
its people and culture. He has been living in Poland, working in the Department of English
Studies at Tarnow State College, ever since.
shahahm@lycos.com
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Alldred, Pam and Nick J Fox
Becoming political: micropolitics, activism, policy – a workshop
Key words: activism, micropolitics, politics
The world of politics is of concern to us all, whether as activists, contributors to social or
environmental policy, or simply as citizens attempting to live a useful and worthwhile life. For
some academics, politics has also been part of our intellectual focus, as we have sought to
understand the connected topics of power and resistance. What is the nature of power and how
does it work? Why and how do people resist power, and where is resistance located? How may
we apply power and resistance to pursue social transformation?
Deleuze and Deleuzians do not frequently speak of politics, yet Deleuze’s work is deeply political.
This reticence is a direct consequence of the flat ontology underpinning a social ontology of
assemblages and affects, in which the events all around us – and nothing else – produce the social
world from minute to minute, year by year. By contrast, a conception of micropolitics is integral
to this social ontology. For Widder (2012: 125) ‘politics begins with micropolitics’, while Patton
(2000: 68) has pointed to the ‘politics of desire’ at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s project.
For these reasons, a Deleuzian politics needs to shift from a macro-sociology of governments
and states firmly back to the micropolitics of events. Power, in this flat ontology, is a
disseminated phenomenon, revealed and deployed at the very local level of actions and events,
rather than some kind of amorphous stuff that somehow permeates the social world. What
social science has called power and what it has called resistance are both aspects of the affective
flux between relations in particular assemblages; all events are sites in which both ‘power’ and
‘resistance’ may be discerned. Furthermore, the fluctuating character of assemblage micropolitics
means that ‘power’ and ‘resistance’ wax and wane, shift and reverse continually.
However, we would argue that micropolitically – rather than seeking power or resistance in
events – it is more important to assess the capacities that affect economies produce. The task is
consequently to bring to bear Deleuzian concepts of territorialisation and de-territorialisation,
becoming and lines of flight upon the daily actions and encounters between people, things and
social formations. We can ask of any affect: does it close down political capacities or open them
up?
The aim of this workshop is to explore the practical application of this understanding of politics
for our engagements with the world beyond the academic register, whether in activism, policy or
as citizens. It will use the workshop format to explore how to apply a micropolitics of events to
current issues, and start to formulate a ‘micropolitics of politics’, in which we are all becoming
political.
Length of Workshop: 60 minutes
Audience: This workshop will be of interest to those wishing to apply a DeleuzoGuattarian perspective to
activism, policy or to the academic analysis of politics, power and resistance.
Biographical note
Nick J. Fox is honorary professor of sociology at the University of Sheffield, School of Health
and Related Research, and has researched and written widely on postmodern and new materialist
social theory. Pam Alldred is based at Brunel University, London, UK in the Department of
Clinical Sciences. Her work is predominantly on gender, sexuality and youth work, informed by
post-structuralism, feminist theory, and new materialism. Alldred and Fox have been working
together since 2010 on projects developing new materialist and DeleuzoGuattarian analyses of
sexuality, masculinities and social inquiry. Their book ‘Sociology and the New Materialism’ is
published by Sage in 2016.
n.j.fox@sheffield.ac.uk
pam.alldred@brunel.ac.uk
14
Amaral, Heloisa
Fabulating practices: Musical scores between memory and monuments
«[…] Memorials by themselves remain inert and amnesiac,
dependent on visitors for whatever memory they finally produce.»
James E. Young
In the last chapter of What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari describe artworks as
monuments, or distilled percepts and affects which, in interplay with the material, form selfpositing blocks of sensations that in the case of a musical score will only be actualized in the
event of the performance (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 p. 164). Until very recently, however,
performance practices of Western notated Art music have been steered by hermeneutical ideals
of predeterminacy that stand in strong contrast to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of percepts and
affects as potentialities independent of those who created or of those who experience them. They
quote Proust: “Memory, I hate you” (ibid, p.168). The action of the monument does not lie in the
past but in the becoming, in fabulation. Hermeneutical aesthetics, on the other hand, presuppose
an active involvement with the past: musical scores function as hypomemnata (Derrida, 1995),
material memories of things read, heard or thought whose signs are unravelled by the interpreter
into specific sounds and gestures.
Following the ripening of performative aesthetics since the late 1950s, a number of musicians,
composers and music theatre directors have been substituting the fixity of hermeneutical ideals
by more fluid performative practices that are no longer medium-bound and that, through selfreferentiality and emergent associative processes (Fischer-Lichte 2008), approach musical scores
as sources of the “becoming-music” of today. Taking as starting point recent works from Romeo
Castellucci, Georg Nussbaumer, Trond Reinholdtsen and Simon Steen Andersen as well as my
own practice as musician and curator, this proposal rethinks Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of
monument in the context of performance practice, transforming musical works from the past
into works from the past into deterritorializing agents, fabulating machines.
References
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is Philosophy? (H. Tomlinson, & G. Burchell, Trans.) New York, USA:
Columbia University Press.
Derrida, J. (1995). Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. (J. Derrida, & E. Prenowitz, Eds.) Diacritics , 25 (2), 9-63.
Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008). The transformativ power of performance. (S. I. Jain, Trans.) New York, NY, USA:
Routledge.
Foster, H. (2015). Bad New Days. Art, Criticism, Emergency. London, UK: Verso.
Foucault, M. (1997). Subjectivity and Truth. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ehics: Essential Work of Foucault, 1954-1984 (pp.
87-92). London: Allen Lane.
Rancière, J. (2010). The Monument and Its Confidences; or Deleuze and Art's Capacity of 'Resistance'. In
Continuum (Ed.), Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics (S. Corcoran, Trans., pp. 169-183). London, UK.
Brazilian-born pianist Heloisa Amaral has studied piano, historical keyboards and conducting in Freiburg
and Oslo. Her early interest for contemporary music has led to collaborations with composers such as
Helmut Lachenmann, Matthias Spahlinger, Simon Steen-Andersen and Marina Rosenfeld. Member of
ensemble asamisimasa between 2003-09, Heloisa works currently as a freelance, performing mainly as a
soloist, with Duo Hellqvist/Amaral (vln/pn) or Ensemble neoN. In addition, Heloisa is active as curator
and researcher, with special interest for the political and philosophical aspects of contemporary music
practice. Between 2012-15 she was Head of Education at Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival and
curator of Ultima Academy. Since 2015, Heloisa pursues a PhD in artistic research at the Orpheus
Institute (BE) as part of the research cluster MusicExperiment 21.
orpheusinstituut.be
musicexperiment21.eu
Kortrijksesteenweg 131ª 9000 Ghent Belgium
heloisa.amaral@orpheusinstituut.be
15
Araújo Lima, Elizabeth M. Freire de and Juliana Araújo Silva
Contributions of philosophy for clinical practice with autistic children and adolescents
Keywords: Clinical Practice, Philosophy, Psychology
The proposal of this communication is part of the doctorate research being developed by the authors
(doctoral researcher and supervisor) in São Paulo, Brazil. The aim of the research is to cartograph the
processes of professionals who work with autistic children and young people in different contexts. For
this communication, we propose thinking about the contribution of concepts such as becoming and a life
for the experimentation of practices that seek to avoid concepts grounded in structuralisms and “correct”
forms of care, and produce clinical effects on affirming the importance of experimentation, of multiplicity,
of movements, of alliances between practices. In this way, we can increase the power of thinking about
the processes of the singularization of professionals (in their Actions) and of the children themselves in
the processes.
From the two contexts of work with autistic children being analyzed in the research, we would like to
weave proximities between the experiments and the concepts mentioned above. The first context is the
practice of Psychosocial Attention, a paradigm that came out of the psychiatric reform in Brazil initiated at
the beginning of the 1980s, which reorganized the means of caring for people with psychic suffering, and
which has specific centers catering to the needs of children and adolescents with autism, psychosis and
other issues. In these centers, the teams are composed of different professions, and are also open to
experiments in care, with criteria guided by reform, but which can encompass different ways of thinking.
The second context is the practice exercised by Fernand Deligny, in France, with autistic children, which
influenced the thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In the research, contact with this context has
taken place through written and audiovisual production carried out by professionals.
We understand clinical practice as an encounter between bodies, languages, smells and intensities. Bodies
affecting others and allowing themselves to be affected in turn, by diverse presences that aggregate
differences in ways of being. The encounter moves the bodies to produce a “being together”, taking us
away from the ready-made, to which we are accustomed and from what we often believe we already know
and therefore only recognize in the other. The encounter that deterritorializes us and demands the
formation of new bodies is essential in this practice.
Autistic children are very often viewed in a stereotypical way, as if they only experience syndromic
repetitions, with their silences, their movements viewed as repetitions without sense and meaning.
However, in the encounters during clinical practice we came across many singularities, like those described
by Gilles Deleuze, concerning new-born babies “they have singularities, a smile, a gesture, a funny face…”
Both the practice in Psychosocial Attention and the writings and videos concerning Fernand Deligny’s
practices show us situations in which we notice movements of transformation installed in the children and
the professionals through the encounter. Through the films produced by Deligny and his companions, we
can observe a series of gestualities, looks, behaviors in the children and the adults that put these more
generalizing concepts to the test. Hence, we intend to communicate how these concepts allied to
experience make it possible for us to build new ways of looking, understandings and actions with these
children and adolescents.
Juliana Araújo Silva is an Occupational Therapist, with a Master’s Degree, currently doing
doctoral research in Psychology and Society at UNESP- ASSIS.
Juliana.arsi@gmail.com
Elizabeth M. F. De Araújo Lima is an Occupational Therapist, and Professor on the
Occupational Therapy Course at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She is a Doctor of
Psychology from PUC University and did a post-doctorate at the University of Arts, London.
Beth.araujolima@gmail.com
16
Askin, Ridvan
Deleuze’s Virtual Romanticism
Keywords: Aesthetics, Romanticism, Virtuality
Deleuze is regularly inscribed in a Kantian and post-Kantian lineage, but he is rarely evoked as a
direct descendant of romanticism. This paper places him squarely in the romantic tradition and
shows how he builds on and extends the romantic project.
Romanticism emerges as the attempt to draw up a comprehensive and accurate account apt to
reconcile the human (thought) and nonhuman (nature) worlds decisively divorced by Kant’s
critical project. In order to do so without sliding back into dogmatic metaphysics, that is, without
relinquishing Kant’s critical insights, it needs to come up with a genetic theory (that is, a theory of
creation) able to ground thought in nature without reducing thought to mere mechanism. Such a
project remains very much a transcendental project, but “transcendental” now comes to signify a
real ground in nature rather than the mere conditions of thought. To comply with Kant’s critical
project, this ground, the romantic Absolute, needs to be located beyond the limits of thought.
That is, the Absolute has to remain inaccessible by means of rational, conceptual thought. If this
is the case, the only remaining option is aisthesis or aesthetic intuition. It is precisely this wager on
aisthesis that makes the project of the reconciliation of thought and nature romantic. Since works
of art in general and literary works in particular (due to their linguistic constitution) amount to
the material manifestation of such aesthetic intuition, art and literature attain central importance
within romantic discourse. The romantic insistence on aesthetics does not amount to
irrationalism, however, as the romantics essentially avail themselves of rationalist metaphysics in
presenting their argument—they take up Baumgarten’s original definition of aesthetics as lowerlevel epistemology (gnoseologia inferior) and invert the rationalist hierarchy: with the romantics,
aisthesis by means of the literary work (or the work of art in general) becomes the royal road to
truth.
Deleuze’s own system constitutes the twentieth-century continuation and development of this
literary-philosophical project. Harking back to the romantic problem of genesis elucidated above,
Deleuze basically updates romanticism. Deleuze’s most singular achievement in this respect is his
thorough immanentization of the transcendental, which he also makes apparent on the
terminological level by resorting to Bergson’s notion of the virtual instead. As is well-known, this
virtualization of the transcendental rests on a strong account of ontological univocity and the
absolutization of difference. Deleuze’s famous “clamor of being” is precisely the noise of the
incessant different/ciation of difference.
Crucially, the realm of Deleuzian virtuality is only tangible by means of what Deleuze calls the
transcendental use of the senses, which is but another name for aesthetic intuition. Accordingly,
and in due romantic fashion, aesthetics denotes the “apodictic discipline” (DR 68) for Deleuze.
In this vein, one might even maintain that Deleuze’s repeated assertions that his books are to be
read like novels (see the prefaces to Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense) are precisely made in
the spirit of Schlegel’s call for a transcendental poetry.
Ridvan Askin is Postdoc in American and General Literatures at the University of Basel. He is
the co-editor of Aesthetics in the 21st Century, a special issue of Speculations (2014), and of Literature,
Ethics, Morality: American Studies Perspectives (Narr 2015). His first book, Narrative and Becoming, is
forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in 2016.
ridvan.askin@unibas.ch
17
Atamer, Esra
Physical, Vital, Psychic and Collective Individuations in Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva
Keywords: Lispector, Simondon, Deleuze
This is life seen by life. I may not have meaning, but it is the same lack
of meaning that the pulsating vein has. –CL
In Clarice Lispector’s writing, one not only finds an otherwise notion of being, but also an
implosion of what ontological and psychoanalytic traditions define as the psychic site of being:
angst. She radically alters the tenets of ontologies of man and fully exposes what is left out as
non-representational or unspeakable through a revolutionary writing that does not require a
suspension of the possibilities (time) so as to release (effectuate) and confirm one’s being. In
Lispector’s Agua Viva, silence neither refers to this suspension nor to a subjugated no-thing nor
to an oedipalized unconscious, but to the virtual as the preindividual site of becoming. As
opposed to the Freudian and Heideggerian notions of being/subject and their recuperations,
Clarice enacts a transversal partial subjectivity that does not assume an absence or lack as the
primary principle of her ‘being’.
I will utilize Simondon’s critique of anxiety as an impediment to the psychic and collective
individuation and try to illustrate the conterminous presence of the physical, vital, and psychic
individuations that determine the I in Agua Viva. The I and the you are not the liaisons of an
inter-subjective phenomenology as a result of angst, but emerge as a transindividual relation in
Clarice Lispector’s writing. Silence then takes on a different sense that traverses the text: a
tension, a disparate that cannot be molarized into the sedentary structures of individuated being.
I will argue, following Deleuze, that this ‘sense’ is not situated between the subject and predicate,
but lies somewhere else: “What I say to you is never what I say to you but something else instead.
It captures the thing that escapes me and yet I live from it and am above a shining darkness”
(Lispector 8). In alliance with Elizabeth Grosz, Claire Colebrook, and Rosi Braidotti’s
interpretations of “becoming woman,” I will suggest that CL enacts a different sense, a
becoming-imperceptible that is not an effect of angst but a transduction of the pre-individual, a
transindividual relation between the I and the you.
My name is Esra Atamer. I received my doctoral degree in Comparative Literature at
Binghamton University, NY in 2014. I am currently a part-time faculty at Queens College,
CUNY, NY. I wrote my dissertation on Gilbert Simondon’s L'individu et sa genèse physico-biologique,
and explored the question of how physical and chemical individuations (or molecular
individuation in Deleuze’s sense) alter our notions of communication and collectivity. Ilya
Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers’ work greatly informed the tenets of my dissertation.
Esra.Atamer@qc.cuny.edu
18
Aubán Borrell, Mónica
Becoming-City? Smooth Spaces and Virtual Territories in Informal Urban Settlements
Keywords: Informal City, Virtual Territories, Micro-Resistance Practices
Taking into account the interest on geography expressed by Deleuze and Guattari in several
occasions, an approach to contemporary urban reality is set out in order to trace the proposed
path trough their philosophy. Thus, the so-called informal city will be presented as a
contemporary form of smooth space, a very specific location in which relevant concepts from
these two authors can be placed. The landscape drawn by slums constitutes a particular mode of
territorial occupation that cannot be explained by the guiding lines that defined striated urban
centres. According to this, the dialogue between Deleuze and Guattari’s work and the informal
city will create a theoretico-practical bind in which not only certain philosophical notions will
encounter an open material field for experimentation, but also some alternative conceptual tools
will be discovered, allowing to face the inner particularities of informality.
Focusing now on the given triad, three registers of geography can be found in Deleuze and
Guattari's readings: the actual, as the institutionalised organisation of space; the intensive, which
appeals to the cartography that follows lines of becoming; and, finally, the virtual as the machinic
assemblage of destabilising minorities (Protevi, 2013). The dynamic, heterogeneous and nohierarchical reality of the informal city participates actively from these three registers, opening up
a complex territory crossed by affects, lines of forces and multiple becomings.
The experience of living in such informal settlements articulates a deep link between territory and
inhabitant, which undoubtedly modifies the composition of the subject. The hyper-degrade
conditions that characterise informality lead to the emergence of a huge range of self-organised
practices that give individuals the possibility to have an impact on their near context
conformation. These self-organised practices are easily turned into collective actions that imply
the generation of spatial tactics, able to operate significant transformations on a socio-political
plane (Jáuregui, 2012). I consider that affirming the potential – which hides within informality –
is a good starting point to find the necessary reconsideration of slums as the real cities that they
actually are.
The same negation of the informal settlements as proper cities leads to a connection with a
particular understanding of the deleuzian concept of the virtual as a no longer, no yet; a sense of
possibility that is permanently acting (Braidotti, 2013). I want to suggest a reading of the informal
city as a virtual territory subdued to a process of constant actualisation. Can the slums –in their
becoming–city movement– be understood as a contested arena where micro-resistance practises
of everyday life are experimented? How can we recognise these cities while keeping the smooth
condition of this complex machinic assemblage? With this reflection, I would like to propose a
critical walk through the informal city in order to explore the particularities of this form of
contemporary urban desert.
Mónica Aubán Borrell: BA in Architecture by the Universitat Politècnica de València (2007 –
2013) and MA in Theory and History of Architecture (2013 – 2015) by the Universitat
Politècnica de Catalunya. I am currently a PhD candidate at the Universitat Politècnica de
Catalunya, working on a thesis on the critical, destabilising and creative potential that can be
associated to informal cities. I collaborate with the research group: “ACC-Architecture, City and
Culture”, participating, specifically, on the competitive project: “Topology of Urban Space:
Recognition, Analysis and Mapping of Fragile Spaces in the Contemporary City”.
monica.auban@gmail.com
19
Baldissone, Riccardo
Becoming as repetition: constructing identity as a retrospective projection
Keywords: becoming, repetition, retrospective projection
The production of permanence is the hidden cornerstone of the logic of identity since before
Plato. By prioritizing immutability over transformation, pre-platonic thinkers open the way to the
Platonic absolute severance of models from copies, which Deleuze understands as the condition
for discriminating between good and bad copies, or simulacra. In the Anti-Oedipus, the machinic
coupling of flows and cuts reverses the Platonic scheme, inasmuch as it puts forth the image of
movements that always precede their always temporary interruptions. However, the previous
Deleuzean emphasis on repetition goes even beyond the reversal of Platonism, because, by
eschewing opposition, it takes further Kierkegaard’s suggestion of a path that is alternative to
both classical ontology and modern dialectics. It is the altering power of repetition that releases
simulacra from the reference to models, origins and identities: and yet, repetition can offer more
than an alternative ontology. On this regard, we may well rely on Péguy, who follows Bergson’s
construction of possibility as the effect of a dispositif that projects backward an acquired result,
which thus becomes possible in its future perfect. In doing so, Péguy produces his own
overturning of Platonism as a temporal rather than logical reversal: the previous elements in a
series of repetitions repeat the subsequent ones. This chronological reversal underlines our
projective construction of the past, which we can only access from its future perspective of our
present. More precisely, each past occurrence only appears within a series, whose origin is
constantly re-negotiated with the open sequence of present perspectives. I would contend that we
may construct repetition in general as the effect of a retrospective projection. In this case, it may
be necessary to generalize the recasting of repression as a threefold structure, which Deleuze and
Guattari devise in the Anti-Oedipus by adding a displaced represented to the repressed
representative and the repressing representation. Such displaced represented is a projective effect
of the repressing, which cannot exert its repressive action directly on the repressed. In a similar
way, repetition would involve not only a repeated and a repeating, but also a third element.
Analogously to Bergson’s notion of possibility, which does require a projective device, repetitions
would need a projecting element in order to couple the repeating with the repeated. In turn, the
recovery of the third element of repetition, by claiming the productive role of theoretical
practices, may help us to rethink the notion of identity as the outcome of practices of repetition
not only in the limited sphere of habit formation, but also as the always temporary result of the
ordering of the chaosmos.
Riccardo Baldissone is Visiting Scholar at the University of Westminster, London, for the academic year
2015-16. He reconsidered human rights discourse in the broader context of the modern theoretical
framework. Riccardo is taking further his genealogical commitment in narrations that link the process of
construction of the logic of identity in classical ontology with the medieval emergence of conceptual
discourse and the transformations of modern naturalism, in the perspective of the overcoming of the
double Western straitjacket of entities and representations.
This year, Riccardo published: ‘The Costs of Paradise: Temporalisations of Place in Pasargadae,’ in World
Heritage in Iran: Perspectives on Pasargadae, Ali Mozaffari ed. (London: Ashgate, 2015); ‘I and Another:
Rethinking the Subject of Human Rights with Dostoyevsky, Bakhtin and Simondon,’ in Literature and
Human Rights: The Law, the Language and the Limitations of Human Rights Discourse, Ian Ward ed.
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015); ‘Non Giudicheremo gli Angeli: Dalle Biopolitiche alle Polibiotiche,’ in
Differenze Italiane. Politica e Filosofia: Mappe e Sconfinamenti, Dario Gentili and Elettra Stimilli eds.
(Roma: DeriveApprodi, 2015); ‘Speech and Graphomena: The Power of Apuleius’ Words in Court and in
Translation,’ Polemos, vol 9, n 2, 2015, pp. 441-456.
riccardobaldissone@yahoo.com.au // https://westminster.academia.edu/RiccardoBaldissone
20
Banalopoulou, Christina
Deleuze, Haecceity and the Force Relations Between Poetics and Politics: the “NO”
Demonstration Before the Greek Referendum of July of 2015
Friday, 3rd of July at Syntagma Square in Athens-Greece: More than 20000 people have gathered
in order to publically empathize with the newly elected government of Syriza, an acronym for the
Coalition of Greek Radical Left. On June 28th, Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister and
leader of Syriza, refused to continue the negotiations between Greece, the European Commission
(EC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB). Once the
negotiations were frozen, Tsipras called for a referendum so to add more weight to his positions
during Greece’s government’s talks with its international creditors. The “NO” demonstration
that took place two days before the referendum included a series of public concerts and
performances.
Christos Thivaios, one of the invited artists, right before his own performance, took the
microphone and shouted “because we owe more to our poets than to our creditors”. Drawing
upon this publically performed statement in my paper, I will argue that the “NO” demonstration
of July of 2015, including the public concerts and performances, can offer some actualized
ground to the Deleuzian concept of “haeceity”. According to Gilles Deleuze, haecceity is an
assemblage that dramatizes and actualizes the heterogeneous and virtual force relations between
poetics and politics.
Additionally, it is my contention that Deleuze’s deep interest towards the poetic arts of literature,
image – either painted or cinematic – and theatre, emerges from his understanding of art as
multiple and multipliable processes of becoming(s) that continuously stretch both the potentiality
of the virtual and its immanent actualization. As a result art becomes more real than everyday life
because it does not imprison itself within notions of possibility that rely on transcendence, in
order to territorialize notions of lack and negation. On the contrary, art assembles poetic forces
that affirm the non-yet actualized potentialities of the virtual.
I want to argue that the “NO” demonstration, including the free and public concerts and
performances, the artists who performed, the government of Syriza that was part of the audience,
the very short speech of Alexis Tsipras, the 20000 people, the Syntagma square that is right in
front of the Greek parliament and the absolute absence of the police, assembled a haecceity of
forces of pure difference and heterogeneity that stretched both the virtual and actual
potentialities of political poetics. The force relations between poetics and politics, unfolded from
an ongoing process of dramatization that both differen(t)iated and differen(c)iated all the
involved intensities. Deleuze, in his essay The Method of Dramatization understands
dramatization as a process of intensification during which intensities, or in other words, multiple
becoming(s) of qualities, actualize themselves in tangible extensities.
As a result, in my paper, I will closely investigate how the dramatization of the involved
intensities of the “NO” demonstration composed a haecceity of the force relations between
politics and poetics that envelop the capacity not only to be affected by but also to affect new
multiplicities of political non-organization.
Christina Banalopoulou is a PhD candidate in Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at
University of Maryland. She holds a BA in Sociology and an MA in Social and Cultural
Anthropology, both from Panteion University of Athens Greece. She has also graduated from
Laban/ Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York. Her research interests include the
interplay between the works of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari, performance, embodiment
and political poiesis.
cbanalop@umd.edu
21
Bandi, Nina
Material for a film and the meaning of time
Keywords: political philosophy, artistic practices, the virtual
The relation between art and the political is not at the heart of Deleuze’s engagement with visual
art. Rather his focus lies on sensation and the figural as a non-representational way of rendering
visible developed with regard to painting and Francis Bacon. Even though it might be seen as a
political work and used for such a reading in relation to art I am proposing in my paper a
different path. I suggest to relate the possible political manifestations of an art work to Deleuze’s
concept of the virtual as he develops it with his reading of Bergson and in his second cinema
book with regard to the time-image.
I focus on Emily Jacir’s artistic work Material for a film (2004–ongoing), an ongoing engagement
with the life of Palestinian writer Wael Zuaiter who was assassinated near his home in Rome by
Israeli Mossad agents in 1972, which she presents in a large-scale, multi-layered installation
including archive material, family photographs, correspondence, documents, film, sound, etc.
While art critics commonly reproach her that her art is – even though it is presented in classic
white cube situations - rather activism than art, I want to propose a different reading of her work
and discuss in which way it relates to the philosophical question of the relation between politics
and art. In the end, this engagement with Deleuzes’ and Bergson’s thought and Emily Jacir’s art
work also relates to the question of an ontology of the now. While avoiding this exact
terminology, I propose a thinking of the now as never separated from an acting in the now and a
becoming that is memory to become, to become present, visible, but never represented or fixed
in an image of thought.
Nina Bandi is a philosopher and PhD Researcher at Zurich University of Arts and at Lucerne
University of Arts, both in Switzerland, working on politics and aesthetics. She is part of a
research project funded by the Swiss National Research Fund on the relevance of political art
practices. Her PhD focuses on a non-representational thinking of the relation of arts and politics.
At ZHdK, she also teaches within the design department. She is part of the editorial collective of
kamion, a journal at the intersection of political theory, social movements, and artistic practices.
nina.bandi@hslu.ch
22
Bang Jensen, Lars
The Knight of Faith encounters Mr.Robot –a dramatization of digital literacy
Keywords: digital literacy, Kierkegaard, becoming
Digital literacy has become an integrated part of contemporary educational curricula and was
tested internationally in the PISA test of 2009(OECD, 2011). Digital literacy has become part of
the plethora of benchmarks used to evaluate and differentiate the development and
competitiveness of the educational systems of the nation states. In contemporary research on
digital literacy there has been a line of research investigating what digital literacy is in pragmatic
terms (Belshaw, 2012) or advocating a Deleuzian inspired multiple literacy theory (MLT), where
digital literacy is part of this MLT(Masny & Waterhouse, 2011). This paper is approaching digital
literacy from a different angle. The aim is here to initiate an outline of a dramatization (Deleuze,
2004), to not ask what digital literacy is, but what can it do, what type of resistance can be
affirmed through digital literacy? To outline such a dramatization the attention is directed to
Deleuze’s and Guattari’s use of Kierkegaard’s notion of the knight of faith (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987), as an outline of the ‘man of becoming’(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 282) tied to a
particular stance of resistance of continuous anonymous becoming. Acting as a case within the
concept of ‘man of becoming’ the movement is directed towards Sam Esmail’s show Mr.Robot
(2015), where the main protagonist is here analogous to the man of becoming; the schizophrenic
with a developed resistance in the form of hacking capitalist life, hacking capitalist codes and
celebrating molecular revolution.
References
Belshaw, D. (2012). What is' digital literacy'? A Pragmatic investigation. Durham: Durham
University.
Deleuze, G. (2004). The Method of Dramatization (M. Taormina, Trans.). In D. Lapoujade (Ed.),
Desert Island and Other Texts 1953-1974. New York: Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Masny, D., & Waterhouse, M. (2011). Mapping territories and creating nomadic pathways with
Multiple Literacies Theory. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 27(3).
OECD. (2011). PISA 2009 Results: Students on Line: Digital Technologies and Performance
(Volume VI). Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/48270093.pdf 31
December 2015
Lars Bang Jensen: PhD, Research Fellow, Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester
Metropolitan University.
l.jensen@mmu.ac.uk // lbj@learning.aau.dk
23
Bankston, Samantha
Becoming and Dialectic: The Parallax between Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Žižek
The ontologies of Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Žižek are incommensurable. Rather than appropriate
one at the expense of the other, this essay uses Žižek’s notion of parallax to think the two
philosophers together, without mediation. After elaborating the two modes of becoming
(absolute and sensory) in the philosophy of Deleuze, it is clear that both Deleuze and Žižek
provide mirrored philosophical images, with the point of divergence being absolute lack.
Following Henri Bergson, Deleuze argues that lack, or the being of negation, is an error of
representational understanding, while Žižek conceives his philosophy as being driven by absolute
lack. A stark opponent of Žižek’s precursor, Hegel, Deleuze rejects opposition as a constitutive
feature of reality. However, Žižek mirrors Deleuze’s very concepts in his Lacanian reading of
Hegel, while said concepts retain identical terms. For instance, Žižek calls l’objet petit a
“difference,” while his term for absolute negation is “repetition,” and finally, he refers to his
philosophical system as the “non-All”. These singular concepts in Žižek’s thought share an
identical language with that of Deleuze. Deleuze’s philosophy is one of “difference,” while its
mode of proliferation is “repetition,” and finally, he often refers to his philosophy as the “OneAll”. Mapping these common terms that do not denote a common language, but
incommensurable, inverse logics, it becomes evident that Deleuze and Žižek are mirror images of
one another, infinitely fragmenting across the expanse of their respective ontological positions of
becoming and Hegelian dialectic. Thus, by triangulating ontology from their unique perspectives,
a new ontological shift emerges—one that resists mediation and admixture.
Samantha Bankston is an associate professor of philosophy at Sierra Nevada College in the
United States. In addition to translating Anne Sauvagnargues’ book, Deleuze and Art
(Bloomsbury/Continuum, 2013), her first authored book, Deleuze and Becoming(s), is
forthcoming from Bloomsbury Publications, and she is currently writing a book, Deleuze and
Žižek, for Palgrave Macmillan. Her work has appeared in various journals and book volumes,
such as: Simone de Beauvoir—A Humanist Thinker (Brill, 2014), Biopower: Foucault and
Beyond (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Deleuze and the Passions (Punctum Press, 2015),
and she is a member of the international team that transcribes Deleuze’s unpublished, audiorecorded lectures from the University of Paris, Vincennes for www.webdeleuze.com .
sbankston@sierranevada.edu
24
Bar, Tal
Transposing Nomadic digital Architecture – towards a theory of artisanal digital
Keywords: Nomadic, non-essential, digital
In this paper I outline a nomadic and affirmative digital architecture theory that question the
seemingly complex yet homogenous formation of this increasingly prolific discipline. My
understanding of homogeneity has developed with reference to the non-essential as an underlying
processes of differentiation deployed by Deleuze as well as with reference to Rosi Braidotti’s
onto-epistemological processes of situating via nomadic cartography. I propose to mobilize these
nomadic methodologies towards a reconceptualization of alternative, non-essential yet situated,
digital processes that develop altered sense of the body that is corporal yet non unitary, affective,
and always situated as an alternative to the body perception of both phenomenology as well as
object-oriented ontology. In the broader perspective, this is to suggest and alternative to the
alliance formed between digital architecture and the Royal sciences that lead to a compliance with
Neo-liberal practices through an interesting reversal of the principles of openness and complexity
that in the past have posited the discourse as forefront of the thrive to diversity and variation.
For example, the entail reiteration of Deleuze’s processes of variation encapsulated in the Fold
that sparked the first phase of digital formation has gave way to a formal appreciation variation
commonplace within digital architecture strands. I will argue that by reinstating forgotten
immanent concepts such as the infinitesimal aspect to the widely practiced differential calculus. I
refer to the infinitesimal as a concrete reconceptualization of the variable, but also as an example
to the experimental and revolutionary aspect of this theory, attesting to the quality of Deleuzian
ambition to create alternative frameworks for the extension of thought to cartographies of
potentiality and hope in the ability to differ from the mold. The Artisan, proposed by DG in A
Thousand Plateaus as a nomadic alternative to the Architect and its reliance on Royal science is
yet another conceptualization that I would like to explore in relation to the notion of site, or
location, organic non organic in relation to data, weaving and the non-unitary.
Grounding, or situating these immanent techniques is as crucial to my proposition. Here I would
tap into a situated, yet pre-subjective, molecular techniques that challenge the organic-non
organic binary. This will enable me ‘trajectories of affirmation’ (Braidotti) which not only create
new cartographies of the mutations of the discourse towards neo liberal compliance but
moreover, propose an alternative that begin to render an ethical digital practice that is maximizes
our capacities to affect and be affected, and sensitive and enhances all ecologies.
Tal Bar is a PhD candidate (by Research) at the Bartlett school of architecture, UCL, London.
Her research into feminist new-materialist subjectivities in digital architecture is intended towards
developing a nomadic and affirmative digital theory. Tal has received an MA degree in History
and Theories of Architecture from The Architectural Association, where she examined
architectural discourse relation to the zeitgeist Vs transcendental principles, while exposing the
economies of asserting its autonomy. Prior to that Tal had been working for leading commercial
architecture offices in London and as a freelance writer for various architectural magazines.
Tal.bar.tal@gmail.com
25
Baranova, Jūratė
Schizoanalysis of Literary Creation: How a Writing-Machine Becomes a Sorcerer
Keywords: literature, Deleuze, writing-machine, sorcerer
In the first edition of the book Marcel Proust et les signes (1963), Deleuze suggests a schema for
deciphering signs functioning in Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu. This novel
is conceived as a literary machine of signs. Deleuze rejects the linguistic model of signs suggested
by Ferdinand de Saussure. He does not rely on Jacques Lacan’s investigations. For the question
of what a sign is, Deleuze turns to Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Sanders Peirce asking the
questions: how does a sign affect me? What are the sources of my joy and grievance? What
powers force me to think? What are the desiring machines created by literature?
In this paper the attempt is made first of all to reconstruct the main desiring machines created by
literature integrated into Deleuze’s and later Guattari’s philosophical universe: the oscillation
between the critical and the clinical in Sade’s and Masoch’s case (Deleuze 1991), the surface and
the depth dichotomy revealed by Caroll and Artaud (Deleuze 1990), Kafka’s input into
schizoanalysis versus psychoanalysis (Deleuze, Guattari 1986), Beckett’s Molloy as Anti-Oedipus
(Deleuze, Guattari 1983 ), Melvile’s concept of writing as becoming animal (Deleuze, Guattari
1987), Fitzgerald’s smooth space (Deleuze, Guattari 1987), Henri James’ secrecies (Deleuze,
Guattari 1987), and Dostoyevsky’s idiot as a private thinker (Deleuze, Guattari 1994).
The second question discussed in the paper is: what are the main engines enabling the
functioning of these different literary machines? How does a writing machine become a sorcerer?
We consider that Deleuze and Guattari suggest two main hypothetical answers: the first is
connected with the functioning of the language, and the second one with the process of
becoming.
For the functioning of the writing machine there is a need for specific language—indirect
discourse and speaking in tongues: “To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the
unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret
idioms from which I extract something I call my Self (Moi). I is an order-word. A schizophrenic
said: "I heard voices say: he is conscious of life." In this sense, there is indeed a schizophrenic
cogito, but it is a cogito that makes self-consciousness the incorporeal transformation of an
order-word, or a result of indirect discourse. My direct discourse is still the free indirect discourse
running through me, coming from other worlds or other planets” (Deleuze, Guattari 1987: 84).
On the other hand the literary machine functions well when it makes language itself stammer.
Deleuze and Guattari say that the stammering of the language involves placing all linguistic, and
even nonlinguistic, elements in variation, both variables of expression and variables of content.
They suggest a new form of redundancy. AND ... AND . . . AND . . . (Deleuze, Guattari 1987:
98).
These nonlinguistic elements lead the writing machine towards the ability of fundamental
forgetting in order to establish a relationship with something unknowable and imperceptible.
Deleuze and Guattari conclude that the novella has little to do with a memory of the past or an
act of reflection; quite to the contrary, it plays upon a fundamental forgetting. It evolves in the
element of "what happened" because it places us in a relationship with something unknowable
and imperceptible. “The novella has a fundamental relation to secrecy (not with a secret matter or
object to be discovered, but with the form of the secret, which remains impenetrable)” (Deleuze,
Guattari 1987: 193). Secrecy is the domain of a sorcerer who is very close to the heart of
becoming. Deleuze and Guattari write: “If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a
becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings-writer, but
becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc.” (Deleuze, Guattari 1987: 240).
26
There is no one law for the functioning of every literary machine. Schizoanalysis is like the art of
the new. But is it always possible to ask the same question: what is the line of flight of this
particular literary machine?
Jūratė Baranova (official name Rubavičienė, nickname Ana Audicka) is a professor in the
Department of Philosophy, faculty of History at Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences.
She published the books in Lithuanian: 20th Century Moral Philosophy: Conversation with Kant
(2004), Philosophy and Literature: Contradictions, Parallels and Intersections (2006), Nietzsche
and Postmodernism (2007), Cinema and Philosophy (with co-authors, 2013), The Phenomenon
of Jurga Ivanauskaitė: Between Surrealism and Existentialism (2014), also edited and published
the books in English: Between Visual and Literary Creation: Tarkovsky and Ivanauskaitė (2015),
Lithuanian Philosophy: Persons and Ideas (2000), Contemporary Philosophical Discourse in
Lithuania (2005). Recently is writing the book in English: Gilles Deleuze: Philosophy and Arts
(with co-authors), the project is financed by the Lithuanian Academy of Science (No. MIP067/2014). She is a member of the Lithuanian Writers Union, published literary essay books:
Meditations: Texts and Images (2004) and The Fear to Drown (2009)
jurabara@gmail.com
27
Barker, Joseph
The passive creation of life: thinking explosive temporality against ‘vital materialism’
Keywords: passivity, materialism, temporality
This paper explores the close relationship between life and time in Deleuze’s thought, a
relationship which he sometimes says is one of identity. By focusing on Difference and Repetition
and the Cinema books, we find a notion of life which is characterized by a temporality of fatigue,
explosion, and ultimately, as Deleuze states in his definition of vitalism in What is Philosophy?,
passivity. The passive temporality of life is one in which each present collapses under the fatigue
of holding together elements which are outside it and yet compose it. This is collapse of the
present which opens onto the future has precisely the same structure as the ‘splitting of time’ in
the past and present which is at the heart of Deleuze’s work on cinema but which was also
present as early as Difference and Repetition. Deleuze explicitly distinguishes his passive vision of
vital temporality from those vitalist thinkers who propose an ‘activity’ at the heart of life, among
whom he includes Kant. We hope to complicate one strand of contemporary thought which has
been influenced by Deleuze, but which puts creative activity at the heart of all material beings,
under the impression it is giving ‘vitality’ to the material. In the thought of Jane Bennett, we will
show how the influence of Bruno Latour’s ‘actant’ has the effect of obscuring the connotations
of fatigue and passive mutation which are implied in Deleuze’s philosophy, particularly in his
work with Guattari on the assemblage. Furthermore, in John Protevi’s more direct engagement
with Deleuze’s notion of life, we will find an explicit cancellation of the connotations of passivity,
only to be replaced with the more active ramifications of creativity. We will end by using Quentin
Meillassoux’s distinction between active and passive vitalisms to show that those who emphasize
the creativity of the new in an active register remain in a pre-Deleuzian mode of vitalism, and
particularly one connected to the thought of Henri Bergson. Whereas we find in Bergson find a
‘free selection’ of external elements by the living being, Deleuze breaks with this active vitalism
by positing an ‘unfree selection’ which can, at the extreme, cause the living present to collapse;
indeed, it is only this collapse of the present which can open us up to the becoming of the future.
Joseph Barker is a graduate student at Penn State University. He is working on a dissertation
examining the significance of Nietzsche’s break with Kant for the development of the philosophy
of Gilles Deleuze, most specifically in relation to what Deleuze calls the new relationship
between thought and life. He has published articles on the dramatization, life and the image in
Deleuze’s philosophy, his latest being “Love, Language and the Dramatization of Ethical Worlds
in Deleuze,” published in Deleuze Studies.
jab944@psu.edu
28
Barla, Josef
Chaosmopolitics. Becoming-more-than-human, becoming-worldly, becoming-responseable in the Anthropocene
Keywords: Anthropocene, becoming-with, politics
A specter is haunting the world: the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene marks the “Age of
Man”—that is, a geological era in which humans have become a geophysical force on a planetary
scale, affecting the functioning of the Earth system. The trope of the Anthropocene refers to the
idea and discourse of a new phase in the geological history of the Earth when natural forces and
human forces became fundamentally intertwined. Ironically, despite the fact that the
Anthropocene has become quite fast a fashionable concept it remains entirely unclear who the
Anthropos, the collective subject it interpellates is.
Departing from the idea that concepts not so much explain something, as Deleuze urges us to
understand, but rather themselves require explanation, that is, they demand us to explain the
conditions that give rise to them, in this paper, I will argue that in order to understand and
explain the Anthropocene global warming has to be seen as inextricably entangled with
Capitalism and human exceptionalism—meaning, global warming cannot be separated from the
appropriation of ‘nonhuman Nature’ as a mere resource for production, increasing social
inequality and inequity, global migration movements, and the rise of societies of control. From
such a point of view it is, in fact, not so much the Anthropos that poses the real problem but
rather Capitalism (Moore) and human exceptionalism (Haraway, Braidotti), as it becomes more
and more evident that global warming cannot be separated from a violent history of modern
capital accumulation and its far-reaching political, ecological, and social effects on humans and
nonhumans, as well as on that what ‘we’ used to call “the environment”.
Nevertheless, in a specific sense the Anthropos is, in fact, part, if not the source, of ‘our’
problems. As an ahistorical and homogenous figure it not only represents a majority that
“includes no one” and “speaks for no one” (Deleuze/Guattari) but also ignores that we are
always entangled with and becoming-with a more-than-human world. Arguing that perhaps we
have to become more-than-human in order to take seriously the accountabilities and “responseabilities” (Haraway) which emerge from our multispecies entanglements, in this paper, I will ask
which images of a “new earth” along with “new people” might arise from such a move. If
becoming-more-than-human as becoming worldly and response-able enacts particular ecologies
of disturbance and chaos, by undermining both the idea of the Anthropos and the belief in
Capitalism, such a move then also calls for a different politics, a politics that is neither humanist
nor post-humanist but something else, a politics of composed chaos and disturbance taking
seriously both the critique of Capitalism and its societies of control and the yearning for
ecological and multispecies justice by shifting the focus on the “cuts that bind” (Barad); that is
chaosmopolitics. Reading Deleuze und Guattari’s geophilosophy and chaosmosis through the
works of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, and turning to current struggles for social and
ecological multispecies justice, the aim of this paper lies in tracing the possibilities for such a
chaosmopolitics to emerge.
Josef Barla is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy of Technology and Lecturer in Theater-, Film
and Media Studies as well as in Political Science at the University of Vienna. He was Visiting
Researcher at the Science and Justice Research Center at UCSC in 2012/13 and at the
Posthumanities Hub and the Seed Box Environmental Humanities Collaboratory at Linköping
University in fall 2015. His research focus lies at the intersection of the ethics and politics of
technology, feminist epistemologies, posthumanist theories of bodies and embodiment, and the
environmental humanities.
josef.barla@univie.ac.at
29
Batukan, Can
Spinoza and Deleuze on Affects
Keywords: affectivity, affects, ethology
Deleuze is a Spinoza reader and a Spinoza commentator. Deleuze is a Spinoza ventriloquist. According to
him “everything was moving towards a Spinoza-Nietzsche identity” in the middle of the 50s and 60s.(1)
Indeed, inside the conceptual workshop of Deleuze (a factory just as the factory of Andy Warhol)
“Spinoza as an infinite philosopher”(2) unites with Nietzsche: these two sneak into the concepts of
Heraclitus, of Hume, Bergson and of Leibniz as ghosts and transform them. They take them towards a
plane of immanence that does not yield to transcendence, an immanence that will not give back
transcendence, its strength.
As the inseparability of ontology and ethics becomes visible, the doors of a science that will be called
“ethology”, i.e. the science of affects are opened. This is a labyrinth: the labyrinth of soul. And it is the
study of the ambiguity, paradox, coincidence and fractal structure inside this labyrinth. As transcendence is
excluded, so are morals. Or the morals of immanence are reborn: the Logos of Nature gets heard again,
comes into language and becomes available for the ears.
The meaning of Ethica and affects is especially the main subject of SPP. Deleuze starts with the division
of affectus and affectio. Then follows the emphasis on the division of idea and affect. The interpretation
of the clarification of ideas and affects in Spinoza may give us the trace of one of the biggest mistakes in
the history of philosophy: the necessity to make a choice between reason and affection.
Ethica builds up a system around the definition of “substance”. It calls “attributes”, the things that we
perceive in the sake of understanding the essence of this thing that which is in itself and conceived
through itself (definition III and IV). Modes are the affections of substance that is that which exists in,
and is conceived through something other than itself (definition V).(3) This system that starts with God
(that of which the essence involves existence and which is self-caused) and spreads into the attributes of
substances arrives at the end to the sum of affections of each substance, i.e. modes. Therefore the
affections here must be the key of going from the lowest level to the highest. Everything which exists,
exists either in itself or in something else. Thus we must investigate which are or can be the tonality or
affections possessed by each substance. For all things that exist, for Phusis but also for Logos, for all
bodies that have or do not have life, the only explanation may be “affectivity”. And affectivity in living
beings lies in affects of each united substance: body/soul.
So, where do we find this explanation in pure Spinoza? Where does Deleuze move out of this explanation
or transform it? Can the Spinoza ventriloquist reach the pursued Spinoza-Nietzsche identity by putting
Uexküll into circuit, through a science of affects, from the SPE of 1968 to AŒ, to MP, to the lecture
notes in Vincennes (1978-81) and SPP?
References
Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers 1972-1990, Paris: Minuit, 1990, pp. 185-212.
Gilles Deleuze, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, Paris: Minuit, 1991, p. 59.
Baruch Spinoza, Ethique, Paris: Flammarion, 1965, part I, pp. 21-22.
Abbreviations:
QP : Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?
SPP: Spinoza Philosophie Pratique
SPE: Spinoza et le problème de l’expression
AŒ: L’Anti-Œdipe: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie
MP : Mille Plateaux : Capitalisme et Schizophrénie II
Can Batukan: I was born in Ankara, 1978. Graduated from Saint-Joseph high school, studied
mathematics and economics with a minor in literature and philosophy at Istanbul BILGI University. In
2015, I have completed my PhD research entitled "The Question of the Animal in Heidegger and
Deleuze" at the University of Galatasaray.
My main areas of interest are Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Philosophy of Music, Animal
Philosophy, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Life, Metaphysics, Ontology, Eastern Philosophies,
Presocratics, Aristotle, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze.
batukan78@hotmail.com
30
Beaulieu, Alain
Deleuze and Guattari's Cosmological Thought: Philosophy, Science, Art
Keywords: Cosmology, Philosophy, Science, Art
The aim of this presentation is to explain the role of cosmology in D&G's thought and to better
understand their reformation of traditional transcendant cosmologies in favour of an immanent
expericence of the world and the universe. In order to do so, the three parts of the presentation
will be defined by the three "forms of thought" (WiP?), namely: philosophy, science, and art.
D&G assign specific tasks to these forms of thought as philosophy creates concepts, science
creates functions, and art creates blocks of sensation. These tasks are linked to distinct
cosmological experiences as the main concerns of philosophy, science, and art are respectively:
the Earth (geophilosophy), chaosmic nature, and cosmic forces. The cosmological specificities of
the three forms of thought will be discussed by situating D&G's geophilosophy with regard to
the traditional philosophy of cosmology (from the Greeks to phenomenology), by proposing
their possible readings of recent theories or hypotheses in astrophysics (such as the theory of
everything, particule physics or multiverse), and by illustrating the theme of cosmic art from the
work of contemporary artists (such as Stockhausen, Klee, and others).
Alain Beaulieu is associate professor of philosophy at Laurentian University (Canada). He has a
Doctorat de 3e cycle in philosophy from the Université de Paris 8 with a thesis on Gilles Deleuze
et la phénoménologie (Sils Maria/Vrin, 2nd ed. 2006). He published Cuerpo y acontecimiento. La
estética de Gilles Deleuze (Buenos Aires, Letra Viva, 2012), Gilles Deleuze et ses contemporains
(Harmattan, 2011) and (co)edited the following works: Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics
(Lexington, 2014), Abécédaire de Martin Heidegger (Sils Maria/Vrin, 2008), Michel Foucault and
Power Today (Lexington, 2006), Gilles Deleuze. Héritage philosophique (PUF, 2005), as well as
Michel Foucault et le contrôle social (PU Laval, 2nd ed. 2008). He is also co-editor of Foucault
Studies.
Contact information:
Alain Beaulieu, Professor
Department of Philosophy
Laurentian University
935, Ramsey Lake Road
Sudbury, Ontario
P3E 2C6 - CANADA
abeaulieu@laurentian.ca // alain.b123@yahoo.ca
31
Ben-Arie, Ronnen
“The thought of the outside is the thought of resistance” – Deleuze beyond resistance
Keywords: resistance, transformation, the outside
In his writings, Gilles Deleuze (alone and together with Felix Guattari) referred several times to
the concept of resistance as key to distinguish and qualify his thought and understanding of the
modes of operation of power and of possible political transformation from those of Michel
Foucault. In his 1977 letter to Foucault (Desire and Pleasure) Deleuze asserts that for himself,
contrary to Foucault, “the status of phenomena of resistance is not a problem, since lines of
flight are primary determinations”; then in A Thousand Plateaus follows the designation of the
fact that lines of flight which are primary “are not phenomena of resistance and counterattack”,
as a point of disagreement with Foucault; and finally, in his book on Foucault, Deleuze concludes
that “the final word on power is that resistance comes first”. In recent years, few scholars have
already discussed the status of resistance in the thought of Deleuze and Foucault, and the
distinctions between its conceptualization by the two, focusing mainly on the question of the
primacy of resistance and on the role resistance has in the overall development of their work
(Checchi 2014; Smith 2012; Thompson 2015)1.
In this paper I aim to further explore the ontology of resistance as conceptualized by Deleuze
and through that to develop a way to articulate political transformation. A key factor for
understanding the ontological model suggested by Deleuze (and Guattari) is the triad
organization of power relations with zones of power, indiscernibility and impotence
(impuissance), contrary to Foucault’s rather dialectical model of macro-politics and micro-physics
of power. This conceptualization opens the possibility to think with Deleuze and Guattari
beyond the common understanding of resistance as that which ‘stands opposed to’ (re-sistere)
power. By exploring the relations of zones of impotence with the outside and the movements
and flows of forces, I aim to develop a new understanding of modes of operation and action in
regard to power relations. Based on this analysis, I will propose new ways to conceive political
transformation through the concepts of deviation and perversion instead of the more commonly
used formulations of transgression or subversion, that are usually based on a Foucauldian
conceptualization.
Ronnen Ben-Arie completed his PhD studies in political theory at Haifa University. His
dissertation explores the concepts of resistance in the political thought of Gilles Deleuze and
Michel Foucault, as a basis for thinking of possibilities for transformation of social and political
order. Ronnen is a research fellow at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel-Aviv University and
teaches at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion Institute. Ronnen has
published on the sptio-politics of Israel-Palestine and he is currently working on a new
monograph together with Marcelo Svirsky titled The Cultural Politics of Settler Colonial in
Palestine, to be published in early 2017.
ronnen.ba@gmail.com
Marco Checchi, “Spotting the Primacy of Resistance in the Virtual Encounter of Foucault and Deleuze”, Foucault
Studies 18 (October 2014): 197-212; Daniel W. Smith, “Why Deleuze did not need a concept of resistance“, paper
presented at the ‘Between Deleuze and Foucault’ conference at Purdue University 2012, unpublished; Kevin
Thompson, “The final word on power: Foucault and Deleuze on resistance”, paper presented at ‘The Political
Philosophy of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’ conference at Purdue University 2015, unpublished.
32
1
Bertetto, Paolo
A propos de cinéma/concept/sensation
Au lieu de considérer seulement les deux livres de Deleuze sur le cinéma, il est peut-être plus
intéressant essayer de réfléchir sur certains problèmes de théorie et de philosophie du cinéma en
relation à la pensée de Deleuze concernant soit le cinéma soit l’art. C’est une ligne de recherche
qui vise à développer les potentialités conceptuelles de la réflexion sur l’esthétique et l’art de
Deleuze: une recherche qui se propose de suivre les montages de l’expérimentation philosohique
de Deleuze et son flux nomadique.
Dans cette perspective on parlera avant tout des idées de l’art come bloc de sensations et
comme composé d’affects percepts et concepts, enoncées par Deleuze et Guattari dans Qu’est-ce
que la philosophie? . Surtout les questions de la presence dans l’oeuvre des concepts et des
sensations méritent d’être approfondies. La théorie des processus conceptuels dans l’oeuvre
d’art et dans le cinéma est en effet un horizon de réflexion qu’après Deleuze a connu un intéret e
nouveau , mais qui avant Deleuze dans le cinema était développée seulement par Eisenstein. Le
problème de la creation des concepts par le cinema sera considéré avant tout en relation à la
production d’un automatisme spirituel et d’une vibration psychique à travers le mouvement
automatique. Ce processus est correlé soit au mécanisme intensité-différence soit à la possibilitè
de configuration des concepts à travers l’image. Et dans Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? Deleuze et
Guattari soulignent cette possibilité en rapport à la production de l’idée d’autrui expliquée à
travers l’hors champ cinématographique.
D’un autre côté j’essayerai de réfléchir sur la fonction et la dynamique des sensations à l’intérieur
du cinema et dans le rapport spectatoriel, en rappelant avant tout la réflexion deleuzienne de
Francis Bacon Logique de la sensation, qui dessine des parcours et des configurations des sensations
de grand intéret dans l’ordre de l’art. Dans le cinéma le travail de la sensation crée une intensité
qui est dynamisme des processus différenciels qui constituent l’être comme pure différence. Et
le fonctionnement du film se dèvoile comme un flux de la force relié au devenir, une variation
continue d’intensités (émotionnelles et conceptuelles).
Paolo Bertetto
Professore Ordinario
Cinema, fotografia, televisione
Sapienza Università di Roma
Dipartimento di Storia dell'Arte e Spettacolo
pbertetto2@gmail.com
33
Blenkarn, Patrick
Politicizing Major English
Keywords: major and minor language; English; capitalism
In this essay, I identify several ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘major’, as set
up in their book on Kafka and minor literature, can help us understand contemporary
capitalism’s relationship with English as a ‘global language’. On the basis of a consideration of
Deleuze’s reflections on language from across his corpus, and often transposing from literatures
to languages, I argue that his concepts can help us to resolve the on-going question within
contemporary linguistics about the relationship between ‘English’ and ‘Englishes’. Deleuze, I
suggest, proposes a framework that, at least partially, enables us to understand a major language
as something popular yet particularized rather than as a kind of empty constant category or
‘surveyor’ of minor languages (i.e. all Englishes are ‘English’, but no English is proper English).
That is to say, a major language is not a genus type composed of minor species; and inversely, a
minor language does not simply participate within the greater framework of a specific language’s
becoming. With Deleuze, we are able to, and must, I believe, think both these levels (constancy
and stuttering/variation) at the same time, and as part of the same event. Extrapolating upon
Deleuze’s reflections on English literature and his comments on the language itself, I argue that
English is tied to a becoming with capitalism, and more, the myriad of global stutterings that
make up so much of the language are having little effect on its instrumental position in the event
of multinational capitalism—a system, which, given its own perpetual crisis state, has no problem
accommodating linguistic stutterings. Though hierarchies exist within the ‘Englishes’, from
General American to RP to Chinglish, capitalism is extremely accommodating. English is
engaging in a becoming-commodity of an unprecedented level and minor literatures have become
niche expressions of and entry points to ever more cultural status. What desires are driving this
machine? Do Anglophones have any important role to play as figures that hold a certain kind of
power within the language’s landscape? As a start, I propose thinking of the event of English, in
all of its variation, to be a problem in the sense that Deleuze formulates in Difference and
Repetition. I search for solutions by focusing on the possibilities not within the minor (say, by
demanding a marginal group to take on the responsibility of the destabilizing a majority), but
within the concept of the major itself. Against the grain of Deleuze and Guattari’s distinctions in
their book on Kafka, I ask: how might we include the major alongside the minor as political and a
form of resistance to the hegemony of capitalism? How might a whole language stutter together
in pursuit of an escape from capitalism?
Patrick Blenkarn is an artist currently pursuing a Masters of Fine Arts at Simon Fraser
University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada with the help of the SSHRC Joseph
Bombardier Graduate Scholarship. He has a three-part undergraduate honours degree in
continental philosophy, theatre studies, and film studies from the University of King’s College in
Halifax, Nova Scotia. His artistic practice is interdisciplinary—ranging from experimental
performance to guerrilla audio guides to digital narratives—and frequently engages with themes
of repetition, communication, and language. His current thesis is on the English language in art
and capitalism.
pjblenkarn@gmail.com
34
Bogard, William
Actualization, Time, Rhythm
We know that in relation to how time is given, Deleuze focuses on passive synthesis in itself and
only secondarily on how passive synthesis functions as a condition of active (or conscious,
attentive) synthesis. Passive temporal synthesis involves caesuras or breaks in contractive and
contemplative forces that repeat and become rhythmic. These caesuras are intensive differences
that actualize potentials to affect and be affected. Their passive distribution constitutes time
prior to its active distribution in memory or anticipation. They are how time passes and
something new can happen.
In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche, descending into nihilism, famously cries out “Bad air!
Bad air!” This is not a metaphor. Nihilism for Nietzsche is not an abstract philosophy, but
philosophy against life. When you can’t breathe, you die. Breathing repeats and generates
rhythms. Its distribution of breaks is its temporality. We all experience the joys and sorrows of
breathing, when it is effortless, and when it is a struggle. When breathing becomes effortless,
that is power and the actualization of life. In Nietzsche, effortless laughter is a good example of a
joyous distribution of the breath, and also the heart and lungs of his philosophy of time.
For Deleuze, all is repetition in temporal series—past, present, and future alike (the three
repetitions). The past does not repeat as equal act (except by analogy or similarity), but as acts
“unequal to the act” it imagines. The present, which relates to the caesura, is repetition as
metamorphosis, as a becoming-equal to the act. But the repetition of the present as
metamorphosis harbors a secret complicity with the past it doubles, viz., the “I” whose action
becomes equal to itself. The future destroys this complicity; it shatters the I and repeats the act
as eternal return, as repetition of the new. The caesura thus draws together the past and future,
actualizes action as difference in the present. The caesura generates time as synthesis of intensive
difference, without the I, what Deleuze calls the third passive synthesis of time, the synthesis of
the future. In Deleuze’s view, time passes, as for Nietzsche, as eternal return, repetition as
authentic rather than imagined creation, the dice throw.
William Bogard: Deburgh Chair of Social Sciences/Whitman College
bogard@whitman.edu
35
Bogdanich, Jennifer L.
Becoming-Other: Teaching and Learning Experiences with Shakespeare and
Performance
Keywords: Shakespearean education; Deleuze; becoming
This paper is centered around a research study of English Education students enrolled in a program
focusing on teaching and learning Shakespeare through performance at the Folger Shakespeare Library in
Washington, D.C. and in Oxford, England. Deleuze’s concept of becoming—a key term in this year’s
Deleuze Studies Conference—offers a framework and vocabulary for the study in which the researcher
explores how performance-based approaches open up a space for experimentation in teaching and
learning Shakespeare and how those experiences form and shape a becoming.
The Deleuzian concept of becoming is a response to the western tradition’s focus on being and identity as
a linear progression that instead promotes becoming as an ongoing and constant process of change and
differentiation. Massumi (1992) explained, however, that becoming has no predetermined end point, and
so “it cannot be exhaustively described. If it could, it would already be what is becoming, in which case it
wouldn’t be becoming at all” (p. 103). What Massumi means here is that becoming cannot be predicted in
advance; we cannot know a priori how it will unfold, and so it is important to incorporate a multiplicity of
data inquiry strategies in order to attend to the heterogeneous flows of intensities in process throughout
learning events, making it possible to map lines of flight in thinking and becoming. In particular, this
study incorporates the data collection and analysis of participant observation and corresponding field
notes as well as students’ notes, papers, and presentations generated over the course of seven weeks while
participating in six three-hour workshops, attending weekly play performances and museum excursions,
and engaging in frequent classroom discussions.
The overall research design of this study aligns with poststructural research practices in which the
subject—both the researcher and the researched—is always fractured and shifting throughout the research
process. Accordingly, research data are not viewed as “transparent evidence of that which is real” (Davies,
2004, p. 4) that can be translated, coded, and then produced as a transparent narrative. Instead, data are
messy, shifting, and unsteady. One way researchers have embraced these shifts is to consider data
collection and analysis as rhizomatic in which thought grows and functions horizontally and in the middle,
fleeing the vertical, arborescent structure in order to create and form new connections.
Learning experiences that encourage creation and experimentation—such as those that take place when
focusing on Shakespeare through performance—provide the capacity to form and shape a Deleuzian
becoming since becoming is an experiment with “what is new, that is, coming into being, be-coming”
(Semetsky, 2010, p. 480). Thus, this paper takes up Deleuzian concepts in order to open a dynamic
discussion regarding how performance not only allows but also invites creative experimentations with the
unknown. It considers what these concepts bring to bear on Shakespearean pedagogy, asking what they
can unsettle? What do they make possible?
References
Davies, B. (2004). Introduction: Poststructuralist lines of flight in Australia.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 17(1), 3-9.
Massumi, B. (1992). A user’s guide to capitalism and schizophrenia: Deviations from
Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Semetsky, I. (2010). The folds of experience, or: Constructing the pedagogy of values.
Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(4), 476-488.
Jennifer L. Bogdanich is a PhD candidate in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the
University of Georgia. Her particular research interests focus on Shakespearean education, poststructural
qualitative research methods, and the theory and practice of collaborative writing as a method of inquiry
and pedagogy in the area of teacher education.
Jennifer L. Bogdanich, Language and Literacy Education, University of Georgia
775 Boulevard Athens, Georgia 30601 (770) 313.3375
jenniferbogdanich@gmail.com
36
Bogue, Ronald
Deleuze, Guattari and Dumézil: The State, War and Fascism
Keywords: Dumézil, war, fascism
Deleuze and Guattari open Plateau 12 “1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine” by
citing Georges Dumézil’s opposition of the sovereign and warrior functions, and they begin
Plateau 13 “7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture” with a discussion of Dumézil’s analysis of the
bipartite nature of the sovereign function as represented by the magician-emperor and juristpriest-king. Deleuze and Guattari claim that Dumézil’s work provides evidence of a constitutive
and total opposition of the State apparatus and the War Machine, but in fact Dumézil sees in the
magician-emperor a figure that often blurs the line between the sovereign and the warrior. In the
closing paragraphs of Mythes et dieux des Germains (1939), Dumézil emphasizes this point by
commenting on the fusion of the sovereign and warrior function in Odhinn in German
mythology and in the Nazi revival of such mythology. In Mithra-Varuna (1940; 2nd ed. 1948) he
reflects as well on ancient German culture’s warrior ideology, the ideal of a warrior state, and the
economic implications of such a warrior state. Momigliano, Ginzburg and Grottanelli have
argued that Dumézil shows anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi sympathies in these passages. Lincoln has
claimed that these passages show a far-right, fascist inclination in Dumézil, but not an overtly
anti-Semitic or pro-Nazi stance. Eribon has dispensed with many of the inaccuracies surrounding
these attacks in Faut-il brûler Dumézil, but further clarification of Dumézil’s remarks in Mythes
et dieux des Germains and Mithra-Varuna may be gained through a close reading of the texts in
relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the State apparatus, nomadism, and the War
Machine. Besides defusing much of the criticism of Dumézil, such a reading also helps elucidate
Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of fascism and its bearing on the State. It also puts into
perspective Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Virilio’s notion of Nazism as a manifestation of a
suicidal state.
Ronald Bogue is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the
University of Georgia, USA. His books include Deleuze and Guattari (1989); Deleuze on
Literature (2003); Deleuze on Cinema (2003); Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (2003);
Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tributaries (2004); Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics
and Aesthetics (2007); and Deleuzian Fabulation: The Scars of History (2010). Recent articles
include essays on Deleuze and Donna Haraway, Deleuze and Godard, Deleuze and Raymond
Ruyer, Plateau 3 of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Henri Maldiney, and Deleuze and
Georges Dumézil.
Contact information:
150 Pinecrest Court
Athens, GA 30605
USA
rbogue@uga.edu
37
Bonai, Julija
The role of desire in the process of eternal return
Keywords: desire, becoming, eternal return
For Deleuze, desire is not considered to be limited to the particular kind of subjectivity or
subjective experience. It is not caused merely by the subject, but rather the subject that becomes
through the process of subjectivisation is a product of desire. It is also not conceived as limited
merely to the conative function of mental processes, because it is implicit in any mode of
psychological existence. Desire is explained by him as the affirmative power of actualization of
virtual potential, or as the power of becoming. It acts as the efficient cause that triggers the latent,
virtual potential to become actual. The power of becoming actual is conditioned by two virtual
aspects of being: by the all-pervasive field of immanence, populated by singularities and their
distributions, and by the transcendental field that is immersed in the virtual field of immanence.
The latter virtual condition was defined by Deleuze in his latest text L’Immanence: une Vie as the
a-subjective, impersonal and pre-reflexive consciousness. This all-pervasive consciousness
immersed in the virtual field of immanence gives life to the material world. Along with the
material aspect of being, it conditions every actual mode of existence.
In his book about Bergson, the actual and virtual dimensions are explained as the psychological
and the ontological unconscious. The first refers to the process of becoming or to the process of
actualization, and the second to the pure memory or the pure past that is, as the virtual
dimension, always co-existent with the present. The virtual dimension or the pure memory
conditions actual, present psychological existence. It actualizes itself entirely in every mode of
becoming or in every mode of desire. The latter, in turn, through its experience, influences its
virtual potential and thus changes its conditions of existence. Thus, the psychological and the
ontological conditions of desire are intrinsically connected and explicable only through the
understanding of time.
As ontological past, the virtual conditions the passing of the actual present that results in the
eternal return of the future. To return means to make a difference in itself through every
becoming. Eternal return is explained by Deleuze as the being of becoming. It acts as a
differential principle that has a selective role and ethical purpose in the process of becoming. By
means of affirmation and creativity, it disables everything that is not life affirming: exclusive
differentiation of reactive forces, negation and opposition. Desire as the power to become, or to
be actualized in a specific way is a selective power. It is the power of the absolutely different that
persists through every return. The present paper tries to explain the unconscious conditions of
desire in order to gain insight into the connection between the conscious tendency of selective
becoming and its unconscious virtual potential. The aim of such exploration is to become aware
of the unconscious capacity for life-affirming becoming and the role of desire in this process.
Julija Bonai is an independent scholar in the field of philosophy and a Yoga teacher. Her
doctoral thesis is focused on the concept of desire in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari. Her main research fields are ontology, philosophy of mind, psychoanalysis, philosophy
and psychology of desire, Indian philosophy and ethics. She is currently working on the
connection between the Sāṃkhya philosophy and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
She is living and working in Ljubljana (Slovenia).
julija.bonai@gmail.com
38
Börebäck, Kristina
The awkward work of assessing in education - if teaching is the art to enable connections
If teaching is an art, teaching is a performance where ideas are connected. This means that ideas
virtualizes as they are actualized by the nomadic subjects called teachers and students. Education
is a specific situation which frequently is explained as designed for learning. Teaching is regularly
fixed by objectives, with a “hidden” desire defined by a specific curricula. Teaching will always
become in a machinery for life and as an educational machine. The machinery of an educational
life, make the teacher to a becoming nomadic subject along with the students in each educational
situation. This is the pending art of teaching directing to a transformation through learning.
Teaching rely on a desire to understand a specific curriculum that conjugates teachers and
students. Learning in a formal educational situation require performances in repetition and
differentiation. This will mean that understanding never become a realization of the curriculum
but a virtualization or actualization of the understood. As nomadic subjects learning differentiate
and the expression of understanding will never become pure repetition of a written curriculum.
Learning will become expressed through multiple action and explained as it can be understood
and actualized in life and as life.
Assessments in education are meant to evaluate the students´ “knowledge” or rather their
abilities to express understandings from a teaching situation with a specific curriculum. As
becoming nomadic subjects, the multiplicity of understanding a curriculum will enable both
performances of repetition and differentiation. The teacher has to evaluate and assess each
student´s expression and decide if that expression fulfill the requirements for the specific
educational situation. To do so the teacher will give the student one or several tasks, or problem
to solve. There are several difficulties in giving someone a task. One is to be clear and use a
language that the student understand. Another is to formulate questions clearly enough to guide
the students in to the curriculum.
To become a student means to become in an educational machinery. A machinery that are
selective when it comes to expressions. This is a process of repetitive actions. The extent of
differentiation that is possible is insignificant in the beginning of the education but will increase
when the educational process goes closer to the final exam or dissertation.
A teacher is a nomadic subject that has been graded and passed as one of those students that can
express themselves well and fit into the educational machinery. To teach is to explain the value of
the curriculum and to define how the educational machinery works. A teacher as a nomadic
subject meet students that are nomadic subjects with multiple life experiences sometimes very
different from the educational machinery and the academic life. The awkward problem of
assessing education is that it means to evaluate the students expression of understanding the
curriculum through the teachers own understanding the same. I like to discuss this problem as an
educational task for teachers.
Kristina Börebäck, born in Sweden, lives in Oslo, Norway. I do my PhD at Stockholm
University, Department of Education. My main interest is to find out how the Deleuzian
philosophy can be helpful when we confront various problems within education as well as in life.
My PhD-thesis is about environmental communication understood through the lenses of
posthumanism and Deleuzian philosophy.
I have an undergraduated degree in Education, in Gender Studies and Geology.
I have a master in Education and one in Gender Studies.
kristina@boreback.com
39
Borges, Maria Lucília
Memories of a secret: silence as a symptom of a secret society
Keywords: silence, secret, becoming
In 1951, as he entered an anechoic chamber at Harvard University, American composer John
Cage made the notion of silence “audible”. Two years earlier, in 1949, his Lecture on Nothing
already brought along, in its very title, “nothing” as a concept associated with silence (“I have
nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.”). While listening to his own body
sounds (a high one, from the nervous system in operation, and a low one from blood in
circulation) and taking silence as material for composing as much as any sound, Cage does not
only demystifies silence - thought of as lack of sound until then -, but also its own absence
becomes presence: of a sound, of a secret, of a symptom. In Art, as well as in life, silence (as in
Cage’s Tacet 4’33”, 1952), white (as in Kazimir Malevich’s “Suprematist Composition: White on
White”, 1918) and void (as the span of MASP – Museum of Art of São Paulo, Lina Bo Bardi’s
project, 1968, to which John Cage bent, calling it “architecture of freedom”) are full of
possibilities, “because even the void is sensation, all sensation is composed with the void”, as
Deleuze & Guattari say in What is Philosophy?. Unlike absence, which assumes presence, the
void, just like the silence and the white (of a screen, of a sheet of paper), does not oppose to
“full” (full of noise, full of color), once one and the others are bodies that vibrate infinite
possibilities. They are existents that are present by absence - when it reaffirms itself in the
presence of the imperceptible. “If I don't hear it, does it still communicate?,” asks Cage, in
Silence. The imperceptible of music manifests in life by screams, by means of revealed secrets.
Other times, it manifests only by sensations, where the perceived silence welcomes, hurts or
offends. It is in the pact of silence that secret is born. It is with secrecy that secret societies
(companies, Politics) are fed. The secret at times perceived in subtleties of sensitive
communication (the body that betrays the discourse, the discourse that tries to silence shouting
images). And the maintenance of secret societies as well as the permanence of their powers
depends on it. In times of political and environmental crisis in Brazil (one gaping and the other
one silenced), it is necessary to enter the becomings of secret, in an attempt that “the
imperceptible [is] finally perceived” by means of silence: “the clandestine with nothing left to
hide.” (DELEUZE & GUATTARI, p. 290).
Maria Lucília Borges: Adjunct professor at Federal University of Ouro Preto – UFOP /
Campus Mariana. Master and PhD in Communication and Semiotics at Pontificial Catholic
University of São Paulo – PUC/SP. Graduated in Graphic Design at State University of São
Paulo – UNESP / Campus Bauru/SP. Professor of Aesthetic, Sound Art and Graphic Design
and researcher with focus on Art, Affective Technologies and Sensitive Processes of
Communication.
luciliaborges@gmail.com
40
Boscaggin, Maria Cristina and Giacomo Pezzano
Deleuze Psychomotrician. Could There Be a Deleuzian Therapy?
Keywords: Psychomotor Therapy, action, childhood
This paper was born from an encounter between a (aucouturieran) psychomotrician and a (deleuzian)
philosopher, whose result is a double task: try to compensate for a theoretical lack of the Psychomotor
Therapy [PMT], and to think the possibility of a Deleuzian Therapy [DT]. We aim to show that the
deleuzian philosophy can give a consistent conceptual framework to an already existing practice, while
PMT can offer a concrete therapeutic setting for some of the apparently most abstract deleuzian concepts.
We will articulate our theses stressing four main parallelisms.
First. Deleuze distinguishes morality as system of judgement (Good/Evil) from ethics as system of
evaluation (good/bad). PMT considers therapy not as curing a syndrome but as taking care of possibilities:
not a way of normalization and standardization, but an opportunity to intensify and empower the
experience of the world. For both, if there is “a norm”, it is immanent and not transcendent to the modes
of existence.
Second. For Deleuze, the starting point is the “great reason” and the yet unknown capacities of the body,
while the consciousness is a bodily effect and sign. In PMT, in the beginning was the motricity of the
acting body, while the psyche is a bodily reflex and refolding. For both, our own body represents the
portion of the world that is expressed in the clearest and most distinct way, and the point from which the
entire world is expressed in an unique way.
Third. For Deleuze, the unconscious is not in a conflictual or oppositional relationship to consciousness,
but rather in a differential, durational, preindividual and virtual/actual one, in which the body and its
intensive thresholds play a main role. In PMT, the not-removed or not-repressed unconscious has a great
relevance: it is the implicit memory that stores those pre-symbolic and pre-verbal affections that are linked
with bodily tones and perceptions. For both, the unconscious never stops acting and influencing the
behavior, containing lots of “small perceptions” which condense the experiences of the moving body.
Four. For Deleuze, the child is “a metaphysician” and “pure virtual”, because a child is yet unformed as
individual and tends to resemble to other children, but otherwise he is clearly determined in his own
singularities (expressivity, gesture, posture, etc.), and he is infused with an immanent life that is pure and
neutral power, beyond Good and Evil, which nonetheless is engaged in a process of actualization
following the plane that gives him his particular reality. PMT mainly operates with children and newborns,
because of their intense ability to create: their motricity is still widely open and uncontaminated, pure
tonicity engaged in the discovering of the pleasure of experimenting capacities and exploring the world.
Final. We will offer a first definition of the possibility of DT as therapy of action, and claim that the
psychomotrician, conceived as a warm helper and a development facilitator with the duty to make possible
a sustainable becoming and to let the person free to express and experiment in a safe and containing
condition, assumes a sort of deleuzian attitude in his daily practice.
Giacomo Pezzano (1985) is a PhD Candidate at the Italian Consortium of North-West Philosophy
(FINO – Dept. of Philosophy and Education Science, University of Turin). His research project analyzes
the metaphysics and the philosophy of nature of Gilles Deleuze. He taught argumentative writing (20112014, Dept. of Humanities, University of Turin); since 2012 he collaborates with the Centro Studi sul
Pensiero Contemporaneo of Cuneo (Italy). He is secretary of the scientific journal Lessico di etica
pubblica and member of the Editorial Staff of the scientific journal Thaumazein. His other research fields
are the contemporary development of philosophical anthropology and the philosophical investigation of
the social imaginaries.
Web page: https://unito.academia.edu/GiacomoPezzano
giacomo.pezzano@unito.it
Maria Cristina Boscaggin (1988) is graduated in Education Science (University of Turin), and has
focused her research on the problem of the emptiness in the condition of contemporary youth, crossing
pedagogy, psychology and philosophy. She teaches Arts and Humanities in High School and works as
childhood educator and childcare assistant in public and private structures. She is completing her threeyears training in psychomotor therapy under the supervision of Bernard Aucouturier.
cristinaboscaggin@msn.com
41
Boumeester, Marc
Affirmative becoming of the ‘desire of the medium’: Cinema and the abstract machine
Keywords: creode, abstract machine, cinema
This paper uses the creode as an embodied concept that expresses both the necessity and path. In
its expression, it is subject to the influences of its own becoming-presence and the foreshadowing
of that becoming. In this process, there is no distinction between pasts and futures as both
remain part of a recurring unfolding of a life, neither one being submissive nor standing superset
to the other. The concept has been very effectively used in the creation of a variety of projects
and educational practices that deal with Cinema as an abstract machine that is shaped not only by
its ‘engagement’ with the human desires, but also by its own. Deleuze and Guattari claim that ‘A
true abstract machine has no way of making a distinction within itself between a plane of
expression and a plane of content because it draws a single plane of consistency’( It ‘makes no
distinction within itself between content and expression, even though outside itself, it presides
over that distinction’ from : Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. (New York:
Continuum, 1980), p. 141). The relation between the form of content and form of expression can
be understood as networked contingencies, which are driven by desires and not by any type of
formal logic.( Deleuze and Guattari offer what they call a ‘double articulation’. This means that
first the ‘raw materials’ that will become a new entity must actualise (form of content), and
secondly, they must be consolidated into an entity with properties of its own (form of
expression). See: Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus., p.42.)
Desire gives rise to reason and is therefore neither extraneous nor of a different hierarchy. Desire
is not something generated by the developed mind; rather, it is desire that provokes the
development of the mind. Friedrich Nietzsche calls for a complete acceptance of the course that
is continuously being set by these unconditional drives. (“Amor fati: let that be my love
henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not
even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and
on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” From: Nietzsche and Depth Psychology,
ed. by Jacob Golomb, Weaver Santaniello and Ronald L. Lehrer (New York: State University of
New York Press, 1999), p.41) I will focus on Cinema as an abstract machine that involves the
‘desire of the medium’, with the use of several tools which work non-hylomorphically towards a
mutually beneficial outcome without submitting the medium’s desiring to the human’s volition.
Among these tools are: asignifying cartography, the ‘vital collapse’ and a reversal of the spacetime axis.
Marc Boumeester is a researcher and the dean of AKI ArtEZ academy for arts and design. His
research focuses on the liaison between perception, architectural conditions and instable mediain particular cinema- with a distinct preference for the exploration of the exteriority of relations,
coming to the heuristics of an affordance philosophy. He writes, lectures and teaches in an
international array of educational institutions and research networks.
info@marcboumeester.com // m.boumeester@artez.nl
42
Bourassa, Alan
Freud’s Virtual Mourning: The Crow’s Flight Beyond Melancholy
Keywords: Virtuality, Mourning, Freud, Lacan, Deleuze, The Crow, Film
This paper, to put it in the most straightforward terms, argues that at the origin of the Lacanian
notion of subjectivity is the Deleuzian concept of virtuality. There is, at the heart of subjectivity, a
kind of virtualized mourning. The paper is based upon two intertwining arguments: That Freud’s
theory of mourning evolves towards the notion of a virtualized ego structure that paves the way
for Lacan’s theory of subjectivity (in other words, we go from Freud to Lacan through Deleuze),
and that the popular film The Crow (directed by Alex Proyas, based on the classic graphic novel) is
a powerful illustration of virtualized mourning. The Crow enacts the process of mourning, not the
mourning of the individual, but mourning spread across a social field. The main character of the
film, the avenging figure of Eric Draven, opens up a virtual gap in the narrative space of the film.
This opening is the link between the unfolding of virtuality and the ego of Freud’s later theory,
the precipitate of a history of loss (and the anticipation of the Lacanian subject).
The secret to this movie is not its content, but its structure. Psychoanalysis gives us the key to
understanding this structure. In fact, the structure of this movie is an almost perfect illustration
of the evolution of Freud’s theory of mourning. The film illustrates how the functions of
mourning/melancholia that we would see happening in ONE person are fragmented and
distributed throughout the space of the movie, different parts settling on different characters. In
other words, different characters represent different aspects of mourning. What puzzles me
about this movie is that though it is clearly a movie about mourning people (always loving them, as
Sarah’s voice over at the end of the movie tells us), the main character doesn’t seem to be the
mourner, but the dead person. So there doesn’t seem to be the one proper mourner in the movie.
But that is the strength of the movie. All of the characters together represent the processes of
mourning. But the key here is that one character, Eric Draven, seems in excess of this system. He
is a kind of leftover element, and his excess in relation to the system (i.e. the inability of the
process of mourning to reach a zero state where all is resolved and everything is accounted for) is
what best illustrates the difficulty Freud has with his early theory of mourning and the position to
which he must come later in his career (i.e. that there is no resolution and that, indeed, morning
for Freud becomes an unfolding of difference or it becomes nothing at all). By creating a kind of
virtualized field of mourning, The Crow proves, in the very consistency of its telling, that in order
to function, mourning must open a virtual space, and that this virtual space is precisely the
impossible space of the subject.
Alan Bourassa lives in Montreal and teaches English at Concordia University. His book Deleuze
and American Literature was published Palgrave-Macmillan. His latest paper, “The Analyst and the
Nomad: Lacan, Deleuze and Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K” recently appeared in the
collection Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature. You can read his blogs at
http://whoweare.ca/blog/author/alan-bourassa
and
http://andmagazine.com/contributors/196_alan_bourassa.html. He is currently working on a
study of Lacan, fantasy and American Literature and on a book of poems on a subject that is still
a mystery, even to him.
atbourassa@gmail.com // alanbourassa@hotmail.com
43
Boyacioglu, Can and Faruk Can Unal
Finding the right role for Virtual in Architecture
Keywords: Virtual-Real Becoming, Real-Virtual Concept, Virtual Architecture
Architecture is a discipline that its main issue is transforming the space for necessities of society.
On the other hand the necessities of society is a blury concept that virtually emerge in the design
area of architects brain. It means the building designed with that necessities is both an object for
now and an act from the past. People are using the space designed by architect with
thenecessities and the ideas of their current situation. So actually people are living in an old idea
from architects mind, even the building is brand new. If we think the building is an ontological
being the relationship between the building and its users is the becoming.
Technology is rapidly developing at the present time. Technological advances have created virtual
living space, as well as having a place in every aspect of people’s life. Today, virtuality is leaving
its place to mixed form of reality and virtuality. This situation is a way of becoming in a realvirtual concept. Generally, architects are not aware of interactions while designing. It’s important
to find virtual solutions in an augmented space. The proposed discussion helps to construct the
link between architectural designs spatial transformations and virtual interactions in a
philosophical context. Maybe with the proposed work, the architectural process becomes much
more creative than before, by attaching the virtual becoming approach and different disciplinary
knowledge into the architectural process. These approaches enrich the semi virtual - semi real
design process making it more becoming in life.
Can Boyacioglu and Faruk Can Unal
Istanbul Technical University, Institute of Science and Technology, Architectural Design
Computing Programme1, Architectural Design Programme2, Phd Candidate
Gebze Technical University, Faculty of Architecture, Department of Architecture, Research
Assistant1, Teaching Assistant2
funal@itu.edu.tr
cboyacioglu@itu.edu.tr
44
Boyer, Amalia
Difference and repetition of Deleuze in the Hispanic Caribbean
The focus of our attention will be placed on finding differences and repetitions of Deleuze’s
thought in the Hispanic Caribbean by confronting Deleuze’s The Deserted Island (1953) to
Benitez Rojo’s The Repeating Island (1989). This will necessitate a further elaboration of both
the notions of difference and repetition that might allow a virtual encounter amongst these
thinkers giving privilege to the mode of expression of a contrapunteo. On the other hand, it will
also require a return to the notions of the machinic and the plane of consistency by Deleuze and
Guattari in order to engage with Benitez Rojo’s analysis of the “polyrithmic Caribbean machine”.
The problematisation of the notion of the island in relation to thought in both authors will help
us to reconsider the movements of deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation in terms of a geoaesthetics of the performative.
Amalia Boyer: PhD in Philosophy (1996-2000) and MA in Continental Philosophy, The
University of Warwick, UK (1993-1994). Both theses explore the relation between materialism,
ontology and politics in Deleuze and Guattari and were written under the supervision of Keith
Ansell-Person. BA in European Thought and Literature and English Literature, Ruskin
University, UK (1990-1993) on “The logic of recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit”
written under the supervision of Andrew Bowie. Professor at Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá,
Colombia (2013-) and Head of the Philosophy Department (2015-). Co-director of the research
group on “Aesthetics and Politics” (Universidad del Rosario, Universidad Nacional, Universidad
de los Andes in Colombia) and head of the line of research in Geoaesthetics (2013-). Associate
Professor at Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá (2006-2013) and at Universidad del Norte in
Barranquilla (2001-2006), Colombia. Publications and research interests: French contemporary
thought, aesthetics and philosophy of art, Caribbean thought, feminist theory.
amaliaboyer@gmail.com
45
Bradley, Joff P.N.
Zerrissenheit and post-Fukushima Japan
Keywords: Zerrissenheit, schizoanalysis, breakthrough
In this presentation, I consider in detail the concept of Zerrissenheit in order to better
understand the processes of schizophrenic breakthrough and breakdown developed in Deleuze &
Guattari's work. Furthermore, the notion of Zerrissenheit is analysed through the prism of
Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, and applied using the sense of “tearing,” in the context of the
splitting asunder of subjectivity. I argue that this methodological approach vis-à-vis theories of
subjectivity, technology, and communication informs both the concept of Zerrissenheit and the
notion of schizoanalysis in Deleuze and Guattari's oeuvre. In Asian 'control societies', I contend
the concept of Zerrissenheit can be applied to critique contemporary modes of technology
('industrial temporal objects' such as the Walkman, mobile phones, cinema) and especially so in
terms of their consequent affects/effects on the processes of subjectivity formation. Developing
Guattari’s schizoanalytic methodological approach, my research demonstrates that the concept of
Zerrissenheit is heuristic in mapping the futural tendencies in late capitalist societies.
The presentation also argues that contemporary modes of communication and connectedness are
accelerants of a schizophrenic tendency, whose excrescent formations are conspicuous in Japan.
Through Stiegler's notion of desublimation, the “flattening” of affective subjectivity (laminage) in
Guattari's work, and in the way micro technologies engineer “pulp” subjectivities in Deleuze's
thought, the presentation contends that communication and connectedness are in effect turned
into their opposite, producing a Zerrissenheit of subjectivity, a fractured, estranged, torn or
cracked self (hyper-solicitation of youth, endemic passivity and detachment, loneliness, social
schizophrenia and the phenomena of hikikomori or social recluse in Japan). Applying
philosophical concepts from the work of Deleuze, Guattari, Stiegler, Virilio, Marc Augé, I shall
examine the dialectical breakdown of communication and processual breakthrough of new,
possible subjectivities. In summa: I maintain that communication technologies, social media, and
mobile phones accelerate the cracking up or tearing away of subjectivity from itself and aid a kind
of detrimental subjectivation process or "axiomatic stupidity".
Joff P.N. Bradley teaches at Teikyo University, Tokyo, Japan. Although born and bred in a
working class area of northern England and a graduate of several British universities, he is a
resident of Japan and applies his long-standing interest in schizoanalysis, European philosophy
and critical thought to the social and political problems affecting his students. Interested in the
dialectic of the becoming-Japanese of the other and the becoming-other of Japan, he has
published in Japan, Taiwan, Australia, the UK, North America and the Middle East.
joff@main.teikyo-u.ac.jp
46
Braun, Bruce
Induced seismicity: virtuality, geology, and life in the Anthropocene
Keywords: geology, induced seismicity, virtuality
The association between ‘life’ and ‘becoming’ is often set against, and differentiated from,
‘nonlife’ understood as a realm of static and inert things. Things exist, but life evolves. Drawing
upon Deleuze, recent work on ‘geological life’ (Yusoff) and ‘geontology’ (Povinelli) has
emphasized an indistinction between life and nonlife, such that biological life – and human life in
particular – is brought into closer contact with its geochemical and geological conditions. This
paper advances this thinking by exploring how Deleuze’s understanding of the ‘virtual’ and the
‘actual’, and his understandings of temporality and becoming, can inform the geological turn,
drawing upon the phenomena of ‘induced seismicity’. Induced seismicity names movements of
the earth’s crust (i.e. earthquakes) that result from human activity. It occurs primarily in regions
where highly pressurized fluids are injected into deeply buried strata, either to access
unconventional reserves of oil and gas, or to dispose of waste water produced from such efforts,
lubricating faultlines and triggering movements whose temporalities precede and exceed any
simple human temporality. While the geological turn has emphasized the diverse ways in which
the energetic forces of the earth are harnessed, molded, and captured to produce singular forms
of collective life, the phenomena of induced seismicity reveals that efforts to harness or actualize
the earth’s energies necessarily return human life to a groundless (virtual) ground that ‘folds’ and
‘cracks’ alongside, without regard for, and at times in response to, our efforts to ‘produce’ and
‘regulate’ life. As such, induced seismicity may help us see Deleuze as a key thinker for the
Anthropocene, that epoch in which humanity simultaneously recognizes itself as a geological
agent while facing up to its own inhuman nature.
Bruce Braun is Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the
University of Minnesota. His books include, among others, The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature,
Culture and Power on Canada's West Coast, and Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy and
Public Life. His current research explores geosocial formations of extractive frontiers in the
United States and Canada. He is currently co-editor of the Annals of the Association of American
Geographers.
braun038@umn.edu
47
Breuer, Rebecca Louise
Towards a becoming fashion
Keywords: fashion, body, affect
Fashion theory traditionally starts with, and centres upon, the examination of personal
appearances and the manner these may (mis)inform one about the identity of the wearer. As such
fashion theory revolves around signification, representation and the identity of both items of
clothing as their wearers. Fashion branding and marketing furthermore encourages wearers to
identify with the brand image attached to items of clothing and as such reinforce the common
relationship between fashion and representation of identity. After a concise introduction of the
current theoretical and practical modes in which one relates to fashion, this paper investigates
what is missed when adopting a perspective in which thinking about fashion centres upon being
and essences. It argues that a philosophy of fashion that is based on Platonic thought encourages
a focus upon essences, being and representatives, which fails to open up a thinking about
fashion’s affective, transformative and experimentally creative forces.
In stead this paper suggests adopting a Deleuzian perspective upon fashion that allows for
inclusion of fashion’s affective qualities, its becomings between the body, its movement and
textile, and its future potential. Drawing upon the Spinozist claim “we know not what a body
can do” it is argued we do not know what fashion can do either. As such fashion’s virtual
potential is opened up, and a focus upon becoming rather than signifying qualities of fashion
emerges. This extensive perspective upon a becoming fashion is illustrated by describing the
work of Dutch designers Elisa van Joolen and Saskia van Drimmelen as well as the life-affirming
‘Garments for the Grave’ by Australian designer Pia Interlandi. The article concludes by
demonstrating how fashion’s extensive and never-ending affective qualities and its creative
experiments enable us to adopt new modes of perception towards fashion, the body and what
they can do as and for a life that is continuously becoming.
Rebecca Louise Breuer studied fine arts, art history and teaching at the Utrecht School of Arts,
and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. She obtained a PhD in Fashion and Philosophy
from the University of Amsterdam with a dissertation entitled Fashion Beyond Identity: The Three
Ecologies of Dress that demonstrates that a Deleuzeoguattarian perspective upon fashion succeeds
to enable a thinking about fashion in which its destructive as well as its creative forces are
addressed. Rebecca Louise is a member of the research institute of the Amsterdam University of
Applied Sciences and of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis - ASCA. She lectures
cultural philosophy at the Amsterdam Fashion Institute – AMFI.
breuer@xs4all.nl
48
Burchill, Louise
A NEW DIFFEREND BETWEEN BADIOU and DELEUZE: BECOMING, DESIRE
and "THE GIRL"
Keywords: Badiou, becoming-woman, desire
The triad of terms chosen, on the occasion of this 2016 conference, to chart a path through
Deleuze and Guattari's thought – Virtuality, Becoming and Life – equally yield the coordinates on
which Badiou bases his critique of Deleuze, with this triadic constellation revealing, on Badiou's
reading, Deleuze's "philosophy of vital continuity" to be the "most magnificent contemporary
attempt to restore the power of the One". In terms of the path Badiou thereby traces, Virtuality
functions as an inverted transcendent ground that, in its indivisible continuity, is identified as the
immanent One-All expressed both in becomings and in life. Becoming is, accordingly, the
process by which this One is donated to the concatenation of multiplicities, while Life is the
Nietzschean name to which Deleuze fixes the thought of being, such that "inorganic, impersonal
life" is the "in-between" of the movements of actualization and virtualization.
Against the backdrop of this critique—of which various renditions have been proffered by
Badiou from the late 1980s to the publication of Logiques des mondes in 2006—it is all the more
interesting to note that Badiou would seem to have recently engaged in a more subterranean (in
the sense of not explicitly declared) differend with Deleuze, in which the triad of terms involved is
this time: Becoming, Desire and "the Girl".
In fact, the radical revamping Badiou has undertaken of his thought of sexuation over the last
five years or so would seem to aim, by way of a sort of hidden agenda, at the disqualification of
notions such as Deleuze and Guattari's "becoming-woman", which he deems far too indebted to
a "vital or carnal" topology of thought. In opposition to all such excesses of "vital continuity",
Badiou proposes an axiomatization of "woman" as guarantor of the universal and the
concomitant ontological primacy of love's excess over desire.
Louise Burchill holds the position of Visiting Lecturer in Contemporary French Philosophy,
Aesthetics, and Feminist Thought in the Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts, University
of Melbourne. Her research and publications focus on subjects such as "the feminine" in
contemporary French philosophy, the notion of "space" in the work of Deleuze and Derrida, and
the intersection of philosophy and the visual arts (notably film and architecture). She has cocoordinated a dossier (including an article of her own) on "Deleuze and translation" for the
French review Multitudes (summer 2007), and is the translator of three books by Alain Badiou:
Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Second Manifesto for Philosophy, and Philosophy and the Event. She is
currently working on a book provisionally entitled Badiou's "Woman": Sexuate Ventures with the
Universal.
louiseburchill@orange.fr
49
Burkhanova, Sasha
Doing art, undoing humanity, becoming-artist: rethinking art as practice after the
nonhuman turn
Keywords: nonhuman, art, becoming
My research is set up to investigate the emerging condition of contemporary art practice, initiated
by the nonhuman turn in science and humanities. Referring to the works of new materialists
Timothy Morton, Erin Manning and Patricia MacCormack, I will address the nonhuman turn as a
claim for possibility to encounter and dwell ethically in the nonhuman world (understood in
terms of animals, bodies, affectivity, technologies and ecosystems), and to confront agency and
value of its aspects — without the necessity to correlate it with human categories.
In art discourse, the nonhuman turn primarily constitutes itself in relocating art to the domain of
the nonhuman, allowing an alternative route of envisaging the artist-artwork interrelation. Instead
of asking how do artists make art, it gives rise to speculations on how art makes artists; how does
the encounter with the nonhuman facilitate the unconscious becoming-artist movement — to be
coupled with the (in)voluntary modifications in one’s body and thinking?
Locating my inquiry in the domain of emergent non-anthropocentric ontologies, I will address
becoming-artist as a manner of ‘undoing one’s humanity’ that allows to put into life the
speculative propositions of non-humanism. I will address art as a mode of learning to attune to
the difference of the nonhuman: to dwell on the process itself, on the manner of becomingattuned. I will investigate the mode of becoming-artist in terms of the physicality of change,
linked to the idea of ‘turn’ as an ‘action’, ‘movement’, ‘transformation’ that corresponds to a shift
in the way of living itself — that is inseparable from a shift in thinking about the human
condition. From this perspective, turning towards the nonhuman by means of art practice would
stand for alterations in one’s way of being in the world, that would allow to lose “the traditional
way of the human” and move aside: “so that other nonhumans—animate and less animate—can
make their way” (Grusin, 2015).
To give an example of art practice as a ‘lived thought philosophy’ of this kind, I will introduce
AND ALSO: a collaborative project in a form of a play, produced by myself and artist Alev Adil
(London, 2015). In this project we worked to facilitate the ‘becoming-undone’ of the identity
categories imposed on us (among other art practitioners) by the prevailing art discourse: namely,
artist and curator. We investigated the dynamics of relationship that arose in joint art production:
as we rejected the division between artistic and curatorial subjects — towards artist-becomingcurator and curator-becoming-artist movements, and inquired into the materiality of art
happening to us. The ‘technologies of becoming-undone’ — as derived from the experience of
realising AND ALSO — will be presented as an outcome of the collaboration.
Sasha Burkhanova is a London-based curator and art writer, specialising in the ethical and
philosophical aspects of emerging art practices. A graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London,
she is currently undertaking PhD research at the University of Greenwich and works as an
exhibition curator at Maxim Boxer Modern & Contemporary Art. Meanwhile, her independent
curatorial projects have been exhibited at galleries and museums throughout London (176
Gallery, Hanmi Gallery, Display London, GRAD Gallery, Erarta Gallery) and Moscow
(MMoMA, National Centre for Contemporary Art). She is a contributing art writer at GARAGE
magazine.
sashaburkhanova@gmail.com
50
Caille, Antoine Constantin
Virtuality and possibility: A complex and refined relationship
Keywords : virtuality, possibility, relationship
In several works2, Deleuze carefully differentiated the virtual from the possible. In her article «
Actuel / virtuel » (Vocabulaire de Gilles Deleuze), Anne Sauvagnargues insists on this distinction.
Their assimilation is indeed frequent, and symptomatic of a theoretical loosening. Yet, if one
should not assimilate them, one should not maintain either, as she does, that the actual and the
virtual are “categories that replace other couples such as intelligible vs. sensitive, essence vs.
existence, possible vs. real” (22). What Deleuze asserts is remarkably and importantly different: «
The virtuality of the Idea has nothing in common with a possibility. » (Différence et répétition
247). The complete absence of the notion of possibility in Deleuze’s last text on the virtual
(“L’actuel et le virtuel”) could indeed make one think that the concept of virtuality gained the
philosopher’s preference; and that one should stop conceiving of the virtual in terms of
possibility. But many other portions of works prove that the category of possibility is far from
being overrun, and support the pertinence of the relationship between virtuality and possibility;
among which, one that defines chaos: “It is a void that is not a nothingness, but a virtual,
containing all the possible particles and drawing all the possible forms that loom to disappear
straight away, without consistence or reference, without consequences.” (Qu’est-ce que la
philosophie? 111) We will argue that, instead of replacing possibility by virtuality, Deleuze
worked at complicating and refining both concepts through an insistent study of their
relationship. To do so, we will re-examine his commentary on Beckett’s works (L’épuisé) and
show how it is related to the Leibnizian concept of incompossibility, and to the Joycean concept
of chaosmos.
Dr. Antoine Constantin Caille is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of
Technology in the department of Modern Languages, where he teaches, among other subjects,
French Philosophy. He obtained a Doctorate of Philosophy in Francophone Studies at the
University of Louisiana (Lafayette) in May 2015, and master’s degrees in Philosophy and in
English at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis. His dissertation is on the concept of
textuality. Several of his articles were published in peer-reviewed journals: Etudes Francophones
(27), TRANS- (18), Alkemie (14), Plasticité (1).
antoineconstantincaille@gmail.com
2
Le bergsonisme, Différence et répétition, «A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?», Cinéma 2 : L’image-temps
51
Camara, Anthony Curtis
The Eco-Robotics of Elizabeth Bear’s “Tideline”
Keywords: Posthumanism, Ecology, Technology
Elizabeth Bear’s Hugo award-winning short story, “Tideline” (2007), follows a critically-damaged
military robot struggling to accomplish its final mission amidst the ruins of human civilization.
Crippled in an apocalyptic thermonuclear attack, the tank-like robot, named Chalcedony, is the
last of the war-machines. Confined to a small beach due to a malfunctioning leg, Chalcedony
combs the shore for precious stones to incorporate into elaborate funerary necklaces, which she
is compelled to make because commemoration of her deceased human comrades is coded into
her programming. While beachcombing, she meets Belvedere, a ragged and malnourished feral
child. Initially predicated solely on the demands of survival, their confederation soon bears the
bonds of friendship and family, as Chalcedony essentially adopts Belvedere as her son. She uses
her weapons systems to cook shellfish and shorebirds for him; protects him from violent
nomads; and accesses her databases in order to tell the boy tales of swashbuckling adventure,
Arthurian legends, and war stories based on the heroism of her platoon. As Chalcedony’s
sensors register the growth of the boy into a man, they also detect the impending failure of her
batteries and the waxing of the winter tide, which will wash over her cracked carapace and shortcircuit her central processing unit. After completing the final necklace, Chalcedony bestows all
forty-one pieces of jewelry on her son, knights him, and then sends Sir Belvedere out into the
wasteland in search of men and women worthy to wear the jewels and honor the memories of
the fallen marines.
As the title of the story suggests, with its conflation of circularity and linearity, “Tideline”
explores the smooth spaces conjoining the organic with the inorganic, the human with the
robotic, the dead with the living, and the futuristic speculations of science fiction with the
medieval sensibilities of fantasy. In this paper, I recruit Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
concept of the “Machinic Phylum” in order to argue that Chalcedony is an ecological creature
that fully enters the flux of life, participating in the alliances, antagonisms, and becomings that are
characteristic of existence, notwithstanding the fact that, as a robot, she is an inorganic and
allopoietic system rather than an organic and autopoietic life-form. In place of the conventional,
oversimplified notions of robot autonomy as the capacity for independent operation, Bear
substitutes the capability to intelligently navigate the ecological web of relations in which a robot
finds itself enmeshed, flexibly adjusting its performance and evolving adaptive behaviors with
respect to the challenges and opportunities afforded by the ecosystem. Hence Chalcedony’s
transformations from a war-machine into a mother, a teacher, a storyteller, and an artisan reflect
ecologically-mediated becomings and powers contingent upon the assemblages that she forms
with Belvedere and the vibrant materials and forces in her physical environment. I contend that
D&G’s vitalism, with its sophisticated armature of intensive difference, enables us to recognize
eco-robotic existence in “Tideline” as a life, springing from affirmative creative becomings and
the joyful transmission of affects, and wonderfully heedless of the false distinctions
organic/inorganic and subject/object.
Dr. Anthony Camara is a literature and science specialist whose critical work focuses on the
popular genres of horror and science fiction. His scholarship is informed by his background in
ecology, biology, and evolutionary theory. His current book project investigates the origins of the
Weird horror genre in the work of British Decadents and Aesthetes at the Fin de Siècle. He is also
interested in the influence of H.P. Lovecraft on contemporary science fiction and horror writers.
He is an assistant professor in the department of English at the University of Calgary.
anthony.camara@ucalgary.ca or acamara@ucla.edu
52
Campo, Alessandra
Logic of time: n plateaux=1
Keywords: Nachträglichkeit, Delay, Immanence
In this paper I will try to compare Deleuze’s concept of virtuality with the Freudian one of
Nachträglichkeit (“deferred action”, “retroactivity”, “posteriority”, “après-coup”). In particular, I
will try to demonstrate that, if Bergson and Deleuze both aim to assert the coexistence and the
continuous overlapping of past and present, of actual and virtual, Freud creates the term and the
concept of Nachträglichkeit to describe exactly the same coexistence and mutual relation.
Nachträglichkeit is in fact the name for Psyche, intended as a continuous and creative process of
differentiation, as a virtual multiplicity involved in an infinite movement (“the incessant to-ing
and fro-ing of the plane”).
In Chapter 2 of Différence et répétition, Deleuze states that “there is no question as to how a
childhood event acts only with a delay (retard). It is this delay”. The passage refers to Freud but
in a critical way. Freud is for Deleuze a dualistic thinker, unable for this reason to conceive the
relation between two distant events in terms of immanence (“it is this delay”). My work will
explore the relations between delay and simultaneity, actual and virtual, past and present in
Bergson, Freud and Deleuze, showing their unexpected proximity. Delay is an immediate
coexistence of events also for Freud, as long as there are not two separate events but a single one
occurring at two distant moments in time at once. That is to say: immanence is not immanence
of anything but immanence is anything.
According to what Deleuze and Guattari wrote in What is philosophy about the plane of
immanence, I will try to argue that the “supreme act of philosophy” (“not so much to think THE
plane of immanence, as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane”) has the same
consistence as Freud’s invention —the Unconscious (“the unthought in every plane”)— and as
the Lacanian objet petit a (“not-external outside and non-internal inside”). The paradoxical
expression “unconscious-consciousness” and the neutrality of the ‘object = x’ are signs for the
Event of a “nonthought within the thought” which is the basis of all planes for the authors of
Mille Plateaux.
In conclusion, I will try to show how Nachträglichkeit works like a device defusing any
transcendence and, in this way, how psychoanalysis -before and like schizoanalysis- is that sort of
“war machine” which destroys every illusory “Thing as a unity superior to all things” and every
“Subject in act that brings about a synthesis of thing”. Psychoanalysis is another way to say that
“it is only when immanence is no longer immanence to anything other than itself that we can
speak of a plane of immanence”.
Alessandra Campo: I am preparing a PhD in Continental Philosophy at the University of Rome
3 (Italy). For many years, I have been dealing with the relationship between philosophy and
psychoanalysis, working mainly on Freudian and Lacanian thought viewed through the lens of
some of modern French philosophy (in particular, Bergson and Deleuze). My PhD work is now
focused on a philosophical reading of the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action),
and on the contribution that psychoanalysis can offer toward defining a philosophy of processes
(in the sense of Whitehead) via a critique of traditional philosophical conceptions of temporality
and causality.
alessandra.campo@hotmail.it
53
Carocci, Enrico
Deleuze and the Affective Turn in Film Studies
Keywords: Film Studies, Affect Theory, Affective Neuroscience, Virtual
A growing interest in affect, emotion, and experience characterizes a large part of contemporary
film studies, inspired by different theoretical perspectives. In this regard, a “turn to affect” led
continental film scholars to investigate with greater attention how the spectator’s corporeality,
affectivity and sensitiveness are implicated in film viewing (Koivunen 2015). Deleuze’s thought is
surely relevant to this trend, and indeed, it is variously evoked in several studies. However, at least
from Sobchack (1992) onward, the study of filmic experience has favored phenomenological
frames of theory, with a particular emphasis on topics as tactility, reversibility of perception, and
embodiment. More recently, neuro-phenomenological approaches to film experience have
strengthened this perspective, eg. regarding the issues of empathy or embodied simulation
(Gallese and Guerra 2015).
Apart from exceptions (eg. Shaviro 1993; Kennedy 2000; Del Rio 2008), the turn to affect in film
studies has essentially neglected the distance that separates phenomenological approaches from
Deleuze’s philosophy; more particularly, Deleuze’s notion of affect is rarely evoked, frequently
misunderstood or trivially considered (see Elsaesser and Hagener 2015). Actually, as known,
Deleuze did not offer a theory of spectatorship in his two Cinema books, and this could explain
the lack of a genuine interest by scholars of the above-mentioned field. However, scholars as
Bellour (2009) and Pisters (2012) have shown that a theory of cinematic experience can be
usefully inspired by Deleuze’s concepts. Moreover, Deleuze’s thought is at the core of the
widespread “affective turn” in cultural and media studies (aka “affect theory”, see eg. Gregg and
Seigworth 2010) — and this further significance may encourage the endeavors towards a
deleuzian approach to affective cinematic experience.
This paper aims to emphasize the significance of Deleuze’s notions of affect and affection for a
theory of cinematic experience. Deleuze’s “deduction” of subjectivity (as developed in Difference
and repetition and Cinema), together with his emphasis on the sub-representative conditions of
experience, resonate with some of the assumptions of the more recent trends in cognitive science
— and mostly with the “4EA school”, as Protevi (2012) labels it: an “embodied, embedded,
enacted, extended, and affective” model of subject. More particularly, this paper will suggest
some similarities or contact points between Deleuze’s view and contemporary Affective
Neuroscience, especially as theorized by the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp (1997; Panksepp and
Biven 2012) and by Gal Raz et al. (2013), which opened the research field of “Affective
Neurocinematics” (i.e. empirical studies on cinematic emotional experience). In doing so, this
paper aims to contribute to the development of a theory of “discognition” in film studies —
namely, as Shaviro puts it, “a noncognitive, and fundamentally affective, account of sentience”
which is “nonintentional, noncorrelational, and anoetic” (2014).
54
References
Bellour, R. (2009), Le corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, émotions, animalités, Paris, P.O.L.
Del Rio E. (2008), Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection, Edimburgh,
Edimburgh University Press.
Elsaesser, Th. and Hagener M. (2015), Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses, New
York, Routledge.
Gallese V., Guerra M. (2015), Lo schermo empatico. Cinema e neuroscienze, Milano, Cortina.
Gregg M. and Seigworth G.J. (2010, eds.), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, Duke University
Press.
Kennedy B.M. (2000), Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation, Edinburgh University
Press.
Koivunen A. (2015), The Promise to Touch: Turns to Affect in Feminist Film Theory, in L.
Mulvey, A. Backman Rogers (eds.), Feminisms, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press.
Panksepp J. (1997), Affective Neuroscience: The Foundation of Human and Animal Emotions,
New York, Oxford University Press.
Panksepp J., Biven L. (2012), The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human
Emotions, New York-London, W.W. Norton & Co.
Pisters P. (2012), The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture,
Stanford, Stanford University Press.
Protevi J. (2012), One More “Next Step”: Deleuze and Brain, Body and Affect in Contemporary
Cognitive Science, in R. Braidotti, P. Pisters (eds.), Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze, LondonNew York, Bloomsbury.
Raz G. et al. (2013), E-Motion Pictures of the Brain: Recursive Paths Between Affective
Neurosciences and Film Studies, in Arthur P. Shimamura (ed.), Psychocinematics: Exploring
Cognition at the Movies, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Shaviro S. (1993), The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis-London, University of Minnesota Press.
——— (2014), Discognition, in Angerer M.-L., Bosel B. and Ott M. (eds.),Timing of Affect:
Epistemologies, Aesthetics, Politics, Zurich-Berlin, Diaphanes.
Sobchack V. (1992), The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Princeton,
Princeton University Press.
Enrico Carocci is Associate Professor in Film Studies at the University of “Roma Tre”. Among
his areas of research interests: theories of cinematic emotion, cinema and philosophy, cinema and
neuroscience. He is author of Attraverso le immagini. Tre saggi sull’emozione cinematografica,
Roma, Bulzoni, 2012, and co-editor of Il cinema e le emozioni. Estetica, espressione, epserienza,
FEdS, Roma 2012. His essays and articles are published in edited books and academic journals.
enrico.carocci@uniroma3.it
55
Castillo Becerra, Patricia
Perspectives on the ontological turn of virtuality
In the framework of the current philosophical discourse operates a contrast of their
conformation and its relationship with the real. That discourse, from the ontological level, has
been configured from and only from the reality itself. In the present time, and with the speed and
the quantity of the technological aspect, the ontology has been presented in their latest reviews as
the search of reshaping its own discursivity; presenting a spacing between one and another
determination and an intermediate distance of creative possibilities rather than stratifications.
However, the ontology does not represent a discourse that is affixed or attached with a clip to a
series of events, but it is inherent to the real as their paradox, from figures such as the other, the
virtual and unheard of. From their most recent representatives in France, especially in Gilles
Deleuze, there is no more fundamental determinations; we agree to say with the philosopher
parisian that, properly understood, the work of the contemporary ontology has been to
understand itself not as a system but rather as a process.
The following essay aims to recover the classical dialectic between the real and the virtual from a
reassessment that contains characters of reconfiguration of our spirituality. Based on what
Deleuze indicates respect to computer language and in the moments that within the history of
philosophy has been given another conformation to the separate dimensions between reality and
virtuality. We intend to expose that the philosophy of Deleuze, there is no such separation
between these two dimensions, but a unit, an inherency. Let us then focus the Deleuzian criticism
to an amphibology between the real and the virtual, whose details will result in the dissolution of
this amphibology and rather lead towards the plane necessarily required to think.
We will explain the virtuality as a degree of reality. We agree in saying that the virtuality
developed in computing, since not only reflects, but it completes so rhizomatical, our
individuality and our self-perception. In a second time, we’ll find how individuality is a
conformation, a result, the moi. The moi appears in the Deleuzian thought as what constitutes
individuality, or, to be strict deleuzian, what constitutes a “singularity". From "Difference and
repetition" operates a hiring of the conformation of the moi, of the “moi-même" but not only as
a figurative resulting from an operation of decentering from what had been allowed to own
philosophical knowledge begin with its certainties: the real. Our current spirituality is not only
constituted by the real, the aprehensible, but also by virtuality with which we interact every day.
Thus, possible answers to what we are, become increasingly complex, while our relations develop
increasingly sophisticated means, but those resources are inherent to our development, as
creations, as multiplications of ourselves, so the philosophical thought has an enormous task to
recognize this new spirituality, and this paper aims to provide at least a starting point for this.
Patricia Castillo Becerra. Doctor in philosophy by the University of Seville, Spain. Member of
National Research System (SNI), Level 1, México. She is currently an Asociate Professor C in
the philosophy Department of the University of Guanajuato, where has been Professor of
philosophy since 2000. Has published the book Ontology of the first Levinas (UG, 2013) and the
articles: Phenomenology of Emmanuel Lévinas, for the Philosophical Association of Mexico
(memoirs, 2013), and Existing or human? Reflections on the pre-ontological levinasian scheme
for the University of Antioquia, Colombia (memoirs, 2008), among others. Orients its research
toward the ontological drift of the 20th century.
patricasbec@gmail.com
56
Chang, Tae Soon
Post-cinema: Time-Image in the Digital Age
Keywords: post-cinema, modern cinema, deterritorialization
“Post-cinema” is an umbrella term used at least three different contexts which sometimes come
together. Firstly, it indicates metamorphosis of cinema after the mid-twentieth century, when film
give way to television as ‘cultural dominant’. The ‘death of cinema’, declared from 1980s by some
critics and filmmakers, has just confirmed this phenomenon. Secondly, it points out the cinematic
situation in digital age after 1990s, in which film lost, little by little, its role as the medium of
cinematic art, and movie making and distribution has profoundly changed under the influence of
digital technology. Thirdly, it shows new relations established, during the first decade of the 21st
century, between cinema and visual arts, one of the result of which appears nowadays as the
omnipresence of cinematic image in contemporary art museum. Sometimes the three contexts
converge in a work, like Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma.
In this paper I will advance three hypotheses about the ‘post-cinema’ and try to prove them.
First, ‘post-cinema’ after the ‘death of cinema’ is anticipated by Deleuze in his Cinema 2: TimeImage as the “new readability of visual image” and the “birth of the audio-visual”, and
exemplified by the directors of modern cinema, like Jean-Marie Straub and Marguerite Duras.
Second, ‘post-cinema’ as cinema in digital age is an emergent entity: cinema is, like e-book, no
longer a media-dependent concept, so we don’t have to think about film or any other media as
the medium of cinema any longer, although ‘film’ production is highly dependent to the
contemporary technological condition of the moment. Third and the last, cinematic images in art
museum does not signify the death of cinema, but shows deterritorialization and
reterritorialization of the domain of art. They are probably caused by the advent of the digital
technology which will lead art to a new plane of consistency.
Tae Soon Chang is a visiting researcher for Institute of Philosophy in Seoul National University.
After BS degree in Physics and MS degree in Philosophy, he obtained PhD degree in Philosophy
from Université Paris VIII in 2014. His PhD work is focused on elaborating and comparing the
concept of multiple time in three different domains: physics, philosophy and cinematic art. His
research interest lies in contemporary French philosophy (Derrida, Deleuze, Badiou) and
philosophy of art. He translated Alain Badiou’s Petit manuel d’inesthétique in Korean (Bimihak,
Seoul: Ihaksa, 2012). He also presented “Multi-temporality and Creation: Science, Philosophy and
Art” in Daughters of Chaos: 8th International Deleuze Studies Conference 2015 Stockholm.
tschang50@gmail.com
57
Charitonidou, Marianna
Neorealism between Cinema and Architecture: Looking for New Signs
Keywords: Neorealism, cinema, architecture
In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze sees World War II as a historical event underpinning
divergent taxonomies; the post-war period greatly increases the situations in which we are faced with
spaces we no longer know how to describe, to which we longer know how to react. Deleuze refers to a
crisis of the action-image in cinema, which corresponds to the war’s historical caesura. In Italian neorealist
cinema, he sees a delinkage between the affection-image, the perception-image and the relation-image, and
identifies certain formal inventions that reduce the distance between fiction and reality. The result is the
production of a formal or material ‘additional reality’, a kind of formalism in the service of content. This
leads Deleuze to ask whether the problem of the real arises in relation to form or to content. I, however,
examine the possibility of applying Deleuze’s same question regarding neorealism to the domain of
architecture.
Neorealism in cinema is associated with the subordination of the image to the demands of new signs. For
example, in neorealism, the montage of representations is replaced by the sequence shot. This leads to the
invention of a new type of image, the ‘fact-image’, which address a new form of reality. As André Bazin
notes of Roberto Rossellini’s films, the neorealist reversal of the image’s subordination to montage serves
as a critique of how pre-established meanings (in images) are imposed on the spectator. In relation to
architecture, this leads us critique pre-established meanings of spaces in postwar architecture. For instance,
what new types of signs emerge in architecture as a result of World War II? And how can we see a notion
of virtual becoming taking place in architecture?
Neorealist architecture understands constructions in relation to a rhythm of aggregation evident in their
successive elements. It’s often characterized by the fabrication of a new architectural language that aims to
challenge “International Style” and to overcome rationalist types of composition. At the same time, there’s
also a passage from a pre-established concept of compositional unity to one obtained by means of
superposition, expressed through the obsessive fragmentation of walls and fences, as in the case of
“Quartiere Tiburtino”. Furthermore, we also see an elaboration of formal discontinuities and a rediscovery
of the value of the street, an attempt to examine surgically the singularities of the visible world and
everyday life, which unfolds according to a logic of impersonal individuation, rather than personal
individualization. Special attention is paid to a pre-individual notion that through the sheer materiality of
living, the powers of a life can be attained. Indeed, something virtual doesn’t lack reality, but is rather
engaged in a process of actualization which lends it its singularities. Similarly, the fabrication of
architectural assemblages doesn’t imply a translation from the virtual to the actual. Instead, every stage of
the genetic process is characterized by a coalescence of actuality and virtuality. The resulting
indiscernibility is not produced in the mind, but it is inherent in their material expression.
Marianna Charitonidou is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy and Architecture at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre
La Défense and at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens (joint PhD program).
Her doctoral thesis combines Deleuzian philosophy with diagnostics of conceptual generative strategies of
architectural and urban design. Her latest publications include: “Scripting Cultures, Parametric Urbanism and
Adaptive Ecologies” (9th International Conference on Intelligent Environments, July 2013), “From the research of a
modernity to a multiplicity of the present”(1st Colloquium of History of Architecture in Greece, May 2014),
“Revisiting the encounters of the social concern with the utopian aspirations: is pragmatist imagination or utopian
realism the way to follow?” (1st International Conference on Architectural Design and Criticism critic/all, June
2014), “How is Deleuze and Guattari’s Model for Subjectivity Critical for Architectural Theory and Practice Today?
The Diagrammatic or Abstract Machine in Contemporary Theory of Architecture” (7th International Deleuze
Studies Conference Models, Machines and Memories, July 2014), “Gilles Deleuze and the Non-discursive Arts: From
Symptomatology to the Capture of Forces” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Refrains of Freedom International
Conference, April 2015), “The debate between contextualism and autonomy in architecture: a genealogy”(2nd
International Conference on Architectural Design and Criticism critic/all), “Towards a Narrative of Connected
Geographies: Display of Architecture and Transnational History” (European Architectural History Network: 4th
International Meeting), “Historiography of Architecture in Greece between 20th and 21st Century: Architecture and
Arts between “Greekness” and Globalization” in Art History journal, “L’AUA entre le Team 10 et le
postmodernisme”, in Une architecture de l’engagement: l’AUA 1960-1985 (Éditions La Découverte, 2015), and
“Reinventing the Historical Posture: Theoretical Debates on Comparison and Transfers” in Espaces et Sociétés
journal.
charitonidou@aaschool.ac.uk
58
Chen, Hung-Han
Understanding the Deleuzian Affects in Cinemas: An Artificial Neural Network
Approach
Keywords: Affect, Deleuze, Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Film Philosophy, Unsupervised
Learning
In the last few decades, the concept of affect has played significant roles in Cinema and New
Media studies. Deleuze, following Bergson, argued that affect is the entity that attains the closeup in Cinemas (Deleuze 1986). He developed the ideas that filmmakers transform the close-ups
of faces, i.e., the becoming of the affective farcical expressions into the affection-images (Pisters
2015; Valier 2004; Hansen 2003). In order to construct the ontology of the affection-images,
Deleuze investigated the initial presentations of the affection-images at the dawn of Cinemas. He
examined the motion pictures in the beginning of the 20th century and purposed the ontological
arguments for the affection-images.
However, the Deleuzian ontology for affects, which is derived from the transcendental
empiricism that underpins the concept of becoming and affirms the positive nonbeing,
complicates how difference is thought (Rae 2014; Baugh 1992; Par 2015). The ontology of
becoming, i.e., the ontology aims to elaborate the processes of the becoming of affects(Sholtz
2015), challenges the reader to comprehend the affect theory in his Cinemas books.This article
investigates the Deleuzian ontology of affects by the help of artificial neural networks(ANNs).
Firstly, inspired by the rhizomatic thoughts by Deleuze and Guattari, we selected several
rhizomatic ANNs, which are widely utilized in unsupervised machine learning (see Kohonen
(1990; Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman 2009)). Secondly, we clipped images from the films
hinted by Deleuze in his Cinema books and fed these images into the ANNs. The unsupervised
learning algorithm will then generate a topological map, which represents the ontology of
Deleuzian cinematic affects according to the images.
The article aims to furnish alternative paths to approach Deleuzian Image of Thought (Herzog
2000; Posteraro 2015) and purposes a transdisciplinary way, combing computer science and
philosophy, to understand the Deleuzian affect theory. This article presents the visualization of
the map, The unsupervised learning algorithm supporting Deleuze’s ontology and the algorithmic
mechanism design constructing the visual representations.
References
Baugh, Bruce. 1992. “Transcendental Empiricism: Deleuze’s Response to Hegel.” Man and
World 25 (2). Springer Science $$ Business Media: 133–48. doi:10.1007/bf01250532.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Edited by Barbara Habberjam Hugh
Tomlinson. First Edition. Vol. 1. University of Minnesota Press.
Hansen, Mark BN. 2003. “Affect as Medium, or the ’Digital-Facial-Image’.” Journal of Visual
Culture 2 (2). SAGE Publications: 205–28.
Hastie, Trevor, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman. 2009. Unsupervised Learning. Springer.
Herzog, Amy. 2000. “Images of Thought and Acts of Creation: Deleuze, Bergson, and the
Question of Cinema.” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture.
Kohonen, Teuvo. 1990. “The Self-Organizing Map.” Proceedings of the IEEE 78 (9). IEEE:
1464–80.
Par, Adrian. 2015. “What Is Becoming of Deleuze?” https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/what-isbecoming-of-deleuze .
59
Pisters,
Patricia.
2015.
“Deleuze’s
Metallurgic
Machines.”
https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/deleuzes-metallurgic-machines .
Posteraro, Tano S. 2015. “Do Not Just Do as I Do: Knowledge and Learning in the Image of
Thought.”
Deleuze
Studies
9
(4).
Edinburgh
University
Press:
455–74.
doi:10.3366/dls.2015.0200.
Rae, Gavin. 2014. “Traces of Identity in Deleuze’s Differential Ontology.” International Journal
of Philosophical Studies 22 (1). Taylor & Francis: 86–105.
Sholtz, Janae. 2015. The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political.
Edinburgh University Press.
Valier, Claire. 2004. “Introduction the Power to Punish and the Power of the Image.”
Punishment & Society 6 (3). SAGE Publications: 251–54.
Hung-Han Chen is a doctoral candidate from Media Lab Helsinki, Media Department, School
of Arts, Aalto University, Finland. His research interests are affect theories, Film Philosophy,
Henri Bergson metaphysics and Affective Computing/Affective Interaction. He was born in
Taiwan R.O.C. and now doing his doctoral research in Finland. He was a software engineer and a
media theories researcher. His doctoral research project named “In Between-Ness: A Practice-led
Study Rooted in the Concept of Affect in Bergsonian Metaphysics”.
chenhungh@gmail.com
60
Chieffi, Paula
Resonances between life and education
Keywords: state of listening, resonance and singular educational processes
Brazilian students occupied their own schools in a huge protest in response to the government’s
plan that intended to close 92 public schools. The response to the announcement was immediate.
First, the teachers’ union organized the largest strike in history, but the government ignored their
demands. Then, students protested in their neighbourhoods hoping to raise awareness among
community members. They were also ignored. Finally, on the 9th of November 2015, some
students decided to occupy a school in the metropolitan area of São Paulo. Within a week, nearly
100 schools had been occupied, and, a week later 200.
They are directed influenced by three movements. One of those is the movement of Chilean’s
students that happened during 2006, known as “La rebelión pinguina”. They also followed the
flow of 2013 where protesters demanded reductions of public transport fares, this one was also
connected to protests against removals that intended to clear the way for the construction of
stadiums for the World Cup 2014, both in Brazil. The latest movement that influenced the
occupy schools is the occupation of the last green area located in the centre of São Paulo, which
demand the right to have a public park instead of the construction of a private complex of high
buildings.
The school’s occupation joined a broad support from parents, neighbours, teachers and a wider
community, although it had faced tough resistance from the state government by the violent
police action, which was the same treatment that those protests mentioned before received.
The student’s occupation showed ways to political actions concerning to the affirmation of vital
movements. But it has left a lot of questions to thought concerning about the routine of regular
schools. In this context, this paper intend to use a clinical listening as a mode to access forces and
lines, functioning as a possibility to explore other ways to propose educational actions, especially
the ones that consider students as active forces of the educational process.
It is important to say that the clinical listening here is operated as non-moral and non-hierarchical
domain. This modal of listening is configured in order to be able to capture vibrations that can
resonates as interfere on the production of different modes of education and life.
Furthermore, the analysis of the students’ occupations seem to have some points of connection
with some listening groups of students in public schools in Brazil. These groups took place in
other context, but they seem to have resonated common ground link to the occupation
movement and trace relations of closeness with the proposal of singular educational processes
where life and education are in continue resonance.
Paula Chieffi: Graduated in Psychology with masters in Clinical Psychology at the Catholic
University of São Paulo (PUC-SP). The masters was the result of a research by interviewing
people connected with different and extraordinary social movements, tracing maps and diagrams
concerning contemporary political actions. A PhD student in Philosophy and Education at the
University of São Paulo (USP). The present PhD research is about the practice of clinical
listening as an intercessor of the proposal of singular educational processes, connecting the fields
of Psychology and Education in an intensive perspective.
paulachieffi@yahoo.com
61
Chiu, Hanping
Becoming and the Romantic Repetition of Pleasure or Pain
Keywords: pleasure, pain, eternal return
In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the sailor feels regularly
an overwhelming impulse, his body “wrenched / With a woeful agony” (lines 578-79), to narrate
his ghastly tale to a stranger, and then that pang leaves him free before another bout seizes him
some time later and his tale has to be told again. The recurrence of the painful need to state one’s
tormenting experience finds an echo in the repetition of joy gained from getting near to nature,
as declared by William Wordsworth in poems like “Tintern Abbey” (1798) and “I Wandered
Lonely as a Cloud” (1804). The ecstasy felt while watching a host of daffodils waving along a lake
shore cheerfully often returns palpably when he lies on his couch “In vacant or in pensive mood”
(“I Wandered Lonely,” line 20). In the “Tintern Abbey” poem, the beautiful forms of the
landscape are described as repeatedly informing his mind and body with great pleasures. “I have
owed to them / In hours of weariness, sensations sweet” (lines 26-27). Extreme pleasure, just like
extreme pain, can initiate endless repetitions.
This paper studies the repetition of pleasure and pain as shown in the poems by Wordsworth and
Coleridge from the perspective of becoming, referring primarily to Nietzsche’s notion of the
“eternal return” and the thought derived from it by Deleuze alone or with Guattari. In Nietzsche
and Philosophy, Deleuze elaborates Nietzsche’s idea of the becoming-reactive of forces, asserting
“[w]hen reactive force separates active force from what it can do, the latter also becomes
reactive” (64). With active forces becoming reactive, “the becoming of forces appears as a
becoming-reactive” (64). Coleridge’s lament for the loss of creativity in “Dejection: An Ode”
bespeaks a case of becoming reactive. Questioning the healing power of sweet sensations from
nature, he stresses the crucial role of imagination in kindling memory. “I may not hope from
outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within” (line 45-46). With
the loss of imagination, which Coleridge considers crucial to his creative power, memory, reactive
in Nietzsche’s view, would be left ineffectual even though stored with great pleasures. The
Romantic views of pleasure, pain, and creativity would receive a systematic exploration based on
becoming.
Hanping Chiu is Professor of English at Tamkang University, Taiwan, and concurrently
President of Taiwan’s Comparative Literature Association. He was formerly President of
Taiwan’s English and American Literature Association. Besides co-editing Deleuze and Asia with
Ronald Bogue and Yu-lin Lee, he has published in fields of literary theory, cultural studies, and
translation studies. He has headed numerous academic initiatives, the most recent one being the
First International Deleuze Studies in Asia Conference (2013).
hpchiu@mail.tku.edu.tw
62
Chuang, Stephen Shih-Hung
“To Dismantle the Face”: the Life Liberated in Francis Bacon
Keywords: faciality, life, becoming, virtual, F. Bacon, G. Deleuze
The theme of life serves as the primary thread of thought that runs through Deleuze’s lifelong
philosophical career. However, the importance of faciality (visagéité)—which is an act virtually
related to the liberation of life—is not significantly addressed within the scholarly literature of
Deleuze studies. Hence, the crux of this paper is to highlight the relationship between life and
defaciality by discussing Francis Bacon’s paintings and interviews.
The paper attempts to forge the argument that the process of defaciality—or to employ
Deleuze’s words, “to dismantle the face”—is virtually interrelated and intertwined within the
notion of life: to liberate life from the faciality and the figurative, the subjective and the organism,
etc. I hold that Francis Bacon’s canvas or work has already imported a virtual diagram of the
struggle with the relationship between organism and the body, animal and man, face and head,
figure and figuration, new and old, etc. Hereafter, I reiterate my contention that the virtual
diagram of Bacon’s paintings performs a double process of defaciality, which indeed
demonstrates a life liberated from the Figure, History, and God on the one hand, and from the
art maestros on the other.
First, faciality has the possibility of subjectivity and significance, which reveals the means of
demarcation at the edges of centralizing despotic power. The power of this sort enables Deleuze
and Guattari (henceforth “D&G”) to propose that the face is Christ, and that it is typical White
European. It goes without surprise that they would urge us to “dismantle the face,” an attempt
stressed by D&G to liberate the life confined and defined by the limited structure. To dismantle
the face is to call forth deterritorialization, lines of flight, and becoming (-imperceptable, -animal,
etc.), a force beyond the form of life.
Second, to dismantle the face, I contend, is to dismantle the faces of the art maestros such as
Vélasquez, Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Cézanne. The canvas is always already a virtual site
wrestling with the forerunners for artists in general and for Bacon in particular. As an artist
intends to break with the past, he or she has to create a rupture between the self and the Old, or
the entirety of art history. For Deleuze, the artist’s lifestyle can seemingly be found in Bacon’s
oeuvre, in which the humans or inhumans in his work struggle with the relationship with the
clichés of the Old.
To sum up, Bacon’s paintings manifest D&G’s notion of dismantling of face in order to welcome
a liberation of life from the significance or signification, which is the stake of the paper devoted
to the discussion of “dismantling the face.”
Shih-Hung Chuang is currently a Ph.D. student at National Taiwan Normal University,
Taiwan. His research interests focus mainly on contemporary French philosophy, particularly on
studies of Deleuze, Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy. Also, he dedicated himself to the research of
postcolonial studies, especially the studies on J.M. Coetzee’s oeuvre. He has presented his
research in some countries, such as Taiwan, Swedon, Australia, Italy, and mainland China. His
current publication, co-authored with Fu-jen Chen, is “‘The Reality of the Virtual’”: the Politics
in the Internet Communication” in Internet Media and Culture: Image, Figure and Virtual
Simulacra (Taipei: Hwatai Culture, 2015): 239-265.
baudelaire@gmail.com
63
Chuang, Yen-Chen
Dr. Deleuze’s Love Machine
This paper examines Deleuze’s conception of love along with the discussion on the trope of
dancing bodies. While attending Lacan’s seminar on courtly love, Deleuze famously counters the
idea of desire as lack by claiming that desire is a process of producing connections between
bodies. Courtly love reveals the multiplicity of subjectivities. Being a lover, or being loved,
allows one to embrace a plurality of worlds. A lover is a tentacular creature that sends out myriad
modes of connections. In other words, the love machine is plugged into other machines, and it is
always already in the processing of becoming. Despite of the fact that courtly love may lead to a
restrained domesticity, its trajectory is a line of flight toward numerous particles of the beloved.
In Dialogues II, Deleuze declares that courtly love is constructed through desire instead of
pleasure. Pleasure is the enemy of courtly love; it interrupts the flows circulating around the
economy of chivalrous love. Within this economy, everything is permitted. Desire is not
directed to a certain object as long as it is impersonal. Lancelot is a great lover not because of
Guinevere’s personality. All that matters is the representation of love, which combines the
warrior flux with the erotic flux. The lines of passion, on one hand, take the risk of producing a
suffocating consciousness by the lovers’ mutual recognition. On the other hand, the knight as an
abstract machine has the potential to escape the black hole and break through the white wall,
drawing asubjective lines of movements. For Deleuze and Guattari, love “does not love the self,
any more than it loves the whole universe in a celestial or religious way” (TP, 156). It makes
possible the flows of nonsubjectified affects and entails all kinds of choreography of becomings.
A lover is a dancer who creates a vertiginous whirl, or a spiral of desire. The body encounters
other bodies even in a solo. The politics of affects becomes what Claire Colebrook calls the
“passional connections among bodies” (Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed, 55). Seen this way,
our bodies are our affects, and our affects are our becomings. These intense, affective matters
are both experienced and intertwined. While a material dancing body expresses emotion, it also
gives rise to a breaking down of the inside/outside differentiation. A dancing individual, in
Leibniz’s words, performs “a dance of particles folding back on themselves” (N, 157).
Yen-Chen Chuang is an assistant professor at the Department of English Language and
Culture, Tamkang University. She’s a graduate from the program of Comparative Literature at
Rutgers University. Her interests include film studies and critical theories, especially Deleuze and
Derrida.
138460@mail.tku.edu.tw
64
Colquhoun, Alice
Alice and the worms (Performance)
The show 'Alice and the Worms' is a 40 minute storytelling and physical theatre piece. It delves
into 'the negative' with the help of the earthworms regenerative prooperties and Lewis Carol's
Alice in Wonderland. The stories map out the need for new and affirmative ways of being through
the character 'Alice' as she it attempts to weave through difficult notions of war that have the
plagued her since she was an eight year old girl.
Alice begins the show speaking to the audience with a poem about the first time she was shown
her school wormery when she was an eight year old girl. Alice then recalls going into her first
history lesson and being taught about war.
"Thats W. A. R. Now, copie this down off the board quickly, Hitler took over in 1933. You! at
the back !..why do you look funny ? This knowledge is your responsability, so wear it on your
shoulders- like one of the british soldiers- who marched the grand march of death- so you could
play on the concrete crocodile in the playground and pay a penny for a poppy."
Alice takes the audience on a journey through events in her life as she attempts to 'become alice'
and come to terms with the atrocities of the 20th century. Much like Alice in Wonderland there
are fantasy scenes. In one scene Alice becomes Adolf Hitlers, college art tutor and trys to gives
him a constructive critique on one of his artworks.
The show is framed around the worms who are in a little plant pot at the front of the room.
Alice consults the earthworms for guidance and philosophy and way's to wiggle through and
diffract the negative.
Alice Colquhoun: AHRC TECHNE funded doctoral student/ University of Roehampton,
London
alice.colquhoun@live.co.uk
65
Criton, Pascale
Consistency, subjectivation and musical process
Keywords: music, performance, transitivity, process, gestural, multimodal
How becoming – consistency and subjectivation – are at work in musical process? The
characteristic of a musical time-space, whether sound is the result of material sources or
generated by machines, is to give consistency to previously unheard sound individuations –
without identity (1). Transitivity and heterogeneity more than stable continuities, retains our
interest here, connecting dimension of different type, setting indiscernible areas (smooth /
striated) and dazzling couplings that allow to abandon linear, exclusive or restrictive models, and
move from one category (or « middle ») to another (3).
We will discuss consistency operations at work with disparate series and their actualization in
unexpected individuations. We will discuss in particular the virtual / actual double aspect of
differentiation at work in the “forces-material” couple, a concept used by Deleuze to describe
“paradoxical” musical spaces and temporalities (cf. « Rendre audibles des forces non-audibles par
elles-mêmes», Le temps musical, Ircam 1978).
Furthermore, the “forces-material” relations - active in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s music-thought
corpus - cover all kind of fields of thought and open new connections. The production of an
heterogeneous transversality, significant in a Thousand Plateaus (1980) and following works, is
decisive within the scope of processual and subjectivating creativity. Singular time-spaces and
autonomous signs practices redistribute the order of sensation in view to form free enunciations:
they produce a difference able to confront the irreality of media and capitalistics signs regimes.
They make possible to experiment and elaborate ways of feeling, performing and becoming.
I will expose several transitive, heterogeneous – sensory, gestural, spatial – situations linked to my
recent research and works. I will focus on gestural processes and subjectivation in pieces such as
Circle Process for violin (2012) and Chaoscaccia for cello (2013) and their link to multimodal listening
(5).
References
(1) Deleuze (G), « Rendre audibles des forces non-audibles par elles-mêmes », Le temps musical, Ircam 1978,
in Deux régimes de fous. Textes et entretiens, 1975-1995, D. Lapoujade (ed.), Paris, Minuit, 2003.
(2) Criton (P), “ L’hétérogénèse sonore” in Gilles Deleuze. La pensée-musique, Criton (P) & J-M Chouvel (JM), (co-dir.), CDMC, Symétrie (2015).
(3) Criton (P), "Nothing is established forever" in The Guattari Effect, Alliez (E) & Goffey (A), (dir.),
Continuum (2011).
(4) Criton (P), “O ouvido ubiquista: escutar diferentemente », Cadernos de subjetividade, Pelbart (PP), (dir.),
University Catholic Pontificale of Sao Paulo, Brazil (2012).
(5) Criton (P), “Listening otherwise: playing with sound vibrations”, ICMC Proceedings, Athens (2014).
Pascale Criton studied composition with Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Gérard Grisey and Jean-Etienne Marie.
She received a musical computing course for composers at IRCAM (Paris, 1986) and earned a PhD in
musicology (1999). Her works explore sound variability, ultrachromatism, multi-sensoral receptions and
the spatialization of listening. Artistic director of Art&Fact, she initiates concerts combining music,
architecture and materials inviting the public to experience new sound representations (Ecouter Autrement,
Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2015). Her works, commissionned by the French Ministery of Culture, Radio
France and Sacem are published by Jobert Editions. They are internationally performed by ensembles
such as l’Ensemble 2e2m, l’Itinéraire, Aleph, Accroche Note, Taller Sonoro, Dedalus. She is currently an
associate researcher at the Lutherie Acoustique Musique laboratory (Pierre and Marie Curie University,
CNRS). Her encounter with Gilles Deleuze determined her interest in philosophy and she became one of
his interlocutor concerning music from 1974 to 1987. She recently edited Gilles Deleuze, la pensée-musique,
(co-dir), Cdmc, Symétrie (2015). Website: www.pascalecriton.com.
pcriton@club-internet.fr
66
Crossley, Sean and Beau Deurwaarder
'The Poison Garden: A Sorcery Handbook'
Keywords: sorcery, becoming, contamination
'The Poison Garden' is a collaborative arts project uniting the visual work of Brussels based artist
Sean Crossley and the writing of Melbourne based philosopher Beau Deurwaarder. Over its twoyear lifespan, the efforts from a series of international residencies, conference presentations,
exhibitions, publications, and strange experiments will be compiled into a conceptual handbook
of sorcerous instruction. Anchored by a methodology of research and practice, this collaboration
will permit a conceptual reimagination of the figure of the sorcerer and sorcerous practice,
without recourse to conventional occult motifs or naive appropriations of witchcraft, mysticism
or magic.
For us, the practice of sorcery is any procedure that seeks to interrupt and interrogate the given
stratification of our world. Sorcerers are practitioners that conjure proceedings that interfere with
thought. The promise of sorcery is the abstract enforcement that assures a mixture of integration
and intervention: the jeopardy of security, knowledge, and actions, in the name of an anonymous
pasture in thought. Our vision of sorcery, seen through the cracks of Deleuze-Guattarian
discourse, is the unnatural licence that authorises
- an alliance between the virtual and the actual
- the interaction between knowledge and non-knowledge
- an evental agency that allows new thought to emerge.
We are currently working together to produce a handbook on sorcery that will contain images,
diagrams, and writing. This venture was born from a theoretical fascination with the 'Memories
of a Sorcerer' passages in A Thousand Plateaus, and a collaborative desire to experiment with the
instruction these short passages summon. At 'Virtuality, Becoming, Life', the next International
Deleuze Studies Conference in Rome, we will co-present an academic paper detailing how our
criteria of sorcerous practice embrace the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as thinkers
such as Alain Badiou and Friedrich Nietzsche. In particular, we will discuss how Nietzsche's will
to power and Badiou's conception of the event operate in our theoretical framework and inform
our artistic practice. Over the next six months we will focus our collaborative attention to
crystallising these philosophical approaches to production. As a result, our presentation will
showcase a constellation of new work that will interrogate the text under analysis, in a format
designed to workshop the final content we will be drafting for the publication of 'The Poison
Garden', due for release in September 2016. We also hope to attend the Deleuze Studies Camp
prior to participating at the conference.
Sean Crossley is an Australian artist living and working in Brussels. His practice focuses on
complexities found around the image, subject and language. Primarily, he is interested in nonhierarchical visual spaces that encourage experimentation within the broader fields of image
culture. Sean has conducted solo and group exhibitions and has won an array of grants and
rewards. He has upcoming shows in Berlin, Rome, Brussels, and Melbourne.
contact@seacncrossley.com
Beau Deurwaarder is an Australian philosopher attracted to occulture, non-knowledge and
schizoanalytic strategies. His work is inspired by the thought of Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou,
Isabelle Stengers and Georges Bataille. In 2014 Beau created a series of works that rewrote A
Thousand Plateaus into exactly one thousand sentences. Since then he has presented research on
Deleuze and artistic practice in Belgium, France, Turkey, and across Australia. Beau is currently
completing a Masters of Fine Art at the Centre for Ideas at the VCA in Melbourne.
beauanthonyd@gmail.com
67
D'Aurizio, Claudio
Monad as a point of view: perspectivism, individuation, subjectivity in The Fold by Gilles
Deleuze
Keywords: monad, fold, point of view
The fold, particularly dedicated to the analysis of Leibniz work – and of Baroque – is the last of
the greatest reinterpretations of western philosophy classics made by Gilles Deleuze. Proceeding
fold after fold into the text, as implicitly suggested by the author, it’s possible to track down
within the book itself many key notions of Deleuze’s philosophy – differentiation, event and,
especially, becoming. Notably, the latter is implied both by the progressive disposition of these
folds that cross the world and by the laws that govern the composition and the life of different
monads.
In light of this thematic continuity which goes through the work in question, this paper aims to
propose an interpretation of monad – as from Deleuze’s comment – as a manner of
individuation which remains independent from the subject. In my opinion, such an interpretation
could be strengthened by the analysis of two basic theoretical dimensions seen in Deleuze’s text.
The first one consists in monads’ perspectivism: «a subject will be what comes to the point of
view […] The point of view is not what varies with the subject, […] it is, to the contrary, the
condition in which an eventual subject apprehends a variation». The structure of these points of
view allows to underline both the derived position of subjectivity and – at the same time – the
overcoming of monad’s relativism, since the monad expresses a particular dimension of world –
but also the whole world itself. Moreover, it relates to this aspect the analysis of anamorphosis
and allegory as recurring figures within the Baroque culture.
The second aspect concerns the topic of pre-determination of individuality from the employment
of compossibility: “That is the real definition of the individual: concentration, accumulation,
coincidence of a certain number of converging preindividual singularities”. The individuation is
completed as temporary interruption of a serial compositional process – and this process is
related to both time and space.
Thanks to the unique structure of monad, it is possible to read and to compose different
philosophical and artistic features of Baroque in an unitary frame, since the point of view does
not coincide perforce with the subject and since the identification is always dependent from the
development (convergent or divergent) of the series which compose the majestic baroque
framework; e.g. the infinitive lengthening of folds; the proximity and the diversity between the
two levels of world’s composition (concerning matter and soul); Leibniz’s theory of perception;
the cohabitation of freedom and pre-established harmony.
Indeed, Deleuze is particularly interested in the play of forces realised from Baroque philosophy
and art, a play at the limit of chaos which enables the comprehension – through diversity – of
some dimensions of contemporary world. Not by chance, actually, we can read in conclusion of
the text that although “we are discovering new ways of folding, […] we all remain Leibnizan
because what always matters is folding, unfolding, refolding”.
Claudio D'Aurizio (Termoli/1991) is a PhD researcher for the Department of “Humanistic
studies” at the University of Calabria. His research project focuses on Gilles Deleuze's
interpretation of baroque philosophy and art. He achieved his Master's Degree in Philosophy at
the University of Rome “la Sapienza”, with a dissertation on the concept of mimesìs in Th. W.
Adorno's works. His main interests are in contemporary philosophy, more particularly they
regard epistemology, aesthetics, sociology and psychoanalysis.
d-clode@hotmail.it
68
de Assis, Paulo
Wandering between Diagram and Assemblage
Keywords: Assemblage, Diagram, Actual, Virtual, Power
The concrete machines are the two-form assemblages or mechanisms,
whereas the abstract machine is the informal diagram. (Deleuze, Foucault, 39)
This presentation will focus on the intricate relations between the concepts of ‘assemblage’ and
‘diagram’. ‘Assemblage’ (agencement) was invented by Deleuze and Guattari in 1975, in their
collaborative book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975) as a further development (a.o.) of
Deleuze’s previous notions of ‘disjunctive synthesis’ and ‘desiring machines’ (see Difference and
Repetition, 1968, and Anti-Oedipus, 1972). ‘Diagram’ was invented in 1977 in the Dialogues with
Claire Parnet, a concept of Foucauldian origin that affords an original understanding of the
immaterial transformations affecting matter: “… there is yet another axis along which
assemblages must be divided. This time it is according to the movements which animate them,
which determine or carry them along, which determine or carry along desire, with its states of
things and utterances.” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 72). The two-form mechanism of the
assemblage (form of expression, form of content) starts affecting and being affected by the
informal diagram, the concrete machine by the abstract machine, suggesting a continuity between
the diagram and the event, between the virtual and the actual. Assemblages are in permanent
becoming due to the promise of constant reconfigurations produced (or at least suggested) by
diagrammatic machinations. Crucially, the link between diagram and assemblage contributes to
explore the constitutive role of ‘power’ in both notions. Between assemblages and diagrams, a
space opens up for the ever-changing (un)folding of power and desire, in a movement that
ceaselessly goes from the virtual to the actual to the virtual.
In an effort to map the closed-loop system diagram-assemblage, reference will be made to
specific concepts by authors that impacted on Deleuze/Guattari such as Foucault, C.S. Pierce,
Bergson, B. Riemann, von Uexküll, Rosny, Hjemlslev, and Whitehead, as well as to more recent
developments advanced by Bruno Latour (1999), Manuel DeLanda (2006), and Ian Buchanan
(2015).
Paulo de Assis is an artist-researcher (a trained concert pianist, conductor and musicologist)
with transdisciplinary interests on Composition, Philosophy and Epistemology. He is the
Principal Investigator of the European Research Council funded project MusicExperiment21
(www.musicexperiment21.eu) at the Orpheus Institute Ghent. He was formerly professorial
research fellow at the University Nova Lisbon (2008-2012). He published two books as author
and eight as editor. His publications include an article on “The Conditions of Creation and the
Haecceity of Music Material” (Filigrane nr. 13, 63-86), and a chapter on “Epistemic Complexity
and Experimental Systems in Music Performance” (Experimental Systems—Future Knowledge
in Artistic Research, ed. by M. Schwab, Leuven: University of Leuven Press, 151-165)—both
contributing to a Deleuzian approach to music semiotics. He is the chair of the conference series
‘Deleuze and Artistic Research’ (DARE).
paulo.deassis@orpheusinstituut.be
69
de Cock de Rameyen, Jade
Beside the organic and the dysnarrative, Deleuze’s crystal as a tool for narrative
compositions
Keywords: Crystal, narration, event
In the Movement-Image, Deleuze’s preliminary philosophical stance directly concerns narrative.
In order to avoid Christian Metz’s assumption that cinema is a language that necessarily form a
“narrative utterance”, Deleuze posits that narrative represents the imposition of a form over the
heterogeneity of life which prevents us from thinking the condition itself – matter as an
immanent plane of images. According to Deleuze, by putting emphasis on the representative
codes that shape matter, Metz overlooks the pre-linguistic genesis of sense. At the beginning of
the Time-Image, Deleuze states that “narration is grounded in the image itself, but it is not
given”; he thus choses to focus on the given – the images and the signs that they express – and
adopts a semiotic approach. Narration becomes a specific composition that reflects a certain type
of image – the movement-image or the time-image.
Stemming from there, Deleuze conceptualises two types of narration: the organic and the
crystalline. As the organic narration provides the law (sensory-motor) according to which the
images are arranged, the crystalline narration is derived from the images it composes. It
constitutes a becoming of the narrative: one that is not given nor grounded, but occurs with the
image. It is a process of differentiation stemming from a principle of uncertainty: the
indiscernibility between actuality and virtuality in the time-image. The crystal is then nothing else
than the indicator of a potential – the potential of the milieu to receive the New and the potential
of an event to actualise itself in it. As such, it hints to a change to come, a change that would only
be reduced by its alignment in a causal chain of events.
The crystalline narration is thus often treated by Deleuze as dysnarrative. Deleuze describes the
new image in negative terms (as involving a crisis of action, disconnected spaces, movement
anomalies and a montage that decomposes the relations between images). One notices a tension
in Deleuze’s philosophy at the very locus of the narrative: between the organic and the crystalline
narrations emerges the gap between composition and decomposition or, according to Jacques
Rancière, the representative and the aesthetic regimen. The relation appears dichotomous: one
would find it difficult to understand the crystal without the organicity of the movement-image to
which it is opposed.
Deleuze’s readers are then confronted with the following problem: what kind of narrative
compositions does the crystal generate? The crystal appears as a differential and genetic narrative
logic, which simultaneously challenges us to articulate novel and non-causal relations between
events. What modes of composing and shaping a filmic narrative of the time-image does the
crystalline narration call for? In this paper we will attempt to show how the crystal does not
provide us with a narrative composition per se but functions as a methodology, offering us the
conceptual tools to approach cinematographic narratives in a multiple and productive way.
Jade de Cock de Rameyen got her Master’s degrees in French Literature and in Philosophy at
the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2015. Her master thesis for literature focused on evential
narrativity in literature, while for philosophy she approached Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film
Uncle Boonmee with Deleuze’s tripartite concept of memory. She is currently finishing a
Master’s degree in British Studies at Humboldt Universität (Berlin) and preparing for a PhD on
filmic narrativity as a symptomatic concept articulating the gap between the artistic and industrial
cinemas (Dir. : Dominique Nasta & Sabrina Parent).
jadedecock@hotmail.fr
70
Denker, Kai
Language in chains – Deleuze and Markov
Keywords: Markov, language, mathematics
Do you remember the Russian mathematician and de-facto linguist Andrey Andreyevich Markov
(1856-1922)? He developed a mathematical model of language. Hereby, he tried to identify
repetitive patterns within Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin by counting syllables and by
inferring distributions of their probabilities. Today, this respective model still bears his name:
Markov chains. Deleuze and Guattari mention Markov and his chains several times. Yet, they
never elaborate any further on these references. The first reference – in the Anti-Oedipus –
clearly aims at Jacques Lacan. Lacan had once mentioned Markov in a remark for supporting the
existence of symbolic order prior to any empirical realities. Further references can be found in
the Thousand Plateaus and in the books on Leibniz and on Foucault. So, even if Markov chains
had been Guattari’s contribution from the very beginning, Deleuze adopted the concept for his
own works. Here, it apparently serves to describe patterns of probabilities within dispositifs and
multiplicities where it marks partially dependent, aleatory phenomena.
In my talk, I will trace Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) references to Markov and to Markov chains,
elaborating on their function for Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work. For this, I will map the
references within the texts and elaborate on their contexts. It will turn out that it is possible to
draw a connection between Deleuze’s and Guattari’s critique on Noam Chomsky’s notion of
grammar and their adoption of the Markov chain. This is a quite surprising result, since Chomsky
formulated his notion of grammar through a sharp critique on Markov in his 1956 article “Three
Models for the description of language”. However, it is possible to show that this ahistorical
appropriation of Markov against Chomsky repeats Deleuze’s and Guattari’s distinction between
axiomatic and nomadic mathematics. Interestingly, Markov chains (and Hidden Markov models)
are used in algorithmic processing of language in information technology. Hence, I will conclude
by discussing if the connection within Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work might be extended to
reformulate a critique of algorithmization.
Kai Denker, has studied Philosophy, History and Computer Science at TU Darmstadt,
Germany. Between 2009 and 2013 he hold a scholarship within the Research Training Group
"Topology of Technology". Here, he started his dissertation project on the problem of
mathematicality within the works of Gilles Deleuze. Since 2012, he had been research associate at
the Department of Philosophy, TU Darmstadt, Germany. In 2014, he worked as a Teacher for
Special Tasks at the Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt. Since January 2015, he
has been research accociate within the TU Darmstadt project group KIVA VI "Development of
Interdisciplinarity" where he develops concepts for interdisciplinary curricula. His research
interests include the philosophy of language, the history of mathematics, and philosophical
problems of cybersecurity.
denker@phil.tu-darmstadt.de
71
Deurwaarder, Beau and Sean Crossley
'The Poison Garden: A Sorcery Handbook'
Keywords: sorcery, becoming, contamination
'The Poison Garden' is a collaborative arts project uniting the visual work of Brussels based artist
Sean Crossley and the writing of Melbourne based philosopher Beau Deurwaarder. Over its twoyear lifespan, the efforts from a series of international residencies, conference presentations,
exhibitions, publications, and strange experiments will be compiled into a conceptual handbook
of sorcerous instruction. Anchored by a methodology of research and practice, this collaboration
will permit a conceptual reimagination of the figure of the sorcerer and sorcerous practice,
without recourse to conventional occult motifs or naive appropriations of witchcraft, mysticism
or magic.
For us, the practice of sorcery is any procedure that seeks to interrupt and interrogate the given
stratification of our world. Sorcerers are practitioners that conjure proceedings that interfere with
thought. The promise of sorcery is the abstract enforcement that assures a mixture of integration
and intervention: the jeopardy of security, knowledge, and actions, in the name of an anonymous
pasture in thought. Our vision of sorcery, seen through the cracks of Deleuze-Guattarian
discourse, is the unnatural licence that authorises
- an alliance between the virtual and the actual
- the interaction between knowledge and non-knowledge
- an evental agency that allows new thought to emerge.
We are currently working together to produce a handbook on sorcery that will contain images,
diagrams, and writing. This venture was born from a theoretical fascination with the 'Memories
of a Sorcerer' passages in A Thousand Plateaus, and a collaborative desire to experiment with the
instruction these short passages summon. At 'Virtuality, Becoming, Life', the next International
Deleuze Studies Conference in Rome, we will co-present an academic paper detailing how our
criteria of sorcerous practice embrace the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as thinkers
such as Alain Badiou and Friedrich Nietzsche. In particular, we will discuss how Nietzsche's will
to power and Badiou's conception of the event operate in our theoretical framework and inform
our artistic practice. Over the next six months we will focus our collaborative attention to
crystallising these philosophical approaches to production. As a result, our presentation will
showcase a constellation of new work that will interrogate the text under analysis, in a format
designed to workshop the final content we will be drafting for the publication of 'The Poison
Garden', due for release in September 2016. We also hope to attend the Deleuze Studies Camp
prior to participating at the conference.
Sean Crossley is an Australian artist living and working in Brussels. His practice focuses on
complexities found around the image, subject and language. Primarily, he is interested in nonhierarchical visual spaces that encourage experimentation within the broader fields of image
culture. Sean has conducted solo and group exhibitions and has won an array of grants and
rewards. He has upcoming shows in Berlin, Rome, Brussels, and Melbourne.
contact@seacncrossley.com
Beau Deurwaarder is an Australian philosopher attracted to occulture, non-knowledge and
schizoanalytic strategies. His work is inspired by the thought of Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou,
Isabelle Stengers and Georges Bataille. In 2014 Beau created a series of works that rewrote A
Thousand Plateaus into exactly one thousand sentences. Since then he has presented research on
Deleuze and artistic practice in Belgium, France, Turkey, and across Australia. Beau is currently
completing a Masters of Fine Art at the Centre for Ideas at the VCA in Melbourne.
beauanthonyd@gmail.com
72
Di Liberto, Yuri
Body and Use in Deleuze: Immanence, machines and diagrams
Keywords: assemblage, powers, matter
Amongst the recent readings of the Deleuze and Guattari there has been room for a materialist
one. Namely, such readings (for example DeLanda’s and Bryant’s ones) have focused on the
concepts of matter and material organization as they are founded in the works of Deleuze and of
Guattari-Deleuze.
Our work will focus on two dimensions that, in the work of Deleuze, find a strategic theoretical
importance if we speak about matters of ontology and materialism: body and use.
The link between questions of ontology and the concepts of ‘body’ and ‘use’ is key in Deleuze’s
works on Nietzsche3 and Spinoza4. This point comes as no surprise, since it is sufficiently
established, by some authors that Deleuze’s efforts in ontology always pushed towards a
philosophy of matter which is dynamic, intensive, process-like, creative.
However, the other link we would like to explore is the one between body/corporeality and use
themselves.
In a key passage of Milles Plateaux, Deleuze and Guattari argue that powers arise from material
assemblages, as in the case of the ‘warrior+horse’ entity5.
Similarly, and in the same fashion, DeLanda6 argued that, following emergentism and a
philosophical anti-reductionism, we have to smooth the notion of individuality by considering
these new assemblages as new entities arising above their parts.7
Both the notion of power and that of machine/assemblage point to the Deleuzian plea for
immanence of life. We will try to argue that in the work of Deleuze and in that of GuattariDeleuze there’s an important account of body/corporeality which respect this immanentistic and
materialist view and that some of its key theoretical features are traceable to key Deleuzian works
on Spinoza and Nietzsche.
References
Deleuze G., (2002), Nietzsche e la filosofia, Einaudi, Torino.
Deleuze G., (2007), Differenza e Ripetizione, Raffaello Cortina Ed., Milano.
Deleuze G., (2010), ‘L’immanenza: una vita…”, in Due regimi di folli e altri scritti: Testi e interviste 1975-1995,
pagg. 320-324, Einaudi, Torino.
Deleuze G., (2013), Cosa può un corpo? Lezioni su Spinoza, Ombre Corte, Verona.
Deleuze G., Guattari F. (2002), L’anti-Edipo: Capitalismo e schizofrenia, Einaudi, Torino.
Deleuze G., Guattari F., (2010), Millepiani: Capitalismo e Schizofrenia, Castelvecchi, Roma.
Secondary Bibliography:
Bryant L. R., (2014), Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media,, Edimburgh University Press Ltd..
DeLanda M., (2010), Deleuze: History and Science, Atropos Press.
Yuri Di Liberto, University of Palermo, Lettere e Filosofia
I graduated in “Philosophical Sciences” at the University of Palermo (Italy) on October the 14th of 2015
with the final score of 110/110 magna cum laude and mention of the thesis. The final dissertation had the
title of ‘One Thousand Machines: Ontology, Politics and Critique in Levi Bryant’s Deleuzian Realism’. I’m currently
working on Deleuze and a recent paper of mine was published on the journal Methode: Analytic
Perspectives about the materialist readings of Deleuze (See Vol. 4 n.5, 2015, of the Journal).
yuridiliberto@yahoo.it
3
See Deleuze [2002]
See Deleuze [2013]
5 See Deleuze and Guattari [2010]
6 See DeLanda [2010]
7 See also Bryant [2014] for similar interpreations.
4
73
Dickinson, Susannah
Designing for Life
Keywords: indeterminacy, complexity theory, urban design
Bringing life into our built environment seems like a given, but what does that actually mean?
Life can never be completely specified or planned (and isn’t that what makes it interesting), so
why do we think we can do this in the design and planning strategies for most cities and
buildings?
Ideally we should design with an empathetic relationship to our environment and other forms of
life, without the control ethic that has previously dominated the developed world. Allowing for
some degree of adaptability and change in our unpredictable world; creating a scaffold which
would allow for improvisation, life and death, diversity, feedback and change over time. More of
a Deleuzian sense of “becoming” rather than static objects, rules and spaces? Designing for life
should go beyond survival; incorporating much-needed qualities that are aesthetic, equitable and
civilized for all. What implications does this have on our design ethics today?
Some planning theorists are now embracing complexity theories which are akin to Deleuzian
philosophy, where ideas of open systems, emergence, self-organization and non-linear reactions
are key. How can this translate into “reality” over time? What are the aesthetic implications of
this? And how do these relate with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the smooth and striated
and holey space? “What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the
passages or combinations…smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory…Never believe that a
smooth space will suffice to save us” (A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987, p.500)
This paper will present various connections between complexity theory, design and Deleuze’s
work, highlighting some of the most promising examples of indeterminate methodologies and
combinations over various scales of design: hypothesizing on how we evaluate the successes of
these active strategies in a world which is more pluralistic and open-ended.
Susannah Dickinson is an Architect and an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona,
USA. She has a background in digital processes largely gained through experience in the offices
of Frank Gehry, Los Angeles and SHoP Architects, New York. Currently she is also a PhD
student in Architecture and Urbanism at the European Graduate School and a student of
complexity science with the Santa Fe Institute. Her research and projects relate concepts of
complexity to architecture and urbanism. She has published in the International Journal of
Architectural Research (IJAR) and presented at several major conferences including PLEA
(Passive and Low Energy Architecture) and CAAD Futures. She recently was one of the elected
directors of ACADIA (Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture).
srd@email.arizona.edu
74
Dobrowolski, Jacek
Lacan avec Deleuze (+ Descartes) – Anti-Oedipus as an attempt to re-write Lacan’s
psychoanalysis in a neo-vitalist fashion
Deleuze and Guattari’s perhaps most famous book “Anti-Oedipis. Capitalism and schizophrenia”
of 1972 is widely recognized as being a polemical treatise against classic psychoanalytical
approach to human being and human desire, and especially its Lacan’s late version, determined,
as I would argue, by the calamities of the middle 20th Century’s history to present an analysis, or
perhaps a “post-analysis” of the subject after the death of the post-cartesian subject. Lacan’s
account of the human psyche, and its central substance – desire – was that of a final dissection
thereof, leading to a blurred, dismembered subject-crossed (subject, or else: S). This Lacan’s
result, although ultimately doing away with the old rationalist view – traceable back to Plato
himself, and especially important in the making of the modern man, as begun by Descartes and
other rationalists of the new era – of the Self as a Master of oneself, that is of a self-identified
sovereign subjectivity, was, in the end of the day, a negative achievement, leaving Lacan’s readers
or followers, not to mention patients, in a state of self-disintegration, without any exit or prospect
for liberation. As I will try to show, Deleuze and Guattari took up some of Lacan’s achievements
only to reverse this deadly result which posited desire as a purely negative force (understood as
“lack”) – and replace this depressing and repressing Lacanian perspective with one that, to the
contrary, should posit desire as a positive force of liberation, one that would not restitute the old
“Self” but rather carry on the work of the “un-selfing” of desire. Indeed, that desire is not so
much an attribute of a subject, but a freely floating “flow” that can only be channeled by specific
machines is famously the main thesis of “Anti-Oedipus”.
Jacek Dobrowolski is adjunct professor at the University of Warsaw, Institute of Philosophy.
His interests range from modern social philosophy to postmodernism and post-structuralism. He
wrote books (in Polish), “Philosophy of Stupidity” (2007), “The Rise and Fall of the Modern
Man” (2015 – English version to be published soon). He participated in the 2013 and 2014
Deleuze Studies conferences.
jmdobrowolski@poczta.onet.pl
75
Dos Santos, Wanderley
Black Presence: becoming black
In January 2015 a group of twenty five black activists made a performance called Presença Negra
– Black Presence – and occupied the Milan Gallery in São Paulo – Brazil during the opening of
Afonso Tostes’ exhibition, a Brazilian artist who works with objects related to slavery. This
performance started in 2014 and intends to make the presence of black visible in this intellectual
milieu. This action is enough to make a disturbance, because black people are not expecting as an
audience for such events. This performance was not meant as part of the exhibition, in fact that
day only two black people were invited, the artist´s friends, other blacks present were the security
guys, the door men and the cleaners.
Black bodies became composed with virtuality within a potentiality when they occupy other than
the expected space. This virtuality is fundamental to become an event, which has the power to
destabilize an environment, a representation an identity. Or in other words, this presence tries to
restore a multiplicity. So this proposal understands the black presence is understood as an action
of creation within the actualization of the virtual elements. For Deleuze every tendency to keep a
multiplicity alive includes the actualization of virtual elements, where the present and the past and
the future, the micro and the macro become a continuing line of life. The performance also
makes visible a tension between forces related to race in Brazil, which keeps a society dynamic
and reveals lines of conflict that had previously been suppressed and silenced.
It is important to say that even though in Brazil blacks make up to 51% of the population they
are not expected in an intellectual environment. Because of this fact, a multiplicity of race has
been severed. So what the black presence is trying to do, is to restore this multiplicity, by
occupying the symbolic space of the art gallery, making themselves visible and affecting the
ambience. In doing this they are also being affected by this experience, as a part of the constant
becoming black in Brazil.
Wanderley Dos Santos is a Brazilian Psychologist with a Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology.
During his Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology at the Nucleus of Subjectivity of the Pontifícia
Universidade Católica de São Paulo - Brazil, he used break dancing as a political, aesthetic and
clinical means to explore racism in contemporary Brazilian culture. He is concluding his Masters
Foundation Course in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy in Intercultural issues at The Tavistock and
Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London.
wanderleym@hotmail.com
76
Duobliene, Lilija
Rhythm in multimedia composition Silver dust: becoming music, becoming art
Keywords: multimedia, audiovisual, becoming, rhythm
The presentation is based on the Deleuzoguattarian concept of rhythm and an investigation of
how it works in the multimedia project Silver Dust. The uniqueness of this project is that it is
framed by following some of Gilles Deleuze’s ideas. The experimental video project created by
Lithuanian artist Andrius Šarapovas is interdisciplinary, comprising of music, dance, and poetry.
In the project, different art lines run separately, parallel or in different directions, are performed
in different meter and at the same time, they create unity in common rhythm. The question is:
how does Deleuze and Guattari’s investigation of rhythm in Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizopheria and Deleuze Cinema 2. The Time-Image helps to understand the appearance of
interconnections of different arts in the composition Silver Dust? How do separately performed
poetry, body movement and music become art?
The arrangement of composition is analyzed by demonstrating short extract from the video
project and using Deleuze and Guattari concepts of milieu, territory, code, speed, rhythm and
becoming. Playing with repetitions, cracks and intensities of different milieus Šarapovas opens up
the conditions for bringing up cosmic forces into the process of becoming music, becoming art.
As Deleuze and Guattari state, “The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with
exhaustion or intrusion. Rhythm is the milieus' answer to chaos. What chaos and rhythm have in
common is the in-between—between two milieus, rhythm-chaos or the chaosmos…” (Deleuze,
Guattari, 1987, 313). In our case poetry, music, and dance are rhythmically contending,
competing for priority to territorialize and deterritorialize the refrain of composition. While
poetry territorializes by rhythm and deterritorializes by meanings, music does that by pitch,
timbre and the change of speed. Dance flows separately, arhythmically and in the same time
somewhere behind the poetry and music. The conclusion of investigation is that Šarapovas,
working with performed material in montage and sound editing, compounded different art
stories giving a diagram for their directions. Galloping rhythm in music composition allows
entering into another speed and plane of consistency, eventually into pulsation of chaosmic
rhythm and interconnection of different arts in the process of becoming.
References
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1989), Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Videos: A. Sarapovas. Silverdust. Retriewed from https://vimeo.com/75418015 on 12 October,
2014.
Interviews: Šarapovas to Duobliene (2014). (15 October, 2014, approx. 50 minutes)
Professor Lilija Duobliene is Head of Educational Department at Faculty of Philosophy,
University of Vilnius, Lithuania. Her research topics are in philosophy and ideology of education,
creativity and cultural encountering. Her works are based on theories of M. Foucault, M. de
Certeau, J. Dewey, and G. Deleuze. Few resent years she is working on Deleuze’s philosophy,
applying it to educational field and music. She is an author of many articles and monograph,
among them articles developing Deleuze’s philosophy in the field of education and creativity, and
recently she is involved into the research project “Gilles Deleuze: philosophy and art”.
Lilija.duobliene@gmail.com
77
Erwin, Sean
“Cut off the Head of the King”? Security Mechanisms and the Society of Control
The panoptic architecture described by Michel Foucault in, Discipline and Punish (1976), has
been a dominant paradigm in surveillance studies since its inception as an organized field of
inquiry in the 1970s. However, over the last decade this paradigm has come under increasing
criticism. As Kevin Haggerty (2006) states: “Foucault continues to reign supreme in surveillance
studies and it is perhaps time to cut off the head of the king.”
An increasing number of commentators argue that the model of the panopticon fails to account
for the programmed character of smart surveillance technology. They argue that these
technologies do not seek to discipline behaviors as much as they aim to route bodies through
different surveillance environments by events of in and exclusion on the basis of massive
searches of databases.
Seeking a paradigm better able to account for the relationship between software algorithms with
big data, some commentators have turned to Deleuze and his 1992 critique of Foucault in the,
“Postscript on Societies of Control”. They frequently adopt Deleuze’s notion of the
rhizomatically structured, surveillant assemblage, as a model better adapted than the panopticon
to account for the capabilities of today’s digital networks.
In this paper I argue that Deleuze’s notion of the surveillant assemblage may in fact be better
adapted to account for the networked character of electronic surveillance than Foucault’s
panopticon. However, I argue that Foucault himself was very aware of the limits of panopticism
and that his contribution to surveillance studies must not be limited to that model alone. During
his 1978 lectures, Sécurité Territoire Population, Foucault introduced a new paradigm – les
dispositifs de sécurité. This paradigm exceeds the panoptic paradigm and overlaps with
Deleuze’s model in four important ways: 1) security mechanisms operate at the level of
populations (both human and non-human) and do not depend on closed spaces like the prison,
classroom and barracks in order to function. 2) Security mechanisms function in tandem with
disciplinary regimes. This allows Foucault to account for the fact that the disruptive effects of
electronic surveillance networks do not replace disciplinary spaces. In fact they capture
disciplined bodies in the process of virtualizing them. 3) The security mechanism is a nonhierarchical form of governance. Those engaged in the activity of electronic surveillance are as
much subject to surveillance as those whom they observe. 4) For Foucault and Deleuze, the
‘meaning’ of the security mechanism is a function of both the intended and the unintended
effects of the system. This gives the paradigm the flexibility to explain the significance of both
false positives and false negatives in the routine functioning of surveillance networks.
Sean Erwin is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Barry University, a Catholic University
located in Miami Shores, Florida. Recent publications include a translation of Michel Senellart’s,
“Specters of Umori: Foucault’s Reading of Machiavelli in Sécurité Territoire Population”
(Foucault Studies, October 2015) and, “The Metabolism of the State: Instrumental and Aleatory
Aspects of Auxiliaries in Machiavelli” (Époché, Fall 2015). His research interests include
Aristotle, Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy (especially Machiavelli and Spinoza), and
contemporary French philosophy (especially Deleuze and Foucault). He is currently preparing a
book on the theme of arma alienis in Machiavelli.
Serwin@barry.edu
78
Fantozzi, Patrizia
“Croire en ce monde-ci c’est croire à la vie ici”. Gilles Deleuze: cinema, belief, life
In my presentation I’m going to deal with the concept of “croyance” from an eminently
cinematographic perspective, moving from the dense pages Deleuze dedicated to it in Cinema 2.
Deleuze said that “the modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. (…) The cinema
must film not the world, but the belief in this world, our only link”. With the breaking of the
sensory-motor schema - attributed by the philosopher to the historic consequences of the Second
World War - we move from “a kind of image to another”, which, according to Rancière, we can
define only inside a natural history of images, capable to be at the same time ontological and
cosmological.
In opposition to the classical model of knowledge and learning that had instituted their own
thinking paradigm based on a substantial conformity between man and world, modern thinking
dismantles any harmonious concatenation or the proximity principle in order to let the
problematic plexus of knowledge slide towards something that is not given to us.
And if it’s true that in the belief, as Deleuze explains in his essay on Hume, the subject is literally
beyond the given, that is it exceeds what the mind does not give to him (“I believe in what I have
neither seen nor touched”), the same subjectivity will be only able to occur as an “impression of
reflection” that can only be given “insofar as the subject contemplates, and not insofar as it acts”.
If everything, then, remains real in the cinema of the “croyance”, between the reality of the
setting and that of the action a stronger vision penetrates and tends to nullify any distinction
between subjective and objective.
“Oh sweet miracle of our blind eyes”, Godard repeats in his Histoire(s) du cinema. One may say
that the modern age is the age of clairvoyance: and if it’s true what Agamben affirms, that there is
a presence of what it’s not in act, this privative presence is exactly potentiality, the “potential not
to pass into actuality”.
Ripped from the field of the cogito and of the consciousness, the subject will try to take root in
the field of life. Something indomitable “opens a world for us” through some residue struggling
to be reabsorbed because it’s a “living residue” Nancy says, something able to set free a “surplus”
which is useless and living.
The belief would come to be, in this sense, the possibility to believe in another world, starting
from the ability to transform the world we live in.
Patrizia Fantozzi is PhD student at University of Calabria where she carries on a research on
the concept of “croyance” in cinema starting from Gilles Deleuze. She gratuated in 2011 at
University of Bologna discussing a degree tesis on Jean-Luc Godard’s video work Histoire(s) du
cinema. During these last years she has contributed to some important cinema magazines among
which La Furia Umana, Filmcritica, FilmIdee e Fata Morgana. She has written essays on Pier
Paolo Pasolini, Aleksandr Sokurov, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, Artavazd
Pelešjan, Edgar Reitz, Stan Brakhage, Carmelo Bene, Straub/Huillet, Guy Debord, Roberto
Rossellini and Jean-Luc Godard.
patrizia_fantozzi@libero.it
79
Fineman, Daniel
Philosophy’s Indiscernible: Deleuze and The Shifter’s Virtual
In the conclusion to What is Philosophy? (1991), Deleuze and Guattari seem to undo the
tripartite taxonomy the whole book had maintained between art, science, and philosophy. In the
final paragraph, the authors suggest each discipline has a “no” that is its constitutive source: the
concurrent co-generators of the ostensive outputs previously outlined. These “Nos” are not
negatives but the necessarily indistinct intensivities from which distinct intelligibilities of affects,
functions, and concepts spring. “Now, if the three “Nos” are still distinct in relation to the
cerebral plane, they are no longer distinct in relation to the chaos in which the brain plunges…. It
is here that concepts, sensations, and functions become undecidable, at the same time as
philosophy, art, and science become indiscernible” (218). The immanence of chaos was always
the incipient horizon of Deleuze’s philosophy, his differencing engine. Here he labels it “a
nonphilosophy” (not with reference to Laruelle’s use of the same term) that philosophy not only
“needs” but that “comprehends” it. How can we apprehend this intensity? This paper will try to
advance an obscure version of the concept of philosophical “shifting” which finds its articulation
in Nietzsche, Klossowski, Bakhtin, and in the stutter as it appears in Deleuze’s reading of Kafka
and Melville.
Shifters as they are traditionally understood in linguistics, which is in the academic trajectory
between Jespersen and Jakobson, are an apparently small group of deictic words (such as “now”
or “here”) that oscillate between a “clear and distinct” dictionary definition and a non-linguistic
existential reference. These “duplexes” present an impossible quandary for semiology as their
context sensitivity makes them ungovernable under any normalizing structural protocol whether
it is artistic, philosophical, or scientific. To alleviate this disagreeable indeterminacy, traditional
language study has re-territorialized this obstinate, indeterminate, and dynamic materiality by
equating it to narration by non-duplex signs. Thus for example, “It’s me” which by itself lacks
empirical context, is mapped back into normativity with the semiotic placebo, “The voice is
Fred’s.” This oft practiced linguistic, scientific, and philosophical prestidigitation that annuls the
chaotic openness of language may appear trivial, but it is the central mechanism whereby analytic
philosophy from Frege to Kripke pretends to have relevance to a world other than that of its
own fictive projection.
However, in the dark tradition that runs from Heraclitus through the Stoics to Spinoza and on to
Nietzsche and Deleuze, the material context sensitive and ineluctable materiality of becoming of
the shifter is celebrated and not ignored. Shifting is the contact and lived intensity between the
nominal closure of well-structured thought and the virtual chaos that is thought’s ongoing and
unintelligible genesis. Thus the stutter that Deleuze finds in minor literature, the stumble of
language as a whole, is also the interface of his nonphilosophy. With close attention to this
concept as elaborated in Deleuze and Guattari and in their sources, this paper hopes to show that
shifting is not only a universal characteristic of all discourse but is a central techne for
understanding the poiesis of Deleuze’s stylistic complexity, intensity, and presentation.
Daniel Fineman is a professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at Occidental
College in Los Angeles. His scholarly interests concern the intersection of philosophy, literature,
film, and analog photography. His most current projects concern the place of laughter in the
philosophy of Deleuze and non-representation in the lyrics of Emily Dickinson.
dand@oxy.edu
80
Flieger, Jerry Aline
Becoming -Alien: species being and life as we do not yet know it
Keywords: becoming-alien, life, potential
While it is worthwhile to situate Deleuze’s interest in the virtual --and its relation to becoming as
life process-- in the context of his work on Bergson, this approach may overlook an important
third term in the triad (developed in Difference and Repetition), where the virtual and the actual
are situated in relation to the notion of the potential. Deleuze and Guattari insist that while
virtuality and actuality are modes of the real, potentiality is open-ended, as it is not (yet) real,
opening the space of the possible. As such, it relates not only to Nietzsche’s notion of becoming
as ever-unfolding life, but also to Marx’s notion of species being as social potential, the capacity
of human life to differentiate itself from the molar stasis of ‘being’ in the traditional ontological
sense. The ‘potential’ musters differentiation as a means to transformation, in not only a ‘path of
desire,’ but also in ‘a line of flight’. . .
This emphasis on the role of the ‘potential’ in the concept of becoming reminds us that
Deleuze’s notion of becoming relates to the work of the Nobelist Ilya Prigione (Being and
Becoming), who insists on becoming as post-ontological being, a conjugation of different states
comprised of an infinite number of ‘between ‘ states, as in the nonlinear philosophical and
scientific paradigms of both fractality and infinite fragmentation (“Cantor’s dust”). In nonlinear
science, becoming is thus related to the “molecular”, rather than the molar, yielding a repetition
radically other than the notion of eternal return of the same, as it is inhabited and performed by
‘difference’.
The insistence on becoming as molecular relinks Deleuze and Guattari to another essential if
sometimes disavowed influence: Freud (as the theorist of a molecular unconscious, rather than
simply the purveyor of familial romance pilloried in Anti-Oedipus). For Freud’s notion of a
fractal replicated psyche follows its own flight from the psychology of the individual, and
focuses on the potential of the species, over and over again, in what can only be called a radically
new understanding of such notions as ‘humanity’ (not humanism) and gender (not sexuation),
All of Freud’s work, especially as elaborated by Lacan, is about becoming not only post-human,
but extra-or non-human, thanks to the encounter with the alien at the core of the ‘molecular
unconscious’, a radical alterity which Lacan terms the ‘extimate.’
My cultural reading of this emphasis engages our current species fascination with the
Alien…both as the extra national immigrant and the extraterrestrial cosmic Other (that Stephen
Hawking and other eminent physicists have urged our species seek out in space exploration in
this century). In other words, in our century ‘becoming’ implies the encounter with paradigms of
life as we do not know it, away from static humanism, anthrocentrism, and the dead ends of
nationalism and religious conflict that menace our newly penetrable borders and our new
frontiers…in both inner and outer space.
Jerry Aline Flieger, Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Theory, Rutgers
University. Jerry Aline Flieger teaches critical theory at Rutgers University, and has lectured
worldwide on the relation of Deleuze and psychoanalysis, including a keynote address at the 1997
Deleuze Studies conference in Australia. This presentation was the basis of her later book in
Zizek’s MIT Short Circuits series (Is Oedipus online?: Siting Freud after Freud), and includes a
study on the Deleuzean psyche as iterative desiring machine. She is currently at work on
“Undecidable Found Objects”: The Alien in the Human Psyche, which explores the cultural
fascination with ‘the extimate Other’, both as ‘strange attractor’ and as terrifying risk of
penetration. She has recently presented aspects of this work at Harvard, and in conferences in
Spain, Malta, and France.
jflieger@att.net
81
Ford, Russell
Poetry, Becoming, Sense: Jean Wahl and the Early Work of Deleuze
Keywords: literature, sense, dialectic
Deleuze’s early (1954) review of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence is now widely recognized as being
an important resource both for understanding Deleuze’s early philosophical preoccupations and
for understanding the link between these initial interests and his later work. The review is a
remarkably concise indication of Deleuze’s own position with regard to several of the major lines
of philosophical research current in France at the time: he indicates his adherence to Hyppolite’s
non-anthropological reading of Hegel (thereby rejecting the “existential” reading of Hegel
advanced by Kojeve and Sartre); he isolates dialectical development as what is objectionable in
even Hyppolite’s Hegel (thereby challenging the Communist reading of Hegel but also laying the
groundwork for Deleuze’s reassessment of Bergson as a more adequate thinker of becoming);
and, echoing Hyppolite’s insistence on philosophy as ontology, Deleuze obliquely signals his
agreement with the Heideggerian critique and transformation of Husserlian phenomenology.
These indications and signals are developed, transformed, and reevaluated in the years between
the review and the publication of Difference and Repetition and the Logic of Sense in the late Sixties.
An under-appreciated moment of the review is Deleuze’s indication that in the First Part of Logic
and Existence Hyppolite himself provides some of the theoretical underpinnings for a nondialectical ontology of sense. Deleuze writes, “in the first part (theory of language) and the
allusions throughout the book (to forgetting, to remembering, to lost sense), does not Hyppolite
ground a theory of expression where difference is expression itself, and contradiction its merely
phenomenal aspect?” While attention has been paid to this remark insofar as, on its face, it seems
to be a clear anticipation of Deleuze’s work over a decade later, Deleuze is also referring to the
recent work of Jean Wahl (especially his Poetry, Thought, Perception from 1948).
Unlike Hyppolite’s importance for Deleuze’s philosophical development, recognition and
appreciation of Wahl’s importance is still developing – despite Deleuze’s explicit recognition of
Wahl (alongside Sartre) as a major influence. This essay argues that the review of Logic and
Existence is an important document for understanding the way that Deleuze’s early philosophical
trajectory was shaped by both Wahl and Hyppolite. From the latter, Deleuze accepts the
ontological self-sufficiency of immanent language but rejects Hyppolite’s insistence on the
dialectical structure of the becoming of sense. In his review, Deleuze links this rejection to
Hyppolite’s discussions of poetry and the ineffable – to concrete, empirical language. What has
been under-appreciated is the extent to which this objection is rooted in Wahl’s particular
formulation of transcendental empiricism (which dates from the 1930s). From Wahl, Deleuze
accepts empiricism over any idealism (even dialectical) but, like Hyppolite, he rejects Wahl’s
insistence on a supplementary transcendence. This essay concludes that the problem of the
becoming of sense sketched in Deleuze’s review justifies the reactivation of Bergson’s intuitive
philosophy as methodologically adequate to an immanent (contra Wahl) and non-dialectical
(contra Hyppolite) philosophy.
Russell Ford is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Elmhurst College where he also
currently holds the Donald W. and Betty J. Buik Chair. He has edited a special issue of the
journal Angelaki on philosophy and comedy (forthcoming, 2017), co-edited (with Ian James) a
special issue of diacritics on the work of Pierre Klossowski (2005), and has published several essays
on Deleuze and other aspects of contemporary French philosophy. He is currently working on a
book on Deleuze’s early philosophical work entitled Between Immanence and Transcendence.
fordr@elmhurst.edu
82
Fox, Nick J and Pam Alldred
Becoming political: micropolitics, activism, policy – a workshop
Key words: activism, micropolitics, politics
The world of politics is of concern to us all, whether as activists, contributors to social or
environmental policy, or simply as citizens attempting to live a useful and worthwhile life. For
some academics, politics has also been part of our intellectual focus, as we have sought to
understand the connected topics of power and resistance. What is the nature of power and how
does it work? Why and how do people resist power, and where is resistance located? How may
we apply power and resistance to pursue social transformation?
Deleuze and Deleuzians do not frequently speak of politics, yet Deleuze’s work is deeply political.
This reticence is a direct consequence of the flat ontology underpinning a social ontology of
assemblages and affects, in which the events all around us – and nothing else – produce the social
world from minute to minute, year by year. By contrast, a conception of micropolitics is integral
to this social ontology. For Widder (2012: 125) ‘politics begins with micropolitics’, while Patton
(2000: 68) has pointed to the ‘politics of desire’ at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s project.
For these reasons, a Deleuzian politics needs to shift from a macro-sociology of governments
and states firmly back to the micropolitics of events. Power, in this flat ontology, is a
disseminated phenomenon, revealed and deployed at the very local level of actions and events,
rather than some kind of amorphous stuff that somehow permeates the social world. What
social science has called power and what it has called resistance are both aspects of the affective
flux between relations in particular assemblages; all events are sites in which both ‘power’ and
‘resistance’ may be discerned. Furthermore, the fluctuating character of assemblage micropolitics
means that ‘power’ and ‘resistance’ wax and wane, shift and reverse continually.
However, we would argue that micropolitically – rather than seeking power or resistance in
events – it is more important to assess the capacities that affect economies produce. The task is
consequently to bring to bear Deleuzian concepts of territorialisation and de-territorialisation,
becoming and lines of flight upon the daily actions and encounters between people, things and
social formations. We can ask of any affect: does it close down political capacities or open them
up?
The aim of this workshop is to explore the practical application of this understanding of politics
for our engagements with the world beyond the academic register, whether in activism, policy or
as citizens. It will use the workshop format to explore how to apply a micropolitics of events to
current issues, and start to formulate a ‘micropolitics of politics’, in which we are all becoming
political.
Length of Workshop: 60 minutes
Audience: This workshop will be of interest to those wishing to apply a DeleuzoGuattarian perspective to
activism, policy or to the academic analysis of politics, power and resistance.
Biographical note
Nick J. Fox is honorary professor of sociology at the University of Sheffield, School of Health
and Related Research, and has researched and written widely on postmodern and new materialist
social theory. Pam Alldred is based at Brunel University, London, UK in the Department of
Clinical Sciences. Her work is predominantly on gender, sexuality and youth work, informed by
post-structuralism, feminist theory, and new materialism. Alldred and Fox have been working
together since 2010 on projects developing new materialist and DeleuzoGuattarian analyses of
sexuality, masculinities and social inquiry. Their book ‘Sociology and the New Materialism’ is
published by Sage in 2016.
n.j.fox@sheffield.ac.uk
pam.alldred@brunel.ac.uk
83
Fransson, Elisabeth
The becoming young woman in prison
Key words: prisons, young women, the process of becoming
“Actor: It is not normal that young girls on your age are so violent!”
The courtroom is a powerful scene where forces between human and non - human bodies are
played out. Veronica, a young girl, is sitting there listening to voices interpreting her acts and
trying to find answers to the crime she committed. Affects, tones and rhythms fills the room, day
after day, before the judge concludes and a sentence made. The paper is constructed through
ethnographic fieldwork in a local Court in Norway and the following year in a prison for youths.
The paper starts with some particular details regarding the Norwegian penal system, but very
soon I move the text into ethical and methodological aspects due to my research, before
analysing Victoria’s case inspired by the deleuzian concept “the process of becoming” (Deleuze
1987).
Elisabeth Fransson: I have a Phd. in sociology and work as an ass. professor at KRUS, The
Correctional Service of Norway Staff Academy in Norway. My research field covers three areas;
youths in prisons, professional attitudes regarding prison officers work and prison architecture.
My interest for Deleuze started few years ago. I am in a process of understanding, but realize that
I have a long way to go. The fact that I do empiric research, meaning doing ethnographic
fieldwork within prisons, I meet a lot of challenges ethically, methodically and analytically. For
the moment I try to figure out ways to do prison research inspired by deleuzian concepts. The
seminar and the conference will maybe help me on the way.
Elisabeth.Fransson@krus.no
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Galesso Cardoso, Sílvia
From writing tasks to a becoming-writer
Keywords: argumentative writing, teacher-intercessor, becoming
The present author develops a doctoral project in the College of Education of the University of
São Paulo (USP) with the purpose of investigating how the teacher can function as an intercessor
to students, in order to contribute to their appropriation of the expressive and emancipatory
potentiality of writing. The proposed article for the Deleuze Studies Conference Rome 2016 is
part of this study: a cartographic analysis that examines a collection of argumentative texts
produced during a year of dialogical work between a student preparing for the University and his
teacher/interlocutor, with the objective of mapping out fields of knowledge that give visibility to
the potentials produced in the experience with the act of writing.
Since 1977, with the intent of establishing a more scrupulous method of selection for higher
education, the argumentative essay was adopted in Brazil as a mandatory requirement of
admission exams for universities, in which the candidates are demanded to elaborate an opinion
regarding a certain topic. Since then, academic researches have proven that dissertations such as
these do not establish a social communicative situation that favors authorship, due to the
candidate's concern with a positive evaluation, with being able to please his
interlocutor/evaluator, thus, tending to resort to clichés and predetermined structures - a position
that is also reinforced by the schematic, objective and impersonal approach practiced in most
preparatory courses, schools and textbooks to teach this textual genre and guarantee good results.
Faced with this standardizing tendency of the teaching of writing, to demonstrate their
knowledge of form seems to be more relevant to the candidate than using the text as a space that
permits the mobilization and construction of meaning.
The excessive preoccupation with others, on one hand, and the reproduction of formulas and
commonplaces, on the other, do not contribute to the constitution of a singular discourse, to the
point in which the student will not attempt to bring his own reality and ideas into the text,
restricted to what he presumes to be his interlocutor’s opinion. While we wait for a processual
selection that appropriately recognizes the student’s learning progress, the challenge is to develop
argumentative writing teaching methods capable of considering the admissions exam’s essays as a
situation of real communicative interaction, with the exercise of reflecting upon the writing itself
and its broadest social functions – far from being a mere formality. This
study
aims
to
comprehend how a student, with the exercise of writing and the intercession of the teacher, may
find gaps in the impositions and requirements of social life, the language itself, and, therefore,
elaborates texts in which it is possible to contemplate the experience of the author – his relations
with the world, with words and with himself. From this point of view, the preparation for the
admissions exams, a probationary moment of the 12 years of scholastic formation, may be more
than just a bureaucratic demand, it can be a becoming, a life-creating power that overrides
frightening norms of authentic expressions and pauperizing standards of existence.
Sílvia Galesso Cardoso: A doctoral student in the College of Education of the University of São Paulo
and a master in Clinical Psychology by the Center for Studies and Research of Subjectivity, of the
Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (2009), Sílvia Galesso is a Psychology (2002) graduate from the
same university. Her doctoral project investigates how the interaction with the teacher can contribute to
students appropriating themselves with the emancipatory and expressive powers of the act of writing. Her
master's dissertation thematizes literary production regarding the experience of life in the metropolis, and
her graduation thesis analyses the relation between subjectivity and the manner of expressing one's self in
writing. This interest for written expression has lead her professional experience in education and
communications projects with NGO's, formal schools and preparatory courses for college entrance
exams, in addition to giving writing classes to those who depend on writing for their educational and
professional life.
silviagalesso@gmail.com
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Garstenauer, Julia and Rudolf Mösenbacher
Immanence and the Regulative Use of Reason
Keywords: Immanence, Regulative Use of Reason, Becoming
The aim of the lecture is to analyse Deleuze's concept of immanence on the basis of his studies
on Kant with a special focus on the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic. Such an analysis is
important because of two main reasons: Firstly, while Deleuze / Guattari often put a special
focus on the text passage of the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic and especially on the
regulative use of reason (Deleuze 1984, 21-27; 1994, 168-221; 1990, 290-301; Deleuze / Guattari
1994, 56; 77), research frequently focuses on the Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts
of the Understanding and the Schematism-Chapter. Secondly, the interpretation of the Appendix
to the Transcendental Dialectic from the perspective of a philosophy of becoming can also give
new insights to the Kantian text passage which gets little attention and bears a lot of problems in
the Critique of Pure Reason as well as in the research field.
Kant develops in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic a conception that is in conflict
with the rest of the Critique and its orientation on a philosophy of form, because herein he poses
the question of the singular and material. This problem undergoes no detailed elaboration in the
Critique and an other kind of solution in the Critique of Judgement. But for the philosophy of
Deleuze / Guattari it becomes central. Deleuze points out that in Kantian philosophy it is not
about an identification or confusion in the idea “but rather an internal problematic objective
unity of the undetermined, the determinable and determination” (Deleuze 1994, 170). At the
same time he criticises that Kant merely postulates the purposiveness that should be caused by
the ideas. Therefor ideas cannot legitimate “the transcendental field of possible experience,
immanent to the ‘I’ (plane of immanence)” (Deleuze / Guattari 1994, 57). Contrary to Kant who
takes the three ideas as foundation of the metaphysica specialis, Deleuze tries to think dialectic
ideas in difference to empirical sentences although decisively influenced by them.
As a mode of an artistic research we will trace these crucial aspects, the relation between “the
transcendental field of possible experience” and “the three Ideas or illusions of transcendence”
(ibid, 57) very closely connected to Deleuze’s / Guattari’s machinic portrait of Immanuel Kant as
they have drawn in it in What is Philosophy? The drawing is the starting point of thinking in our
lecture. As experimental methodological procedure and in accordance with Deleuze’s / Guattari’s
approach of the history of philosophy as the art of the portrait (ibid, 55) a scientific and an
artistic text will be interwoven during the lecture.
References
Deleuze, Gilles (1984): Kant’s Critical Philosophy. The Doctrine of the Faculties, London
Deleuze, Gilles (1990): The Logic of Sense, London
Deleuze, Gilles (1994): Difference and Repetition, New York
Deleuze, Gilles / Guattari, Félix (1994): What is philosophy? New York
Julia Garstenauer has studied Philosophy and German Language and Literature at the University of
Graz. Since 2012 she writes her PhD at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Her
main fields of research are: aesthetics, body, performativity, haptic, painting. Currently she is part of the
research project „Bodytime – An interdisciplinary inquiry on regular body rhythm and its dysfunctions“
sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) at the University of Graz.
julia.garstenauer@uni-graz.at
Rudolf Mösenbacher BA BA MA studied History, Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Graz
and the University of Vienna. Since 2012 he works as scientific assistant at the Department of Philosophy
at the University of Graz. His main research topics are the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the
philosophy of science.
rudolf.moesenbacher@uni-graz.at
86
Gatti, Giuseppe
Media Ethology: notes on the becoming-animal through media
Drawing from Jacob Uexküll’s ethology, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari proposed an original
approach to life and subjectivation. As opposed to the Cartesian perspective, in A Thousand
Plateaus human and in-human agencies participate in a common trans-specific ecology made of
rhythmical and melodic cycles of perception-action. Notably Deleuze and Guattari dub
“becoming animal” this epistemological as well as phenomenological attitude towards life.
Stressing on the pre-individual, emergent and mechanical features of living agencies, the two
philosophers also provide an insightful bridge between art, science and technology. In fact, as
technical devices have re-calibrated or even re-invented human sensorium (Clark, 2004), in turn
today smart media have dramatically reached the status of intelligent systems. As the works of
Jussi Parikka and Sebastian Vehlken suggest, the becoming-animal of media (drones, robot
swarms, etc.) mirrors the becoming-media of animals (from carrier pigeons to bomb-dolphins),
blurring the boundaries between warfare and welfare technology. As for Rosi Braidotti such
“techno-bestiary” challenges the very idea of a zoe-egalitarian politics between human and inhuman life forms, in turn technological media have produced several narratives of this posthuman and bionic scenario.
In my paper I will explore the animal relationship between life and media. Rather than extending
human consciousness, I will argue that human-media convergence would extend the pre-personal
and ecological possibilities of life and art design. To support my hypothesis I will combine
strands from science and technology studies within the theoretical framework of A Thousand
Plateaus. Rather than simply sending messages, media as well animals are capable to produce
emergent territories that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, could transduce signals from
different environments and create new phenomenologies. Finally, I will provide a definition of
“media ethology” by discussing examples from Western past and present media narratives and
technological developments.
References
Braidotti Rosi, The Posthuman, New York, Polity, 2013.
Clark Andy, Natural-Born Cyborgs. Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2004.
Deleuze Gilles and Guattari Félix, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London,
Continuum, 2004.
Parikka Jussi, Insect Media. An Archaeology of Mind and Technology, Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press, 2010.
Vehlken Sebastian, “Zootechnologies. Swarming as a Cultural Techniques”, Theory Culture & Society,
June 2013, pp. 110-131.
Giuseppe Gatti is a Ph.D candidate at the department of Philosophy, Communication and
Performing Arts of Roma Tre University. His current research focuses on the relation between
mind and media through a cognitive, philosophical and media archaeological perspective. He
took part to several international conferences and in 2015 he received a DAAD scholarship for a
short-period research at the department of Media Studies of Humboldt University. Under the
pseudonym “Nexus” he is an active director and performer.
nexusmoves@gmail.com
87
Geyh, Paula
Dennis Oppenheim’s Conceptual Art as Urban Intervention: ‘The Smooth and the
Striated”
Key words: Dennis Oppenheim, conceptual art, urban intervention, the smooth and the striated
The paper explores five “sculptural interventions” into urban spaces by the conceptual artist
Dennis Oppenheim, whose work traverses the boundaries between art and architecture, buildings
and machines. It considers these works in the context of relational aesthetics and examines how
they transform the public spaces of the city and invite urban publics to reimagine themselves and
their relations to urban spaces in turn. The possibility of this transformation defines, I argue, the
virtual of the art-architecture space, as a smooth space, which in the actual, transforms itself into
a striated space, or rather into a combination of the smooth and the striated, as this type of space
is defined by Deleuze and Guattari, via Riemann in A Thousand Plateaus (“A Mathematical
Model”). The key conceptual point here is the conjunction of the smooth and the virtual (central
to Deleuze and Guattari) in thinking the role of art in urban spaces. I further argue that in
accordance with Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of art, this thinking is defined by the plane of
composition, which is distinguished by the combination of art and architecture in this plane, and
moreover a particular combination of both that is in dialogue with and in opposition to the
surrounding spaces of the city. As such, Oppenheim’s work is also a critique of the confounding
and oppressive striation imposed upon urban spaces, and an invitation to recompose them to
retain as much of the smooth in them as possible.
Oppenheim’s 1998 “Stage Set for a Film,” one of the works examined in this paper, is a Cubistlike, 5-story structure capped with a dangerously listing house. The shifting planes and volumes
of “Stage Set” emphasize the openness and malleability, smoothness, of urban space, as virtual
space. It suggests the potential of all urban spaces to become performance spaces and of urban
spectators to become actors in the improvisational dramas of urban life, in this respect retaining
the smooth of the virtual amidst the unavoidable striation of the actual in the city. But it also
directs our attention to the necessity of transforming the striated in the spaces we inhabit to
release the smooth to the degree possible. It is, as Deleuze and Guattari show, never possible
entirely: any actual space is always a combination of both the smooth and the striated. However,
the nature or structure of this combination may be different and may be transformed by
reterritorializing it to bring out the smooth as much as possible. This is, I argue, what
Oppenheim’s art urges and even enacts in urban spaces. As such the problem of the smooth and
striated in urban spaces becomes a political problem.
In general, Oppenheim’s work places itself in the field of thought experiments with the urban
virtual through artistic thought in order to explore the relationships between the smooth and the
striated in urban spaces, and to show how it is possible to maximally bring out the smooth in
them. And some of these experiments, this paper argues, are conducted by actually intervening in
and experimenting with urban spaces, and helping to extend the smooth there.
Paula Geyh Associate Professor of English Yeshiva University where she teaches 20th-century American
and European literature, literary and cultural theory, and film. She is the author of Cities, Citizens, and
Technologies: Urban Life and Postmodernity (Routledge 2009), and a co-editor of Postmodern American
Fiction: A Norton Anthology (1998). She is presently working on a book manuscript entitled Aesthetic
Interventions: Art, the City, and Social Change, and editing The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern
American Fiction (forthcoming in 2017). She has published articles on postmodern literature, film, and art
in such journals as Contemporary Literature, Criticism, Twentieth-Century Literature, PARADOXA, and
College Literature. She is a member of the advisory board of editors of the journal Postmodern Culture.
geyh@yu.edu
88
Gildersleeve, Ryan Evely and Aaron M. Kuntz
Becoming-Knowledge in Neoliberal Higher Education: Virtuality and Life in American
Academe
Keywords: assemblage, higher education, biopower
Maurizio Lazzarato (2015) theorizes American higher education as the quintessential example of
neoliberal governmentality and the debt economy of the 21st century. We take Lazzarato’s
analysis as a departure for our theorizing of the knowledge imperative of academia as it relates to
the purposes of American higher education. Working through various assemblages of the
knowledge imperative, we seek to territorialize/deterriotorialize the knowledge imperative,
illustrating tertiary education as a machine that plugs into (activates/is activated by/accelerates)
normative knowledge structures, reifying the neoliberal condition. Yet, despite an apparent
institutional stability, there remains a destabilizing periphery of such normative structures: the
counter-logics that push scholars to seek the periphery.
At stake in our analyses are the material configurations of tertiary education’s responsibility for
knowledge production. Historically, knowledge production in American higher education has
sustained transformations from theological to humanities to technical to basic science to applied
science to its current regime focused on workforce development (Cohen & Kisker, 2011). Yet,
each of these pasts remains, at least in part, present in American academe today. Here we
encounter the cycle of past and present, perhaps even future, that Deleuze (1995) deemed
"coexistent cycles of being." Such coexistent cycles extend from representative systems--the
machine renders a reality, a knowing, that can be known, understood according to its own sensemaking. Yet no cycle is ever complete and the differentiation of knowledges across these cycles
makes possible the contemporary virtual knowledge that takes center stage in the theater of
tertiary education of today.
Assemblage 1: Virtuality
With the above as a backdrop, we present the faculty performance review as an assemblage,
noting that in contemporary American universities it is common for administrations to require
the use of data management software to record and track faculty productivity. These digital
systems digitize research into statistically significant reports (numbers of publications, journal
impact factors, citation indexes, etc.). Institutionally, the content of the publication is of no
concern. As an assemblage of knowledge production, these reports stand-in as representations of
the knowledge produced by a faculty member. Knowledge is rendered as purely-virtual.
Assemblage 2: Life
Given the virtual knowledge of the theater of tertiary education, faculty members exist (and
thrive) as their publication records grow. The American life sustained by virtual knowledge is one
of hyper-productivity for productivity’s sake. Life matters in its quantity, not its quality. If the
knowledge imperative is meant to sustain life, just what kind of life is the knowledge imperative,
in the neoliberal regime, meant to sustain? What, then, is the (renewed) purpose of American
higher education?
Assemblage 3: Becoming-knowledge
As the performance review moves discursive-material knowledges into virtual knowledge, its uses
in the sustaining of life – of an academic bios committed to quantity over quality – expand the
virtual knowledge regime into the bios itself. That is, the performance review becomes the life of
a faculty member; the merit or worth of this life is thus systematically documented for
consumption. Any given faculty member, from an institutional perspective, becomes her or his
performance review.
89
References
Cohen, A. & Kisker, C. (2011). The Shaping of American Higher Education, 2nd Edition. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Deleuze, G. (1995). Difference and Repetition. P. Patton (trans). New York: Columbia University
Press.
Lazzarato, M. (2015). Governing by Debt. New York: Semiotext(e).
Dr. Ryan Evely Gildersleeve is Associate Professor and Chair of Higher Education at the
University of Denver. His research investigates the social/political contexts of educational
opportunity for Latino immigrant communities in the U.S. His latest project theorizes
posthumanist higher education in the era of neoliberal governmentality. He is the author of
Fracturing Opportunity: Mexican Migrant Students and College-going Literacy and co-author of
Qualitative Research for Equity in Higher Education. He was a 2012-2014 National Academy of
Education Fellow. Gildersleeve earned his MA in Higher Education and Organizational Change
and his PhD in Education from UCLA. He is a graduate of Occidental College.
Contact information:
1999 E. Evans Ave.
Denver, CO 80210
Ryan.gildersleeve@du.edu
Dr. Aaron M. Kuntz is Associate Professor and Department Head of Educational Studies at the
University of Alabama. His research interests include materialist methodologies, academic
activism, critical geography, and philosophy of education. His recent book, The Responsible
Methodologist: Inquiry, Truth-Telling, & Social Justice (Left Coast Press) contests neoliberal
procedurism in educational inquiry through a critical engagement with Foucault’s lectures on
parrhesia and critical materialism. He co-authored Qualitative Inquiry for Equity in Higher
Education (Jossey-Bass) and co-edited the volume Citizenship Education: Global Perspectives,
Local Practices (Routledge). He received his doctorate in education from the University of
Massachusetts Amherst.
amkuntz@ua.edu
90
Gilge, Cheryl
Becoming economical: responsibilization or investment of desire?
Keywords: microfascism, neoliberal, desire
The contemporary political-economic milieu is frequently described as ‘neoliberal’ and organized
by a set of economic policies that coalesce around notions of ‘freedom.’ Freedom of the market
via deregulation, reduction in government services through public/private partnerships and
divestiture, as well as freedom of the entrepreneurial individual to pursue interest and
opportunity via rationality. At once economic, political and social, the formulation of the
neoliberal regime and the degree to which the individual has agentic capacity to act revives the
structure versus agency debate. The attendant top-down structural forces determine norms and
regulations, while subject is always already rational in the choices made within this milieu as a
neutered act of ‘freedom of choice.’
While the literature focusing on the economic forces and structuring logic of this neoliberal
milieu is extensive, understanding the subject within this field often takes a secondary position.
These articulations range from the citizen seduced by notions of freedom to a ‘two-bit actor’
performing a script, or in non-western contexts, neoliberal’s individual freedom is an
inappropriate concept for subjects of authoritarian governments. More recently, however, the
work of Wendy Brown and Brian Massumi reenergize this discussion by engaging Michel
Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics as the point of divergence: the rational, responsibilized individual
(Brown), or the affective modulation of the nonrational ‘dividual’ (Massumi). While Brown’s
excursus struggles to see productive potential for a political program within a neoliberal milieu,
Massumi sketches out a coherent ethical paradigm and politics that moves beyond self-interest
and into unchartered neoliberal territory of ‘sympathy’ as a motivating force of action.
Yet there is much middle ground between these two poles and the conditions under which the
individual participates. This paper makes two small, yet critical, insertions into the present
discourse. First, many everyday decisions and choices occupy a murkier terrain not predicated on
nonrational sympathetic relations, contra Massumi. And yet, many actions do not neatly fit into
the ‘responsibilized’ servitude, contra Brown. Rather, self-interested choices are forward looking
and motivated by end goals, yet decision-making is often a faulty, irrational process. Leading to
the second point, reason is carved out of the irrational, to recall Deleuze, and the ‘errors’ that
generate faulty decisions and investments stem not from being ‘duped’, forced to comply or ‘selfdeciding’ affective responses, but are rationalized as the right choice. This paper argues that
Deleuze and Guattari’s underutilized concept ‘microfascism’: acquiescing freedom for a ‘better’
future or a desire to identify with larger group formations, is a powerful analytic to better
understand these forward-looking investments of desire within this neoliberal paradigm. Neither
a nonrational sympathetic responses nor conditioned, responsibilized choices to uphold freedom,
they are faulty, yet purposeful, choices from which one might reasonably ask, “Why did the
masses desire their own repression?”
Cheryl Gilge, Ph.D. Affiliate lecturer, University of Washington
Cheryl Gilge received her PhD from the College of Built Environments at the University of
Washington. Her research draws upon the philosophy of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari and
examines mediated urban experience, the role of technology and the tensions that emerge
between social structures and individual practices that give shape to the social field.
cgilge@gmail.com
91
Giudici, Paolo and Andi Spicer
A Starling (PERFORMANCE)
Keywords: Mozart, becoming-bird, fold
PAPAGENO. Not a bird, I hope!
(The Magic Flute, act 1, scene 1)
On 27 May 1784, Mozart records in his expense book the purchase of a starling for 34 Kreuzer
and below notates the bird’s song with the comment: ‘Das war schön!’ (Deutsch 1966: 225). The
musical fragment matches the Third Movement theme of the of the Piano Concerto n. 17 in G
Major (K. 453), except for a fermata and G sharp. Unlike his dog Wimperl and horse Kleper, the
starling never received a name (Deleuze 2001: 28) but at his death, Mozart celebrated a funeral,
buried him in the small garden he was renting on the Landstrasse in Vienna, and recited this elegy
at his graveside: ‘A Little fool lies here / Whom I held dear -- / A starling in the prime / of his
brief time / Whose doom it was to drain / Death’s bitter pain …’ (Mozart, 4 June 1787 in
Hildesheim 1991: 206-7)
The narrative of Mozart’s starling and the K. 453 theme, which is ‘a variation from the start’
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 340; West and King 1990: 106), are the starting point of the music
video we intend to present and a new agencement in our continuing artistic research. Situating
Mozart at the beginning of modern musical time (Berger 2008), A Starling superimposes musical
and filmic layers to dramatize concepts that Deleuze explicitly recognises in Mozart: the micro
block of becoming-bird/becoming-music (Deleuze and Parnet 2007: 2-3; Girdlestone 2011: 252),
the diagonal (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 327) and the crystal of space-time (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004: 384-6). In particular, our music video is constructed on the concept of fold and
unfold (Deleuze 2006: 40, 42) that better specify becoming in this historical and artistic milieu:
hands become bird, become song, become speech, become music, becoming hand …
References
Berger, Karol. 2008. Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow. An Essay on the Origins of Musical
Modernity. Oakland, CA: University of California Press
Deleuze, Gilles. 2001. Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. New York: Zone Books.
———. 2004. 'The Method of Dramatization', in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974,
New York: Semiotext(e), 94–116.
———. 2006. The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. London and New York: Continuum.
——— and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. London and New York: Continuum.
——— and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deutsch, Otto Eric. 1966. Mozart: A Documentary Biography. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Girdlestone, Cuthbert. 2011. Mozart and His Piano Concertos. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Hildesheimer, Wolfgang. 1991. Mozart. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
West, Meredith ]. and Andrew P. King. 1990. ‘Mozart’s Starling’, American Scientist, 78 (MarchApril), 106-14.
92
Paolo Giudici holds a degree in philosophy (Univeristy of Padova, Italy) and in photography
(Royal College of Art, London, UK). Along side his artistic practice, he is associate researcher at
the Orpheus Institute (Ghent, Belgium) and PhD candidate in Critical and Historical Studies at
the Royal College of Art with a thesis about Deleuzian concepts in John Everett Millais’ Ophelia.
He recently published the chapter ‘Experimental Systems and Criticism’ in Experimental Systems:
Future Knowledge in Artistic Research.
paolo.giudici@orpheusinstituut.be
Andi Spicer (born 1959 in Birmingham, UK), is a British electroacoustic classical music
composer who uses electronics in his compositions. His music is published by Edition Tre
Fontane in Munster, Germany. His compositions have been featured at festivals in the US,
Mexico, UK, France, Sweden, Austria and South Africa. He is largely self-taught, although he
took private lessons in composition and music theory South African composer Martin Watt and
composition workshops with British composer Michael Finnissy. His music uses improvisation,
graphic notation, electronics and emphasises surface textures, but is also influenced by southern
African and Asian world music. He is associated with the Gallery III group of artists, musicians
and multi-media artists in Johannesburg, South Africa, which included artist and musician James
de Villiers and Beat poet Sinclair Beiles, and is a member of the New Music Brighton and
London Forum composer collectives in the UK.
andispicer@me.com
93
Golańska, Dorota
Aesthetic entanglements—art and a becoming of the virtual
Keywords: art, affect, aesthetics, rhythm, Richard Serra
Drawing on Deleuze’s definition of art as production of sensations, in my presentation I will look
at certain examples of artistic production by Richard Serra, situating them within the new
materialist philosophical framework. In this context I will critically examine the relevance of
tensions between the signifying and asignifying registers in art for the theorization of life and
creativity and argue for a more encompassing approach to artistic experience/encounter as
relying on the complex entanglement of the virtual and the actual. Instrumental for this analysis
will be the concept of rhythm (i.e., a dynamic coupling of movements), which is here conceived
of as a creative force, the intensive non-conscious dimension of experience, a vibration, an
activity inherent to all matter. While remaining immanent to chaos as its dynamic force, rhythm is
also about constant ordering out of it and as such it constitutes a part of all dynamic processes of
becoming-other. Consequently, in artistic experience, it oscillates between the molar and the
molecular, the signifying and the asignifying registers, the actual and the virtual, etc. Importantly,
in this paper I also elaborate on the connection between rhythm and processes of remembering
and forgetting. This is because rhythm is also about making and unmaking life routines and
habits; it is an artistic life-force, a constant movement, a life itself. The presentation also offers a
brief critical reflection on how these rhythmic becomings rely on and are productive of bodily
memories and embodied knowledges, which both constrain and activate transversal thought and
creation.
Dorota Golańska (PhD in Humanities) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of American
and Media Studies and affiliate researcher at the Women’s Studies Centre, University of Łódź
(Poland). Her research activities are in the field of interdisciplinary gender studies. She is
interested in feminist theories of art and visual culture, criticism of representation, feminist new
materialism, as well as in memory studies. Her current research focuses on the issue of affective
memory, phenomenology of architecture, synaesthesia, and aesthetics of trauma.
dorg@uni.lodz.pl
94
Grogan, Mark
Places Vitalise: Deleuze and Becoming-subject
Keywords: vitality, urban places, event
This paper is about the conditions that make life possible within urban places. We cannot not be
in place; the urban environment, which many of us experience on a daily basis, influences our
becoming even if we are not aware of it. Common-sense suggests that we should consider an
urban place as a substance – as a pre-existing entity that has a more or less fixed identity (on a
moment to basis), which can then be described by attribute from the point of view of a
generalised subject. The place has vitality; the place is vital. That is, place is a substanceattributive scheme comprised of nouns and adjectives. Deleuze provides an alternative, a way
through, and in doing so, can help transform our conception of place and the vitality within it.
The ‘tree is green’ becomes the tree greens; the ‘place is vital’ becomes the place vitalises. The
emphasis is placed on verbs and its imperative form, to green, to vitalise. As the ontological
priority of substance shifts to event, vitality and, along with it, place (and void) becomes a Stoic
incorporeal, a becoming. This is echoed in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense; however, the concept of
event is also prevalent across Deleuze’s entire oeuvre, including his works on cinema, painting,
and literature. Drawing on this substantial body of work, this paper sets out to consider vitality of
urban places as an event and to trace its implications. In doing so, it links the concept of event to
places through information theory and the pre-personal arousal shifts instigated by a biological
need to familiarise ourselves with a changing environment. And, so, this provides our point of
departure, in that built-form or buildings and structures, and the space between, will be
considered to frame the movement of a different sort of built-form: the dynamic movement of
people-as-objects or, rather, people-form. The actualisations of the changing frequencies and
intensities of arousal creates an affect; and these in-betweens of becoming-past and becomingfuture provide the basis of a new concept of vitality, based on an awareness of the present, as
conditioned by the event of becoming-subject. Vitality, thence, becomes synonymous with event.
Places become virtual and multiple; places within places, rather than place being a singularbounded space. The implication for urban design praxis is that vitality is not just about busyness:
busyness with a lack of variation, a lack of arousal shifts, for example, can lead to dead places; in
comparison, less busyness, with more variation, can be livelier.
Mark Grogan is a PhD candidate at the University of New England, Australia, under the
supervisor of Dr. Stephen Wood and A/Prof. Robert Baker. He teaches at Curtin
University/OUA (Planning theory) and tutors at the University of New England (Urban Design
and Architecture, Retail Planning and Geography, Planning for Built-form and Land-use, and
Transport Planning). Mark’s research is focused on developing a concept of vitality by examining
the theoretical underpinnings of urban places, which draws, in particular, on philosophers such as
Deleuze, Whitehead, James, and Bergson. For this work, he was awarded the prestigious
Australian Post-graduate Award (APA scholarship) for displaying exceptional research potential.
Mark Grogan B.Ec (Adel.), M.URP (Curtin) PhD Candidate
Geography & Planning, School of Behavioural, Cognitive & Social Sciences
University of New England NSW 2351
mgrogan3@myune.edu.au
95
Guadagni, Giulia
Anti-Oedipus and Lacan: a reading hypothesis
Keywords: anti-Oedipus, Lacan, desire
This paper focuses on Lacan’s influence on the book Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and
schizophrenia by Deleuze and Guattari. Lacan is an essential reference in the authors’ dissertation
on psychoanalysis. Supported by the critics, my hypothesis is that desire is the main topic which
relates Lacan to Anti-Oedipus. How are desiring-machines related to Lacan’s desire theory,
particularly to jouissance?
In their work, Deleuze and Guattari mention only few of Lacan’s writings: Remarque sur le
rapport de Daniel Lagache, Position de l’inconscient, Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir
dans l’inconscient freudien, La science et la vérité and Le mythe individuel du névrosé; most of
which had been published in the Écrits, four years before the publication of Anti-Oedipus.
Moreover they quote directly only one seminar: L’envers de la psychanalyse (1970). Therefore the
Lacan they refer to seems to belong to a specific period: the early sixties. However, especially
Guattari had been following Lacan’s lessons, and it is likely that both of them knew much more
of his work than they directly refer to. Therefore, my questions are: which seminars and writings
are implicitly mentioned in Anti-Oedipus? Which part of Lacan’s thinking are Deleuze and
Guattari referring to?
While criticizing psychoanalysis, the authors seem to point to Lacan as an exception: «Il revient à
Lacan […]»;«[le] plus profond novateur en psychanalyse». Despite recognizing his attempt to
«[sauver] la psychanalyse de l'oedipianisation […]», they do not agree with all of his theses and
involve him in the criticism, accusing him of maintaining the connection between desire, Lack
and Law, which are two of the «trois erreurs sur le désir».
As desire is the main topic relating Anti-Oedipus to Lacan, we may ask: which is the stake of this
matching? How to relate Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis to the metamorphosis that Lacan’s
theory of desire has gone through over the years? I will follow these issues referring to different
interpretations, trying to figure out whether there is some overlap between Deleuze and
Guattari’s desire without lacking and Lacan’s jouissance.
References
David-Ménard M., Deleuze et la psychanalyse, PUF, Paris 2005.
Deleuze G., Guattari F., L’Anti-Œdipe. Capitalisme et schizophrénie, De Minuit, Paris 1972; tr.
it. a cura di A. Fontana, L’anti-Edipo. Capitalismo e schizofrenia, Einaudi, Torino 1975; eng. tr.
Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1983.
Lacan J., Écrits, Seuil, Paris 1966; ed. it. a cura di G. Contri, Scritti, vol. II, Einaudi, Torino 2002.
Soler C., Lacan, l’inconscient réinventé, PUF, Paris, 2009; tr. it. di M. T. Maiocchi e F. Marone,
Lacan, l’inconscio reinventato, Franco Angeli, Milano 2010.
Vandoni F., Redaelli E., Pitasi P. (a cura di), Legge, desiderio, capitalismo. L’anti-Edipo tra Lacan
e Deleuze, Mondadori, Milano 2014.Biographical statements
Giulia Guadagni (Milano/1990) is a PhD student in Philosophy at the Department of
Humanistic Studies at the University of Calabria. Her research project consists of a comparison
between Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault’s thinking, focusing particularly on the relation
between subjectification and truth. She achieved her Master’s Degree in Philosophy at the
University of Palermo, with a dissertation on the concept of regime of truth in Foucault’s
writings of the latest seventies and the early eighties.
guadagni.giulia@gmail.com
96
Guerbo, Maririta
Becoming and creation of new peoples: for a politic of story-telling
Keywords: story-telling fonction, art, biopolitic
I’d like to analyze the differents places and roles of what Deleuze defines “story-telling function”
in the last period of his production. Notably, to test its potentials openings.
This machine-concept belongs to a serie of instruments that display the deleuzian debt to
bergsonian philosophy. Story-telling finds in fact its first function inside The two sources: to believe
in false tales represents for men the first form of possible salvation from the burdening rigour of
intelligent representations. Human presence in the world depends upon delirious fictions to
which men can rely on. In Deleuze, the cinematographic and literal construction of fiction
become the admission to experimentations of new lifes and, correspondingly, the only salvation
from the endless rumble of opinion. Endlessness of Life and the consequent creation of new life
forms depend on the rupture with true-false oppositive criterion; they take a concrete shape as a
new criterion: everything that establish a new form is true, while the form of the false that
Reason would impose us to exclude doesn’t have consistency and therefore cannot be valued.
But a similar destruction of the truth criterion is inextricably linked to an act of scandal inside the
public space: only story-telling lets us value information.
For making the radical political effect inside story-telling function explicit, Deleuze and Guattari
define it in relation with the creation of a new people, inside of the same theoretical context
where becomings will be defined in relation to the constitution of minority populations.
It is exemplar about this the cinematographic story-telling that fulfilled in “third-world”,
“minority” cinema. Rocha, Chanine, Perrault don’t confront themselves with a people that has
the right to call himself as such, and would be an order-words and images propeller where one
would continuously recognize himself. Conversely, they find themselves facing just the necessity
of domination. The act of story-telling therefore produces collective utterances that paradoxically
miss a pronunciating subject, “raising misery to a strange positivity”. In literature the style,
defined by Deleuze as a placing the language in becoming, as the creation of a new language in
the Language, is once again entwined with story-telling. Emotions felt from the style of a great
author coincide with the impact between a population of linguistic majority and new vital
populations, to whom the author managed to give legitimacy.
Maririta Guerbo: I’m an italian Master 2 student at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and
I’m currently working under the direction of Prof. D.Lapoujade. At the moment I’m working on
a senior thesis about G.Deleuze, notably about the metamorphosis that stir the relationship
instaured by the author between reality and language in differents moments of his lifework. This
path “between sens, sign and sensation” impose a comparison between Deleuze and structural
linguistic: the opening of creating voices and becoming minorities will progressively replace the
description of the description of sens-producing mechanisms.
maririta1@hotmail.it
97
Guercio, Francesco
Deposing capture via Gilles Deleuze.Virtuality, becoming and life: tools for an ethic of
pure immanence
Keywords: capture, ethic, immanence
In A Thousand Plateaus, while describing the three-headed apparatus of capture constituted by Land,
Work & Money, Deleuze and Guattari write in italics: “the mechanism of capture contributes from the
outset to the constitution of the aggregate upon which the capture is effectuated” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987, p. 446)8.
Taking this statement as a starting point, in this paper I shall argue that the apparatus of capture as
outlined by Deleuze & Guattari can be effectively understood, and thus tackled, as an omni-pervasive
device at work on different spheres of life as such. By sketching a genealogy of capture, while stressing its
cardinal operational feature as the relentless production of the captured, my paper exhibits the
performative roles the capture device plays on life, and shows how it must be seen functioning as both the
management of differentiation and the hypostatization of difference. The aim of this research is to
examine to what extent the paramount concepts of becoming, virtuality and life, as assembled by Deleuze,
might - or might not - help us decode and deactivate the capture device and thence retrace a potentially
liberating ethic of pure immanence that would deal with the performativity of that very device.
Firstly, I shall argue that capture operates violently as a crucial power device at work to the same extent in
the process of thinking, as informed by the metaphysics of substance and property, and in the realm of
acting as conducted by specific modes of government of the self and others. It will be argued that not only
are the most striking outcomes of such a capture device to be found in distinctive domains of life - for
instance, the capture device as a metaphysics of the origin (ἀρχή), as an ontology of a stable being, as an
ethic of the accountable subject and as a politics of subjugated selves – but that the very inception and
maintenance of distinctions in those domains are produced by the capture device itself.
Secondly, a sketched genealogy of Deleuze’s concepts of becoming, virtuality and life, followed through a
heretic ascendance lit by Spinoza and Nietzsche, and lately reignited by Agamben, shall be given.
Finally, it shall be exhibited to what extent the latter triad of concepts - be it awoken and driven to its
stretched possibilities “even if this comes at the price of turning it against itself” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1994, p.95)9 - is somehow to be used as a tool for engendering an emancipatory twist in the capture
device and by what means a thorough understanding and an untimely usage of the concepts of virtuality,
becoming and life via Deleuze may depict an an-archical metaphysics, an ontology of becoming, an ethic
of potential subjects and a politics of self-liberating selves as the multiple modes of one, immanent whole,
which is purely “une vie...” (Deleuze, 2003, pp. 359-63)10.
Francesco Guercio: I am an Italian citizen living, researching and translating in New York and a PhD
candidate in Philosophy at European Graduate School. In 2012, after spending a year teaching as an
Italian T.A. at Bucknell University, USA, I earned an M.A. in Philosophy summa cum laude at La Sapienza
University with a dissertation on “A genealogical critique of ressentiment in Friedrich Nietzsche”. In 2014,
I presented the intervention “The usage of life” on the later developments in Giorgio Agamben’s
philosophy at the 1st G.S. Conference at Pennsylvania State University.
My current work focuses on the ontology of property and the concept of capture. Along with writing my
dissertation, I am completing the Italian translation of the book Crack Wars by Avital Ronell and
researching on Reiner Schürmann’s unpublished lecture notes at the New School for Social Research.
Address: 397, 17th street, Brooklyn, NY, 11215, USA
francesco.guercio@egs.edu
In French:“le mécanisme de capture fait déjà partie de la constitution de l'ensemble sur lequel la capture s'effectue.” DELEUZE
Gilles & GUATTARI Félix, Mille plateaux, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1980, p. 552
9 The whole quote in French is: “réveiller un concept endormi, (de) le rejouer sur une nouvelle scène, fût-ce au prix de le tourner
contre lui-même.” DELEUZE Gilles & GUATTARI Félix, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris,
1991, p. 81.
10 DELEUZE, Gilles, Immanence: une vie... in Deux régimes des fous. Textes et entretiens. Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris,
2003, pp. 359-63, originally in Philosophie, n° 47, septembre 1995, p. 3-7.
98
8
Guéron, Rodrigo
Duchamp´s bird: reading readymades with Deleuze and Guattari
Keywords: Duchamp, Deleuze/Guattari, readymade
In this article, we examine Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s motives for utilizing the “concept”
of the readymade, as created by Marcel Duchamp. We explore the context in which Duchamp
was led to appropriate an object, sign it with a pseudonym, and redefine it for presentation in an
artistic exhibition. We will examine the readymade as an act, an action, a type of “turnaround”
that redefines and reinstitutes senses and meanings. This is a decisive act in redefining what
makes “art” or “an artist” – even as Duchamp rejects the label “artist” – that removes itself
completely from notions of “the autonomy of the work of art” and of “artistic genius,” both of
which are decisive for modernism. Although Deleuze and Guattari do not insert their treatment
of the readymade directly into a discussion of “autonomy” and “genius,” they take it as a concept
that names a “turnaround” identified with the artistic act itself. It is, in other words, a movement
in which matter becomes “expressive material” and constitutes a “block of sensations.” “Blocks
of sensations” are how Deleuze and Guattari define art: as a block formed by percepts and
affects. But this is not a definition that is limited to “art” as a specific field of knowledge and
doings; on the contrary, the readymade is itself this “turnaround” which causes a series of
qualities and means of expression to emerge from a given material. These qualities and means of
expression constitute an ethos, or a “refrain”(ritournelle). Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari affirm
that “territory [is] a result of art”, and that “art is fundamentally poster, placard”, which the artist
is the first to demarcate as a “house.” Here, there is a curious description that repeats in both
texts in which the authors refer to the readymade: “1837: Of the Refrain” in A THOUSAND
PLATEAUS, and “Percept, Affect, and Concept” in WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? In this second
book, they examine a species of bird called “Scenopoetes dentirostris” which chews the leaves
off a tree and then turns them over so that their lighter-shaded side contrasts with the earth. The
bird thereby creates a stage for itself, and puts on a spectacle, a song-and-dance performance.
The bird’s leaf turning is, for Deleuze and Guattari, an exemplary case of a readymade: it is
matter that becomes “expressive material.” As in the case of the readymade FONTAINE, the
overturned urinal that Duchamp signed as “R. Mutt,” these marks are like signatures that,
through their expressiveness, determine a possession. This movement of appropriation thereby
determines a “having” that comes before “being,” not in the sense that things essentially belong
to subjects, but rather in the sense that they come to belong to the subjects produced through
these territorial agencies. Duchamp and his readymade thereby become allies in describing a key
point of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking. They describe art as a pre-human force, a creative act
in autopoietic immanence: a world that we create for ourselves, torn from the Chaosmos.
Rodrigo Guéron is a Professor at the Art Institute of the State University of Rio de Janeiro
(UERJ). He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UERJ, and Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from
the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Author of Da Imagem ao Clichê, do Clichê ao
Imagem. Deleuze, Cinema e Pensamento (From Image to Cliché, From Cliché to Image:
Deleuze, Cinema, and Thought), he recently held a post-doctoral fellowship at Université Paris
Ouest (Nanterre/La Defense), researching the relationship of Deleuze and Guattari’s
political philosophy with that of Marx. He is a cinema and video director and screenwriter.
rgueron@uol.com.br
99
Gürel, Zeynep
Autoethnographic Reflections on Becoming a “Physics in Nature Course” Researcher
Keywords: Autoethnographic Reflections, Outdoor Physics, Education
The aim of this study is to argue my autoethnographic reflections on becoming a researcher of
Physics in Nature Course. This course has been a part of the physics education program at
Marmara University, which is a state university in Istanbul, Turkey. It is a course for last
semester students to experience one or two night nature camping around practical and theoretical
framework since 2006.
Physics education mostly, takes place in a traditional classroom, runs by an instructor with a
hierarchical relationship between instructors and students. Our camping experience however,
forces us to move beyond the structural and personal obstacles and to create a new learning
environment in nature, integrating indoor and outdoor settings.
Unpredictable conditions of wild environments effect and change our educational approach.
Throughout the Physics in nature course we experience so many events, involve with physical as
well as emotional conditions, but we can bring only a few of them to classroom settings to
discuss and solve. These problems also need close collaboration between academic researchers
and civilian defense volunteers to become clear and apparent.
The complexity and ambiguity of these problems pushed me to the edge of the conventional
educational research techniques. Throughout the course studies, I struggled with both the
comparative analysis of the similarities and differences of life experiences in nature, and the
positive qualitative research method would not satisfy the demand. Our efforts to put into
methodology the nine years practice of Physics in Nature courses’ constantly occurring processes
and patterns brought us to embrace ‘Deleuzo-Guattarian’ philosophy.
I have many responsibilities in these Physics in Nature courses such as, instructor, educational
researcher, research adviser, coordinator with the civilian defense volunteers and university.
Among alternative research methodologies, autoethnography dominates my becoming a “Physics
in Nature Course” researcher.
The results of the study came out of the researchers’ nine year diary, observations notes, video
and photographs. I tried to answer the following question; what are the similarities or the gaps
between conventional educational research and the alternative methods.
Zeynep Gürel: I am an associate professor of physics education at the Marmara University.
Prior to joining the faculty at Marmara University, I was a physics researcher at Istanbul
University. I am also Search and Rescue Team volunteer and Civilian Defense Students Club
Consultant at Marmara University. Some of the elective courses I opened are as following:
Disaster Consciousness for Society, Physics in Nature: Camping and Visiting Practices. I have
been a pioneer in outdoor physics domain in Turkey. I have also coordinated
an
interdisciplinary project with the aim to create a learning community in rural region between
2008-2010.
zgurel@marmara.edu.tr
100
Hansen, Sandrine Rose Schiller
The Fatigue of Habit
Keywords: habit, fatigue, becoming, organic contemplation
When Deleuze in the later preface to Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory
of Human Nature writes: “we are habits, nothing but habits – the habit of saying ‘I’”
philosophical reflections on habit reaches a peak significance as the response to the ancient
maxim know thyself. If habit, as Deleuze suggests, is the answer to the question: “what are we?”,
reflections on habit must inevitably serve as diagnosis of human life and becoming. As the
organic placeholder of repetition habit is at the very heart of Deleuze’s thinking. In Difference
and Repetition Deleuze determines the essence of habit as contraction. This passive synthesis,
defined as contemplation, is the very contraction of life and the foundation of temporal
continuity as such. Even the smallest composite unit is according to Deleuze a product of this
passive synthesis, therefore must every organism be understood as an intertwinement of
thousands of components habits, or a polyphonic choir of needs singing of past contemplations
and future expectations.
Although Deleuze defines habit as the foundation of psychic life and the lived present he writes
that “we are made up of fatigues as much as of contemplations.” Fatigue appears to be a kind of
limit where the contemplative soul “can no longer contract what it contemplates” and “the
moment at which contemplation and contraction come apart.” In this era of self-help books,
with its increasing focus on the plastic potential of the individual, it is relevant to ask if there is a
threshold within contemplation, a moment of exhaustion, and if so, how we should qualify this
organic limit over against the vital motor of becoming, i.e. the “passion of repetition”. To
understand phenomena of compulsive repetition, psychic indifference and the persistence of
certain kinds of trauma, Catherine Malabou suggests in The New Wounded that what we need is
a book called “Indifference and Repetition”. It is within in this intersection between Malabou’s
attempt to think negative plasticity and Difference and Repetition this paper sets out to
investigate if Deleuze’s notion of fatigue can be seen as a limit of organic plasticity, and further in
perspective of the compulsion to repeat to ask how fatigue and passion face each other in the
contemplative contraction of habits psychic life rests upon.
Sandrine Rose Schiller Hansen: PhD-fellow (Research Foundation – Flanders) at the Higher
Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Belgium.
SandrineRoseSchiller.Hansen@hiw.kuleuven.be
101
Harmer, Colleen
The politics of becoming Australian: citizenship, power and assumptions of Australianness in Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond
Keywords: citizenship, assemblages of enunciation, power
As an Australian by descent I am exempt, along with ‘natural born’ Australians, from being
required to take the Australian Citizenship Test. Immigrants to Australia are not so privileged. In
order to fulfil the requirements for the conferral of Australian citizenship, immigrants must prove
they have ‘adequate knowledge of Australia and the responsibilities and privileges of Australian
Citizenship’ (Australian Border Force). This begs the question, what does it mean to be an
Australian citizen? Such an enquiry is not new, but perhaps Deleuze and Guattari can help us
look at it differently. This paper offers new insights into the relationship between the virtuality
and the actuality of citizenship in the Australian context using Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of
assemblages of enunciation as a framework. Through an examination of Australian Citizenship:
Our Common Bond, a document produced by the government for the purpose of educating
prospective citizens on what it means to be Australian today, this paper offers a new perspective
on the power relations informing the debate around immigration and citizenship in Australia.
The analysis of this document is undertaken in four key steps: identifying key machines
comprising the assemblage of enunciation; examining political, historical, social and temporal
components of these machines; determining how these elements configure specific implicit
presuppositions; and identifying the machines’ semiotic and subjective productions. In doing so,
I address a key schizoanalytic question - what implicit presuppositions and sentiments underly a
given machinic arrangement and how do they affect the functioning of power?
According to Deleuze and Guattari, an enunciation is a linguistic expression of power that has
the capacity to enact corporeal and incorporeal transformations, resulting in particular subjective
productions within a specific social and political context; the enunciation is therefore a variable
signifier of power relations (TP). Enunciations are thus not invariable universal signifiers with
concurrently invariable and universal affects on subjectivity/the unconscious. Rather, both the
signifier and the signified are variable, their meaning and affects are dependent on the machine
from which they are being enunciated and to which they are being directed (or through which
they traverse). A collective assemblage of enunciation is an apparatus of legitimation which
‘determine[s] the social usage of language’ (Patton 2000). Through this framework of the
assemblage of enunciation, this paper analyses the Australian Government’s enunciation of
‘citizenship’ in the publication Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond.
Colleen Harmer is a PhD candidate at The University of Western Australia. Using the theory of
Deleuze and Guattari, her research looks at understanding the human potential for action in the
digital age with a focus on citizenship in Australia. Specifically, this research looks at the
differences between the Australian Government’s articulation (or enunciation) of citizenship and
enunciations of citizenship taking place through social/digital media.
colleen.harmer@research.uwa.edu.au
twitter: @colleen_harmer
102
Harstad, Ola
Toward a Minor Literature Teacher in Norwegian Teacher Education
Keywords: becoming, education, literature circle
Deleuzian thought in teacher education can create an interesting encounter, especially since the
documents that say something about what a literature teacher is in the Norwegian teacher
education formulates goals that presuppose that there is possible to predetermine the becoming.
In addition to this, the goals create a measurable standard for the becoming. Deleuze and
Guattari oppose both the standard over the variation and the possibility for predetermining
becoming, and this opposition inspires to challenge and progress the teacher education on this
matter. Therefore, this paper will present an ongoing Ph.D.-project (Toward a Minor Literature
Teacher – On the Becoming of the Literature Teacher in Teacher Education). The project`s
overall research question and point of departure is: ”How can Gilles Deleuze`s philosophy
contribute in thinking about the becoming of the literature teacher?”
If, as D & G says, to differentiate is to progress, and to homogenize is to regress, the point must
be for the educator of the literature teacher to create more possibilities for the becoming of the
literature teacher. Since real becoming can`t be standardized or majoritarian, a different approach
must be a minor one. In a literature didactic context, this means to think with Deleuzian
aesthetics to create an alternative, which also challenge the notion of a text that something that is
filled with meaning, and therefore must be interpreted (interpretosis).
In exploring the above, a small literature circle has been created together with eight teacher
students who want to read and discuss literature. The circle, books, education, students, etc. is
seen as an assemblage, which shows how the world (and, therefore, the literature teacher) is in a
constant state of becoming. The Deleuzian assemblage consists of different lines, and the point is
to experiment with the lines and find out how they work. The type of lines in focus is 1) the hard
segmentation 2) the molecular segmentation and 3) the lines of flight. The literature circle
(molecular segmentation) can be seen as a space that is both inside and outside of the education:
I am a teacher educator, the students are teacher students, we are sitting, reading, discussing, etc.
on campus. At the same time, the circle don`t operate with exams, documents, curriculum,
assessment, etc. The circle makes it possible to create a space for experimentation in near relation
to/inside the teacher education (hard segmentation) and, perhaps, deterritorialization of the
education`s territory. This involve creating encounters between the literature and the students
with no predetermined outcome, that is, to see what kind of possibilities for lines of flight this
assemblage can create.
Ola Harstad, Ph.D.-student in Pedagogical Philosophy and Literature Didactics
(2014-2018). MA in Literature Didactics (2012).
Institution: Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Faculty of Social
Sciences and Technology Management, Department of Education and Programme for Teacher
Education
Ph.D. related affiliations: SKRIVUT – Norwegian research project that examines teacher
students writing.
TBLR – Text, image, sound, space (Norwegian Researcher training school in the humanities).
ola.harstad@ntnu.no
103
Hartman, Jan
Going transcendental in Deleuze
Like other great French philosophers of his generation, Deleuze was in search of this freedom
and elasticity of thinking, which might let him resist usurping and overwhelming powers of
metaphysical instances. His ambition was however something more than unveiling the space of
freedom of thinking, where we can philosophize on account of repetitively unmasked
metaphysical instances. His plan was to internalize or “domesticate” these instances, and to turn
over the powers of violence inherent in them against violence itself. Therefore Deleuze must find
enough courage to think in a conservative way. Indeed, he refers openly to the Kantian critique
and becomes engaged in search of the transcendental grounds behind classical oppositions of
subject and object, life and death, internal and external, and subsequently remains within the
methodological regime of condition of possibility, that is the genealogy of being and truthfulness.
However the transcendentalism of Deuleuze does without fatal force of “ultimate conditions of
possibility”, which proves possible as a result of the fundamental non-systemic structure of his
philosophizing. Transcendentality of „mille plateaux” prevents all categories from being
constituted as completely, as to become – each of them – an instance of conceptual constraint.
In my lecture I will show and critically analyze this strategy, focusing on the transcendental value
of such concepts as difference, plane of immanence, and, above all, a life. As in no other
philosopher, Deleuze` philosophizing is a strategy. Let us add: a guerrilla strategy. Powerful and
„siege” intellectual methods: total reflexive self-knowledge and the universal dialectics of
metaphysical powers are subject to some specific ironic shift in such a way, that the locality of a
discourse ceases to mask the discursive totality and an opposition like “difference – repetition”
escapes from the dialectical mechanism of “the same and the other”. Nomadic thinking replaces
siege and conquest thinking.
Among categories which undergo demetaphysication special place is taken by what can be called
life-as-immanence-without-transcendence. Did Deleuze really succeed to offer a „philosophy of
(a) life” beyond the classical philosophy of life, known from the XIX century? Is the
transcendental mask of vitalism (metaphysics of life) really just a mask, or we still deal here only
with another version of the classical transcendental philosophy?
Jan Hartman: full professor of philosophy, chair of the Department of Philosophy and
Bioethics, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. Besides: a columnist of major Polish journals
and weeklies as well as liberal politician. He writes books on metaphilosophy, ethics, bioethics
and political philosophy. Three of them are accessible in English: “Philosophical Heuristics”,
“Knowledge, Being and the Human” as well “Short Studies in Bioethics”.
janhartman@gmail.com // jan.hartman@uj.edu.pl
104
Hee Pedersen, Christina & Lisbeth Frølunde & Martin Novak
Becoming ourselves through collaborative inquiry: difference, knowledge production,
becoming
As an international group of five researchers we have been exploring possibilities of collaborative
inquiry for more than four years. We discuss epistemological and ethical consequences of
producing knowledge collaboratively through dialogue. We draw mainly on Bakhtinian
conception of dialogism and poststructuralist thinking. Our dialogue began on the occasion of
a cultural studies conference in Macedonia. That time we prepared a panel consisting of four
brief presentations, based on short papers written in advance, and four dialogical spaces in which
we reacted with each other in a circular choreography. All papers focused on our different
experience with the complexities of collaborative inquiry. We wanted to demonstrate the fluidity
and situatedness of knowledge production as well as multi-vocal character of dialogue and the
dynamic tensions present in dialogical forms of knowledge production. The aim of panel
choreography was to invite the unpredictable or the not-yet-known into the process. This quality
was stressed by the fact that it was the first time when some of us met in person and the first
time when our papers were discussed.
As aforementioned, our group carried out a first round of a joint collaborative inquiry and
attempted to create a possibility for others to look into it, too. Our preliminary discussions lead
to a collaborative writing project based on the collective analysis of our experience. Four years
later, we offer another round of dialogue, this time based on the reflection of a whole process of
inquiring and writing together. Drawing on another group of scholars, we created a writing
assemblage in which “our communications were sometimes voluptuous, sometimes antagonistic.
In the delíre of unexpected moments, in the call and response to one another, as we cast out lines
that made new thoughts and being possible, we spun off the rails in different directions, leaving
ourselves perhaps where we were at the beginning but somehow with everything transformed.”
(Wyatt et al. 2011, 16-17)
During our encounters we learnt to enter the unpredictable field of a mutual not-yet-known in
which she/he becomes different from her/himself. Such encounter represents for us an event of
transgression. Through many moments during the whole process we had to enter such space of
the not-yet-known in which our different expectations and ways of understanding ceased to make
sense. We learnt to become different and move among different structures of understanding – or,
in other words, to let the free indirect speech deterritorialize and take a line of flight to a different
“assemblage of enunciation” (Deleuze & Guatarri, 1987). We opened ourselves for questioning
by an “outside” (Foucault, 1987) and let ourselves to be changed by this. In our workshop we will
present a part of our dialogue reflecting a common experience. Also, we will offer space for
general discussion on becoming in the context of knowledge production.
Lisbeth Frølunde and Christina Hee Pedersen are full-time tenured associate professors
working in The Dialogic Research Group at Roskilde University, Denmark. Martin Novak
works as a therapist and is engaged in the Narativ Fellowship, a group which develops
crossdiciplinary dialogical and collaborative practices in the Czech Republic. We belong to
different types of organisations, hold different formal positions and find ourselves in diverse
moments in (academic) life. We all cherish collective work, horizontal relations and enjoy the
energy and joy involved in experimentation with collaborative inquiry methods. We share a belief
that knowledge forms within academia and the access to knowledge should be democratised.
Christina Hee Pedersen: chp@ruc.dk
Lisbeth Frølunde: lisbethf@ruc.dk
Martin Novak: ma.novak@zoho.com
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Heeney, Catherine
Biomedical consortia: a hybrid becoming?
The biomedical consortium I discuss is gathered together to pursue a defined scientific goal, that
of finding the genetic basis for common diseases via the technique of genome wide association
studies. In this process, following Latour, it is a generator of hybrids between nature and culture,
unable to purify the science due to its essence being neither social nor scientific. Based on
insights taken from anthropological work on scientific practices, Latour in his 1993 work “We
have Never been Modern” has explicitly criticised Western philosophy for looking for an essence
that transcends practices. However, a consortium, bringing together people, technologies and
practices and combining them in dynamic ways, I will aruge, is a good empirical example of the
relationship between the virtual and the actual. The consortium’s identity is not a fixed thing but
constantly changing or better becoming, as it actually incorporates new practices, people and
things. Latour suggests that Western thought in its quest for modernity has learned to purify
experience of its political and moral elements, to pretend that nature and culture are not mixed
together in the process of translation. In other words philosophy like science ignores the work of
persuading and managing transition by gathering and modifying assemblages. Looking at my
example of the consortium, Latour is clearly correct - negotiations abound about the nature of
nature and importance of this science over other types abound. However, when returning to the
methodology of anthropology Latour rejects the critical and potentially transformative properties
of philosophy. Though seldom explicitly referring to Deleuze as an influence much of what
Latour says about the nature of the world resonates with Deleuzian insights – whilst explicitly
rejecting the implication that the power of the transcendental does not belong to actors or
scientists alone. In other words, Latour misses an opportunity to incorporate a philosophy that
would capture the interaction between an ideal that is not fixed and the practices of science,
thereby denying that we analysts can do anything other than capture and conceptualise the
practices we witness. I aim to explore whether Latour’s conceptual tool bag can be augmented,
against his explicit will, via Deleuzian notions of becoming, the rhizome and the virtual to work
with the possibilities offered by shifting ontologies. I ask why should the analyst not be more
involved in the gathering of assemblages? This presentation then deals with the potentialities of a
Deleuzian ethics combined with the Latourian framework for capturing practices in science. The
example of the biomedical consortium, a current and increasingly mainstream model for
collaboration in biomedical research, will provide an empirical focus for this exploration
Catherine Heeney: University of Edinburgh, Department of Science, Technology and
Innovation Studies
catherine.heeney@ed.ac.uk
106
Herer, Michał
Becoming-Imperceptible or a politics of refusal
Keywords: becoming-imperceptible, flight, refusal
In my presentation, I would like to address the question of emancipatory meaning of refusal. I
will argue that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, being as it is a praise of desire, affirmation and
creativity, contains elements that may be used to undermine the dominating paradigm of
participation and to make the refusal important political category. In fact, there are two,
complementary poles of Deleuzian thought: the one referring to the acts of creation,
multiplication of connections and virtual flows, and the other, finding its expression in the
concepts of crack, flight, treason and – last but not least – becoming-imperceptible. Before I try
to show, in what sense the first tendency (towards connection and multiplication) doesn’t
contradict the second one (towards rupture, retreat and subtraction), my objective will be to
reconstruct this, somewhat neglected aspect of Deleuze’s thought.
To do so, I shall begin with a brief presentation of his theory of lines (lines of segmentation, lines
of crack, lines of flight) from Dialogues (wit C. Parnet). The process in question, here, is a desubjectivation, dissolution of the bonds resulting from individual’s social role, identity, etc. – a
movement “towards a destination which is unknown, not foreseeable, not-preexistant”, but
which can also mean self-destruction (addiction, suicide). How to prevent the line of flight (or
absolute deterritorialization) from disappearing in a black hole? Another important concept
coined by Deleuze in this context is the one of treason. Unlike the swindler (who believes to have
a bright future – avenir), traitor has nothing but becoming (devenir). One becomes “traitor to
one’s own sex, to one’s class, to one’s majority”, refuses to participate, to belong. That leads,
eventually, to the question of becoming-imperceptible, which – to quote Deleuze and Guattari
from Thousand plateaus – “is the immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula”. Having fled
its social segment, having betrayed the majority, the individual becomes invisible, molecular
(“below and above the threshold of perception”). It is important to note, that the whole process
has nothing to do with being remarkable or particular; in opposite: becoming-imperceptible
means becoming-like-everyone. The ultimate paradox: “You have become like everyone, but in
fact you have turned ‘everyone’ into a becoming”…
The most evident exemplification of this paradox logic is of course Melvill’s Bartleby, described
by Deleuze as an original, and yet possessing “no qualities” (“I am not particular”) . It is in his
text devoted to the Scrivener, that Deleuze explicitly confronts the political problem: how to
“reunite the original with humanity” and constitute a universal “society of brothers”, without
sliding back into a fascistoid male brotherhood or a “company of bon-vivants”?
The flight is never simply negation, it is active and (potentially) creative. Treason may lead to the
invention of new, collective forms life. What are the conditions of possibility of such creation?
Michał Herer: assistant professor (dr hab.) in the Institute of Philosophy at the University of
Warsaw; author of Gilles Deleuze. Struktury – Maszyny –Kreacje (2006) [Gilles Deleuze.
Structures – Machines – Creations] and Filozofia aktualności. Za Nietzschem i Marksem (2012)
[Philosophy of the Actual. After Nietzsche and Marx]; translated the writings of Foucault,
Deleuze, Althusser, Blumenberg and Theweleit; benefited from scholarships of the French
Government (2002, 2009), Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (2009), Centre National du
Livre (2011) and the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (2011-2013).
michal.herer@uw.edu.pl
107
Holdsworth, David
Mediations between a Classical and a Postmodern Deleuze: A Dialectics of Problems
and a Philosophy of Life
As a transcendental empiricist, Deleuze is thoroughly Kantian. He departs from Kant, however,
in terms of the asymmetrical relation between the transcendental field and the structure of
judgment – between the virtual and the objectival world. For Deleuze, the conditions for our
possible knowledge of the world and the conditions for the world as such, differ, enabling a
focus on the conditions of genesis as distinct from the necessary conditions for possible
knowledge. This break from Kant leaves Deleuze suspended between classical (Platonic)
tendencies and thoroughly postmodern tendencies to think about and through modes of
complexity. In this presentation I shall explore this philosophical hybridity by analysing the role
of a modified Platonic dialectics in Deleuze’s thought and its relationship to problematics. I shall
do so by following Daniel Smith’s observation that dialectics can be thought as the “science of
problems.” The goal of this project is to trace the role of problematic philosophy as such,
starting from the motivation that Deleuze had for treating mathematics (contra Badiou) as
multiple in its historical practices, and invariably as a means to formulate philosophical problems.
I argue that this foregrounding of philosophical problematics is key to discovering a constant
feature of Deleuze’s interest in mathematics, from the axiomatic/constructivist geometry of
Euclid to the formal synthetic geometries of Riemann and modern physics. Equally consistent in
Deleuze’s corpus is the movement of his thought towards the affirmation of life in his final work,
an affirmation that is rendered coherent by virtue of his engagement with Bergson and Einstein.
From the recuperation of the simulacrum (Deleuze’s partial overturning of Platonism) to the
declaration of mathesis as “the exact description of human nature,” Deleuze follows a complex
but consistent path to a living philosophy.
David Holdsworth is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the MA
Program in Theory, Culture and Politics at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada. David
first studied physics and wrote a PhD thesis on the algebraic semantics of quantum logic. More
recently his research has been in French philosophy and the new realism. Recent publications
include “Philosophical Problematization and Mathematical Solution: Learning Science with
Gilles Deleuze,” “Economics and the Limits of Optimization: Steps towards Extending Bernard
Hodgson’s Moral Science,” “The Cosmopolitan Foucault: Global Practice within a Micro-politics
of Thought,” “Becoming Interdisciplinary: Making Sense of Delanda’s Reading of Deleuze.”
dholdsworth@trentu.ca
108
Hubatschke, Christoph
‘Minor Technologies’ of Flight Reflections on the role of technology in current refugeemovements
Keywords: refugee, protest, technology
“We'dom smart phones Don't be dumb”
(M.I.A. – Borders)
When in 2011 thousands of people took the streets in Tunisia, Egypt and many other countries
to topple the ruling autocratic systems, Western commentators did not hesitate to call the events
a “Facebook-Revolution”, to over-emphasize the importance of new media as well as smart
technologies. The so called “Arab Spring” seemingly fits the problematic techno-deterministic
narrative of the liberating potentials of new technologies. When in 2015 however millions of
people fled the war in Syria and other countries and many of these refugees organized themselves
and their escape to Europe using smartphones not only to stay in contact with their families and
friends but also to exchange routes and news and to document their dangerous flight, way too
many people – instead of once again praising the liberating potentialities of smart technologies –
propagated racist accusations, that people who own and can use a modern technological device as
the smartphone must not be refugees. This schizophrenic position exemplifies the hypocrisy in
the discussions on so called smart technologies and the question of who is allowed to use them
for what. Furthermore facing the refugees most of the European governments reacted with
increasing specific technologies on their own. But instead of developing technologies to help
refugees, most governments intensified not only the collection of Big Data but all the more the
rebuilding of repressive and disciplinary technologies, such as fortified borders.
It was Gilles Deleuze, who – in his famous essay “Postscript on Control Societies” – theorized
this very ambivalence of smart technologies in combination with disciplinary technologies,
between control, surveillance and emancipation. And it was Félix Guattari, who pointed to new
technological possibilities for a revolutionary project in the “post-media-era”. In his late writings
Guattari formulated his hopes that new technologies could support a “reinvention of democracy”
and help to connect the struggles of minorities all over the world. Especially important, so
Guattari, would be a “miniaturization and the personalization of equipments”, so that more and
more people could use these new technologies not only at work or at their home, but as mobile
technologies. Guattari’s ideas pursue the “nomadic philosophy of technology” he and Deleuze
developed in their writings. A philosophy of technology, in which specific technologies are
neither good or bad per se, nor neutral, but in which the evaluation of particular technologies
always depends on the assemblages in which they get used and “machinized”.
After a short depiction of the nomadic philosophy of technology Deleuze/Guattari suggest in
their work, the paper will discuss the different power relations in the usage of technology in
assemblages of states and the assemblages of refugees. Drawing on the deleuzo-guattarian
concept of “minor literature”, I want to ask in which assemblages what kind of hegemonic
technologies can become what I want to call “minor technologies” and how these minor
technologies are related to political articulation, processes of becoming and the current struggles
of refugees. Is the famous phrase Deleuze/Guattari formulated in their book on Kafka also
applicable to the question of technology? “There is nothing that is major or revolutionary except
the minor.” (26)
Christoph Hubatschke, University of Vienna
I graduated in philosophy and political science in Vienna. At the moment I’m working on my dissertation
in Philosophy at the University of Vienna, financed by a DOC-fellowship by the Austrian Academy of
Science. The working title of my dissertation is New figures of resistance. Social movements and new
technology in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. My research focuses on the work of Gilles
Deleuze, philosophy of Technology, political theory and social movements.
christoph.hubatschke@univie.ac.at
109
Ibarra Ibarra, Jorge Ignacio
Body without Organs and musical reading in the novel “Idiot” of Fedor Dostoyevsky
Keywords: aesthetic, Dostiyevsky, Deleuze, Body, Organs, literature
The novel The idiot by Fyodor Dostoyesvsky : Holds many clues that can be followed from
lectures of the philosophical work Gilles Deleuze , specially the concept of body without organs
Body without organs(BwO).This last concept has been receiving special attention since its
applications and problematic questioning in diverse fields , such as ethics and or ontology . BwO
makes reference refers to an instant: as an ephemeral or ecstatic reality that it can be obtained by
the subject’s will or some sort of trance that overrides any social, politics or corporate
organizations. The point of perspective of this work intent to take the BwO to an aesthetic field
placing it in a determine moment within the Dostoyevsky’s narrative, also establishing the way in
that Deleuze called stop to been fixed to an structure or role, to wander indefinitely to pass over
the surface of BwO. It is a reflection akin to locate the moment of disorganization as an element
that can become a key to Deleuze’s aesthetics. To explain this thesis I will argue that the handle
of the voices within Dostoyevsky’s novel (polyphony) establish what Deleuze called “flows”,
same as the dramatic knots representing moments of symbolic production, where both elements
play around a collapsing structure in determine times. Managing different narrative lines
corresponding to different characters and emotional outburst as well as a main figure (Prince
Myshkin). The novel “The Idiot“ handles aesthetic value that in my view express an alternation
between movement or flow and burst and disorganization which can be a clear example of
Deleuz’s idea it handles like reading music, while surprisingly can lead to an ethical approach
within the novel to leave the door open to see Mishkin as a prototype of the product subject of
the conditions, wrapped in a stream flow and cuts that make becoming a moral expression
generated by a turbulent reality.
Jorge Ignacio Ibarra Ibarra, was born in Monclova Coahuila, México in 1970. He studied a
Bachelor of Arts in the CEDART School of Arts, associated with national agency INBA. In
1994, he received a Philosophy degree from the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León
(UANL), Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. At this time, he became interested in culture research
and he joined the state agency for the arts (CONARTE) in the strategy projects department,
developing a diagnosis of the arts and culture across the Nuevo León state. Between 1998 and
2002, he studied a Master’s Degree in broadcasting arts and he graduated with the memory work
entitled: Matachines: A Socio Cultural Research of a Northeast México Tradition, which was
afterwards published by the UANL. In 2000, he participated in a summer school folklore
program hosted by the Folklore Life Institute of Indiana University, Bloomington Campus; this
experience influenced him for future research that combined philosophy and anthropology.
Finally, he received a PhD Degree in Philosophy with a memory dedicated to Deleuze’s ethical
thinking. Currently, Jorge Ibarra is a full time professor at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras,
UANL, teaching subjects such as philosophical anthropology, aesthetics, and philosophy of
culture.
jignacioibarra2003@yahoo.com.mx
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Iscen, Ozgun Eylul
The Aesthetics of History for Life in Rabih Mroué and Elias Khoury’s Three Posters
Keywords: Rabih Mroué and Elias Khoury/Lebanese civil war, Nietzsche/Bergson/Deleuze,
Performance/Film
Media Arts and Sciences (Dept of Art, Art History and Visual Studies), Duke University
This paper draws upon both Nietzsche and Bergson’s understanding of temporality and
becoming with an emphasis on the politics they may offer: How can we break away from the
constraints of the present (and what is assumed to be necessitated by the past) in order to
become able to think of or act alternative futures without losing our relationship to the past?
How can this ‘untimely’ or ‘overcoming oneself’ in Nietzsche’s terms be made possible? It is the
question of the writing history for life, or for future; and the production of difference as
untimely. On one hand, Nietzsche’s understanding of history helps us to conceptualize the past
as a reservoir of resource for generating untimely (for the future yet to come), and his insistence
on the production of active forces (rather than or out of reactive ones) trigger the question of
how we do that. On the other hand, Bergsonian understanding of memory as virtuality, and thus,
as a transformative or disruptive force within the present that opens up the future (where the
past becomes part of the virtual for further actualizations). Even though the relationship between
the past, present and future is a problem of ethics for Nietzsche, whereas it is ontological for
Bergson, both thinkers address the dynamic movement of history, which enables the past to be
both the necessary condition for the present, and the resource for its future transformation.
Thus, it is crucial to address how to actualize the past as virtual ‘actively’ in the present; this is
where Bergsonian model of memory based on the interplay of the actual and the virtual becomes
complementary to the discussion of history for life in Nietzsche’s terms. In this regard, I turn to
Deleuze’s book Time-Image (1989), where he discusses the aesthetics of cinema as a creation of
yet-to-come thought, or people, at the edge of the actual and virtual registers of the moving
images. Here, I analyze the performance/video work Three Posters (Beirut, 2000), conceptualized
and performed by the Lebanese artists Rabih Mroué and Elias Khoury, in which they critically
reflect on the concept of martyrdom in the understanding of their own history in the Leftist
politics in Lebanon. In Three Posters, the artists plays with fiction and truth by offering multiple
takes of Jamal al-Sati, a member of the Communist Party and a resistance fighter of the Lebanese
National Resistance Front, explaining his mission for the camera, recorded shortly before his
suicide mission (1985), and juxtaposing those takes of the martyr with the actor’s real-time
testimonial in the present, and the recorded interview with Elias Atallah, one of the leaders of
Lebanese Communist Party. Here, the techniques of reenactment, fabulation and film, come
together for enabling an alternative unfolding of historical figure and moment, for a richer
assessment of the past and vision for future yet-to-come. Three Posters reveals the potency of the
aesthetics of repetition with difference for ‘history for life’ – at the intersection of Nietzsche’s
relationship to history, Bergonian memory as virtuality, and Deleuzian cinema for yet-to-come.
Ozgun Eylul Iscen: I received my B.A. in Social Sciences from Koc University, Turkey; and my
M.A. in Interactive Arts and Technology from Simon Fraser University, Canada. Currently, I am
a PhD student in Media Arts and Sciences at Duke University, United States. My interests are
situated at the intersection of media arts, philosophy and politics in the regions and the diaspora
associated with the Middle East, with an emphasis on Deleuzian film theory.
ozgun.eylul.iscen@duke.edu
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Jacob, Laura
The ´touchless touch´ - disappearing interfaces and new forms of subjectivation11 in
contemporary human-machine interaction
Keywords: human computer interfaces (HCI), affect, subjectivation
New interactive software providers are advertising their touchscreen interface products with
labels as ‘OmniTouch’12 or ‘Touchless Touch’13 and promising thereby to turn every surface into
a human-computer interaction (HCI) device – also even and/or paradoxically if there is no
surface included.14 Furthermore, contemporary interfaces such as interactive walls or holograms
(although these still belong to science fiction realms) foster a shift of the agency which goes
beyond of any notion of a spectator as a viewer in the analog age to a user in the digital age of
computing.15
Moreover, by distributing ‘ubiquitous computing’ in our everyday lives, Mark Weiser’s prophesy
seems to come true, that computer-based virtual data and “all the different ways in which it can
be altered, processed and analyzed […] [has been] brought into the physical world”.16 Taking
market leaders’ visions of prospective features of their devices into account as, for instance, how
they get represented at the annual TED conferences by Macintosh (TED Talks 2006), interfaces
are becoming more and more invisible – in Timo Kaerleins’s words, ’interfaceless interfaces’
shaping our environment.17 Therefore, interfaces can no longer be considered as thresholds
between reality and virtuality but as an immersive inter-subjective sphere whereas the ontology of
the phenomenological ‘being-in-the-world’ alters significantly and sustainably.
Evidently, not only does any distinction between reality and virtuality become obsolete, but also
the mechanical and ‘real’ universes become inextricably intertwined rather than merely coexisting
as hitherto implied in the term ‘machinic hetereogenesis’ conceived by Félix Guattari in his book
Chaosmosis18. In contrast, Guattari assumes an infinitive, continuos exchange between machines
and their ‘users’, whereby being and producing are thought of together as one entity of affect.
The multiplicity (hetero-) of producing and becoming (genesis) culminates in a new form of
subjectivity which Guattari and Deleuze call ‘subjectivation’ in order to emphazise its procedural
production.
This dynamic bilateral figuration fosters a new type of operative participant in contemporary HCI
whose kinetic movements are transformed in real time to something new rather than solely
navigating through virtual databases via windows and technological devices such as mice and
keyboards.19 Input and output cannot be differentiated but coincide as a perpetual becoming.
Remarkably, by still returning and somehow relying compulsorily on the notion of touch even
though “interactive surfaces bring with them the dilemma to make virtual objects ‘touchable’ but
The neologism ‘subjectivation’, originally derived from subjectivity was introduced by the French philosophers
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in order to underline the procedural becoming in itself rather than expressing a
fixed entity.
12 ‘OmniTouch’ represents the idea to use mobile interaction with “a body-worn projection/sensing system to
capitalize on the tremendous surface area the real world provides”.
13 This software claims to provide a multi-touch screen on any kind of surface, respectively, even without surface.
Available at: http://www.touchlesstouch.com/. (last accessed on 15.12.2015)
14 Timo Kaerlein is providing a good overview on disappearing touchscreen interfaces. (cf., Kaerlein 2012).
15 Lev Manovich (2001): The language of new media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
16 Mark Weiser (1991): The Computer for the 21st Century. In: Scientific American, 265.3, 94-104, 98.
17 Timo Kaerlein (2012): Aporias of the touchscreen. On the promises and perils of a ubiquitous technology. In: NECSUS 1 (2):
Tangibility. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 177–198, 178.
18 Félix Guattari (1995): Chaosmosis. An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
19 For Manovich, referring to the art Historian Ervin Panofsky, databases represent the “new symbolic form of a
computer age” which predominantly alters the user’s experience of operating with the structured collection of data.
Cf., Lev Manovich (1999): Database as a Symbolic Form. Available at: http://www.mfjonline.org/journalPages/MFJ34/Manovich_Database_FrameSet.html. (last accessed on 15.12.2015)
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11
not really physically tangible”20, this new comprehension of the ‘touchless touch’ in current HCI
recalls associations of a ‘user’ type as ‘creator’ and his ‘magic’ and ‘divine’ capabilities as
represented in Michelangelo’s notable fresco The Creation of Adam (1511-1512).
How and to which extent one can speak of new forms of subjectivation within contemporary
HCI shall be discussed exemplarily using the Anarchy Dance Theatre + Ultra Combos’ play
Seventh Sense21 and Aakash Nihalani’s interactive projection artwork22.
Moreover, considering the touch as a ‘returning topos'23 as well as in its metaphorical dimensions,
I will concentrate on the reciprocal affective interaction in HCI and a creator who is primarily
defined through a sensitivity for a constantly altering becoming.
Laura Jacob is about to complete her final semester of the International Master in Audiovisual
and Cinema Studies at her home university Bochum (RUB) in Germany (provisional title of her
master thesis: The Unthinkable in the Thinking. Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Under the Skin’ (2013) and
Gaspar Noé’s ‘Enter the Void’ (2009) – filmic inversions as cinematic clash of affection and
surface). She received a bachelor’s degree in German Literature from Ludwig Maximilians
University Munich majoring in Film Studies. Her current research fields of interest are Aesthetics,
Film-Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, Theory of Space.
laura_jab@yahoo.de
M. Herrlich, B. Walther-Franks, R. Malaka, R. (2012): Daten zum Anfassen: Be-greifen mit interaktiven Bildschirmen. In:
Bernard Robben, Heidi Schelhowe (eds.): Be-greifbare Interaktionen. Bielefeld: transcript, 135-153, 141.
21 Excerpts of the play available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQlDEPLHPyQ. (latest accessed on
15.12.2015)
22 Available at: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/awesome-projection-art-can-play-like-brick-breaker/#slide-6.
(latest accessed on 15.12.2015)
23 Erkki Huhtamo (1997): From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd. Towards an Archeology of the Media. In: Leonardo, Vol. 30,
No 3, 221-224.
113
20
Janning, Finn
Deleuze and Mindfulness
In this paper, I ask two questions. The first is: What is an ethical practice? The second question
is: Is mindfulness an ethical practice? My ultimate concern, however, is the possible link between
the two issues: What relationship does mindfulness have with ethics? To answer these questions,
I first draw on Deleuze’s ethical theory, and subsidiary on Spinoza and Nietzsche’s approach to
ethics—to define ethics as way of being that understand life as becoming. Then, I integrate and
compare some significant elements from this ethic with the practice of mindfulness, mainly as
Jon Kabat-Zinn defines it. This is done to clarify to what extent mindfulness shares components
with Deleuze, and vice versa. My study reveals that not only can mindfulness be viewed as a
classical ethical practice but—and perhaps more surprising—mindfulness is closer to parts of
Deleuze than to Buddhism, e.g., regarding whether “the Good” is known beforehand, whether
ethics is an immanent or transcendent practice, and whether ethics is a judgmental or
nonjudgmental practice. Finally, I briefly discuss the ways in which Deleuze may shed new light
on mindfulness through implementing concepts such as becoming and the event.
Finn Janning, PhD
Independent philosopher
C. Vallirana 78, pral. 1a
08006 Barcelona, Spain
finnjanning@gmail.com
114
Jenkins, Barbara
Channelling the Feminine
Drawing on numerous references to a transpersonal, aesthetic force consistently referred to as
‘feminine’, this paper argues that this force can be understood as a libidinal energy layered by
sexual difference. Building on a nascent ‘Jungian turn’ in cultural studies, I examine the
connections between Jung’s notion of anima and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming
woman. This approach involves going beyond a singular focus on language and representation
toward a more ontological approach to understanding sexual difference, emphasizing its political
and economic relevance beyond questions of gender and sexual identity.
This
Jungian/Deleuzean approach offers a new perspective on what Hardt and Negri refer to as
biopolitics, or the production of alternative subjectivities. Further, in line with the ideas of
Lazzarato (Signs and Machines), it invites us to move beyond purely linguistic or semiotic
understandings of subjectivity. In terms of aesthetics, it not only challenges the periodization of
Rancière’s (The Politics of Aesthetics) conception of the ‘aesthetic regime,’ but also encourages a
broader, more political conception of the role of aesthetics in the political economy of everyday
life.
Barbara Jenkins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario Canada. She is the author of the forthcoming Eros
and Economy: Jung, Deleuze, Sexual Difference (Routledge 2016), This is not an Art Book
(ALSO Collective 2016), and various articles on the political economy of culture and aesthetics.
bjenkins@wlu.ca
115
Jude, Ismaël
Performance “ What being was ”
Keywords: performance, ontology, body
To ti en einai - trying to say it. What being was. Hypokeimenon - coming down for it. Coming
down in favour of this subject. If required : taking a walk or a breath. Then : planning to go for a
walk in the neighbourhood. First pronouncing who should it be expressed for (what being was).
Asking what being - someone - was for - this one. Stating this. Saying a name ? Definitely not !
Denouncing nobody. Pointing out towards nowhere. Indicating no place. Rather letting the place
vacant. Free for someone else. Who would live there as well. A place to be. Vacant. A place
where you could stay pretty vacant. Available. Ready to act out. Energeia. (Easy to say. For now
it’s just a blackout. Still the same vacancy. Having no employment.) Renouncing. Starting again
with the project (to go out). Getting ready for a desire path. Putting the body in motion. Asking
what being – in motion – was for - a body. Making it work. Trying to make it walk. One two. But
nothing is moving. Calling the roll : Organs ? Members ? Head ? No reaction. Being nobody’s
fool. Feeling alone. Worst than alone : zero. Useless. Non existent. Excluded from all.
Subtracted. Less than zero : n - 1. Asking what being - a body without organs - was. The earth.
Calling around. Listening carefully. Echo of a voice. Deducing the material universe. Surfaces
getting in touch. Guessing the texture of a wet ground on the skin of a thigh. The beginning of
somebody. Feeling this. Examining it through touching. And trying to find a use of the body
through touching. Trying to manage to stand up. Managing oneself. Toes ? All numb. Legs ?
Gone to sleep. Pins and needles in one’s toes. Pain in one’s foot. Awaking virtual members. A leg
in motion swimming on the floor. A hand. One arm and the other doing the crawl. The face
splashes in a puddle. Thrown under the weight of things. Subjectified. A big body crashed on the
floor. Asking again. What being - bare-bottomed - was. Embarrassing situation. If someone was
going inside the room (the commodities). Stranded there. Washed up like a whale on the floor of
this conference room. What a strange stand-up!
“Use of bodies24”, Agamben's concept, helps to understand a deleuzian “modal” onto-logy,
according to which being is said about its modifications, and a life said about its virtualities and
becomings. The performance will consist of a pre-recorded text (played in speakers) about “what
being was” using verbal sentences, and one performer lip-synching the voice.
Ismaël Jude, french Doctor of Literature (Paris Sorbonne University, 2012) for a thesis on
“Théâtre et philosophie chez Gilles Deleuze, la notion de dramatization”, under the supervision
of Denis Guénoun, published Gilles Deleuze, théâtre et philosophie, la méthode de dramatisation
(Sils Maria, Mons, 2013), the first book in French on this subject. He is a co-founder of the Labo
LAPS (Arts and Philosophies of Scene’s Laboratory) He is a novelist (Dancing with myself,
Verticales, Paris, 2014), a stage director and a playwright (La petite et la grande distribution, 2014,
Figures de l’envol amoureux, 2009).
ismaeljude@gmail.com // http://ismaeljude.blog.com/
24
Giorgio Agamben, L’uso dei corpi, Homo sacer IV, 2, N. Pozza, Vicenza, 2014.
116
Kedem, Nir
Philosophically Queer: The Virtual Life of a Concept
Keywords: queer theory, concepts, philosophy/constructivism
“We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it.
We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.
The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form,
for a new earth and people that do not yet exist.”
—Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Those who work in the vastly heterogeneous filed loosely termed “queer theory” are inevitably
compelled to determine, if only marginally and unwittingly, how they employ the notoriously
evasive and malleable term “queer”—what is it, exactly? How can one use it? And for what
purpose? Rarely in the history of Theory has a concept been both celebrated and deplored so
passionately in such a short span of time as “queer” has, entrenching both advocates and critics
in radically oppositional, incommensurable views. But from the perspective of Deleuze studies, at
stake here is not simply a question of ultimate definitions, but rather one of construction: a
concept is to be created, re-created, or replaced by a new one, as a solution to problems which
must simultaneously be posed, and which alone constitute the concept’s evaluative criteria. I
would therefore argue that if queer theory is to keep hold of its promise to offer new ways of
critical thinking, it should now turn to probe into the virtual life of its founding concept,
“queer”—that is, into the dynamic relations between queer (virtual) problematics and queer
(actual) solutions. Fundamentally, then, queer theory should be wary of uncritical repetitions of
its theoretical procedures, and of simple applications of its concepts; it should be able to account,
however, for the difference of the present by relating the concept of “queer” to the problems for
which it once served as a solution, and, at the same time, to explore the concept’s virtuality—
what it can do and what transformations it must undergo once it is related to new problems.
Concisely, queer theory should undertake constructivism, or philosophy as the practice of
creating concepts.
By introducing constructivism as a constitutive problem for queer theory, this paper will offer
what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a “pedagogy” of the concept of “queer”: that is, an
analysis of the concept’s conditions of creation “as factors of always singular moments” (What is
Philosophy?, 12). To this end, I will reconstruct David Halperin’s famous conceptualization of
“queer” firstly by relating “queer” to the problem it sought to solve, and, secondly, by accounting
for the three activities that comprise constructivism: the invention of a conceptual persona
(Saint-Foucault, the Exemplary Saint); the construction of the concept and its components (three
components: mobile position, indeterminate selfhood, and subsisting otherness); and the laying
out of a plane of immanence (freedom as the movement that constitutes thought). Finally, I will
remark on the new styles of life which the queer solution made possible and thinkable, and on
the possible trajectories which constructivism opens up for contemporary queer thought.
Dr. Nir Kedem is a lecturer in the Literature Department, the Tisch School of Film and
Television, and the Women and Gender Studies Program at Tel Aviv University, Israel. He
moderated the international conference “Deleuzian Futures,” and edited a special issue of Deleuze
Studies bearing the same title. He is currently working on turning his doctoral dissertation, The
Viral Politics of Queer Resistance, into a book.
kedem@post.tau.ac.il
website: http://humanities1.tau.ac.il/segel/kedem/
117
Kesdi, Hatice and Senom Yalcin
The Face, Resistance and Complex Assemblages
An analogy to subjectivity, the face, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987) is "engendered by
an abstract machine of faciality (visageite), which produces" (p.168) it. The operation of the abstract
machine of faciality occurs within assemblages of power. A contemporary example of this is
surveillance technologies, the structure of which can be lineated by the traits of the two types of
societies Deleuze outlined in the Postscript on Societies of Control: an apparatus that collects
data, an algorithm that processes the data and a system of punishment that is a potential
consequence of the previous two. While the apparatus that collects the data is one that is
characteristic to the Societies of Control (SoC), the algorithm is one functions through molds,
thus can be characterized by both SoC and Disciplinary Societies (DS), and finally, the system of
punishment a definite attribute of the DS. It is through this assemblage that contemporary
subjectivities are constructed by states and corporations. We are all masses, dividuals, parsed
through algorithms. This assemblage, in its full scale encompasses the apparatuses and workings
of the global economy - the finance sector and global markets. As stated by Sassen (2014),
finance, "a complex assemblage of actors, capabilities, and operational spaces" (p.119), operates
through complex instruments developed by physicists, algorithms at work are entirely different
from that, for example, of the Domain Awareness System used by the NYPD as a crime
prediction platform (Scannell, 2015). We are not just bodies walking on the streets observed
through cameras or Internet users pouring data into the surveillance apparatus, but also dividuals
made part of grand speculations and complex instruments thrown into coils of debt or a similar
apparatus of encapsulation of the SoC. Forms of resistance against an assemblage of this type and
scale will need to match its formation. Our suggestion, then is in line with Williams & Srnicek's
(2013) Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, forms of resistance parallel to the complexity of
the global systems at work, those that are collective and necessarily technologically sophisticated
and mediated.
References
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, Trans. Brian Massumi,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Deleuze, G. (1992) Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, Vol. 59
Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions : Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge,
Massachusetts : Harvard University Press.
Scannell, J. (2015). What can an Algorithm Do? DIS Magazine.
http://dismagazine.com/discussion/72975/josh-scannell-what-can-an-algorithm-do/
Williams, A. and Srnicek, N. (2013). Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics in #Accelerate. The
Accelerationist Reader. Urbanomic Press.
Hatice Kesdi is a multidisciplinary researcher. She received her MS degree in Industrial Design
at Anadolu University and worked as a research assistant at Eskişehir Osmangazi University. She
is currently studying the analogy of subject ontologies between democracy and design as a PhD
candidate in Industrial Design at Gazi University and where she is a research assistant.
aydin.s.hatice@gmail.com
Senom Yalcin received her PhD at the Department of Literacy, Culture, and Language
Education at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on network-mediated
thinking and learning. She teaches at the School of Foreign Language Education at the Middle
East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey.
senom@metu.edu.tr
118
Kim, Jae-Yin
Variations of Body without Organs
Deleuze, sometimes with Guattari and sometimes alone, elaborates the concept of the Body
without Organs (BwO). He appropriates the concept from Artaud who says “once you have
made human a body without organs, then you will have liberated it from all its automatisms and
given back to his true liberty.” (1947) Deleuze varies and revises the concept three times. First, in
Anti-Oedipus (1972), BwO is conceptualized from the ontological & socio-historical perspective
to construct an immanent naturalist ontology. Second, in A Thousand Plateaus (1974/1980),
BwO reveals the ethical & political aspects in order to help explain and prevent the fascist ways
of living. Last, in Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation (1981), Deleuze develops the artistic and
aesthetic implications of BwO.
In Anti-Oedipus, BwO is defined as “death instinct” which constitutes the process of
production, or the ongoing of the universe, together with “working machine” (AO 13~14F; 8E).
In this sense, BwO is a necessary moment of the process of production, not a moment of total
destruction and annihilation.
In A Thousand Plateaus, BwO is not just a “death instinct” but gets a new kind of “selfdestruction”. “One doesn't do it with a sledgehammer, one uses a very fine file. One invents selfdestructions that have nothing to do with the death drive. Dismantling the organism has never
meant killing oneself, but rather opening the body to connections.” (MP 198F; 160E) Important
is not a self-destruction which usually is considered as “death instinct” or “death drive” but a
very fine filing. A very fine filing is needed for “prudence” or caution (MP 198F; 160E).
BwO, in Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation, gets some concrete meanings which are explained
with the help of adjectives like “undetermined”, “polyvalent”, “temporary”, provisionary” and
“transitory” (FBLS Ch. 7). BwO finally refers to “a whole non-organic life“(FBLS 33F; 45E,
46E), which equals to cosmic forces or “elementary forces” (FBLS Ch. 7~8) contrasted with
simple organic life which one usually regards as life itself.
I would like to emphasize the “prudence” concerning BwO. Why so many dangers and necessary
precautions? (MP 201F; 162E) Because BwO has dangers of not only creative but also selfdestructive or nihilist, and cancerous. “The BwO is desire. […] Desire goes that far sometimes
desiring one's own annihilation, or sometimes desiring having the power to annihilate.” (MP
203~204F; 165E) So we should seek to make BwO to be finally creative. “Could what the drug
user or masochist obtains also be obtained in a different fashion in the conditions of the plane: at
the limit taking drugs without drugs, drunken on pure water, as in Henry Miller's
experimentations?” (MP 204F; 166E) We should take care, or in other word, be prudent.
Jae-Yin Kim is a Researcher at Institute of Philosophy, Seoul National University (SNU), and
was a Junior Fellow at the Transdisciplinary Program Independent Research Group, Korea
Institute for Advanced Study. He now organizes International Deleuze Studies in Asia the 4th
Conference Seoul, Korea as an Executive Committee. He also teaches at the Department of
Aesthetics & the Department of Philosophy, SNU, where he completed his PhD thesis on "NonHumanist Ontology in Deleuze". He has written several articles on European philosophy, and
translated into Korean of numerous philosophical books, including Deleuze & Guattari's AntiOedipus & A Thousand Plateaus and Deleuze's Bergsonism.
armdown.net@gmail.com
119
Klingler, Molina
Poetic Chaosmos: A. R. Ammons’ Rhizomatic Ecological Object-Oriented “garbage”
Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy has enjoyed popularity among ecocritical theorists - many of his
models have been fruitfully applied to ecological perspectives in literary and cultural studies.
Deleuze’s prominent model of the rhizome, an image borrowed from botany, can be regarded as
one of numerous direct connections to environmental thinking. Especially in A Thousand
Plateaus Deleuze and Félix Guattari present a philosophy of becoming that gives rise to a
consciousness of deep ecology.
Whereas many ecocritical scholars embrace Deleuzian concepts, several object-oriented
ontologists as e.g. Levi R. Bryant critically eye poststructuralist positions and question Deleuze’s
transcendental empiricism. Nevertheless, many of Deleuze’s notions, such as the virtual and the
actual, remain an efficient and vital ground for object-oriented ontological discussions.
In my project I explore the promising potential of the genre of poetry as a plateau of Deleuze’s
and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming. As (especially ecological) poetry’s self-conscious
character expresses inevitably a certain tension between the subject and its environment - the
surrounding objects - it serves as a space to explore the conflated notions of subject and object,
which contest concepts of differentiation.
I will focus my attention on the poem “garbage” by Archie R. Ammons, a contemporary
American “nature poet.” Ammons’ book-length poem “garbage” shows a manifestation of
rhizomatic complexity and a celebration of multiplicities. The poem’s noticeable turn to the
object (already marked by its title “garbage”) has prompted literary criticism to read it primarily
through the lenses of an ecological object-oriented ontology (as e.g. proclaimed by Timothy
Morton), which tries to contrast itself from Deleuzian thought in various ways. However, I argue
that “garbage” in fact successfully shows how applications of Deleuze’s concepts can be in tune
with an object-oriented interpretation of being.
Ammons’ poetry does not present a dualistic subject-object relation, but opens up a space for an
interplay between a virtual and an actual, for transformations of both subject and object. It
follows a Deleuzian proclamation for mankind to strip itself of all anthropomorphic and
anthropological armoring as a means to perceive what is nonhuman in man: it thus embodies a
becoming-other in “zones of proximity or undecidability, smooth spaces.” The object-oriented
poem’s nature of a chaosmotic assemblage hence celebrates an (eco-)conscious affirmation of
life.
Molina Klingler: I am an advanced student of English and American Studies, German Studies
and Philosophy at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany. I have been working as teaching and
research assistant for the chair of the American Studies department and as a teaching assistant in
the German Literary Studies department since 2013. I began my studies with the pursuit of a
teacher’s degree in upper secondary education for the subjects English, German and Philosophy.
After an Erasmus year the University of Teesside, UK, I also enrolled for a BA degree (same
subjects). In the academic year 2014/15 I was granted a scholarship for my BA and MA studies
of English and American Literature and Philosophy at Eastern Illinois University, USA. My study
focus lies on literary theory, continental philosophy and Anglo-American literature.
Molina.klingler@stud.uni-wuerzburg.de // molinaklingler@gmail.com
120
Klinkova, Katerina
Being and Becoming: Deleuze and Literature
Key words: being, becoming, life
The paper inquires the literary image using the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze about time,
difference, actual and virtual, and as an interdisciplinary method - his works on cinema as
applicable theoretically on literature. My thesis holds on the dynamic, temporal nature of the
image as a constant, singular variable, always different in each case. But this conception brings
the question: what is an image then and if it is so transformable, can we really define it? Or, we
consider the image as a temporal unit, then the question would be: when is an image (when do
we say it is an image and not something else and on the other hand, in which time dimension the
images poses itself)?
In the noted book ‘Matter and Memory’ Henri Bergson gives an outline of the image as a “certain
existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which
the realist calls a thing; - an existence placed half-way between the `thing' and the
‘representation.'” (‘Mater and Memory’, Zone Books, New York, 1991, p. 9). And later in the
work he states it is “an existence in itself”. Hence, what kind is this “certain existence” and could we
claim that the image only exists in the text? Furthermore, if we think of art as indivisible of its
own perception (as Receptive Aesthetic shows), then would be fair to say the image receives
actualization every time it is perceived. This would lead us to the assertation that the image is
always present and its presentism defines it as what it is. But according to Bergson and as
Deleuze underlines in ‘Bergsonism’ the present is not, but it acts, it is ‘pure becoming’. On the
contrary, the past is, but it does not act; it is in passive state ready to work, to actualize itself when
needed. It is a deception that there is a paradox here - the image gathers together past and
present, actual and virtual, and the borderline between them is indistinguishable. The image is
going to be explored as situated somewhere between being and becoming in Deleuze’s terms. I
will use the notion of crystal image as combing actual and virtual to show its application on the
literary image.
At the end of the presentation, I would like to give a short illustration of the theoretical inquiry
with the last stanza of the poem ‘Spleen’ by T.S. Eliot. There we can see the personificated image
of Life as a suited man waiting ‘on the doorstep of the Absolute’. Life could be interesting
example of crystal image since its virtual side is pure virtuality - it has no singular reference but a
number of objects we can find it in. Additionally, it can actualize itself in a broad range of forms,
related to the readers’ past, consciousness and imagination. This Life is exactly the smallest
circuit, as Deleuze puts it in ‘Cinema 2: Time-Image’, a crystal image with complex actual and
virtual side.
Katerina Klinkova, doctorate student in theory of literature, department of ‘Theory of
Literature’, Faculty of Slavic Studies, University of Sofia, Bulgaria
I work on dissertation project called ‘Time and Image - theoretical models of literary temporality’.
It is an attempt of an ontology of the literary image, considering its temporal, dynamic nature.
The proposed paper is part of the project and its main conception.
katerina.klink@gmail.com
121
Kokubun, Koichiro
Perception of politics and politics of perception
Keywords: politics, perception, Other
The extraordinary response Deleuze made in his DVD Abécédaire to the question of what it
means to be on the Left is well known. He refers to two styles of writing a postal address: the
Western style starting from one’s street number and proceeding to larger geographical entities
(the city and the country) and the Japanese style going in reverse order. According to him, they
correspond to two different modes of perception and the latter is the perception of the Left.
Being on the Left, he says, is perceiving firstly the periphery, starting with the edges, and
knowing, for example, ‘The Third World problems are closer to us than problems in our
neighbourhood.’ In Deleuzian perspective, the way of perceiving political problems is located at
the centre of the politics and the Leftist political perception is the one which doesn’t start from
here, but there: not from nearby, but far away.
This idea of what can be called the ‘politics of perception’ is not as impromptu as it might seem.
Because therein we find the echo of his theory of the Other developed in ‘Michel Tournier and
the World without Others’ (in The Logic of Sense), according to which ‘the Other is initially a
structure of the perceptual field’. What I can see of an object is always limited: I cannot see, for
example, the façade and the back of the same building at the same time. Despite that, I believe
the building has the depth and the back, because, says Deleuze, ‘[t]he part of the object that I do
not see I posit as visible to Others’. When I assume a building to have the depth without seeing
it, I posit an Other who sees and experiences it in place of me. And this Other is not given but
formed by some means. It can therefore vanish, which is what Robinson experiences on his
island: ‘world without Others’.
If we see again what we called the politics of perception from this theory of the Other, we realize
that we cannot begin by perceiving the periphery without any preparation. Because, in order to
think about what I do not see, I firstly have to be able to form an Other who sees and
experiences it. But, from how far away would we be able to start our perception? This question is
inevitable, because the politics of perception is also a matter of degree. And if so, the political
perception of those who are not on the Left must be analyzed too: it shouldn’t be as simple as it
appears. We can conceive a political perception which, indeed, doesn’t perceive the faraway
periphery, but begins by thinking of relatively distant places. We need thus more detailed and
delicate conceptual apparatus for explaining what is happening in the politics of perception. This
paper will be a little contribution for this project.
Koichiro Kokubun is an associate professor at Takasaki City University of Economics (1300
Kaminamiemachi, Takasaki, Gunma, 370-0801, Japan). He received his PhD from University of
Tokyo in 2009. He specializes in the 17th century philosophy and the 20th century French
philosophy. He has published a dozen of books on philosophy and politics in Japanese and his
major works are translated into Korean. He is also a Japanese translator of Kant’s Critical
Philosophy and the DVD Abécédaire. He is one of the invited plenary speakers of the First
International Deleuze Conference in Asia (2013, Taiwan), the Second (2014, Japan) and the
Fourth (2016, Korea).
koichirokokubun@gmail.com
122
Kotani, Yayoi
Theatrical world and ‘True Madness’ in Difference and Repetition – with an
interpretation of ZEAMI and NOH
Deleuze’s philosophy is spreading its roots into the world. In recent years, it seems an original
development as one’s soil. What is the signification of this growth? And how do we think about
this uniqueness? Of course there is one of the popular way of political reading. Nevertheless, I try
to show you an artistic beauty of a Japanese traditional performing arts, and the greatest
masterpiece, which named as ‘風姿花伝(FUSHIKADEN)’. This interpretation can show you
one of the traditional beauties and art of Japan, and not to find just a ‘similarity’ of Deleuze’s
philosophy, but to find a fundamental principle of ‘I’ by analyzing of ‘Madness’.
‘風姿花伝(FUSHIKADEN)’ is written by 世阿弥(Zeami,1363-1443) in recently 15th century, at
the ‘室町時代(Muromachi age) in Japan’. ‘風(FU)’ means ‘wind’, ‘姿(SHI)’ means ‘figure’,
‘花(KA)’ means ‘flower’, and ‘伝(DEN)’ means ‘tradition’. It was a special teach the secret to
one’s pupil. It is a theory of ‘能(Noh)’ for Noh player(能楽師). He also writes twenty-odd works
of the theory of art. There are many instructions and lessons, and especially, we can find the
description of ‘Madness’. Here is a key of the issue of ‘I’, inside of his beautiful work.
How do we think about Deleuze’s ‘Madness’, which is one of the most important themes of his
concept. What does it means, in essence? It is as well known as ‘Schizophrenia’. Unfortunately,
those psychoanalytic topics let people to think of ‘Madness’ just as booster of deviation from the
strict structures of Philosophy. Is ‘Madness’ a convenient, handy concept of Deleuze? All that we
can know is just ‘Be free’? –On no account.
My purpose of research is to set Deleuze’s philosophy as it is. It means in the traditional way of
Philosophy. Then, what is a fundamental concept of ‘Madness’ of Deleuze? In conclusion, there
is a fundamental relationship between the issues of ‘I’. This concept is already appearances in
Différence et Répétition (1968). There is a concept of ‘Shizophrenia’, and this issue will shows us
the ‘true’ meaning of Deleuze’s ‘Madness’. It needs to be considered with the problem of
doubleness of ‘I’. We can consider about it searching for the fundamental principle of
subjectivity, which Deleuze try to criticize the traditional philosophy for doubleness of subject.
In last 3rd International Deleuze Studies in Asia Conference (Manipal, India), I presented about
the time theory of Différence et Répétition and Deleuze’s original concept of time that ‘fêlure
(crack)’ of I. Today’s topic is, of course, in this train. ‘Madness’ is the shéme of ‘I’, and this issue
means one of the most important traditional issues of philosophy - Especially, subjectivity. I
hope to raise an issue of Deleuze, with ‘風姿花伝(FUSHIKADEN)’.
Yayoi Kotani is Research Fellow of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS Research
Fellow), major of Philosophy. Graduated from Keio University, and Master's program in
Philosophy at the Graduate School of Letters, Keio University. A Bachelor and Master’s degree
of Philosophy, the theme of master thesis is: The signification of ´Death instinct (l’instinct de
mort)´ of Gilles Deleuze. Belong to Doctoral program in Modern Thought Laboratory, Graduate
School of Human Sciences, Osaka University in Japan.
yayoikotani63@gmail.com
123
Kousoulas, Stavros
Correlational Variables: Modes of Architectural Acces
If one is to provide an alternative account for the plurality of, intentional or other,
morphogenetic processes that take place constantly within the urban field, then one has to
examine the intricate relationship between the field itself and our access to it. In this dividing line
between ontology and epistemology, any attempt to prioritize one of the two will lead to fallacies
of all kinds, which would eventually exclude our access to a world from the world itself.
Ontology, epistemology and the –urban- world are put forward in this paper. Throughout it I
deal with the first of consequences that ‘urban correlationism’ entails; that of the primacy of a
subjective access over a ‘hylomorphically’ malleable present. The claim that correlationism is the
episteme of architectural theory and practice is expanded with an amplified version of epistemes
themselves. It is through an ecology of material-discursive practices that the apparatus of
architectural thinking can be traced genealogically and posited as an abstract machine catalyzing a
very specific image of thought. That of a meta-subject which privileges its access to a world
bifurcated in primary and secondary qualities so as to trace the transcendental elements of its own
justification.
My aim is to diffractively expose a genealogical line that runs from the first attempt to
theoretically reflect on issues of spatial production, their later interpretation and critical
transformation in defining the outlines of formal architectural qualities, to the combination of
both under the premise of modernist emancipation. However, as Deleuze would have it, it’s not a
matter of bringing all sorts of things under a single concept, but rather of relating each concept to
the variables that explain its mutations. Vitruvius, Alberti and Le Corbusier will be considered as
the ‘conceptual personae’ that highlight issues attached to spatial production while nevertheless
expanding beyond it. The question of access appears under the mode of a problem, forcing one
to consider its implications on a population of heterogeneous fields. What is at stake here is that
all the actualizations of modernity are based on the incarnation of an ideal possibility, an
archetypical futurity which is somehow to be brought from a transcendent exterior to a malleable
present via the manipulation of the access between primary and secondary qualities.
Therefore, most of spatial theories seem to ignore a quite simple fact; that a horizontally
expanded experience is the phenomenon whose existence is more certain than the existence of
anything else. It is on this premise that architectural theories, for the sake of their own
persistence and individuation, should shift focus from the relata of the discipline to the
experiential relationships that precede them. I conclude this paper by arguing that if any
architectural theory and practice is to aim in a break from the past then it is through the focus on
the contingent actuality of a virtual state of affairs. The question therefore for any architecture to
come, is whether space can topologically afford and be afforded the virtual; afford the nonneutralization and the non-confinement of desire.
Drs. ir. Stavros Kousoulas studied Architecture at the National University of Athens where he
received his first Master diploma in 2009. He received his second MSc in Architecture from the
Faculty of Architecture of the TU-Delft in 2012. Since 2012 he has been active in the capacity of
guest lecturer and researcher at the Theory Section of the Faculty of Architecture of the TUDelft. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at IUAV Venice participating in the Villard d’
Honnecourt International Research Doctorate. His doctoral research focuses primarily on
morphogenetic processes framed within assemblage theory. He has published and lectured in
Europe and abroad. He is member of the editorial board of Footprint since 2014.
stakousou@yahoo.gr
124
Kreps, David
Durée réelle: microphysical indetermination: creative emergence
Keywords: Bergson, movement, emergence
Bergson argues that measurable time is an artificial concept, formed by the intrusion of space
into the realm of duration. His durée reélle is a continuous reality that is tempero-spatial, in
contrast to the discontinuous, spatio-temporal discrete moment that positive science casts as the
real. Bergson’s is thus a philosophy of movement. Contra the pre-Socratic Eleatics, whose
universe of points brought us the cinematographic reality of ‘being’ and fixity, Bergson’s universe
is fluid and continuously becoming. Deleuze, in Bergsonisme, highlights the multiplicity this
becoming implies, and that Bergson’s intuition philosophique, as method, must always ‘state
problems and solve them in terms of time rather than of space.’
This paper addresses the role of consciousness and complexity in the creation of this moving
reality. Absolute causalism, the notion that the universe is determined by fixed physical processes,
with no room for conscious choice, breaks at the quantum level. Bohr described this as
microphysical indetermination. Deleuze’s Bergson invites us to revisit the multiplicity of the
present. Because the past no longer exists, once the present has arrived, ‘newness’ cannot exist
unless it contains some corollary of ‘memory,’ by which to differentiate. The present thus arrived
at, the future, if it is to be novel, must in fact be a number of possibilities, the one that will come
to be the new present a future not yet chosen. In this quantum space where the possibilities of
the future have not yet been reduced to the one that will come, consciousness becomes an
integral part of the physical becoming of the universe.
For Bergson ‘consciousness launched into matter,’ is also the starting point of life, existence both
creative and emergent. Life is the gathering, ordering principle opposed to the entropy of the
inert. Life, bursting forth explosively wherever it can, always seeking ever greater and more
diverse forms, is, for Bergson, driven by another of his famous intuitions, the élan vital: a
direction of flow like the self-organisation of living systems in complex evolutionary biology.
Consciousness, moreover, ultimately seeks out its mirror, and includes, at its pinnacle, self-aware
and social consciousness, in the form of humankind. We are not nature’s perfection, nor indeed
the best possible outcome, let alone inevitable. But we represent, for Bergson – and for Deleuze that which it is ultimately for, what existence is finally about, and “durations that are inferior or
superior are still internal to” us.
Dr David Kreps PhD MA BA(hons) PGCAP SFHEA, Senior Lecturer in Information Systems
and Society, Salford Business School
Room 511e, Maxwell Building, University of Salford, Salford, Manchester, M5 4WT, UK
d.g.kreps@salford.ac.uk // business.salford.ac.uk/staff/davidkreps
125
Kuipers, Halbe Hessel
Deleuze, Exhaustion and our Mode of Existence in Smooth Space
Keywords: exhaustion, smooth space, our mode of existence
On several occasions in his works Deleuze refers to a ‘process of exhaustion’. In this paper I will
first give draw out what this process is for Deleuze; from its more metaphysical nature in
Difference and Repetition, to its naturalistic constituency in “Lucretius and the Simulacrum”, to
the aesthetics of exhaustion in “The Exhausted”, the process of exhaustion can be taken as an
exhaustion of the possible: all that inhabits a certain plane is surveyed in order to open it up to
that which is more than its parts, enabling a line of flight. As Deleuze elaborates on the process
in its different situations, exhaustion as a process is precisely the inclusion of a subject onto the
plane (whatever the situation may be) in order to leave the body exhausted, a state wherein it can
affirm novelty of that situation.
By analysing the documentary Episode III by Dutch artist Renzo Martens, I will subsequently
argue that exhaustion has become the inevitable, inescapable condition of our current, neoliberal
system, thriving on intrinsic exploitation within smooth space. In Episode III Martens undertakes
the impossible task of empowering the exploited workers in the Congo. By trying to give them
means to exploit their own poverty, which he sees as a resource in our global economy, the
attempt is to cut into the flows of capital to make poverty to commodity of those who own it.
Meanwhile Martens continuously acknowledges his own position within this field, and necessarily
includes and exploits this all the same — Martens shows that the Self, by virtue of the current
conditions, is always included and exploited as well, i.e. intrinsic exploitation (Hardt & Negri). By
attempting to exhaust the possible and the necessary inclusion of the Self, Episode III shows that
exhaustion is a mode of existence of our times, and that through strategically engaging with it
there are certain possibilities of life, new ways of perceiving and new sociabilities.
Halbe Hessel Kuipers is a PhD-candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and
connected to Concordia University Montréal. His research concerns itself with the convergence
of the dynamic of resistance and the dynamic of current neoliberal state. His current project
revolves around intrinsic exploitation and its concomitant modes of exhaustion in relation to
artistic practices that engage with precisely that logic in order to counter the dominant logic:
exhaustion of the Self. His interests lie in: modernity and excess, visual culture, philosophy of
difference, aesthetic-politico practices and the idea or concept of the Self.
hhkuipers@gmail.com
126
Kuntz, Aaron M. and Ryan Evely Gildersleeve
Becoming-Knowledge in Neoliberal Higher Education: Virtuality and Life in American
Academe
Keywords: assemblage, higher education, biopower
Maurizio Lazzarato (2015) theorizes American higher education as the quintessential example of
neoliberal governmentality and the debt economy of the 21st century. We take Lazzarato’s
analysis as a departure for our theorizing of the knowledge imperative of academia as it relates to
the purposes of American higher education. Working through various assemblages of the
knowledge imperative, we seek to territorialize/deterriotorialize the knowledge imperative,
illustrating tertiary education as a machine that plugs into (activates/is activated by/accelerates)
normative knowledge structures, reifying the neoliberal condition. Yet, despite an apparent
institutional stability, there remains a destabilizing periphery of such normative structures: the
counter-logics that push scholars to seek the periphery.
At stake in our analyses are the material configurations of tertiary education’s responsibility for
knowledge production. Historically, knowledge production in American higher education has
sustained transformations from theological to humanities to technical to basic science to applied
science to its current regime focused on workforce development (Cohen & Kisker, 2011). Yet,
each of these pasts remains, at least in part, present in American academe today. Here we
encounter the cycle of past and present, perhaps even future, that Deleuze (1995) deemed
"coexistent cycles of being." Such coexistent cycles extend from representative systems--the
machine renders a reality, a knowing, that can be known, understood according to its own sensemaking. Yet no cycle is ever complete and the differentiation of knowledges across these cycles
makes possible the contemporary virtual knowledge that takes center stage in the theater of
tertiary education of today.
Assemblage 1: Virtuality
With the above as a backdrop, we present the faculty performance review as an assemblage,
noting that in contemporary American universities it is common for administrations to require
the use of data management software to record and track faculty productivity. These digital
systems digitize research into statistically significant reports (numbers of publications, journal
impact factors, citation indexes, etc.). Institutionally, the content of the publication is of no
concern. As an assemblage of knowledge production, these reports stand-in as representations of
the knowledge produced by a faculty member. Knowledge is rendered as purely-virtual.
Assemblage 2: Life
Given the virtual knowledge of the theater of tertiary education, faculty members exist (and
thrive) as their publication records grow. The American life sustained by virtual knowledge is one
of hyper-productivity for productivity’s sake. Life matters in its quantity, not its quality. If the
knowledge imperative is meant to sustain life, just what kind of life is the knowledge imperative,
in the neoliberal regime, meant to sustain? What, then, is the (renewed) purpose of American
higher education?
Assemblage 3: Becoming-knowledge
As the performance review moves discursive-material knowledges into virtual knowledge, its uses
in the sustaining of life – of an academic bios committed to quantity over quality – expand the
virtual knowledge regime into the bios itself. That is, the performance review becomes the life of
a faculty member; the merit or worth of this life is thus systematically documented for
consumption. Any given faculty member, from an institutional perspective, becomes her or his
performance review.
127
References
Cohen, A. & Kisker, C. (2011). The Shaping of American Higher Education, 2nd Edition. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Deleuze, G. (1995). Difference and Repetition. P. Patton (trans). New York: Columbia University
Press.
Lazzarato, M. (2015). Governing by Debt. New York: Semiotext(e).
Dr. Ryan Evely Gildersleeve is Associate Professor and Chair of Higher Education at the
University of Denver. His research investigates the social/political contexts of educational
opportunity for Latino immigrant communities in the U.S. His latest project theorizes
posthumanist higher education in the era of neoliberal governmentality. He is the author of
Fracturing Opportunity: Mexican Migrant Students and College-going Literacy and co-author of
Qualitative Research for Equity in Higher Education. He was a 2012-2014 National Academy of
Education Fellow. Gildersleeve earned his MA in Higher Education and Organizational Change
and his PhD in Education from UCLA. He is a graduate of Occidental College.
Contact information:
1999 E. Evans Ave.
Denver, CO 80210
Ryan.gildersleeve@du.edu
Dr. Aaron M. Kuntz is Associate Professor and Department Head of Educational Studies at the
University of Alabama. His research interests include materialist methodologies, academic
activism, critical geography, and philosophy of education. His recent book, The Responsible
Methodologist: Inquiry, Truth-Telling, & Social Justice (Left Coast Press) contests neoliberal
procedurism in educational inquiry through a critical engagement with Foucault’s lectures on
parrhesia and critical materialism. He co-authored Qualitative Inquiry for Equity in Higher
Education (Jossey-Bass) and co-edited the volume Citizenship Education: Global Perspectives,
Local Practices (Routledge). He received his doctorate in education from the University of
Massachusetts Amherst.
amkuntz@ua.edu
128
Lai, Chung-Hsiung
The Virtual Face: On Deleuze and Guattari’s Machine of Faciality
Keywords: face, machine, becoming
This paper is aimed at examining the virtuality of Delueze and Guattari’s immanent face. In
“Year Zero: Faciality,” Deleuze and Guattari provide the reader with an insight: an abstract
machine of faciality. They argue that the face is what constructs both humanity and individual
identities. The meaning of our faces is “engendered by an abstract machine of faciality.” That is,
the face is not only “actual” but also “virtual.” It is the facial machine that imposes
“signification” (the white wall) and “subjectification” (the black hole) as a pre-determinate
structure of the human face. Since the face is incorporated into itself, it becomes rather than
expresses. In brief, there are three roles with which the face is usually associated: it is
“individuating” (it distinguishes each person), “socialising” (it manifests a social role) and
“relational” (it ensures not only communication between two people, but also in a single person,
the internal agreement between character and role). Deleuze and Guattari write, “faces are not
basically individual; they define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field that neutralizes
in advance any expressions or connections unamenable to the appropriate significations.” As a
result, the face, they argue, is also political. The machine of faciality is operated by a specific
despotic assemblage of power that produces the face and then decodes and overcodes the
“body” and “head.” To be “human” is thus to be “pinned to the white wall and stuffed in the
black hole of the face.” Racism is actually a product of such an abstract poltical machine. Deleuze
and Guattari believe that there are two problems with the faciality machine: the relation of the
face to the abstract machine that produces it, and the relation of the face to the assemblage of
power that requires that social production. To them, the face is not an end of representation but
a virtual process of becoming, of inventing and of defacialization. The questions I want to ask
are: how can we deterritorialize this faciality produced by an abstract system (that is, how can we
break through the white wall of signification? And how can we draw our lines of flight from the
black hole of subjectification?)? Can the face as a political machine have its own ethical
implication, or can this political act of defacialization entail the ethic of the face? What are the
attendant problems of Deleuze and Guattari’s facial ethics?
Chung-Hsiung Lai is a Professor of Critical Theory at the Department of Foreign Languages
and Literature, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. He is specialized in contemporary
philosophy, critical theory and globalization studies. Currently, he is working on the idea of
philosophical messianism and the ethics between Levinas and Deleuze.
chlai@mail.ncku.edu.tw
129
Landaeta Mardones, Patricio
“A Deleuzian vitalism. Or the Uses and Disadvantages of philosophy for life”
Keywords: Deleuze, Nietzsche, Vitalism
Vitalism is not a “content”, not merely a problem of Deleuze's philosophy. Vitalism corresponds
to the immanence in which concepts and history are inscribed. To understand in the first instance
the interweaving of thought and life, we need to distance the author and find a vantage point
allowing us to experience his philosophy beyond the interpretation of it. We shall attempt to
repeat Nietzsche's critique of history in Untimely Meditations (On the Advantage and
Disadvantage of History for Life), exploring how his theses could apply to the philosophy of
Deleuze, given that Deleuze's critique of "metaphysics" is comparable to the critique of
"monumental history" investing the logical order of concepts with a court of authorities judging
over good and evil. Deleuze’s critique of the "history of philosophy" is, furthermore, comparable
to Nietzsche’s critique of the “antiquarian history”, a sterile view of history limited to preserving
the past in order to prevent its corruption in present times. Finally, we observe the destructive
power of Nietzsche’s critique of “critical history”, where his approach, or reproach, is once more
similar to Deleuze’s critique of negative thought in Hegel, and which may extend to a critical
theory attempting to divest history of the misery of the present. Deleuze’s philosophical journey
can be seen as a counterpoint to the three modes of history envisaged by Nietzsche, who sought
balance between them, much as Deleuze sought to combine "metaphysics", "history" and
"critical thought" in a wider respect for life.
PhD. Patricio Landaeta Mardones is permanent researcher of Social Philosophy at the
Advanced studies Centre (CEA), Universidad of Playa Ancha, Valparaiso, Chile. He obtained his
Master of Advanced Studies in Philosophy and his PhD in Spain, Universidad Complutense de
Madrid. He obtained a second PhD in France, Université de Paris-8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, and
a third PhD. in Chile, Pontificia Universidad Catolica of Valparaiso, Chile. He has participated in
many Deleuze Studies Conferences since year 2008 (Copenhagen, New Orleans, Lisbon, Osaka
and Turkey), demonstrating his interest on Deleuze and Guattari. At this time his research focus
on the study of Deleuze and Rancière understanding of politics and of aesthetic, as well as
deleuzian comprehension of vitalism.
patricio.landaeta@gmail.com
130
Liao, Hsien-hao Sebastian
Enlightenment through the Holey: Chan as Intercessor
Keywords: Chan (Zen), holey space, enlightenment
Even though some of its major ideas can be traced back to early Buddhism, Chan (Zen)
Buddhism owes its distinct outlook to quite anextent to Taoist as well as Confucian influences.
These influences helped re-orient Buddhism in such a way as to turn the centuries following the
arrival of Bodhidharma in China into almost a Chan “hegemony,” which in turn re-shaped the
Chinese philosophical landscape. If we can understand early Buddhism as an investment in
Deleuzian smooth space as resistance to striated space manifested mainly in the Hindu caste
system and its religious hierarchy, then Chan Buddhism opted for an alternate route, one that is
committed to engendering the Deleuzian “holey space.”
According to Deleuze, holey space is the space that “communicates with smooth space and
striated space,” passing through both without stopping at either (ATP 414-415). The function of
holey space is to enable the “passages or combinations” that occur in both the process of
striation and smoothing: “how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in
the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces” (500). What
interests me, then, is how Chan Buddhism as a latter-day re-working of Buddhism by means of
indigenous ways of thinking and living produces a holey practice that allows smooth space to
emerge in striated space.
This essay will explore how indigenous Chinese influences helped transform Chan Buddhism
into a practice that cultivates holey space and enables smooth space to emerge by means of
creating events. Two major components of Chan Buddhism benefited most from indigenous
influences: the “encounter dialogue” way of teaching and the “woods” (cong-lin) way of life. The
gong-an way of teaching, which creates lines of flight away from “truth” and into life, most likely
took shape under the influence of both _The Analects_ and _Zhuangzi_ (to a lesser extent
_Laozi)_, with the Analects providing the dialogue format and Zhuangzi the technique of
paradoxical parables. And the master-disciple relationship on which the encounter dialogue is
founded was made possible largely by the communal way of life initiated by Mazu and
Baizhang.
Thus, Chan Buddhism as a holey practice mediates between smooth space and striated space in
terms not only of instigating new thinking by deploying the power of the false but of forming
Buddhist communities that intermingle with the mundane world. The communal way of life
completely changed the individualized mendicant way of early Buddhism and created nodes of
transversal alliances and metallurgical or intercessor collectives, which actively introduce smooth
space into striated space, the new into the banal. With both the encounter dialogue and woods
system, Chan Buddhism offers itself both as a way of thinking and a way of “living”: a practice
not only devoted to personal salvation but actively engaged in an endeavor of “becoming minor”
in hope of creating a “people to come.”
Dr. Hsien-hao Sebastian Liao is Professor of English and comparative literature at the Department of
Foreign languages and literatures at National Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford
University and was post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University. In addition to being chief editor for three
important literary journals in Taiwan, he also served as President of the Comparative Literature
Association of Taiwan (ROC) (2002-04) among others. His most recent publications include “Becoming
Butterfly: Power of the False, Crystal Image and (Taoist) Onto-Aesthetics” in _Deleuze and Asia_, eds.
Ronald Bogue et al (Cambridge Scholar, 2014) and “Becoming God, and Dog: Taoist _You_, Deleuzian
Nomadism and _God, Man, Dog_.” in _Deleuze in China_, eds. Paul Patton et al. (U of New South
Wales & Henan U). He is currently working on two projects-- “The Sino Maritime” and “Deleuze and
Taosm”.
xliao@ntu.edu.tw
131
Lindner, Eckardt
Robotic Heresy: Inorganic Life between Kant and Deleuze
If the 20th century in philosophy was the century of „being“, the 21th will be that of „life“. Not
only the politicization of life, but also the theoretical and practical ability to synthesis and
reproduce it in soft-, wet- and hardware has brought classical concepts of life at the edge of the
deconstruction of its seemingly inherent naturalness and organic constitution.
These postvital constellations are concerned with the material processes and effective potentials
that constitute life, instead of the characteristics or functions of the organism. They make
cybernetics, artificial life and computer science not only viable but necessary fields for providing
facts and methods for a modern philosophy of life. However, these sciences are constantly
countered by a second dominant school of thought that insists on the naturalness, purity and
medium specificity of life, proofing that the new sciences do not have found their metaphysics
yet. To gain insight into the original artificiality and technicity of life, the foundation for thought
about life has to be critiqued and shifted.
In his late work What is philosophy? Deleuze draws two lines of interpretation of life. One line
from Kant to Bernard with an understanding of life as an idea, which does not exist
independently, but is effective, while on the other hand in the vitalism from Leibniz to Ruyer life
is a force, that exists, but is not effective. The external determination of life in Kant implies a
structural parallel movement of thought and organism.
While in the faculty of knowledge – according to its highest form – the understanding is
legislative, in the faculty of desire it’s reason and in the sensitive faculty the judgement.
Unlike an idea of reason however, the idea of natural purpose has a given object and in contrary
to a concept of understanding, it is not legislative for that object. Rather, the natural purposes can
only be thought in its generality, if the objects of experience present this purposefulness
themselves. With this step Kant wants to transition from natural teleology to natural theology,
which at the same time relies on natural purpose and grounds it. While in the aesthetic judgement
the harmony of nature and the faculties is external to the sensus communis, this relationship is
internal to the sensus communis in the teleological judgement. Therefore, the transition from
aesthetic to teleological judgement excludes the problem of the genesis of the sensus communis,
insofar as the reflection without a concept of beauty prepares for the
introduction of the idea of natural purposes, which is itself only fully constituted in the
application of reflection upon nature.
Therefore, Kant’s concept of the organism is not solely a biological, but primarily a moral idea,
supported by the transition from the speculative to the practical interest of reason and
retrospectively held up by the condition of an intentional divine cause in the natural purposes.
Instead of being a de facto object of thought, the organism determines de jure what can be an
object of thought and therefore constitutes an image of thought; an image that thought makes of
itself, determining its inner limits.
Deleuze’ transcendental empirism does offers not only a line of flight out of the Kantian
restrictions, but radicalizes the transcendental account of life beyond the logic of purposes and
especially naturalness. Therefore, artificial life becomes not only an imitation, but the paradigm of
life.
Eckardt Lindner teaches Philosophy at the University of Vienna and is a translator as well as an
editor with Merve Verlag. He has published articles and books on Deleuze, Adorno, the
philosophy of nature, artificial life and the philosophy of desire.
He is currently working on his PhD-Thesis on the philosophy of artificial life from a Deleuzian
perspective.
Eckardt.Lindner@univie.ac.at
132
Link, Franziska
Liquid Speech, Fluid Bodies – Thoughts on translating the becoming-woman in Theresa
Cha’s Dictee
Keywords: becoming-woman, body, language
“In the whiteness/ no distinction her body invariable no dissonance/ synonymous her body all
the time de composes/eclipses to be come yours.”25
Written in five languages (English, French, Korean, Latin and Chinese), Theresa Hak Kyung
Cha’s Dictee tells the story of Cha’s mother Hyung Soon Huo, the Korean revolutionary Yu
Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone and Cha herself. Roughly structured by the
name of the nine muses, Cha’s narratives dissolve and reemerge, they interact with image and
mere white paper and seem to long for a distant, camera-like perspective that is never fully
established. Reading Dictee thus provokes the confrontation with a mode of expression that is
fundamentally unsure of itself: While continuously producing text, the languages keep changing,
here and there giving way to images. The different text formats broach the issue of bodily fluids,
perception and materiality, thus extending the question of the body to the languages used in the
text. In this manner language seems to be a way to ensure being alive, mirroring life’s constant
flow. Chinese calligraphy and facsimiles of handwritten text interrupt that flow, sparking
foreignness and irritation, prompting the reader to repeat a passage or a chapter. Dictee thus
provokes watchfulness in the reader, demanding her to become a translator that is confronted
with the infuriating impossibility to translate. To read and to translate slows down, challenges and
dismantles the reading process, allowing the reader-translator to dissect and reassemble the
language. That way the performative movement of the text is mirrored in the reading-translating
practice. Consequently, my intention is to find and apply modes of reading-translating that
interact with the fluidity and unreliability of Cha’s Dictee, thus coming closer to and revealing
traces of the becoming-women: their bodies, their hurt and their suffering.
Franziska Link is a master’s degree student in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at
the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich (LMU). In 2013 she received her bachelor’s degree
in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature and Philosophy from the same university. In 2015,
she spent a semester studying Finnish Language and Culture at the University of Helsinki,
Finland. Her main focus lies on translation theory, hermeneutics, literature of migration and exile
and feminist perspectives on text and writing. She writes book reviews for the Jahrbuch für
finnisch-deutsche Literaturbeziehungen (‘Yearbook of Finnish-German Literary Relations’) and
contributes to the recently founded literary and political-philosophical magazine [kϽn].
Franziska.Link@campus.lmu.de
25
Cha, Theresa: Dictee. University of California Press: Berkeley 2001, p.118.
133
Mackenzie, Hollie
A Feminist and Poststructuralist Artistic Theory-Practice of Resistance
Keywords: Deleuze, Zepke, Braidotti
In this paper I will begin by laying out a critique of the current crisis of the production of art. I
will argue that the production of art is influenced by the dominant economic, social, cultural and
political forces aligned with the interests of capitalism and patriarchy. I will explain that
challenging the modern ideal of aesthetic judgement and the authority of the individual artist,
may require more than the decommodification of the art object. Instead, I will propose a feminist
and poststructuralist artistic theory-practice of resistance. I will argue that this practice has the
potential to both avoid and challenge the traditional dogmatic image of thought and foster
becoming-woman.
My ontological conception of artistic practice will draw succour from Deleuze's (1968) notion of
the encounter and Zepke's (2014) applied Deleuzian schizo-revolutionary art. In doing so, this
presentation will explain that art is an encounter with the possibility of experiencing the world
differently; through ontological transformations or becomings. By developing the notion of art as
a decisively political force, I will argue that what is produced is not just an art work or a form of
protest, but a new mode of life. In which, the 'work' becomes an on-going / never-complete
process of expression / creation and construction / becoming. I will argue that this artistic
formula provides us with the possibility to go beyond art’s representational and capitalist limits.
I will conclude this paper with a suggestion that this ontological conception of artistic practice is
a process of learning. I will explore this artistic formula as a practice of learning how to express
the problems that reside within ideas. I will argue that learning can offer lines of flight that can
escape and challenge the traditional dogmatic image of thought. I will propose, then, that it is
within this artistic formula that we can embark on a heuristic process of asking the question of
becomings: What can a body do? How do you increase its capacities to affect? And, in this
feminist proposal: “how to emancipate ‘woman’ from the subjugated position of annexed ‘other’”
(Braidotti, 1994)? By addressing Braidotti’s feminist question, I will invoke a minority sensation
that is feminist. I will describe that the minority sensation affirms the ontological autonomy of
art. It is through experiencing this minority sensation through the artistic encounter that, I will
argue, incites the possibility of learning to think differently, by learning to experience the world
differently. This proposal of a feminist and poststructuralist artistic theory-practice of resistance
capable of challenging the norms of capitalism, patriarchy and the traditional dogmatic image of
thought will then be summarized; engaging with the problem of learning how to become-woman,
through such artistic encounters and by expressing our own artistic singularity, will also enable us
to discover our constituent practices of resistance in common. By becoming-women becomingartists and becoming-participating artists, we will learn how to resist through enacting an ongoing / never-complete / ever-folding / learning / labial revolution of creation and becoming.
Hollie Mackenzie is an artist and a PhD candidate in Political and Social Thought within the Politics and
IR department at the University of Kent, UK. Her research is focused on practicing a non-dogmatic
relationship between art and politics, through feminist and poststructuralist perspectives. Predominately
drawing upon the literature by and on Deleuze and Gauttari. Weaving together artistic practice, scholarly
work and political engagement, she aims to both practice and explore a feminist philosophy of 'labial' artpolitics.
www.mackenzieartist.co.uk
hm319@kent.ac.uk
134
Maeng, Hyeyoung
Documentation Art and Transcendental Realism; Painting as Virtuality, Becoming and
Life
Throughout this paper, I will try to answer crucial questions regarding Deleuzian aesthetics,
specifically in what way Deleuze’s concepts of virtuality, becoming, and life can be considered as
transcendental realism in art. The term transcendental realism describes Deleuze’s aesthetics in
relation to the transcendental field, univocity of being, and imminence, as discussed in my PhD
thesis. Deleuze’s aesthetics and ethics rise in the plane of immanence, and make life into a zone
of experimentation, an absolute “non-human becoming.” In the Deleuzian aesthetics of
transcendental realism, art can never be defined by the notion of representation or formal styles.
Instead, artists search for the real, which is related to the freedom of powerful inorganic life,
virtuality, becoming, and pre-individual singularities located prior to the formal distinctions of art.
This paper will examine the capacity of the terms virtuality, becoming, and life, which transform
the process of Korean Bunche painting into an independent video art piece which I call
Documentation Art. Bunche paintings use powder pigments mixed with water glue on Korean
paper in multiple layers. Documentation Art is a stop-motion animation-like video piece
consisting of digital photography and film footage capturing multiple layers during the process of
painting. I will argue that this approach to art practice opens up new potentiality for painting to
be seen as a virtual multiplicity, not a single identity or essence. I investigate how Deleuze’s
concept of art can be interpreted as transcendental realism through the process of making the
Documentation Art piece Sandys (12 min, 2015). The title Sandys refers to the multiple
subjectivities the teenage girl Sandy has been synthesizing, which cannot be defined within the
constraints of a single identity or static boundary, but can be expressed by a process. This paper
will elucidate how virtuality explains the exact role of becoming in the process of painting Sandys.
The Documentation Art Sandys visualizes the virtual aspect of actual painting as it reveals the
invisible multiple layers underneath the painting. If the painting Sandys is seen as a synthesis of
multiple images, the painting itself becomes a zone of indiscernible or imperceptible which can
only be sensed. Many layers of images are merged into the depths of the single painting in which
differences between the images are only visible in the Documentation Art. The present layer of
the painting simultaneously includes all past and future layers created in difference of intensity
during the differentiating process of painting. Even though the underlying layers of the painting
are not visible, they definitely exist as a real part of the painting. This is the virtuality of painting
which gives form to the Documentation Art through the video editing process. Eventually, the
Documentation Art Sandys is no longer subordinate to the painting; instead it is an autonomous
fine art piece which, as described by Deleuze, becomes a monument standing alone by itself, and
a block of sensation which consists of affects and percepts. This paper presentation will include a
video screening of Sandys.
Link to watch the Documentation Art Sandys:
https://filmfreeway.com/project/428155
Password: youngproject2015
Hyeyoung Maeng was born in South Korea, and is currently a PhD candidate in Contemporary
Art at Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Art, UK. Her art practice based PhD research
investigates the aesthetics of Deleuze’s transcendental realism based on the process of making
Documentation Art of Korean Bunche painting. Hyeyoung studied Korean painting for her BFA
and MFA at Kyung Hee University, South Korea. Her Master’s thesis was about the aesthetics of
Heavenly Harmony in Chaung Zhu’s philosophy. Hyeyoung earned a second MFA in
Contemporary painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she first started applying
Deleuze’s ontology and philosophical concepts in her art practice.
Art website: www.hyeyoungmaeng.com
h.maeng@lancaster.ac.uk
135
Maїda, Clara
"Sound rhizomes" - Virtuality and actualizations: music and its multiplicity of sound
becomings
Keywords: sound desiring machines, sound becoming, multiple time
When I started reading Deleuze and Guattari, I had been working for several years at the
intersection of musical writing and psychoanalysis. In Order of release, border of relish (200204), I developed a transversal between musical time and the time of the unconscious. Echoes,
resonances, rebounds between sound fragments build a complex temporal form. Processes of
condensation or dissolution induce a mutative and elastic musical matter with heterochronic
textures, a multiplicity of strata, and transitory sound objects. From both philosophers’
perspective, the minimal units I combine in ever changing sound constellations, their capacity of
connection and propagation through the sound field, can be referred to the asignifying particles
of the machinic unconscious. In my music, small modular and pendular figures are the
elementary constituents of a sound abstract machine, and are pushed by antagonistic forces:
stratification/destratification, territorialization/deterritorialization, repetition/mutation.
These pendulums, with their modular quality and their constant pivoting movement, keep
forming evolving assemblages whose ramifications (chains of interconnected pendulums) can
either converge towards one centre such as Guattari’s black hole, with the condensation on one
object or figure, or create independent lines and migrate towards other zones. Since they keep
circulating and building ever renewing fleeting configurations, they can be considered as sound
desiring machines. In these sound rhizomes, repetition has an important function. It is a step-bystep process. Each repetition of a pendulum alters its envelope, generates a small differance
[Derrida, 1967]. It is a differentiating repetition. Being caught in a permanent flow, these
elementary figures both repeat and mute, simultaneously form and dissolve. This formal paradox
characterizes all my pieces. Abstract figures are elaborated only in order to show that they can be
undone, that they are plays of forces. They are perceptible only because they insist. Their
appearance/disappearance reveals a capture of forces, but also the paradoxical becoming of a
present which eludes towards before and after, past and future, Aion or the empty form of time,
time as a pure process.
The musical form is not preformed, it is the result of the sound trajectories, of different
becomings according to the different pieces whose mobile architecture superimposes sound
layers conceived as the actualizations of a virtual matrix.
Psyché-Cité/Transversales (2005-07) is a zone of indiscernibility between urban topography and
psychic topology, the brain and the subway, the psyche and the city, organic and mechanical
matter, scream and noise. It is a hybrid sound territory, both a becoming-machine and a
becoming-scream. Mutatis mutandis (2008) is a whole set of vibrations. Flux of particles
coagulate or trace more or less dense migratory paths in a network of entangled threads. It is a
"musical genetics", with repetitions and errors (such as the DNA). It is a becoming-filament and
a becoming-molecule. Shel(l)ter (2009-10) refers to an atomic bunker in Berlin and to nuclear
physics. It is a becoming-atom, a "nanomusic".
From the Body without Organs, a kind of "organum-body" underlies my music cartographies, i.e.
a never definite and never stabilized sound body since the invested vibratory fields are never
frozen.
136
References
- Deleuze, G. (1964; 2010), Proust et les signes (Proust and Signs), PUF/Quadrige, Paris.
- Deleuze, G. (1968), Différence et répétition (Difference and Repetition), PUF, Paris.
- Deleuze, G. (1969), Logique du sens (The Logic of Sense), Editions de Minuit, Coll. "Critique",
Paris.
- Deleuze, G. (1981; 1996), Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation (Francis Bacon. The Logic of
Sensation), La Vue le Texte aux Editions de la Différence, Turin.
- Deleuze, G. (1985), L’image-temps. Cinéma 2 (Time-Image. Cinema 2), Editions de Minuit,
Coll. "Critique", Paris.
- Deleuze, G. (1988), Le pli (The Fold), Editions de Minuit, Coll. "Critique", Paris.
- Deleuze, G. (1993), Critique et clinique (Essays: Critical and Clinical), Editions de Minuit, Paris.
- Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1972), L’Anti-Œdipe. Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1 (AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1), Editions de Minuit, Coll. "Critique", Paris.
- Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1980), Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 (A Thousand
Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2), Editions de Minuit, Coll. "Critique", Paris.
- Derrida, J. (1967), L’écriture et la différence (Writing and Difference), Editions du Seuil, Paris.
Clara Maïda is a French composer living both in Paris and Berlin since she was the guest of the
one-year Artists-in-Berlin programme of the DAAD. She works at the intersection of music,
psychoanalysis, Deleuze’s philosophy and nanosciences. She has received several international
awards and grants such as the Berlin Senat Grant, the Stuttgart and the Berlin-Rheinsberger
composition 1st Prizes (Germany), an Honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria), as
well as many commissions from famous institutions and festivals. Her pieces have been
performed by numerous contemporary music ensembles and broadcast on radios all around the
world. She has given lectures and conferences in many countries. Two monographic CDs of her
music have been published.
http://www.claramaida.com
clara.maida@club-internet.fr
137
Mijatović, Aleksandar
The Sense of Revolution: Becoming, event and ordinary in Deleuze’s reading of Kant’s
Conflict of Faculties
Key words: event, time, ordinary
In What is Philosophy? (1991, hereafter cited as WP) Deleuze and Guattari returned to an
analysis of modernity and its link with the notion of revolution. They refer to Kant’s famous
analysis of the event (Begebenheit) of revolution given in the Conflict of Faculties (1798).
According to Kant, the revolution could not be predicted by relying upon an immediate
experience (unmittelbar Erfahrung), but only by isolating an event as a historical sign which
points to a disposition for revolution.
Kant’s notion of revolution spawned important readings in the work of Foucault, Habermas and
Lyotard and they are mentioned in WP. However, a special attention was given to Foucault’s
notion of Actual. They consider Actual with Péguy’s and Nietzsche’s notions of Aternal and
Untimely. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the Actual is related to the transformation of
present into becoming. It is the transformation that is defined as “resistance to present” (WP,
108) and as “becoming-revolutionary” (WP, 112). Becoming-revolutionary consists in wresting
percepts and affects from perceptual states and affection. Those revolutionary affects and
percepts – “vibrations, clinches, openings” (…) “new bonds” – compose monument that is in
the process of becoming.
In discussing the notion of revolution as monument, Deleuze and Guattari poses the famous
question on the effectivity of revolution regarding its (un)successfulness: “Will this all be in vain
because suffering is eternal and revolutions do not survive their victory?” (WP, 177). That
question was already posed in Deleuze’s 1969 book The Logic of Sense (hereafter cited as LS):
“Why is every event a kind of plague, war, wound, or death? Is this simply to say that there are
more unfortunate and fortunate events?” (LS, 151). The revolution as event is indifferent to its
determinations, extracting itself from a sensory-motor chain and separating percepts and affects
from perceptual and affective states. Such event of revolution maintains its ideationality by being
turned into the sign which is not recognised, but encountered. The effectiveness of the sign-event
could not be simply measured by it successfulness; the sign retains its sense even if it fails to
denote.
In the presentation it will be considered Deleuze’s reading of Kant. It will be outlined Deleuze’s
reconceptualization of revolution from historical accident to becoming through redefinition of
notions event and sense. That will be connected with Deleuze’s notion of ordinary developed in
Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985) in relation to crystalline narration which gives direct image of
time.
Aleksandar Mijatović teaches literary theory, literary history and semiotics at the Faculty of
Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Rijeka. He has published two books in
Croatian language Personific(a)tions: Literary Subject and Politics of Impersonality (2013), World
without Man: Consciousness, Materialism and Literature (2012) and he has edited the collection
of essays titled Imaginary Languages: Visual Culture and Limits of Representation (2012). In
English language, he has published articles on Agamben, Althusser, Benjamin, Bergson, Breton,
Deleuze, and Derrida. One of his recent articles is “Heteroessences: Community, Demonstratives
and Interpretation in Agamben’s Philosophy of Language” (2014), published for Rodopi
collection.
Aleksandar Mijatović, ph. d. University of Rijeka Sveučilišna avenija 4 51000 Rijeka Croatia
aleksandar.mijatovic16@gmail.com // amijatovic@ffri.hr
138
Miller, Zea
Being and Becoming Science Fiction: Tracing the Past and Freeing its Future
Keywords: Genre, Science Fiction, Identity, Becoming, Hjelmslev
To the extent that science fiction evolves with each generation, its identity should be considered
transitory. Yet, scholars often structurally privilege the genre’s being over its becoming whenever
reflecting on its futuristic, generic assemblage of properties or imposing canonical sorting
mechanisms on it that are inherently rooted in the life and times of authors. This need not be the
case. Between speculation and extrapolation, the genre is certainly forward-focused, yet the
project of science fiction studies has been a retrospective function of the virtual past. What
would it take to deterritorialize and destratify the essential identity of the genre so as to become a
hyperplane or horizon of possibility? By investigating the narratological content of science
fiction, as a genre, and its expressions, as texts, through the lens of a Hjelmslevian glossematic
manifold, this paper will examine how science fiction’s purport can be refined by concepts and
models developed by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. In the
same way that Hjelmslev deconstructed a sign-complex through its content-form, expressionform, content-substance, and expression-substance, so science fiction can be deconstructed to
reveal its structural assembly, and through Deleuze and Guattari, its post-structural assemblage.
This project will therefore interrogate how the form of science fiction is assembled (a science
fictional novum that striates the immanant narrative without organs) and how its substance is
evolving (from humanity to the societies of destruction), ultimately tracing the constrained being
of science fiction to its unfettered becoming. This paper will first explore the history of science
fiction and science fiction studies to determine how the identity of science fiction has been
essentialized as being, and second, it will argue that its Deleuzoguattarian becoming is an
improved generic operation, freeing it from its critical constraints. This will be accomplished by
troubling the essential features of narratological identity and then building a theoretical frame for
narratological becoming as a process.
Zea Miller is a PhD candidate in theory and cultural studies at Purdue University, where he is
writing a dissertation on the Hjelmslevian content and expression of science fiction through
Deleuze and Guattari. He is also a project manager at the Center for Cognition and Neuroethics,
where he explores the work of neuroethics in science fiction and hosts an international
conference on the theme. His research interests also include structuralism, semantics, semiotics,
and genre.
mill1178@purdue.edu
139
Mohammed, Sideeq
Life in Wonderland: The Ethnographic Subject and the Third Synthesis of Time
Keywords: Ethnography, Subjectivity, Time, Shopping Centre
The import of the third synthesis of time, delineated by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition,
lies in the establishment of the independence of the subject not just from the ordinal and the
cardinal- not just from time as movement or psychological states of affairs- but in reading the cut
or fractures in the subject that separate it from time, such that time can never be reduced to its
action or product. Western philosophy will have successfully deconstructed and dissolved the
subject at some point in its pasts, and indeed, the moves towards thinking the subject as multiple,
as without fixed identity, as transient ephemera connecting to all manner of new communities
could be said to characterize dominant strands of cultural theory emerging since the 1960’s (Hall,
2000). Yet when in the midst of ethnographic fieldwork, thought is always drawn back towards
the subject and thus to the self; towards identity, representation and the relations of the
intersubjective; as though the academic forgot all that he had read when he realized that there
were people in the field whose lives he could not ignore, his own subjectivity comprising one of
them. Even after the reflexive turn prompted by Writing Culture, ethnographic work is still
arguably yet to find an adequate answer to Cadava et al’s (1991) question of “Who Comes After
the Subject?” other than what has emerged in partiality from explorations of various
cosmological perspectives or alternative modes of thought (see Kohn 2013; Viveiros de Castro,
2012). This paper shall argue that this is where Deleuze’s work on the third synthesis can assert
its relevance, for in his attempt, via Kant’s reading of time as a “pure and empty form” and
Nietzsche’s eternal return as a basis for a model of repetition, to develop a genetic account for
thought and understand how it comes to be about and of a subject, Deleuze creates a moment
for thinking such subjects as other than the sole progenitor of thought; that thought forms the
“I” rather than the “I” thought (Voss, 2013). Simply put, thought, at its genesis, fractures the
subject but the fractured subject still struggles to find a moment in the ethnographic. This paper
shall thus present a speculative look at ethnography after the “I think”, considering what happens
once we take the ideas of transcendental empiricism and the three syntheses of time, into the
field-site of the contemporary British shopping centre. Often billing itself as “a wonderland” for
various flights of consumer fantasy, what emerges in the ethnographic encounter is a life,
immanent to what we might understand to be the temporalities of the shopping centre, one
bound up in prepersonal singularities, observing what at once seems mundane and pataphysical,
abstract and embodied, temporal and alive with other times- the series of untraceable
connections that make up life in the shopping centre.
Sideeq Mohammed is currently pursuing a PhD at The University of Manchester with a focus
on engaging with Deleuze’s writings in the context of ethnographic fieldwork; exploring concepts
such as the war-machine, the Body without Organs, the three syntheses of time and the method
of transcendental empiricism (in conjunction with the political, organizational and
epistemological issues that are interlinked with these), all in relation to the shopping centre. He is
a multi-instrumentalist and an avid reader of transgressive fiction.
sideeq.mohammed@mbs.ac.uk
140
Monteiro, Luis Ricardo Nunes da Costa
Visions of Landscape Disclosures and Deleuze's Operative Territory
What happens when art presents landscape that does not exist, without memory and history?
Actually we may attach them some meaning, mostly because there's no innocent eye, and our own mind
recapture these views with its own recollections, because landscapes are also cultural constructions.
Besides, as Deleuze suggests, "geography doesn't limits itself by giving matter and changeable places to the historic form.
Geography is not only physical and human, but also mental, like a landscape".
So, we should go beyond the mere contemplation of landscapes and construct an autonomous view,
raising a virtual world or several. This calls for the construction of a place without history and origin, but
with sequences and forces. It is more about sensation than perception. Or eventually, the landscape
transforms itself in an aesthetic compound with a perception of its own: "The landscape sees", says Deleuze.
The percept erases man subjectivity, its memory and identity "it is the landscapes in the absence of man". Our
presentation recalls this conception of percept as a "non human landscape of nature" - as a productive creative
force in order to enlarge reality through virtualization of territory and (re)discover actual meanings in this
meta-territoriality.
We may intercept Deleuze own evocation of landscape with pictorical artworks which put 3D computer
generated landscapes in interplay with painting, drawing or photography. Moreover, we intend to retain
the sense in which Deleuze considers "that the aim of painting as always been the deterritorialization of faces and
landscapes". During our presentation we will analyze artworks conceived as heterogeneous terrains, and
testify that virtualizing the landscape may contribute for revitalization of landscape aesthetics. This view
may be supported by a dialogue between various landscape theories together with Deleuze's references to
the concept, and stating divergences from seminal texts like Georges Simmel Landscape Philosophy.
Moreover, when taking as reference the typology of landscape we find a privileged point of contact with
virtualization in art, by identifying the intangibility as a link between both notions. The intangibility is
proper of the landscape itself, because despite its natural materiality it cannot be grasped as an object. This
may evoke the philosophical basis of the virtual as a “space of becoming”, concept widely analyzed by
Gilles Deleuze, and retaken by Pierre Levy and various authors in more specific areas such as technology.
Nevertheless, it is too simplistic to make a connection between the digital landmark and Deleuze's virtual
world. Actually, its meaning requires that the technological counterpart is somehow to be overcome or
refurnished, so that we can re-create a ground with both physical and digital means, and consider the
landscape as a path open to our wishes and desires.
Luis Monteiro is a Phd student UCP (CITAR), artist and teacher (ESCS), who explores visual imaging
across media, and mostly the interplay between digital image and the role of painting. Lately he's been
approaching the revitalization of landscape in the digital age. His academic background includes: a degree
in Communication Design (FBAUL), a Master in Art Theory (FBAUL) and additional art practice
development in drawing and painting (FBAUP, Slade). Recently has contributed with communications
and articles questioning the cultural work of the new landscapes, and how these terrains include or erase
human presence/perception. Moreover, he has been developing an art practice, with production in the
field of painting and installation in a collective studio in Lisbon.
Publications/ Presentations:
-”Configuring the Art Object in the Age of Digital Computing: Meaning, Intentionality and Virtualization”. CITAR
(UCP-Porto) Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts. Number 5, 2013 (article).
-"Overcoming the Digital Landmark. Transforming the Landscape". Contempart'15. 4th International Contemporary
Art Conference. Istanbul, 2015. E-Book with ISBN 978-605-9207-00-3 (article).
-“Future Cartographies: Visualizing European Space Beyond “Technological Unconscious”". ISSEI XIV
Conference – Porto 2014. Images of Europe: Past, Present, Future. (presentation).
-"Re-inventing the landscape in the digital age". Fascinate Conference 2014. Falmouth. U.K. (presentation).
-"A Screen with a View. Fictional Turkish Cityscapes". Contempart'15. 4th International Contemporary Art
Conference. Istanbul, 2015 (presentation).-"Fictional Memories: From Amnesia to Techno Landscape
Enchantment". Anthropology Conference 2015 - Landscapes, sociality and materiality. Helsinki. Finland
(presentation).
luiscm@netcabo.pt // luiscosmon01@gmail.com
141
Mösenbacher, Rudolf and Julia Garstenauer
Immanence and the Regulative Use of Reason
Keywords: Immanence, Regulative Use of Reason, Becoming
The aim of the lecture is to analyse Deleuze's concept of immanence on the basis of his studies
on Kant with a special focus on the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic. Such an analysis is
important because of two main reasons: Firstly, while Deleuze / Guattari often put a special
focus on the text passage of the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic and especially on the
regulative use of reason (Deleuze 1984, 21-27; 1994, 168-221; 1990, 290-301; Deleuze / Guattari
1994, 56; 77), research frequently focuses on the Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts
of the Understanding and the Schematism-Chapter. Secondly, the interpretation of the Appendix
to the Transcendental Dialectic from the perspective of a philosophy of becoming can also give
new insights to the Kantian text passage which gets little attention and bears a lot of problems in
the Critique of Pure Reason as well as in the research field.
Kant develops in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic a conception that is in conflict
with the rest of the Critique and its orientation on a philosophy of form, because herein he poses
the question of the singular and material. This problem undergoes no detailed elaboration in the
Critique and an other kind of solution in the Critique of Judgement. But for the philosophy of
Deleuze / Guattari it becomes central. Deleuze points out that in Kantian philosophy it is not
about an identification or confusion in the idea “but rather an internal problematic objective
unity of the undetermined, the determinable and determination” (Deleuze 1994, 170). At the
same time he criticises that Kant merely postulates the purposiveness that should be caused by
the ideas. Therefor ideas cannot legitimate “the transcendental field of possible experience,
immanent to the ‘I’ (plane of immanence)” (Deleuze / Guattari 1994, 57). Contrary to Kant who
takes the three ideas as foundation of the metaphysica specialis, Deleuze tries to think dialectic
ideas in difference to empirical sentences although decisively influenced by them.
As a mode of an artistic research we will trace these crucial aspects, the relation between “the
transcendental field of possible experience” and “the three Ideas or illusions of transcendence”
(ibid, 57) very closely connected to Deleuze’s / Guattari’s machinic portrait of Immanuel Kant as
they have drawn in it in What is Philosophy? The drawing is the starting point of thinking in our
lecture. As experimental methodological procedure and in accordance with Deleuze’s / Guattari’s
approach of the history of philosophy as the art of the portrait (ibid, 55) a scientific and an
artistic text will be interwoven during the lecture.
References
Deleuze, Gilles (1984): Kant’s Critical Philosophy. The Doctrine of the Faculties, London
Deleuze, Gilles (1990): The Logic of Sense, London
Deleuze, Gilles (1994): Difference and Repetition, New York
Deleuze, Gilles / Guattari, Félix (1994): What is philosophy? New York
Julia Garstenauer has studied Philosophy and German Language and Literature at the University of
Graz. Since 2012 she writes her PhD at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Her
main fields of research are: aesthetics, body, performativity, haptic, painting. Currently she is part of the
research project „Bodytime – An interdisciplinary inquiry on regular body rhythm and its dysfunctions“
sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) at the University of Graz.
julia.garstenauer@uni-graz.at
Mag. Rudolf Mösenbacher BA BA MA studied History, Philosophy and Psychology at the University of
Graz and the University of Vienna. Since 2012 he works as scientific assistant at the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Graz. His main research topics are the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and
the philosophy of science.
rudolf.moesenbacher@uni-graz.at
142
Mroczkowski, Bartosz
Becoming a body / becoming through a body
Keywords: body, becoming; life, oppression
Baruch Spinoza writes in Ethics: "We do not know what the body can do..."; a few centuries
later, in his book about Dutch philosopher, Gilles Deleuze comments on these words "Spinoza
offers philosophers a new model: the body. He proposes to establish the body as a model..."
(Deleuze, Spinoza. Practical Philosophy).
The dominant part of the history of philosophy has displayed contempt for the body. The
turning point is the seventeenth century, when Descartes and Spinoza gave two radically different
answers to the so called mind-body problem. Cartesian Dualism completely separates the body
from the mind through negative difference. In consequence the mind is affirmed but at the cost
of diminishing the role of the body. Thanks to this operation the body is just a machine, a vehicle
of the mind; the body is always negative, submissive, and contemptible. Thus the Cartesian’s
discourse may be seen as a discourse of oppression. Instead of that Spinoza's monism shows the
body and mind as a manifestations/modis on the same level. In my speech, I want to show
consequence of this movement: the body stops being a thing, and it becomes an active process
(Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies). Spinozian monism eliminates negative difference, and in its
place offers a complete affirmation: an active body and an active mind. We can consider monism
of Spinoza as a line of flight from the oppressive nature of Cartesian dualism. In my speech, I
want to pose the hypothesis: thinking is that what combines the body with the mind in
Spinoza's/Deleuze's monistic concept and expresses their activity. From this point I will connect
this idea with the concept of becoming shown in both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia
by Deleuze and Guattari which allows the release of body as an active force. We can consider the
second half of the twentieth century as a new trend in philosophy, the beginning of somatic turn.
In my speech, I want to show how we become bodies and how we become through the bodies.
Donna Haraway opposing the binary opposition of nature-culture in The Companion Species
Manifesto proposes the concept of naturecultures. In my presentation, I would like to do
something similar with a pair: body-mind (bodiesminds?). I would like to propose the question:
how the thinking (active) body works when it is combined with the thinking mind? I will try to
answer to the question in my presentation. In my speech, I will take into account the critical
approach of posthumanism and new materialism: the human and non-human bodies in the
multiplicity of connections and relationships, in other words—zoe-centric perspective (Rosi
Braidotti).
Bartosz Mroczkowski is a PhD student in the Institute of Philosophy at the Adam Mickiewicz
University in Poznań, Poland. He received his masters degree in Philosophy from Nicolaus
Copernicus University in Toruń. He is one of the founders of Machina Myśli
[https://machinamysli.wordpress.com/]. His recent publications include Zoe. Wieczny obieg
życia. Inspiracje w filozofii i popkulturze [Zoe. Eternal cycle of life. Inspiration in philosophy and
pop culture] (2015) and Kazimierz Dąbrowski i dezintegracja pozytywna [Kazimierz Dąbrowski
and Theory of Positive Disintegration] (2014). His current research interests include
posthumanism, transhumanism, new materialism, becoming (Deleuze), corporeality, life in
general (zoe), and anti-psychiatry.
bartosz.mroczkowski86@gmail.com
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Myserli, Aikaterina
Inhabiting the Desert island - From the singularity of the imaginary to the re-discovery
of the collective soul of the city
Keywords: desert island, re-creation, collectivity
The contemporary crisis of spatiality issues lies largely in the sense of the uncanny, the existential
anguish. This thesis studies the way in which the desert island became the defensive refuge of
man, synonymous of the unrealistic and the unfeasible. When people realize the rupture between
imagination and real world, they see the desert island as the ideal model of the world, as a
separate reality. Deleuze in his text 'Desert Islands' studies this separate reality, which he
highlights as a fundamental driving force for the re-creation of the world. The reading of this text
reveals a new space that passes from the finite to the infinite, through a constant process of
metamorphosis, a procedure of successive formats which each time leaves a trail to penetrate it.
To understand this, we must examine what kind of space produces architecture as a symbol par
excellence of the cultural act on the island and how the desert island functions as a virtual place
of re-birth and re-creation.
The concepts of élan vital, of myth and re-creation, as mentioned in the text, lead subsequently to
the investigation of relevant texts and poems that deal with the fundamental question of how
man imagines the desert island. In order to demonstrate this, I will refer to the narration of Plato
regarding the myth of Atlantis, to Thomas More's work 'Utopia' and to the poem of T.S. Eliot
'The Waste Land', where we might come across some of the above Deleuzian concepts. A
renewed reading of these classic works has the potential to bring contemporary architecture close
to what Deleuze saw in the 'Desert Islands', that is to be the concept of collective in the
individual. This approach is related to the recognition that the desert island is conceived as an
imaginary world where we discover the collective soul of the place that we lost in contemporary
cities and elucidates a spatial model of common good where architecture and urban planning
emphasize on collectivity –and thus, public space- and convey and draw values from the society.
Aikaterina Myserli studies Architecture & Engineering (MSc) at Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki and she is currently working on her diploma design project, regarding the
transformation of an existing cruise ship into a floating refugee camp for the ongoing refugee
crisis in Greece. Her theoretical thesis 'Inhabiting the Desert Island' was based on the text of
Gilles Deleuze 'Desert Islands' and explored new spatial models with emphasis on collectivity.
Along with her studies she collaborated with technical companies in Thessaloniki, she has been
awarded in international student architectural competitions and her work has been published in
Biennale Brau 2.
amyserli@arch.auth.gr
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Nakipbekova, Alfia
‘Nomos alpha by Iannis Xenakis: Performing silences’
Key words: Xenakis, violoncello, multiplicity of time
In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side - there where territories tremble, where the
structures collapse, where the echoes get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great
ritornello that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return.
Gilles Deleuze Essays Critical and Clinical (p.104)
My lecture-recital will involve a presentation and performance of Nomos Alpha for solo cello by
Iannis Xenakis, one of the most radical compositions of the 20th century. Completed in 1966 the
work is still considered a pinnacle of new cello virtuosity.
In my presentation I will discuss the extreme challenges demanded by the work from the
performer who must demonstrate the ’existential virtuosity’ substantiated by a grasp of
Xenakis’s compositional strategies that resonate with the Deleuzian concepts of becoming and
virtuality, and Bergson’s notion of la durée.
The ongoing project of live performances of Nomos alpha is a significant part of my research
into the subject of time in Xenakis’s music. The symmetrical structure of the composition
comprises of two contrasting Levels (smooth and striated) that express multiplicity of time.
Matossian (1986) depicts the work as a multi-dimensional and multi-temporal process comprising
of 192 events: ‘Micro-events follow macrostructures in close juxtaposition to reveal similarities
of structure at different levels; a micro-photograph next to an aerial shot or a zoom followed by a
wide pan is an identifiable movement of Nomos alpha.’
The work exemplifies the paradox of freedom and the rigorous discipline in the way it gives the
performer a precise map, the extremely elaborate markings in all parameters of the score, yet, as
admitted by the composer, contains ‘the element of genuine impossibility’. That creates an almost
unbearable tension, an anxiety, a kind of longing on the part of the performer, for whom every
performance presents an experiment, a personal and artistic challenge, an adventure – and the
moment of freedom, a chance, a discovery.
In this context I investigate the relationship between sound and silence: in my live rendition of
Nomos alpha I will focus on performing the silences articulating the ruptures occurring within
and between the ‘events’ and at the intersections that (dis)connect the two Levels (the two main
elements of the structure that perpetuate the dislocation of time). It is within these liminal spaces
that the infinite possibilities for ‘unleashing the powerful song’ emerge and ‘the dark precursor’ is
activated.
Former student of Rostropovich, Alfia Nakipbekova is an internationally acclaimed soloist,
recording artist, chamber musician and pedagogue. As well as having a busy performing and
teaching schedule, Alfia is currently researching the development of the cello in the 20th century
for her PhD thesis at the University of Leeds. In 2014/15 Alfia performed Nomos alpha for solo
cello by Iannis Xenakis in the UK, Europe and Hong Kong.
Affiliations: University of Leeds, Leeds College of Music
alfiabekova@gmail.com
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Negri, Carlo
The Posthuman Subject (Un)bound? Deleuze’s Becoming and the Posthuman Hybrid:
a (very) critical comparison
Keywords: becoming, posthuman, hybrid
My aim is to examine the problem of human subjectivity in postmodernity. That is to say, to
rethink subjectivity in the context of bioengineering, globally networked computing and, above
all, in connection with the posthuman body or Cyborg.
My analysis is based on a comparison between Critical Posthumanism (Nayar, 2014; Roden, 2015)
and Gilles Deleuze. More specifically, I stage a confrontation between the posthuman Cyborg,
usually presented as a fundamental framework for conceptualizing the reconfiguration of
contemporary human ontology and subjectivity, and Deleuze’s ontology of relations.
“In the bio-genetic age known as ‘anthropocene’ ” (Braidotti, 2013), and according to Haraway’s
breakthrough lesson – “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism”
(Haraway, 1991) – we are all hybrids incorporating non-biological tools and structures deep into
our physical and cognitive routine. As hybrids, we are the result of the blurring boundaries
separating human beings, machines and non-human entities. In the light of the critical posthumanist
stance, the post-human body or, in other words, the model of a cyborg embodiment, is able to
provide a new kind of emancipated subjectivity based on the idea of hybrid mutation. Hybridity is
seen as the opportunity to actualize the virtual possibilities of a subject who is able to slip
through the net of bio-power (Foucault, 1978) relations.
In order to highlight the theoretical issues in this perspective, I turn to Deleuze. One the one
hand, it is undeniable that both Deleuze and Critical Posthumanism share an antianthropocentric standpoint, which is in favour of the affirmation of an anti-hierarchical
ontological egalitarianism. On the other, my claim is that through the concept of becoming,
Deleuze provides a suitable theoretical tool that makes thinking of a never-ending process of
subjectivization possible; this process is fundamentally different from the Cyborg, the hybrid
posthuman subject.
In order to support my claim, I present Deleuze’s ontology of relations (Difference over Identity,
Becoming over Being), which sheds light on the issue of the posthuman subject.
My analysis shows that the hybrid is always caught in a process of juxtaposition through loss of distinction;
it is “a dynamic hybrid” of “ontologically different elements” (Jöns, 2006). This implies that,
contrary to posthuman claims, the cyborg’s transformations are always just a new form of
identification with established references ruled by the discourse of techno-biopower. So the cyborg
is not the model of an emancipated subjectivity, but the opposite: it is a model of a subjugated
subject; it is a subject only because it is reduced to a techno-biological object.
On the contrary, Deleuze’s Becoming is not a loss of distinction, but a coming together in difference.
Becoming is a process always in between.
Thanks to his ontology, Deleuze builds a framework in which it is possible to think of human
subjectivity not as an entity undergoing various transformations and underpinning multiple
identities, but as a process of subjectivization: a process of dis-identification from established references,
capable of accounting for our own finitude as well as our difference.
Carlo Negri, PhD in Metaphisics at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.
His research interests focus on poststructuralist French philosophy, specifically on Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, and, more recently, Quentin Meillassoux.
His publications include the monograph Homo Tantum: the transcendental experience in the thought of
Gilles Deleuze, AlboVersorio, Milano (2013)
cnegri1986@gmail.com
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Nicolini, Andrea
Becoming Innocent. The Death Drive Between Sex and Philosophy
Keywords: Desire, Death Drive, Masochism
The most important contribution appeared against psychoanalysis but inside psychoanalysis itself
comes surely from Deleuze and Guattari. If in fact Foucault truncates with psychoanalysis and, in
order to avoid the coercive and pathologizing implication of its reflection on desire, he chooses
to focus on pleasure, Deleuze and Guattari face directly the psychoanalytic notion of desire
freeing it from the Oedipus complex. Indeed, their aim is not to refuse psychoanalysis per se but
to use it as a political tool that enables the multiple possibilities of “A LIFE” thought as a pure
immanence.
In this context the notion of masochism becomes really important for Foucault as much as for
Deleuze and Guattari. However, if Foucault thinks of masochism as “the real creation of new
possibilities of pleasure freed from desire” (Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity in Dits et écrits) and
for this reason able to resist the dispositif of sexuality, Deleuze and Guattari think of masochism
“not as a source of pleasure, but as a flow to be followed in the constitution of an uninterrupted
process of desire”(Re-présentation de Masoch in Critique et clinique). For Deleuze and Guattari
masochism is indeed one of the multiple ways by which the “becoming multiple” that
characterizes the “schizoanalysis” of their project becomes possible. Although in different
directions, the intention of either positions is to take masochism away from the classical
interpretation of psychoanalysis, according to which masochism (and all other sexual
“perversions”) reveals the hidden and thorny truth about a subject and his (or her) past. On the
contrary, they reinterpret masochism as a way to experiment new and unexpected possibilities of
life. What is important to point out is that these two opposite (anti)psychoanalytic reinterpretations of masochism are united in denying the most important and philosophically
interesting intuition of the Freudian thought: namely the Death Drive. Taking into account the
Death Drive means in fact to jeopardize both positions. Concerning Foucault it reveals that it is
impossible to detach pleasure from desire: masochism is indeed never pleasure in pain per se but
always an encounter with pain that is pleasurable because it has been filtered through fantasy.
Concerning Deleuze and Guattari, taking into account the Death Drive means to accept the
possibility that the “becoming multiple” (that sustains the “schizoanalysis”) could stop in front of
the immutability of the Death Drive incarnated in the “fantasme” of the masochistic scenario (that,
as Deleuze himself points out, is structured on the basis of iron rules). Starting from these
historical and theoretical considerations, the intention of my paper is to follow Foucault,
Deleuze, and Guattari in their attempt to distance masochism from the pathological
interpretation of the classical psychoanalysis, without however ignoring the undoing power of the
Death Drive. Taking into account the Death Drive allows to think the dark side of sexuality, the
one that (as Bataille and Perniola already showed) is connected with philosophy. In this way
masochism will be a placeholder useful to think the crux that links philosophy to sexuality.
Andrea Nicolini: After my masters degree in Philosophy at the University of Milano, I studied
Moral Philosophy at the Sorbonne University, and then I did a course in collaboration with Princeton
University. I am currently enrolled as a PhD student in the program of Human Sciences at the
University of Verona with a thesis on the philosophical implications of Masochism. My fields of
interest are Nietzsche, Deleuze, Bataille, and Queer Theory. In 2015 Lee Edelman invited me as
Visiting Professor at Tufts University. In March 2016, I will give a paper at Harvard University titled
Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and the Challenge of Masochism.
andrea.nicolini.uni@gmail.com
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Nóbrega, Diogo
The face as becoming. About two shots of Pedro Costa
Keywords: Cinema, Face, Becoming
Having as scope the filmography of Pedro Costa, in particular two shots of Zita Duarte in Bones
(1998) and in In Vanda’s Room (2000), respectively, this essay attempts to analyse the aesthetic
category of the portrait, setting up a reflexive apparatus which considers it, following Deleuze, in
the form of a force, i.e, as the capture of a virtual differentiality that inhabits a perceived form.
We will develop our argument in three steps. Firstly, we will draw a brief archeology of the
concept of portrait, inquiring a set of theoretical instruments that have historically defined its
analysis: face, mimesis, representation, resemblance, dissemblance, identity, difference. Secondly,
we will analise both the rarefaction of the portrait as a device of representation of an unified
identity, and its becoming as a place of an event (Jean-Luc Nancy), as a topography of signals and
forces in motion (Deleuze), taking for that purpose the exemple of two portraits by Francis
Bacon: Study For Three Heads, from 1962, and Three Studies For a Portrait of Lucian Freud,
from 1964. Finally, we will examine the process of the capture of the concept by the cinematic
apparatus of Pedro Costa, questioning its operativity in terms of a symptomatology, i.e, as the
capture and modulation (Gilbert Simondon) of microscopic sensations, beams of forces which
(de)form the face, which make the face possible as difference, pure form in becoming, permitting
a reframing of the concept of portrait as a rhythmic game of depth and surface, of inside and
outside, of expression and dissimulation, of appearance and disappearance (George DidiHuberman).
Diogo Nóbrega is a filmmaker and a PhD student of the Artistic Studies program of the New
University of Lisbon. He obtained his MFA in Audiovisual Comunication / Documentary Film
and Photography at Escola Superior de Música, Artes e Espectáculo, in Oporto, with the thesis
The Word / Toward a Logic of Intensity. He has published and presented several papers on
figurative/figural questions related to film.
His research interests include Cinema and Philosophy (e.g Perception, Film Language/Analysis
(Figural Analysis)); Film History, Aesthetics and Memory (e.g. Space, Time, Body and Afection),
particularly in relation to Portuguese Cinema.
diogo_nobrega_@hotmail.com
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Novo dos Santos, Maria Fernanda
New models of individuation: differentiation, meta-stability, singularity and becoming
Keywords: individuation, differentiation, singularity, becoming
The aim of this study is based into the ways in which the contemporary theories of individuation
reflect the need of a new formulation of the concept of individual, that integrates a pluralistic
perspective of philosophy and life sciences. In this sense, we intend to investigate the hypothesis
of the Bergson and Deleuze perspective of a philosophical and epistemological pluralism as an
essential step for philosophy assimilate the changes on the design of life and models derived from
it; between Bergson and Deleuze the exponents that more took this in a step further were
Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon. Which means that their contributions are essential to
establish a more systematic framework of the role of individuation in contemporary philosophy.
We will work with major notions that have contributed to a new sense of individual not
individuated such as differentiation, meta-stability, singularity and becoming.
Maria Fernanda Novo dos Santos (University of Campinas – FAPESP - Brazil ) is bachelor
degree and master degree in philosophy. Develops PhD research at the University of Campinas Brazil with the guidance of Luiz Orlandi. Her most recent research examined the deleuzian
reading from Matter and Memory of Henri Bergson and the chaining concepts of multiplicity,
movement and matter. In her current research develops the theme of individuation from the
propositions in Leibniz, Bergson, Simondon and Deleuze. Is member of the research group Life,
Difference and Creating bringing together brazilian researchers from various areas about
philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Was collaborator of the brazilian translation of Spinoza et le problème
de l'expression.
mariafernandanovo@gmail.com
149
Nuscis, Lorenzo
The paradoxical unity of pure becoming
Keywords: pure becoming, indiscernibility, plan of consistence
A typical feature of Deleuze’s thought is undoubtedly the effort to think the pure becoming. As it
is written in A Thousand Plateaus, becoming does not have a subject different from itself: it is
not a sole being, but it exists always as a rhizomatic complexity, as a becoming of becoming. The
exigence of thinking pure becoming as something that is not reducible to the norms of the
totality convinces Deleuze to search an overtaking of oppositional logic. In this paper I am going
to uphold the fact that it is starting from the concept of indiscernibility that Deleuze is able to
lead this overtaking. Deleuze’s belief that a becoming is always a between-two means a shift of
the conceptual attention from the oppositional disjunction to the conjunction, and a consequent
transition from the ontological dimension of extension to the one of intensity. Assuming a
category recently used by José Gil and Philippe Mengue, my aim is to show how the intensity of
the between-two of a becoming could be thought as a zone of logic indiscernibility. The line of
becoming moves neither in a sequence of opposite, separated and fixed points following an
extensional model nor it is considered chronologically in terms of past and future. On the
opposite, it does not have either start or ending, but only an in-between. Thought as an
intercalary act, becoming takes place in a logic regime of indiscernibility. When we consider the
becoming animal, for instance, the flight of the man into the animal does not requires nor a “man
as such” neither an “animal as such”: in fact, it does not happen without a contemporaneous
becoming other of the animal. In this sense, a zone of indiscernibility is a sort of block of nuance,
or what Deleuze and Guattari call an assemblage (agencement). However, each becoming runs
towards a becoming imperceptible, a keynote and enigmatic figure of A Thousand Plateaus.
Addressing to the concept of plan of consistence, I will attempt to explain the imperceptible as
the paradoxical unity of the becoming or as the plan of absolute intensity where all becoming are
connected. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari call this unity plan of Life or plan of
Nature, specifying that it has nothing in common with the unity of a fundament. I will explicate
the paradoxical nature of this unit assuming the rhizomatic formula n-1. In this regard, following
a proposal recently given by Rocco Ronchi, I will suggest that the continuous subtraction of the
unity is the event itself of the becoming. Thinking the event as the act of subtraction of the unity
is paradoxically the only way to give unity to absolute becoming: in fact, if we try to think
becoming as a unity entirely present, we are not thinking becoming, but stasis.
Lorenzo Nuscis (1990) is a Ph.D. student at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, working
under the supervision of prof. Roberto Esposito and prof. David Lapoujade (Université Paris 1).
He received a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the Università degli Studi di Milano and a
master’s degree in Philosophy from the Università San Raffaele di Milano. His research interests
in modern and contemporary philosophy is focalized on the philosophical conceptualization of
immanence, particularly in Spinoza, Bergson and Deleuze. His thesis is concerned with the
notion of subjectivity in the philosophy of Deleuze, in its relation to the problem of the
transcendental empiricism.
lorenzo.nuscis@sns.it
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Pereira, Sílvia *
'OMNIADVERSUS self-actualizing the subject’
'OMNIADVERSUS self-actualizing the subject’ or O, is a theoretical, visual and performative art
research project that has been developed since 2010. O proposes a revision of the question of
authorship through a conceptual and immersive practice and inquiries about the functionalities of
the self in art politics.
O is a rhizosphere-like platform that revives concepts which are put to an experimental
performative practice. Its formulation has been influenced by ubiquitous concepts in philosophy,
in the critical theory and by a subsistential affinity encountered with Mille Plateaux. These are
undertaken as playful elements for research, with ultimate considerations in self-overcoming,
becoming-other, metamorphosis of the being, schizoanalysis and schizophrenic practices, the
existential nomadic, multiplicity and impersonality.
O’s practice happens through an immersive performance with existential contours, consisting in
launching several artist-personae, or immersive heteronyms, that develop distinct lines of
investigation resulting in individual bodies of work, by inducing the manifestation of
agencements, practicing deterritorialization and evolving through becoming-other.
The heteronyms, are integrated in particular cultural and social backgrounds and interact in
specific circuits, describing their existence as living personaes. Evolving in an autonomous way
and independent of each other, they create different artistic approaches, as by-product
multiplicities surging within the context of immersion. Promoting insights into the overcoming
of the self through multiple-subject approaches, O aims to cast the self as the art piece,
ungraspable, within several prisms and cultural impacts. This is in accordance with the identity
forming process of subjectivation the heteronyms are relating to in the field of visual and
performing arts.
These heteronyms are impersonated by a sole person who temporarily disengages from using her
official, familiar identity and sets off on a post-identity journey, immersing into a field of action
with other identity attributes (such as name, origins, generation, gender), allowing these to
become tinted by the circumstantial contact in the cultural-social environment they are immersed
in. This self-approved allowance for frequent identity-shifting according to an external leverage,
strives to recreate and actualize the concept of identity as an ever-changing interfacial embedding
of the self, as a medium for self-overcoming, beyond arborescent compliances.
O encourages processes of becoming, immanence acts as the subject emerges as an artistic object
in unexpected existential formats, as in life itself, sustaining non-art statements.
It conceives trajectories of life as the artistic object per se, living-as-form, with their inevitable
processes of deconstruction/re-construction unveiling the possibility of ‘being-zero’ as an
excellent source of the art medium.
Sílvia Pereira: based in Germany, Iceland and Portugal, has a BA/MA degree in Fine Arts specializing in
Sculptural Behaviors, from the University of Barcelona, recently concluded a post-master degree in artistic
research at a.pass, Brussels and has initiated an MA in Philosophy and Phd in Artistic Studies and
Mediation of the Arts at the University NOVA of Lisbon. Sílvia is a transdisciplinary artist which realizes
research based work contextualized by certain environmental areas or cultural circuits, using the concept
of ‘becoming’ as an artistic medium par excellence. She has exhibited in Germany, Iceland, Portugal,
Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, Australia, Japan and her films have been screened in festivals such as
Festival International du Court Métrage, Clermont-Ferrand in France, In-Sonora in Madrid and FILE,
Electronic Language International Festival, Sao Paulo, Brazil and the MONAFOMA Festival in Australia,
amongst others.
omniadversus.research@gmail.com
*The authorship of OMNIADVERSUS is deliberately presented as sous rature due to the reasons explained above
which defend the impersonality of the author thus it should always be presented in this way.
151
Pezzano, Giacomo and Maria Cristina Boscaggin
Deleuze Psychomotrician. Could There Be a Deleuzian Therapy?
Keywords: Psychomotor Therapy, action, childhood
This paper was born from an encounter between a (aucouturieran) psychomotrician and a (deleuzian)
philosopher, whose result is a double task: try to compensate for a theoretical lack of the Psychomotor
Therapy [PMT], and to think the possibility of a Deleuzian Therapy [DT]. We aim to show that the
deleuzian philosophy can give a consistent conceptual framework to an already existing practice, while
PMT can offer a concrete therapeutic setting for some of the apparently most abstract deleuzian concepts.
We will articulate our theses stressing four main parallelisms.
First. Deleuze distinguishes morality as system of judgement (Good/Evil) from ethics as system of
evaluation (good/bad). PMT considers therapy not as curing a syndrome but as taking care of possibilities:
not a way of normalization and standardization, but an opportunity to intensify and empower the
experience of the world. For both, if there is “a norm”, it is immanent and not transcendent to the modes
of existence.
Second. For Deleuze, the starting point is the “great reason” and the yet unknown capacities of the body,
while the consciousness is a bodily effect and sign. In PMT, in the beginning was the motricity of the
acting body, while the psyche is a bodily reflex and refolding. For both, our own body represents the
portion of the world that is expressed in the clearest and most distinct way, and the point from which the
entire world is expressed in an unique way.
Third. For Deleuze, the unconscious is not in a conflictual or oppositional relationship to consciousness,
but rather in a differential, durational, preindividual and virtual/actual one, in which the body and its
intensive thresholds play a main role. In PMT, the not-removed or not-repressed unconscious has a great
relevance: it is the implicit memory that stores those pre-symbolic and pre-verbal affections that are linked
with bodily tones and perceptions. For both, the unconscious never stops acting and influencing the
behavior, containing lots of “small perceptions” which condense the experiences of the moving body.
Four. For Deleuze, the child is “a metaphysician” and “pure virtual”, because a child is yet unformed as
individual and tends to resemble to other children, but otherwise he is clearly determined in his own
singularities (expressivity, gesture, posture, etc.), and he is infused with an immanent life that is pure and
neutral power, beyond Good and Evil, which nonetheless is engaged in a process of actualization
following the plane that gives him his particular reality. PMT mainly operates with children and newborns,
because of their intense ability to create: their motricity is still widely open and uncontaminated, pure
tonicity engaged in the discovering of the pleasure of experimenting capacities and exploring the world.
Final. We will offer a first definition of the possibility of DT as therapy of action, and claim that the
psychomotrician, conceived as a warm helper and a development facilitator with the duty to make possible
a sustainable becoming and to let the person free to express and experiment in a safe and containing
condition, assumes a sort of deleuzian attitude in his daily practice.
Giacomo Pezzano (1985) is a PhD Candidate at the Italian Consortium of North-West Philosophy
(FINO – Dept. of Philosophy and Education Science, University of Turin). His research project analyzes
the metaphysics and the philosophy of nature of Gilles Deleuze. He taught argumentative writing (20112014, Dept. of Humanities, University of Turin); since 2012 he collaborates with the Centro Studi sul
Pensiero Contemporaneo of Cuneo (Italy). He is secretary of the scientific journal Lessico di etica
pubblica and member of the Editorial Staff of the scientific journal Thaumazein. His other research fields
are the contemporary development of philosophical anthropology and the philosophical investigation of
the social imaginaries.
Web page: https://unito.academia.edu/GiacomoPezzano
giacomo.pezzano@unito.it
Maria Cristina Boscaggin (1988) is graduated in Education Science (University of Turin), and has
focused her research on the problem of the emptiness in the condition of contemporary youth, crossing
pedagogy, psychology and philosophy. She teaches Arts and Humanities in High School and works as
childhood educator and childcare assistant in public and private structures. She is completing her threeyears training in psychomotor therapy under the supervision of Bernard Aucouturier.
cristinaboscaggin@msn.com
152
Piatti, Giulio
Being as becoming. Paths of the virtual in Bergson, Simondon and Deleuze. Virtuality,
becoming, metaphysics
In Henri Bergson’s opinion, memory is a virtual entity, unable to fit in usual perception before being
eventually transformed, through a complex operation, in actual images (1965, pp. 45-79). Starting from the
particular case of memory, Bergson introduces his key concept of virtuality, conceived as a non-actual
reality, ineffective, but still existing: what is virtual coincide with an unpredictable, human-less driven élan
vital, in explicit opposition to the concept of possible, which retroactively predetermines the creative
emergence of a process (1969, pp. 45-56). Several years after his first appearance, the virtual has become
central in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, whose debt to Bergson is well documented: what Deleuze find in
Bergsonism is the theorisation of a virtual coexistence of all levels of reality (1997, pp. 45-70). Combining
Kantian heredity with bergsonian roots, Deleuze elaborate then his notion of transcendental empiricism,
in which conditions of possibility lie at the very heart of experience, conceived no more as human-actual,
but rather as virtual-impersonal. Before concrete entities, there is always, following Deleuze, a virtual plan
of immanence that guides an unexhausted process of actualisation. When theorising the plan of
immanence, Deleuze not only reactivates the field of images analysed by Bergson in Matter and memory,
but refers also to Gilbert Simondon’s intuition of a preindividual field (2005), as a meta-stable state, full of
virtual energy about to explode, structuring reality through multiple processes of transduction.
Purpose of this presentation is to study theoretical paths of the virtual in Bergson’s, Simondon’s and
Deleuze’s thoughts. How could bergsonian memory, «real without being actual, ideal without being
abstract» (Deleuze 1997, p. 99), has become the cornerstone of an impersonal becoming? How could
continuous vitalism drawn by Bergson matches, within deleuzian philosophy, with the explicitly antibergsonian quantic transduction theorised by Simondon? I will try to analyse the transformation of this
concept, focusing in particular on the memory of the present individuated by Bergson (1967, pp. 71-95)
and applied by Deleuze to the cinema of time-image (1985, p. 106), and on the figure of the crystal,
emblematic materialisation of the virtual, deeply present in both Deleuze and Simondon’s philosophy. My
aim is, on the one hand, to enlightens inevitable differences: if Bergson tries a harmonic way to revive the
almost switched off lamp of the virtual (1959, p. 158), Simondon focuses on virtual ontogenesis of the
real, while Deleuze engages himself on the extreme boundaries between perception and imperceptible
(2003, p. 182), in order to catch the virtual nature of the event. On the other hand, I will try to express the
significant continuity between them, focused on the common attempt to build an affirmative ontology of
the interval, where being and becoming are about to coincide. Combined Bergsonian and Simondonian
influences lead in the end Deleuze to an original metaphysics of becoming, where virtual energy, both
continuous and discontinuous, is always on the verge of actualising itself in percept, affects and concepts.
References
Henri Bergson, L’évolution créatrice (Paris: PUF, 1959)
Id., Matière et mémoire (Paris: PUF, 1965)
Id., L’énergie spirituelle. Essais et conférences (Paris: PUF, 1967)
Id., La pensée et le mouvant (Paris: PUF, 1969)
Gilles Deleuze, L’image-temps – Cinéma 2 (Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1985).
Id., Le bergsonisme (Paris: Quadrige/PUF, 1997)
Id., Deux régimes de fous. Textes et entretiens 1975-1995 (Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 2003).
Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et information (Paris: Aubier, 2005)
Giulio Piatti earned his bachelor’s and master’s degree in philosophy at University of Turin and he is
currently a doctoral student in social and philosophical sciences at University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, in
co-tutorship with University of Toulouse “Jean Jaurès”.
His research interests include the idea of impersonal in Henry Bergson’s and Gilles Deleuze’s thought,
connections between cinema and philosophy, and, more in general, 20th century French philosophies.
He is a member of the advisory board of Sensibilia – Colloquium on perception and experience and he is
part of the editorial board of Philosophy Kitchen, a contemporary philosophical review.
piatti.giulio@gmail.com
153
Pilati, Wilma
Difference and becoming
Keywords: difference, becoming, event
The concept of difference and of becoming are two keys of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
This paper has both the focus and aim to show their connection and mutual dependence. The
relation between the two concepts is analyzed in order to point out the relation between the early
and the later work of Deleuze, and in particular between the two masterpieces Différence et
repétition (1968) and Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (1972-1980).
The first part of the paper focuses on the concept of difference, developed in the first chapter of
Différence et repétition. The analysis considers the criticism of G. W. F. Hegel as functional for
the formulation of the concept. The theoretical philosophy of Deleuze as philosophy of
difference or transcendental philosophy, in fact, has a close relationship with the “philosophy of
representation,” whose main exponent is Hegel. The Hegelian perspective is a critical objective of
the work, and because of that, at the same time, one of the most important keys to understanding
the concept of difference. Through the criticism emerges, in fact, the meaning of the difference
as a transcendental concept that defines the real as a movement of becoming.
The difference as a transcendental concept or as condition of possibility of the real opens to the
dimension of the becoming, which is analyzed in the second part of the paper. The process of
becoming can neither be described as a quality or a relation between events, nor as the time
between two different conditions. In Deleuze's philosophy it is the changing event itself, the
instant of production of changing. Central concept of the work Mille Plateaux, and in particular
of the chapter “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible” the
becoming shows therefore to have a close relationship, that can be defined as a reciprocal
dependence, with the difference.
In this way, the comprehension of the difference's role shows his importance for the
interpretation of Deleuze's thinking and in particular of later works as Capitalisme et
Schizophrénie. At the same time the concept of becoming completes and explains the one of
difference.
The connection between the difference and the becoming has the important function, to clarify
both and to underline the coherent development of the Deleuzian work, despite the deep stylistic
and thematic differences between them. In this way, the first of the connections between the
theoretical and the practical philosophy of Deleuze can be established.
Wilma Pilati studies at the University of Padua, attending the double-degree master “Deutscher
Idealismus” at the Friedrich Schiller Universität in Jena. She devoted her bachelor thesis to the
concept of war machine in Capitalisme et Schizophrénie. At the moment she is writing about the
critic of Deleuze to Hegel in Différence et repétition. She presented it at the University La
Sapienza of Rome in the conference “Filosofia teoretica e pratica dopo la critica di Kant alla
metafisica” in the summer 2015. She speaks fluent Italian, German and English. At the moment
she is also studying French.
wilma1992@hotmail.it
154
Pješivac, Željka
Through the western view: Karl-Heinz Klopf´s Tower House
Keywords: ma, becoming, Tower House
The majority of contemporary Japanese houses are based on spiritual beliefs and practical
solutions derived from traditional house types such as minka (rural houses) and machiya
(merchants’ house). The important characteristic of these types of houses is the logic of life and
organization of space based on the abstract space-time concept ma. In this context, the main aim
of this study is the understanding of the concept ma through analysis and interpretation of KarlHeinz Klopf’s film Tower House, moving between Eastern mysticism, theoretical physics,
cognitive psychology, and phenomenology and ontology of space and time. The main hypothesis
of this paper is that Karl-Heinz Klopf’s experimental and documentary film Tower House is
based on the Japanese space-time concept ma which can be read through the language of
Western philosophy, that is, through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a
space-time concept in continuous process of becoming. The study is not about offering a
synthesis of scientific, philosophical, artistic and mystical thoughts, but about a dynamic interplay
between mystical intuition, philosophical and artistic reflection, and scientific analysis. Neither is
comprehended in the other, nor can either of them be reduced to the other, but all above
mentioned visions are present in order of supplementing one another and fuller understanding of
the concept of living. How does Karl-Heinz Klopf emphasize and develop philosophy of living
based on the concept ma in Tower House using special film techniques? How can we understand
the concept ma represented in the film Tower House through the language of Western
philosophy? In other words, how can we understand the space-time concept of becoming
(becoming-house of a city, becoming-imaginary of real space-time, becoming-virtual of actual,
becoming-marginal of central, becoming-tactile of optic space and time, becoming-intensive of
extensive borderline) in the context of Japanese architectural design and philosophy of living?
These are the key questions of the study. Besides Deluze’s and Guattari’s philosophy, the
theoretical starting point is to be found in the works of: Arata Isozaki, Günter Nitschke, Richard
C. Tolman, Henri Bergson and Jean Piaget.
Željka Pješivac is born in Novi Sad (Serbia) where she finished Faculty of Technical Sciences Department of Architecture and Urbanism. She obtained Magister degree from Interdisciplinary
artistic magister studies “Scene Design“ at the University of Arts in Belgrade and PhD degree
from Interdisciplinary scientific doctoral studies “Theory of Arts and Media“ at the University of
Arts in Belgrade. In the school year 2014/2015 she was postdoctoral research fellow at the
Vienna University of Technology – Department of Architecture Theory. Željka Pješivac has
published a number of scientific papers, has given several guest lectures at Universities in our
country and abroad, and has taken part in numerous (inter)national conferences, symposiums,
seminars, exhibitions, artistic and theoretical-study workshops. She has received several awards
and scholarships for the success achieved during her education. Currently, Željka Pješivac is
research fellow at the Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad.
zeljkapjesivac@gmail.com
155
Plotnitsky, Arkady
“Most Tantalizing State of Affairs”: Chaos, Brain, Thought, and the Virtual in What is
Philosophy?
Keywords: brain, probability, quantum theory, Finnegans Wake
This paper argues that What is Philosophy? represents a significant shift in Deleuze and
Guattari’s thinking concerning the nature of thought and cognition, from that grounded in a
geometrical, specifically Riemannian, model, corresponding to the physics of Einstein’s relativity,
to that grounded in a quantum-theoretical, specifically quantum-field-theoretical, model.
Naturally, these are only two among many such models, “a thousand models,” at work in
Deleuze and Guattari. For example, I shall suggest that Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a literary
model of the second type. However, these models could be split into two types, in accordance
with the shift discussed in this paper, although, unsurpsinngly, there is some overlapping between
them. The main reason for my argument is that, while Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of
thought as a confrontation between the brain and chaos is not surprising, their conception of
chaos, as the virtual, is unusual and even unique in the history of philosophy. This conception, I
argue, is borrowed from quantum field theory and the concept of the virtual there, which also
changes Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the virtual, from Deleuze’s Difference and
Repetition on. It is this shift that defines their innovative conjecture concerning the architecture
of the brain in the conclusion, “From Chaos to the Brain,” of What is Philosophy? In
accordance, with this model of the virtual, the functioning of the brain becomes essentially
probabilistic, along the lines of the so-called Bayesian probability theory, and as such, reflects a
complex interplay of chaos and order in its relationships with the world. Moreover, the nature of
this probability is special, more quantum-theoretical, insofar as this probability is inherent,
ontological, rather than, as in the classical view of probability, epistemological, that is, resulting
from our insufficient knowledge of the underlying causal ontology of events. This view
corresponds to some of the most advanced recent approaches to the brain, specifically in the
work of Alain Bertoz. I shall also comment on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a literary model of the
quantum virtual and, I would argue, one of Deleuze and Guattari’s models as well. As Joyce says,
there: “I am working out a quantum theory about it for it is really a most tantalizing state of
affairs,” the statement from which I borrow my title.
Arkady Plotnitsky is a professor of English and Director of Theory and Cultural Studies
Program at Purdue University. He has published extensively on Romanticism, continental
philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the relationships among literature, philosophy, and
science. His most recent books are Epistemology and Probability: Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger
and the Nature of Quantum-Theoretical Thinking, and Niels Bohr and Complementarity. His
new book, The Principles of Quantum Theory, From Planck’s Quanta to the Higgs Boson, is
forthcoming in 2016.
plotnits@purdue.edu // http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~plotnits/
156
Pósleman, Cristina
Is it enough immanent desire to escape of imperialism?
Virtual, becoming, life three "steps" that may constitute Deleuze pathos. In 1973 Deleuze teaches
about Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Fittingly it carried out a genealogy of the concept
of desire. He looks for those speeches linked to desire in what he calls Western thought. He
compares East and West considering that the difference is that in the former there is a link
between desire and immanent flow, while in the second the desire is linked to lack, sawn, to the
Oedipal standardization. One participant argued that notwithstanding the alleged immanence of
desire in the eastern machinery, the discourse of sexuality is full of oriental phallocentrism and
imperialism. Such intervention motivates Deleuze to express a hunch that perhaps constitutes
one of the most committed inheritances in this time of emergency of decolonial and postcolonial
discourses: that is not enough to define the desire as a field of immanence to escape of
imperialism. What extent it is possible to give to that statement? Linked to other that we’ll
eventually develop, this declaration gives rise to clear or remove an area of Deleuzian thought
maybe stabilized thanks to the rhetoric effectiveness of certain categories, but to which we must
return from eccentric situationality respect on the endogamic universe of discourse of the
European Academy. It is our intention to address this statement from areas where the bond
becomes complex or maybe a fire pomp would remove the Deleuzian thought itself leaving
emerge some indications of an unused political reach. We intend to dwell on some of these
potential achievements, particularly in the scope of a possible auto-criticism as intellectuals
enrolled in the radical urgency of de-Europeanization of History, or in terms of Deleuze and
Guattari, of tracking lines of maximum deterritorialization considering that in addition to
defining desire as a field of immanence we need to review the corresponding historical bond.
Cristina Pósleman: Master and Doctor of Philosophy. Her thesis focuses on the Deleuzian
thought as a philosophy of immanent creation. She serves as a research professor at the National
University of San Juan, Argentina. She co-directs the Project "Transdisciplinary inquiries to
“decolonial turn” and postcolonial theory form research and creation located practice". She
actively participates in the Argentine cultural environment in developing comments artwork.
Regularly publishes in Revista La Universidad, published by the National University of San Juan,
Argentina and in other national and Latin American media.
cristinaposleman@yahoo.com.ar
157
Presa, Elizabeth
“This will be childhood but it must not be my childhood”
Keywords: art, becoming-child, childhood
The title of my paper, taken from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, appears as a quotation in A Thousand
Plateaus. It occurs within the context of the distinction drawn between childhood block or a
“becoming-child” and childhood memory. The distinction holds the promise of a productive
freedom, as the molecular child is a child within, but a child we have never been. While art,
writing, composing and performing are all moments of becoming-child, they are also forms of
production permeated by child’s games, refrains and gestures.
“This will be childhood but it must not be my childhood”, becomes a proposition to making art
in shared proximity with an infant. The infant, my grandson, has since birth been in my care one
or two days a week and has for several months lived with me. I am fascinated by him, but not
only in the sense of his parents and those who anticipate and mark each “developmental” stage,
search for familial resemblances, projecting him into future social scenarios and so on. Rather my
fascination lies with his shifting ecology of gestures, rhythms, vocalizations and fixations - all of
which make him both seemingly familiar, yet somehow foreign. It is as if he were a different
species for whom life, in its exuberance, unfolds in a different time.
Deleuze draws attention to this vitality of children when he writes, “…very small children all
resemble one another and hardly have any individuality, but they have singularities: a smile, a
gesture, a funny face – not subjective qualities. Small children, through all their sufferings and
weaknesses, are infused with an immanent life that is pure power and even bliss.” Children
possess extraordinary capacities to experience pleasure in the sensuousness of things, forming
new assemblages with objects, anatomies and intensities. Such assemblages, though fragile, can be
remarkably resistant to the infant’s own physiological and psychic vulnerabilities, as well as
external regimes of control and reduction to Oedipal and other predetermined structures. My
project is making art that intersect with, rather than maps or traces something of an infants
“singularities”, his “pure power” and ‘bliss”.
In so doing I ask: “What might various schema the infant invents look, feel or sound like? How
can following an infant’s “becomings”, gestures and intensities be harness into modes of artistic
production? How can being in close proximity with a playing infant uncover something more
that a Winnicottian model of object relations (as important as this is), to reveal intensifications of
energy and imagination that could become strategies for art and for life? Furthermore, how can
such a project proceed without “the dominant competence “ of adult language interfering with
“gestural, mimetic, ludic and other semiotic systems,” for freedom from such interference is as
important for infants, as for artists.
Elizabeth Presa is a Melbourne based visual artist whose work often engages with philosophy
and traverses a wide-range of references from animals to psychoanalysis, literature to feminism.
She is the Head of the interdisciplinary Centre for Ideas, in the Faculty of the VCA+MCM, The
University of Melbourne.
epresa@unimelb.edu.au
158
Prud´homme, François D.
The Mirror (1975) – Eternal Return – Time-Image
The Mirror In Time
The idea behind this paper starts as a joke: “a Frenchman, a German and a Russian enter a
bar…” The Frenchman is obviously Gilles Deleuze, followed by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
and director Andrei Tarkovski. They met and went for a pint to reminisce on the good old days,
when everything wasn’t about smartphones, Facebook and Star Wars. They talk about
philosophy, religion and sex (as the third pint is downed…) when suddenly, Nietzsche – who is
not used to drink so much! – gets a little arrogant and asks Tarkovski about his 1975 movie The
Mirror: “Andrei! I’ve seen your movie Zerkalo last night and frankly, I think that this could be the
best metaphorical representation of my own ideas about time and existence!”
“This is not a movie about Eternal Return, Fred, if that is what you are thinking!” replies
Tarkovski, a little offended.
“What in Zarathustra’s name is it about, then?”
“LIFE!” says Deleuze, loudly putting down his empty pint on the bar. “This movie is about
virtuality, becoming and life!”
“Example” goes Nietzsche, quoting Jules Winnfield.
“Well, as I wrote in Time-Image, ‘Crystalline perfection lets no outside subsist: there is no outside
of the mirror or the film set, but only an obverse where the characters who disappear or die go,
abandoned by life which thrusts itself back into the film set.’ So in a sense – and I am sorry to
contradict you Andrei – it is indeed a superb example of Fred’s Eternal Return.”
“If we really have to relate my work to yours, replies Tarkovski, then consider what I wrote in
Sculpting in Time:
Art is by nature aristocratic, and naturally selective in its effect on the audience. For even in its
'collective' manifestations, like theatre or cinema, its effect is bound up with the intimate
emotions of each person who comes into contact with a work. The more the individual is
traumatised and gripped by these emotions, the more significant a place will the work have in his
experience.”
“Ok, but before he can accept that a given work as signification in his existence, says Nietzsche,
one must have the courage to accept the inherent trauma that generated the emotion.”
“Courage interrupts Deleuze, consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and
hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes
that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as
the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable
things”
“We ought to face our destiny with courage and all agree that we all said the same thing in a
different way. There are no facts, only interpretations!”
“Wait a minute. Are you both saying that in spite of the fact that I’m the only one here who made
movies, we all had the same view on life and time as it is?”
“Not quite…” answers Nietzsche.
“Tavernier! Bring us another round and a bottle of whiskey” says Deleuze, “We’re in for the
night!”
François D. Prud'homme is a doctoral student in semiotics at the University of Quebec in
Montreal. His research focuses on aesthetics accessibility of possible worlds in cinema. He gives
writing workshops and classes on metafiction as a teaching assistant. He frequently collaborates
to Montreal film magazine Sequences. He produced and directed his first short film called The
Appetites Or The Insisting Tickle Of The Soul in September 2015.
fdprudhomme@gmail.com
159
Radman, Andrej
On Architecture as Psychotropic Practice
Keywords: Architecture, Asignifying Semiotics, Radical Empiricism, Ethico-Aesthetics.
The paper is an attempt to shake off the architecture’s bad habit of representationalism (culture
of hylomorphism) and embrace the creative environmental, social and psychic morphogenesis.
Architecture ought to focus on the encounter between thought and that which forces it into
action. While accepting multiple nested scales of reality, the ecologies of architecture challenge
the alleged primacy of the ‘physical’ world. What we engage with is the world considered as an
environment and not an aggregate of objects. The emphasis is on the encounter, where
experience is seen as an emergence which returns the body to a process field of exteriority.
Sensibility introduces an aleatory moment into thought’s development thus turning contingency
into the very condition for thinking. Not only does this upset logical identity and opposition, it
also places the limit of thinking beyond any dialectical system. Thought cannot activate itself by
thinking but has to be provoked. It must suffer violence. Art and architecture may inflict such
violence. If to think differently one has to feel differently, and if the sole purpose of design is to
change us, then architecture is a ‘psychotropic practice’ that modulates and compels routines of
experience.
We thus ought to stop treating systems as isolated first (structure) and as interacting second
(agency). In their paper “Symmetry and Symmetry-Breaking in Thermodynamic and Epistemic
Engines: A Coupling of First and Second Laws” the ecological psychologists Kugler and Shaw
propose a different strategy based on the non-linear coupling of the laws. The transversal
coupling is irreversible across different scales (symmetry-breaking) and reversible across the same
scale (symmetry preserving). For any two (or more) interacting systems, there is a subset of
solutions that can be used to understand the outcomes of their dynamical relationship. The
‘critical set’ that specifies shared symmetries between the respective systems of organisms and
their environments is called affordance, akin to the Deleuzian affect. While meaning is
traditionally defined in terms of an organism’s perceptions governed by ‘intentionality’, affect is
a-personal, pre-subjective, extra-propositional and sub-representative, i.e. immanent. Experience
is not an event ‘in’ the mind. Rather, the mind emerges from an interaction with the
environment. In this light, the Greek entasis, for example, is not an optical but rather an affective
‘correction’. Kugler and Shaw underscore that it is not the observer who causes the effect (selfinducing). Rather, the observer’s state space is literally warped by what it detects. Architects
ought to know by now; the so-called perceptual illusions are not illusions, but locally generated
(geometro-dynamical) effects. Things are powers, not forms.
Andrej Radman has been teaching design and theory courses at TU Delft Faculty of
Architecture since 2004. A graduate of the Zagreb School of Architecture in Croatia, he is a
licensed architect and recipient of the Croatian Architects Association Annual Award for
Housing Architecture in 2002. Radman received his Master's and Doctoral Degrees from TU
Delft and joined Architecture Theory as Assistant Professor in 2008. He is on the editorial board
of the TU Delft peer-reviewed journal for architecture theory Footprint. Radman is a member of
the National Committee on Deleuze Scholarship.
a.radman@tudelft.nl
160
Rantala, Teija
Experimenting with productions of female collective and maternal subjectivity
Keywords: experiment, schizoanalysis, collective subjectivity
Deleuze & Guattari’s (1983) schizoanalysis and Bracha Ettinger’s (2006) idea of partsubject/part-object are utilized in creating an understanding of process of female subjectification
within conservative religious movement. This reading of subjectivity is understood as a process
of an ethical encounter-event, in which the possible identifications, subjectifications temporarily
occur as reattunements to the ‘other’. The analysis and data are part of a doctoral study, which
focuses on experimental reading of desires as machines in productions of female collective
images, arrangements and dispositions. This reading aims to grasp subjectivity as partial and
machinic, but yet to see the process forming complex cartographies with emphasis on
intentionality (to connect) (Guattari 1995, 21–22; Buchanan 2013) and maternal as relationality.
By employing Ettinger’s theory of part-subject (Pollock 2006, 18,9–20,1; Ettinger 2005)
subjectivity can be examined through a process, in which the subject-to-become co-emerges
within maternal. This is to ‘develop’ the idea of subjectivity by combining the production of
abstraction in schizoanalysis with the understanding of subjectivity as generative matter, a
question of connections and reattachments of the part-subject (Massumi 2006, 210,1). This partsubject is belongs to area of connecting on the borders between partial-subjects and relational
subjective-objects producing the subject and subjectivity as a generative material process of
”complex apparatus modelled in relation with female bodily specificity and her encounters… and
desire” (Ettinger 2006, 138,9–140,1).
Teija Rantala, PhD Student in Gender Studies, Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and
Art Studies, Faculty of Arts, Helsinki University
https://helsinki.academia.edu/TeijaRantala
My current doctoral work focuses in employing methods and methodologies to produce complex
readings of religious women’s autobiographical, collective biographical writings and co-produced
memorywork data. I am interested in new materialist methodologies in pedagogy, in examining
motherhood as co-production of subjectivities drawing from works of Deleuze and Guattari,
Rosi Braidotti and Bracha Ettinger. My current research activities include, for instance, co-editing
and contributing to “Darkness Matters” open access journal for Reconceptualizing Educational
Research Methodology (RERM). My experiments on Deleuzoguattarian methodologies have led
to invitations to visit several universities: University of Gent, University of Aberystwyth and
Arizona State University.
teija.rantala@helsinki.fi
161
Richardson, Michael
Climate Trauma, or Wounds in the Virtualities of a Life
Keywords: climate change, traumatic affect, a life
Climate catastrophe permeates culture, politics and economies. Once largely the preserve of
science fiction, apocalypse is everywhere in popular culture: the fictions of Margaret Atwood,
Alexis Wright and Cormac McCarthy; film and television such as Mad Max: Fury Road and The
Walking Dead. As the Paris Agreement shows, responding to climate change is increasingly the
crucial economic dilemma and political battleground of the contemporary moment. Within
academia, a turn towards the anthropocene is reshaping not only physical sciences but also the
humanities. Across societies, climate change manifests in activism and denial, in shocking images
and opaque statistics, as an existential threat and a conspiracy to enact a left-wing agenda. Making
sense of this multiplicity of forms and scales is increasingly difficult, not only in conceptual terms
but in everyday experience. How to account for human impingement upon something the
magnitude of a planetary climate? How to describe becoming entangled in a vast global system,
not just of climate but its countless mediations? How to understand the forms and intensities
with which climate change affects lives?
In its micro and macro manifestations, in the threat it poses to existing ways of life, in its
upending of entrenched understandings of the workings of the world, in the injury it is doing to
particular lives and wider ecologies, climate change is traumatically affecting. It works upon
ecologies and bodies as a kind of wounding. Yet to describe this trauma in terms derived from
the medical or psychoanalytical clinic is insufficient: this is a trauma that can be variously intense,
fleeting, mediated, visceral, and enduring. In ‘Immanence: A Life,’ Deleuze describes a ‘wound
[that] is incarnated or actualised in a state of things or of life; but it is itself a pure virtuality on the
plane of immanence that leads us into a life’ (2001, p. 31). This paper considers climate trauma as
opening onto a wound in those virtualities that offer access to ‘a life.’ Such a conception places
fear and denial into relation with love, grief and injury. In dialogue with recent work on climate
change by Claire Colebrook, Adrian Parr and others, it suggests activist arts and politics that
bridges the desire for new forms of climate-responsive life and the primal anger such change too
often unleashes.
Michael Richardson is Lecturer in the School of Arts & Media at the University of New South
Wales. His research examines literary, cultural and media affect, focusing on torture, trauma,
secrecy and power. He is the author of Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma and Affect in Literature
(Bloomsbury 2016) and co-editor of Traumatic Affect (Cambridge Scholars 2013). He also reviews
books, writes commentary, and was awarded a 2014 Varuna PIP Fellowship for his in-progress
first novel. Once, he was the only Australian speechwriter in Canadian politics.
michael.richardson@unsw.edu.au
162
Richter, Hannah
The Politics of Temporal Synthesis: Apocalyptic Events and the Governance of LifeTime
Keywords: temporal synthesis, biopolitics, Sense-Event
This submission proposes a theoretical perspective which draws on Deleuze’s virtual synthesis
and serialisation of time to understand the governmental containment and regulation of life in its
collective becoming. The political productivity of apocalyptic, temporal figures pointed out by
Italian biopolitical theory is unpacked as the emergence of a sovereign machine of temporal
ordering which reproduces itself by serialising Sense-Events into its sovereign eschatology of the
present. With Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception and Roberto Esposito’s political immune
response, the apocalyptic notions of threat, risk or crisis can be identified as fictions of legal or
epistemological governance designed to reproduce sovereign power in its capacity to decide,
order and resolve. But while certainly providing understanding for the political prevalence of
these temporally ordering figures, both theories identify spatially grounded, political stasis as the
foundation of governance. Hence, I argue that Italian Theory fails to grasp the dynamic
emergence and serialisation of ‘critical’ events in their political relevance beyond a simplistic,
monolithic understanding of governmental control.
My contribution argues that Deleuzian theory can unpack the synthetic political productivity of
temporal figures, the dynamic kinopolitics which order temporal flows in a more multi-layered
and open-ended way. It draws on the three temporal syntheses in their productive connection to
the making of Sense-Events to identify time as the central dimension in which social continuity is
established through a combination of cuts, ruptures and connections. Eternally present in
themselves, Sense-Events can both change and reproduce the meta-stability of a particular
future-past series on the surface of stratified signs. A politics emergent from, but also reliant on
the productivity of time does not just regulate the velocity of social life, as put forward in the
critical theory of Hartmut Rosa or by accelerationism. Subject to intense movements from the
chaotic depths of materiality and epistemic complexity, it must integrate new Sense-Events into
the established future-past series of collective memory to politically ‘make sense’ of them.
The machinic political memory which regulates temporal flows places events within a historical
lineage to direct and limit future action in the sense of a Leibnizian calculated infinity which is
here pre-determined by the rules of political, not divine creation. The increased political
repetition of apocalyptic temporal figures reveals the sovereign reliance on categorising and
serialising new, intense Sense-Events into the political perception-image to reproduce of the
former. A Deleuzian politics of temporal ordering thus problematises certain readings of Deleuze
– such as most notably Alain Badiou’s – which tend to idealise the event as moment of certain
rupture, of the separation of times. Viewed against the machinic temporal continuity of epistemic
series from which the Sense-Event emerges – and from which it can only for a moment escape to
the Aion of eternal presence – its intensity is always in danger of being dissolved in the inclusive
governance of the political memory. What is needed, it will be finally argued, is resistance to
temporal repetition and serial preconditioning as a collective form of the “creative forgetting”
introduced by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition.
Hannah Richter is a PhD student and assistant lecturer in Social and Political Thought at the
University of Kent. Her dissertation intertwines the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze with Niklas
Luhmann’s theory of social systems to understand contemporary politics as both focused and
dependent on the complexity-reducing governance of sense. In addition to her PhD research, she
has written on, organised and presented at conferences on biopolitical theory, in particular Italian
Theory in connection with the theories of both Deleuze and Luhmann.
H.C.Richter@kent.ac.uk // hr203@kent.ac.uk
163
Rioseco, Macarena
Visualisation of ontological becoming
Keywords: Aesthetics and Artistic Practices, Geometric Abstraction, De-formation, Becoming
This paper presents a critical reflection of a set of paintings developed since 2011 using Deleuze and
Guattari’s philosophy of becoming (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 1984; 1988) as a framework. These works
were realised as part of a practice-based project, in combination with theoretical research, aimed at
rethinking early 20th Century Geometric Abstraction from a contemporary perspective.
As a general feature, what visually characterises the paintings of that period is a marked formalist aesthetic
approach to images. More specifically, that approach is presented through the depiction of formal
compositions of geometric shapes. The aim of these painters was to depart from mimesis and the mere
representation of the material world and they used geometric representations to problematise more
abstract aspects of reality such as space, time and relations between them.
According to Hartmann’s ontology, space and time are dimensional categories of reality which provide the
right conditions for beings —abstract and real— to exist. He further defines two types of dimensions
which he calls extensive and intensive (Pinna, 2015). The fundamental geometrical notions such as length,
area, volume and duration, which are quantitative ‘essential properties of space’ (Ibid.: 288), are examples
of abstract beings within the domain of extension. On the other hand, the intensive dimensions are
qualitative characteristics of beings such as colour, density or heat. Since intensive dimensions can be
transformed into extensive through measurement, they can also be geometrically represented. In the light
of this, I propose that these paintings overall problematise, through depicting formalist geometric
abstractions, fundamental ontological notions of being as such.
In the process of rethinking these ideas from a contemporary perspective, I mainly refer to two models.
The first is Complexity Science (cf. Prigogine and Stengers, 1986; Coveney and Highfield, 1995; Capra,
1996; Morin, 2008), a scientific paradigm that proposes a systemic view of the world and focuses
principally on collective behaviours in nature. In the second, I refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s framework,
particularly the notion of becoming. What these approaches have in common is a new ontological
conception of being qua being intended as a figure that exists in a constant dynamic process of
transformation and hence, is conceived in terms of becoming.
Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology of becoming was reflected in my paintings in a substantial departure
from formalist representations. The relevance of Deleuzian ideas such as multiplicity, ensembles and
rhizome (cf. Deleuze, 1984; 1988), together with others from Complexity Science like complex collective
formations (cf. Coveney and Highfield, 1995), emergence (cf. Capra, 1996) and fractals (cf. Mandelbrot,
1983), led me to pursue a progressive fragmentation and dissolution of geometrical shapes, moving away
from formalism, which constituted the starting point of my research.
The paper will consist in a in-depth description of the unfolding of this creative process. The main
contribution of this work will be an effective integration of Deleuzian ideas within a practice-based
approach to painting and abstraction.
References
Capra, F. (1996). The web of life. New York: Anchor Books.
Coveney, P., & Highfield, R. (1995). Frontiers of complexity: the search for order in a complex world. London: Faber.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F (1984). Anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Athlone Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Mandelbrot, B. B. (1983). The fractal geometry of nature/Revised and enlarged edition. New York: WH Freeman and Co.
Morin, E. (2008). On complexity. Hampton Press (NJ).
Pinna, S. (2015). The philosophy of quantum gravity–lessons from Nicolai Hartmann. European Journal for Philosophy of
Science, 1-18.
Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1986). Order from chaos. Moscow: Mir.
Macarena Rioseco: I am originally from Chile. I have a BA degree in Visual Arts (2000 - 2004), a
foundation degree in Digital Illustration (2005 - 2006) and a Postgraduate degree in Painting Restoration
(2006 - 2008). In 2012 I studied an MA in Fine Arts at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge UK and
currently I am a PhD candidate in Art at Lancaster University, UK. I have exhibited my work in Chile,
Argentina and the UK.
m.riosecocastillo@lancaster.ac.uk
164
Roberts, Spencer
(In)Animate Semiotics: Virtuality and the Illusion(s) of Life
Keywords: Animation, Semiotics, Affect
Stuart Blackton's (1906) Humorous Phases of Funny Faces and Emile Cohl's Fantasmagoria (1908) are
each positioned in histories of animation as seminal examples of the animated film. However, despite a
number of apparent similarities, Blackton and Cohl's animations would seem to express a radically
divergent set of ontological commitments. Cohl offers the audience an experience of chaotic, mutable,
relational complexity that revels in its incoherence, whilst Blackton presents a series of more
straightforward set pieces, dwelling for the most part upon object-centric representational form - or on
what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) term the faciality of a subject.
Whilst it is well known that Deleuze devoted very little space to the discussion of animation, a number of
attempts have been made - most noteably by Schaffer (2007) and Lamarre (2009, 2010) - to construct a
Deleuzian position in animation theory. Schaffer's account is strongly Bergsonian, developing a form of
phenomenal, durational subjectivity, and stressing the temporal disparities between the mode of
production and the mode of projection (the way in which the time of drawing never corresponds to the
time of projection). In contrast to this, we find a more impersonal approach to the animated image
developed in the work of Lamarre, which stresses the importance of the non-Euclidian, differential and
affective qualities of the plastic line. This is then extended into a Deleuzo-Guattarian commentary upon
the coordination of strata that takes place in animation - begining with consideration of the animation
stand as apparatus, going on to explore the relational confluence that coordinates the multilayered
composite image, and then spilling back out into the world in an exploration of expanded modes of
animation, embracing cosplay and fanfiction.
Despite the differences in their approach, Schaffer and Lamarre are united in their concern with animated
affect. Indeed, consideration of the work of Cohl and Blackton serves to facilitate a rich discussion of
Deleuze's concept of relation in the context of animation - drawing attention not only to the many axes of
animation's relational mutability and affective force, but also to Deleuze's somewhat ambivalent reaction
to semiotics. That is to say, in the discussion of the Deleuzo-Guattarian (1987) account of faciality, signs
are positioned negatively, as instantiating semiotic regimes, whilst in context of Deleuze's (2008)
development of material-semiotics, the sign is venerated as that which most closely approximates the
workings of vital matter. With this in mind, the aim of this paper will be to explore the way in which
consideration of the vitalistic mode of semiotics that occurs in the context of animation - particulary with
reference to the films of Cohl and Blackton - can provide a rich context for contemplating the operation
and status of relations, as well as providing a canvas for phenomenal experimentation that might
supplement to the mathematico-kinetic examples that Deleuze (1993, 2001) develops in his work on
Leibniz's differential calculus - ultimately providing an alternative means of adressing a mode of being that
is 'real without being actual and ideal without being abstract.'
References
Deleuze G. (2005) Cinema 1. London: Continuum.
Deleuze G. (2001) Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum.
Deleuze G. (1993). The Fold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze G. (2008). Proust and Signs. London: Continuum.
Deleuze G, & Guattari F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lamarre, T. (2009). The Anime Machine. Mineapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Lamarre, T. (2010) Manga Bomb: Between the Lines of Barefoot Gen. Comics, Worlds and the World of Comics.
Towards Scholarship on a Global Scale. Kyoto, International Manga Research Centre.
Schaffer, W. (2007). Animation I: Control Image. The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation. ed. Alan
Cholodenko, 465-85. Sydney: Power Publications.
Spencer Roberts is a senior lecturer in the Department of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of
Huddersfield (UK). He teaches design and animation theory alongside a general departmental lecture programme
exploring the application of Deleuzian thought in the visual arts. His recently completed thesis examined Deleuzian,
process-philosophical perspectives on practice-led research from a relational perspective - exploring their at once
integrative and differential dimensions whilst taking issue with a textually oriented, sceptical position through the
staging of a series of aesthetico-conceptual interventions. He has spoken internationally on Deleuzo-Bergsonian
thought in the context of art and research.
s.roberts@hud.ac.uk
165
Rothermel, Dennis
Encountering the War Machine in Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani’s, Ajami (2009), Claire
Denis’ White Material (2009), Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari’s Women without Men
(2009), and Christopher Morris’ Four Lions (2010)
Keywords: political cinema, fabulation, immanent critique, Deleuze, Adorno
Four recent films traverse similar terrain of intractable violence and resulting trauma within separate
trajectories of protracted horrendous conflict. In each of the four, significantly innovative cinematic
construction elevates comprehension of the narrative out of the predilection to measure the acceptability
of a film’s perceived outlook according to a chosen stance within a political or theoretical spectrum. These
four films depict encounters with what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call the war machine. They also
present opportunities to realize the politically and philosophically radical advantage of how Theodor
Adorno articulates immanent critique in contrast to transcendent critique. The mistake of transcendent
critique of literature or a film is to impose a context of meaning for the sake of interpretation or critique
that is extraneous to the context of meaning that the work creates on its own. To suppose that a film’s
primary context of meaning is to favor either side of the historical conflict that provides the setting of the
story is that sort of mistake. A journalistically balanced viewpoint commits the same error. By contrast, the
point of immanent critique that Adorno encourages is to comprehend exhaustively the context of
meaning that the work of literature – or cinema – creates on its own behalf, which may or may not, as the
case may be, project a clear moral or political standpoint relative to the associated historical events.
Immanent critique does not readily come to fore where the political circumstances of strife connected
with the film or literature still prevails. Prevailing polarizations obtrude upon a clear immanent reading of
a film. This sort of indelible tendentiousness can afflict scholarly treatments as easily as it does popular
reception.
The dominant mode of Hollywood film – and its imitations in other national cinemas – projects a
protagonist heroically, as morally, politically, and psychologically ideal in character and action. Hollywood
thus promotes juvenile responses to moral and political issues. Some international cinema and some
Hollywood films as well, however, sustain a careful distanciation toward the character and actions of a
story’s central protagonists. Imposing the expectation of idealization of the protagonist upon films where
that defies a careful reading constitutes saliently mistaken interpretation – in effect, imputing the juvenile
response regardless. The expectation that a character with specific ethnic, gender, political, social, or age
attributes thus represents an entire class of such individuals commits a similar sort of error, which also
amounts to imposing a transcendent standpoint that occludes levels of sophistication beyond the trivial
ploys of mainstream cinema and television programming.
Deleuze similarly asserts the importance of reading a text for its immanent context and eschewing
transcendent impositions of meaning and evaluation, and specifically to oppose the automatic assumption
that characterizations in literature are meant as idealizations and generalities. Literature indulges
fabulation, rather than fantasy, Deleuze writes, when it “discovers beneath apparent persons the power of
the impersonal.”
Dennis Rothermel is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico. His
research lies in the intersection of Continental philosophy and cinema studies. His recent publications
include “Slow Food, Slow Film,” “Heroic Endurance,” in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video; and
book chapters on Joel and Ethan Coen, Clint Eastwood, John Ford, Bertrand Tavernier, Julie Taymor,
“Anti-War War Films,” “Grievability and Precariousness,” “Workerist Film Humor,” “The Tones of
Judgment in Local Evening News,” “Becoming-Animal Cinema Narrative,” and True Blood. He has coedited a volume of essays on peace studies, Remembrance and Reconciliation, which was published by
Rodopi in 2011. A Critique of Judgment in Film and Television, a collection of theoretical essays in film
and media theory, co-edited with Silke Panse, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. He is working
on a monograph on Westerns and another on Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books.
drothermel@csuchico.edu
http://www.csuchico.edu/phil/faculty/dennis.html
https://csuchico.academia.edu/DennisRothermel
166
Rudnicki, Cezary
The image of thought: from morality to ethics
Keywords: image of thought, ethics, experiment
In the preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition Deleuze emphasizes the
importance of the third chapter of this book. In retrospect, he sees in “The Image of Thought” a
kind of prolegomena to (his) philosophy. And indeed, it seems that the distinction – introduced
in this book – between the two “perspectives” (between the dogmatic image of thought and a
thought without image) serves as a “noological” fundament of his whole work. This is evident
especially during his cooperation with Guattari, in the conceptual oppositions coined by both
thinkers: macropolitics and micropolitics, royal science and nomad science, organism and body
(BwO). The objective of my presentation is to examine the relation between the critique of the
dogmatic image of thought and the Deleuzian distinction between morality and ethics.
My paper will be composed of two main parts. I will begin with a brief report on the question of
recognition and its link to morality. The basis for this reconstruction will be a rarely commented
lecture on Spinoza, given by Deleuze on the 21st of December 1980, at the University of
Vincennes (Paris VIII). Then, again referring “The Image of Thought”, I am going to discuss the
category of the problem. Here, the important motive will be the critique of the modeling of
problems on solutions and an attempt to approach the problems as “ideal «objecticities»
possessing their own sufficiency and implying acts of constitution and investment in their
respective symbolic fields”. In the conclusion of this part I will once again stress the link between
morality and the dogmatic (un-problematic, recognition-centered) image of thought.
The second part will be devoted to the Deleuzian attempt to approach the reality in its nonrepresentational or virtual aspect. In this context the word “virtuality” refers first and foremost to
the body, its power, its level of intensity. Using various Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) references to
Spinoza, I will argue that this different perspective – a thought without image – requires a
different problematisation of activity: no longer a morality, but an ethical one. I will put an accent
on the question of inventing new possibilities of life by becoming and experiment (it is the
concept of the experiment that should facilitate the passage from the first to the second part of
my paper: I will try to show that the problems not modeled on solutions must in fact refer to
experiments).
Cezary Rudnicki (1986) – nomad and pagan; editor and co-founder of Machina Myśli – Internet
portal to popularize philosophy; PhD student in the Department of History of Contemporary
Philosophy, University of Warsaw, where he is preparing a dissertation devoted to the ethics of
the Self; he published articles about Deleuze and Guattari, Benjamin, Foucault and Mumford.
togashi.furebo@gmail.com
167
Saldanha, Arun and Stuart McLean
Earth and Time in the Anthropocene
In philosophical debates, the concept of the Anthropocene has triggered an invigoration of
ethical theorizing through the “posthumanist” redeployment of phenomenology, deconstruction,
psychoanalysis, philosophy of science and literary theory. What might the significance of Deleuze
and Guattari be in relation to this new and urgent set of concerns? Deleuze’s work presaged
much of the concept of the Anthropocene, not only in his sustained challenges to humanism,
anthropocentrism and capitalism, but also through his interest in geology and the philosophy of
time. Guattari was keen on giving his work an “ecosophical” and “cartographical” dimension and
spoke of a “mechanosphere”. Together, they posited a “geophilosophy” which called for a “new
earth” along with “new peoples”. Not only does the work of Deleuze and Guattari offer a range
of useful concepts that can be applied to contemporary global problems such as anthropogenic
climate change, peak oil and genomics, but it also models the kind of interdisciplinarity that the
epoch of the Anthropocene requires.
McLean, Stuart
Arctic Becomings: Inuit Art, Shamanism and Planetary Futures
The Arctic and its populations (human and other) have often been portrayed as being in the front
line of anthropogenic climate change, images of ozone holes, melting ice and rising sea levels
being routinely invoked to mobilize public concern at the prospect of impending ecological
disaster. There is, however, a danger that contemporary environmental discourses are unwittingly
reiterating earlier colonial narratives about the decline and disappearance of indigenous cultures
under the impact of white Euroamerican settler society. It seems imperative therefore to ask
whether the ecological knowledges and philosophies of the peoples of the Arctic might pose
productive challenges to some of the ways in which the region and its possible futures have been
imagined and understood. Does the tenacity and enduring cultural creativity of the Inuit and
other Arctic peoples afford lessons for the project of a contemporary geophilosophy? In 1922,
the Danish anthropologist Knud Rasmussen witnessed and described the conversion to
Christianity of Avva, the last remaining shaman in Igloolik in the Canadian Arctic. In
2006, Rasmussen’s published account of the episode served as the basis for the film The Journals
of Knud Rasmussen by the Canadian Inuit film-maker Zacharias Kunuk. Approaching events
from an Inuit rather than a Euroamerican perspective – and through the medium of the Inuktitut
language – the film contests interpretations of the episode of conversion as a straightforward
moment of cultural loss, seeking instead to emphasize both the destructive effects upon Inuit life
of colonial settler society and the endurance and creativity of Inuit worlds. It does so, I suggest
here, by challenging the distinction between belief and reality on which Rasmussen’s account
depends. Drawing on the director’s own discussions of his work and on Deleuze’s account of
the cinema of the “time image” (especially the notions of “fabulation” and “the powers of the
false”) I argue that Kunuk’s film obliges the spectator to confront Inuit shamanism and its
attendant spirit worlds as twenty first century realities rather than beliefs belonging to the
historical past. It does so, moreover, in ways that resonate powerfully with contemporary
debates about the Anthropocene and planetary futures.
Dr Stuart McLean: Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Minnesota.
Author of The Event and its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2004).
168
Saldanha, Arun
Deleuze and the End of the World
What will life be like at the end of the tweny-first century? Whose descendants will still enjoy the
fruits of three centuries of mad productivity and deterritorialization? Deleuze is suspicious about
eschatology because of its immediate recourse to transcendence while retrieving a platform for
redemption in the face of catastrophe. Nevertheless, indebted as he is to Nietzsche, and willynilly associated with the postmodernist moment of coming to terms with the ideological
bankruptcy of progress, Deleuze can’t help but share moments of sensing that a world-historical
juncture is nigh. His work with Guattari gives plenty of material for grasping the gravity of the
destructive features of militarized planetary capitalism with conceptual precision. Guattari was
more explicit than Deleuze about the necessity critical thinking engage the spiraling planetary
problems environmentalists have been cataloguing, like global warming, pollution, slums,
refugees. But it is Deleuze who can provide the ontological framework for systematically
formulating an ethics, and perhaps politics, adequate to the coming disasters of the
Anthropocene. This paper will draw on several of his concepts in metaphysics, including
geophilosophy, belief in the world, and the new as the third synthesis of time, to argue they can
support an immanentist eschatology which bypasses the pitfalls of the archaic monotheistic and
redemptive notions of the end of the world which are increasingly pressing on public discourse.
Dr Arun Saldanha: Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Environment, and Society,
University of Minnesota. Author of Space After Deleuze (Bloomsbury, forthcoming) and Psychedelic
White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Coeditor with
Hannah Stark of Earth Shatters: The Deleuzian Anthropocene (proposed for University of Nebraska
Press), with Jason Michael Adams, Deleuze and Race (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), with
Hoon Song, Sexual Difference Between Psychoanalysis and Vitalism (Routledge, 2013), and with Rachel
Slocum, Geographies of Race and Food: Fields Bodies Markets (Ashgate, 2013). Further publications on
colonialism, music, drugs, and communism.
169
Sava, Alexandru Vasile
Becoming-revolutionary and the revolutionary outcome – a schizoanalysis of the
Romanian Revolution
Keywords: ontology of time, virtual-actual, minoritarian-majoritarian, desire
In the following paper I will attempt to explore the Deleuzian concepts of „becomingrevolutionary” and „revolutionary outcome”, as a means towards a chrono-centric ontological
framework for political thought (i.e. one that does not revolve around spatial-structural notions)
and towards developing some useful contributions to emancipatory political theory. To achieve
this, I will focus specifically on the December Revolution in Romania, tracking its complex
composition of multiple processes: its socialist, proletarian element, in which the collective
revolutionary becomings of workers and students brought about the collapse of the regime, and
its capitalist counter-revolutionary element, which comprised both in the insertion of the socialist
State into international capitalist institutions and its replication, within its own bureaucratic
apparatus, of the axiomatics of corporate organization, as well as the small-scale privatization of
the commons undertaken by individual workers and bureaucrats, under a black market regime
that grew significantly during the austerity of the 1980’s. Using the ontology of time mapped out
by Deleuze as early as his „Difference and Repetition”, I will analyze the formation or failure of
collective institutions, the way in which this historical background shaped the actualization of the
revolutionary situation (and in which it was, in turn, remade retroactively by the Revolution), and
the irruption of events at the crossroads of various becomings. Lastly, I will analyse the
formation of desires in order to explain the mass political choices that shaped the outcome of
these revolutionary becomings, by using the deleuze-guattarian theory of desire outlined in the
two volumes of „Capitalism and Schizophrenia”, to trace the interaction between heterogeneous
elements that made up these assemblages (from a mishmash of socialist doctrine, nationalist
protochronist propaganda and remnants of Inter-war fascism to western consumer goods), as
well as the conceptual couple of minoritarian-majoritarian, in order to explain the relationship
between the Romanian population, its different self-representations and its Western onlookers.
Alexandru Vasile Sava is currently a PhD candidate at the Philosophy Department of the
Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, with a thesis on the relationship between the
ontology of time and the formation of subjectivity in the thought of G. Deleuze, J. Derrida and
G. Agamben. He received a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, and a M.A. in Philosophy and
Culture Studies from Babeș-Bolyai University, with dissertations on various topics in Deleuzian
Philosophy. His current research interests include materialist ontologies, emancipatory political
thought and changes in the formation of subjectivity across modernity and late-modernity.
alexandru_vasile_s@yahoo.ro
170
Schleusener, Simon
Deleuze and Neoliberalism
Keywords: Deleuze, Capitalism, Neoliberalism, Becoming
To most Deleuzeans, there is probably nothing ambiguous or controversial about the relationship
between Deleuze and neoliberalism. For although Deleuze never used the term in his work, it
nevertheless seems evident that the type of society he so fe¬rociously attacks in his “Postscript
on Control Societies” precisely corresponds to what political scientists nowadays refer to under
the rubric of “neoliberal capitalism.” Moreover, Deleuze explicitly states (in an interview with
Toni Negri) that he and Guattari have “always remained Marxists.” By the end of his life,
Deleuze even planned to write a book about Marx, which led Fredric Jameson to assert that he
“is alone among the great thinkers of so-called poststructuralism in having accorded Marx an
absolutely fundamental role in his philosophy.”
As the following examples confirm, however, there are other views as well. According to a muchquoted statement by Slavoj Žižek, for instance, there “are, effectively, features that justify calling
Deleuze the ideologist of late capitalism.” Somewhat less polemically, Nigel Thrift has observed
that a Deleuzean notion of “political economy as composed of a series of modulations is not
without its ironies,” since “it increasingly resembles capitalism’s description of itself.” Likewise,
Dany-Robert Dufour has argued that what “Deleuze failed to see was that, far from making it
possible to get beyond capitalism, his programme merely predicted its future. It now looks as
though the new capitalism has learned its Deleuzean lesson well.”
In my paper, I will engage with these and similar charges by specifically looking at the
development of Deleuze’s thought in the context of the neoliberal revolution of the late 1970s
and early 1980s. While I will ultimately argue that to identify Deleuze’s thinking with the cultural
logic of neoliberalism is based on a simplified understanding of the issue, I nevertheless think
that it is worthwhile to take the above mentioned claims seriously. Yet, the real question is not
whether we interpret Deleuze’s philoso¬phy as a manifestation of pro-capitalism or anticapitalism. Indeed, if we follow Luc Boltanski’s and Ève Chiapello’s argument, namely that the
hegemony of the new spirit of capitalism can partly be attributed to its incorporation of various
aspects of the critique of capitalism (in particular what they term the artistic critique), then the
problem becomes much more complicated. Hence, by contextualizing Deleuze’s philosophy
within the history of neoliberalism, I will argue that one cannot understand his work as a unified
body of stable philosophical or political propositions and principles. Rather, what I seek to point
out is that Deleuze modified parts of his philosophy in the light of the rise of neoliberalism in the
late 1970s – a rather seldom noticed shift, which be¬comes visible, however, if one compares
Anti-Oedipus (1972) with A Thousand Plat¬eaus (1980), and which is most evident in his late
essay “Postscript on Control Soci¬eties” (1990). This, then, leads me to not only qualify the
political usefulness of Deleuze’s work (as well as more recent versions of Deleuzean theory)
against the backdrop of today’s global capitalism; it also allows me – in line with the conference
theme – to reflect on the actual “becoming” of his philosophy.
Simon Schleusener is a research associate at the University of Würzburg’s American Studies
Department. In 2012, he obtained his PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on the
topic “Kulturelle Komplexität: Gilles Deleuze und die Kulturtheorie der American Studies.” He
has published texts on American literature, cultural theory, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
Currently, he is pursuing a postdoctoral project on the cultural and affective dimensions of the
new capitalism.
simon.schleusener@fu-berlin.de
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Shilina-Conte, Tanya
Folds to Black and White in Minor Cinema
Keywords: Minor Cinema, Fold, Black or White Screen, Machine of Faciality, Experience,
Information, Image, Becoming-Minor
In Night and Fog (1955), a documentary about the Nazi concentration camps, Alain Resnais had
“to remove images that implicated the French police in the deportations of the Jews” (Pisters,
The Neuro-Image, 225). For the spectator, the act of enfolding of information or erasure of
images can pass unnoticed, unless the filmmaker somehow alerts us to this absence. After the
Thai Board of Censors cut six “offensive” scenes in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes
and a Century (2006), the director replaced them with fifteen minutes of black scratched leader
and silent soundtrack. In my presentation I will argue that minor cinema often employs the very
same tactics of silence, negation or absence by which the state machine instills censorship or
suppresses the memory of a missing people.
Minor cinema neither seeks essences nor entertains stable identities; instead it celebrates ruptures
and discontinuities, inviting an a-subjective thinking, becoming and multiplicity. Relying on
contemporary approaches to minor cinema, and through a comparison with Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari’s concept of a minor literature, I examine the black or white screen as a tool of
deterritorialization of the “major” cinematographic language and an introjection of stuttering and
mutism in the “filmmaking machine.” I ruminate on silence and absence in cinema not as a
negative operation (Adorno) but as an affirmative force of experimentation based on continuous
difference that marks the creation and invention of life (Deleuze).
Mutism in minor cinema often manifests itself through what I describe as the folds to black and
white. Here I draw on the Leibnizian-Deleuzian notion of the fold, Deleuze and Guattari’s
concept of the machine of faciality, as well as Laura Marks’s triadic model of “Experience—
Information—Image.” In my presentation I will take a close look at the folds to black and white
in minor films through the levels of Experience and Information and the poles of the “white
wall” and “black holes” of the machine of faciality. I will demonstrate how the folds to black and
white point to an enfolded (suppressed or dismissed) Experience and an enfolded (censored or
erased) Information, as well as to their selective unfoldings by the social power structures and
mainstream media. Mutism in minor cinema, as the “obverse” or “reverse” of actual images and
sounds, both alludes to the unacknowledged or unaccounted for past experiences of the missing
people and serves as an impetus towards inventing the future which is not yet. Drawing on the
virtual regimes of past and future and evoking the latent or hidden dimensions, the folds to black
and white invite a process of unfolding by the spectator through the power of affect and thought,
thus also inventing a missing audience.
Dr. Tanya Shilina-Conte works in the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo where
she teaches a wide variety of courses in Film and Media Theory, Global Culture and Media, Color and the
Moving Image, Gender and Film, World Cinema and Avant-Garde Cinema. She is the recipient of an
award from the Ministry of Culture and Cinematography of the Russian Federation. She has received
grants and fellowships from the U.S. Department of State, George Soros Open Society, Princeton-Weimar
Fellowship, Canadian-American Studies Program, UB Humanities Institute, riverrun Liberal Arts
Fellowship, Tony Conrad Distinguished Professorship Grant and a number of UUP Professional
Development awards. Dr. Shilina-Conte is the founder of the Center for Global Media in the Department
of Media Study. Her interests include film philosophy, transnational cinema, new media and sensory film
and media. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Black Screens, White Frames:
Recalculating Film History, based on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy and theory of cinema.
Dr. Tanya Shilina-Conte 231 Center for the Arts Department of Media Study SUNY at Buffalo Buffalo,
NY 14260-6020
tshilina@buffalo.edu
172
Silberberger, Jan
The progressive differentiation of judgement criteria - Following a controversial
architectural project through the jury deliberations of an architectural competition
Keywords: architectural competitions, jury deliberations, sensemaking
The paper at hand bases on findings from an ethnographic study on the jury sessions of four
architectural competitions in Switzerland. In particular, the paper is attentive to the unforeseeable
turns and leaps within the evolution of a jury’s judgement – not only with regard to a single
“provocative” competition entry but also regarding the design problem as such.
Referring to DeLanda’s (2002) interpretation of Deleuze’s ontology – DeLanda describes the
virtual, the intensive and the actual as “three aspects of one and the same process” or as “the
different moments of a cascade of progressive differentiation” respectively (2002: 164) – the
paper traces a jury board’s decision-making as an exploration of a continuous conglomerate of
possibility spaces. Assigning the way judgement criteria are defined in competition programmes
(that is, at the outset of architectural competitions) to the virtual realm and the jury’s concluded
reasoning as it is presented in the final report (that is, the judgement criteria as they are defined at
the end of an architectural competition) to the actual realm, we are particularly interested in the
events that occur within the intensive realm. Applying the concept of sensemaking (Weick 1995),
we will describe various instances of jurors interacting with architectural plans and models
thereby expediting the progressive differentiation of judgement criteria. These instances in turn
will be theorized as bifurcations within the morphogenesis, the “passage to consistency”
(Guattari 1979) of the judgement criteria.
References
DeLanda, M. (2002), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, Continuum, London, New York.
Guattari, F. (1979), L’inconscient machinique, Recherches, Paris.
Weick, K.E. (1995), Sensemaking in organizations, Sage, Thousand Oaks CA.
Jan Silberberger is a Post-Doc researcher at ETH Wohnforum – ETH CASE (Centre for
Research on Architecture, Society & the Built Environment), Department of Architecture, ETH
Zurich, Switzerland. He has studied Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of
Stuttgart/Germany and Visual Communication and Fine Arts at the Hochschule fuer bildende
Kuenste in Hamburg, Germany. Between 2008 and 2011 he did a PhD at the University of
Fribourg’s Geography Unit investigating decision-making within jury boards of architectural
competitions. His current research focuses on the circulation of quality within planning
processes.
ETH Zurich, Department of Architecture, ETH Wohnforum – ETH CASE: Centre for
Research on Architecture, Sociology & the Built Environment, Stefano-Franscini-Platz 5, HIL G
65.1, CH-8093 Zürich
silberberger@arch.ethz.ch
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Skonieczny, Krzysztof
Beyond Life and Death. On the Uneasy Relationship of Immanence and Life in
Deleuze's Thought
Keywords: Life, Immanence, Spinoza
When in What Is Philosophy? Deleuze says that the domain operates on a plane of immanence, he
defines the it not so much as it historically was, but rather what it should be – and indeed, only a
few philosophers seem to meet the requirement: the presocratics, Spinoza, Nietzsche and, at
times, Bergson. Thinking in terms of immanence is also a task or challenge Deleuze puts before
himself, which makes his last text, Immanence: A Life, all the more important. The author of
Difference and Repetition vehemently criticised theories of life which would see death as a
transcendent principle governing life in this or that way, such as the Heideggerian vision of Sein
zum Tode or the psychoanalytic Death Drive. Derrida's theory of the autoimmunity of life seems
to be equally flawed – at least from the Deleuzean point of view. But does Deleuze's theory of
life not fall – willy-nilly – into the same category? At least two moments seem to be problematic:
(1) after Spinoza, he acknowledges that death always comes from the outside – how then could it
be thought of on a plane of immanence, which, as Deleuze himself admits, has no outside? (2) in
the aforementioned Immanence: A Life he describes what he means by a life by presenting a vision
of a man on his death bed.
In my paper, I would firstly like to propose a reading of Deleuze's theory of life, which would
address the aforementioned problematic points. Firstly, I will show how, by a re-reading of
Spinoza, that in fact the external nature of death has nothing to do with it being a transcendent
point of reference. Secondly, I will try to go further than that and show how, through a certain
reading of Deleuze, the frontier between life and death can be shown to be inconsequential, and
that a true philosophy of immanence needs to venture beyond life and death – in the name of
life.
Krzysztof Skonieczny is an assistant professor at the Department of “Artes Liberales”,
University of Warsaw, Poland. In 2014, he received his PhD in Philosophy from the Polish
Academy of Sciences, for a dissertation entitled “The Animal and the Human. A Perspective of
Immanence.” In 2011/2012 he was a visiting scholar at the Department of Comparative
Literature at SUNY at Buffalo, USA. His interests include Animal Studies, Men's Studies, the
question of atheism, and contemporary American literature, which he occasionally translates.
k.skonieczny@al.uw.edu.pl
174
Sokolowska, Ewelina
Behavioral genetics in light of the virtual understanding of the nature of genes
Keywords: Genetics, Life, Virtuality
Behavioral genetics has been gaining increased intrest in the life and social sciences as well as the
wider social discourse over the last couple decades. Whereas heritability studies have enjoyed
high popularity ever since 1970s, research employing more advanced molecular-genetic
techniques has intensified in more recent years, claiming to be able to identify “genetic
predispositions” to specific phenotypic traits and behaviors. In view of this high popularity of
behavioral genetics in today´s world, one could argue that genes constitute a dominant element
that defines life today.
In this context, I propose that Deleuze's distinction between “actual” and “virtual” may prove to
be a fruitful concept to critically assess the discourse of behavioral genetics. Accordingly, I argue
that the dominant understanding of genes that underlies the discourse of behavioral genetics has
been the one of genes conceptualized in an inherently actual way, mostly in terms of “genetic
information” coding for some specific end-states. In contrast, in line with Deleuze´s argument in
„Difference and Repetition”, I argue that genes should be understood in virtual terms. In this
sense, “genetic information” is to be seen as a “difference that makes difference”, to use Gregory
Batesonʼs expression, but where the precise difference that is made is determined first in the
process of ontogenetic development. In short, the meaning of “genetic information” is always in
the process of becoming.
In view of these considerations, I undertake to critically assess the claims that are made on behalf
of behavioral genetics in the life and social sciences as well as the wider social discourse. I
subsequently reflect on the question as to how these claims would need to change, if the virtual
nature of genes was taken seriously.
Ewelina Sokolowska, PhD student in political science at the Department of Government,
Uppsala University. In my work I focus on ontological assumptions that underlie the recently
increasingly popular claims about the approaching “neuroscientific revolution” in the social
sciences. I have co-authored two papers related to this topic: “Ontological Issues in the Life
Sciences” (Biological Theory, 2015) and “Replies to Chris Brown’s “Human Nature, science and
international political theory”” (Journal of International Relations and Development, 2014).
ewelina.sokolowska@statsvet.uu.se
175
Sowińska-Fruhtrunk, Iwona
Deleuzean Concept of Becoming in Musical Art: Examining Atonal and Dodecaphonic
Works by Arnold Schoenberg
Keywords: atonal music, dodecaphony, Arnold Schoenberg.
This article attempts to explore the Deleuzean concept of becoming in musical art, taking as a
point of departure the definition of music as “the being of sensation”. As a methodological tool
will serve (apart from Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s writings) Ronald Bogue’s reading of
Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theories about music, as well as Bruce Quaglia’s and Marianne KielianGilbert’s applications of the concept of becoming to specific musical works. Difference in
becoming, as another crucial point in Deleuze’s philosophical thought, was strongly emphasized
in Arnold Schoenberg’s theoretical output, as well as problematics of repetition and musical
representation. Hence the ‘difference’ between representation, affection, and expression should
be treated specifically. As an exemplary atonal work by Schoenberg, Erwartung Op. 17 will
receive a focused study. For an example of a dodecaphonic work, Variation for the Orchestra
Op. 31 will be explored. Schoenberg expressed clearly his wish for a musical piece where
“variation almost completely takes the place of repetition”, a thought of great resonance in
Deleuze’s philosophy. Since these works encompass the composer’s diverse processes of
‘becoming’ (becoming other, becoming revolutionary), so does the music manifest itself as
becoming intense, becoming world/universe, or even becoming molecular. Deleuzean notion of
sensation is a closely related concept, especially in the context of Erwartung’s music, described by
Schoenberg himself as ‘thousands of sensations’, as a glimpse of cumulated experience presented
in slow motion over a half an hour paste of time. As Holly Watkins notes, Erwartung is “a
continuum of transitory impressions.” As a conclusion, I wish to draw some perspectives for the
future musicological analysis and interpretation, based on the concepts examined in this survey.
Iwona Sowińska-Fruhtrunk, conductor and music theorist. She studied in the Academy of
Music in Kraków (Poland) and College of Musical Arts at the Bowling Green State University in
Ohio (USA). From 2002 to 2010 she was the Assistant Conductor in the National Opera House
in Warsaw. In August 2004 she made her international opera debut in Teatro Colón in Buenos
Aires conducting Ubu Rex by Krzysztof Penderecki. She has performed with various orchestras
and opera houses in Poland. Currently she is a doctoral student of Theory of Music at the
Academy of Music in Kraków.
iwonasow@laposte.net
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Spicer, Andi and Paolo Giudici
A Starling (PERFORMANCE)
Keywords: Mozart, becoming-bird, fold
PAPAGENO. Not a bird, I hope!
(The Magic Flute, act 1, scene 1)
On 27 May 1784, Mozart records in his expense book the purchase of a starling for 34 Kreuzer
and below notates the bird’s song with the comment: ‘Das war schön!’ (Deutsch 1966: 225). The
musical fragment matches the Third Movement theme of the of the Piano Concerto n. 17 in G
Major (K. 453), except for a fermata and G sharp. Unlike his dog Wimperl and horse Kleper, the
starling never received a name (Deleuze 2001: 28) but at his death, Mozart celebrated a funeral,
buried him in the small garden he was renting on the Landstrasse in Vienna, and recited this elegy
at his graveside: ‘A Little fool lies here / Whom I held dear -- / A starling in the prime / of his
brief time / Whose doom it was to drain / Death’s bitter pain …’ (Mozart, 4 June 1787 in
Hildesheim 1991: 206-7)
The narrative of Mozart’s starling and the K. 453 theme, which is ‘a variation from the start’
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 340; West and King 1990: 106), are the starting point of the music
video we intend to present and a new agencement in our continuing artistic research. Situating
Mozart at the beginning of modern musical time (Berger 2008), A Starling superimposes musical
and filmic layers to dramatize concepts that Deleuze explicitly recognises in Mozart: the micro
block of becoming-bird/becoming-music (Deleuze and Parnet 2007: 2-3; Girdlestone 2011: 252),
the diagonal (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 327) and the crystal of space-time (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004: 384-6). In particular, our music video is constructed on the concept of fold and
unfold (Deleuze 2006: 40, 42) that better specify becoming in this historical and artistic milieu:
hands become bird, become song, become speech, become music, becoming hand …
References
Berger, Karol. 2008. Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow. An Essay on the Origins of Musical
Modernity. Oakland, CA: University of California Press
Deleuze, Gilles. 2001. Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. New York: Zone Books.
———. 2004. 'The Method of Dramatization', in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974,
New York: Semiotext(e), 94–116.
———. 2006. The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. London and New York: Continuum.
——— and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. London and New York: Continuum.
——— and Claire Parnet. 2007. Dialogues II. Rev. ed. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deutsch, Otto Eric. 1966. Mozart: A Documentary Biography. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Girdlestone, Cuthbert. 2011. Mozart and His Piano Concertos. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Hildesheimer, Wolfgang. 1991. Mozart. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
West, Meredith ]. and Andrew P. King. 1990. ‘Mozart’s Starling’, American Scientist, 78 (MarchApril), 106-14.
177
Paolo Giudici holds a degree in philosophy (Univeristy of Padova, Italy) and in photography
(Royal College of Art, London, UK). Along side his artistic practice, he is associate researcher at
the Orpheus Institute (Ghent, Belgium) and PhD candidate in Critical and Historical Studies at
the Royal College of Art with a thesis about Deleuzian concepts in John Everett Millais’ Ophelia.
He recently published the chapter ‘Experimental Systems and Criticism’ in Experimental Systems:
Future Knowledge in Artistic Research.
paolo.giudici@orpheusinstituut.be
Andi Spicer (born 1959 in Birmingham, UK), is a British electroacoustic classical music
composer who uses electronics in his compositions. His music is published by Edition Tre
Fontane in Munster, Germany. His compositions have been featured at festivals in the US,
Mexico, UK, France, Sweden, Austria and South Africa. He is largely self-taught, although he
took private lessons in composition and music theory South African composer Martin Watt and
composition workshops with British composer Michael Finnissy. His music uses improvisation,
graphic notation, electronics and emphasises surface textures, but is also influenced by southern
African and Asian world music. He is associated with the Gallery III group of artists, musicians
and multi-media artists in Johannesburg, South Africa, which included artist and musician James
de Villiers and Beat poet Sinclair Beiles, and is a member of the New Music Brighton and
London Forum composer collectives in the UK.
andispicer@me.com
178
Stępień, Justyna
(Re)visiting the Virtual in Affective Spaces: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s American War Veteran
Projects
In their seminal work What is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari assert that artists
who are presenters, inventors and creators of affects reopen the unknown territories to dispose
of already familiar (our “actual”) selves. Art, a genuinely creative act, as a matter of fact, actualises
the virtual, understood here as a realm of affects. In this respect, artistic practices can operate as a
fissure in representational processes as spectators experience a work of art while being engaged in
the sensations produced by different forms. Thus, as the philosophers highlight, art practice, in
fact, becomes a kind of ethicoaesthetics; the organisation of productive encounters through art
that unfold multiple differentiations and flows.
Drawing on the theoretical framework proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, the paper explores
Krzysztof Wodiczko’s projects For Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection from 2012 and
OUT OF HERE: The Veterans Project from 2009. The installations, which metaphorically refer
to the plight of traumatised American war veterans, trigger a trans-mediated dialogue with
spectators to reevaluate a silent assent of the community. In fact, Wodiczko has been utilising
American institutional spaces to prove that they alienate the marginalised to uphold the
dichotomy between the centre and periphery. Thus, while actualising monumental spaces, the
artist liberates a multiplicity of narratives hidden beneath the facades to achieve multiple visions
of the subject–as–process, replacing the exclusionary binary “either-or” with a logic of additive
possibilities. Hence, the paper proves that Wodiczko’s projects become affective spaces, events,
that allow spectators not only to witness a traumatic event but primarily produce and experience
new modes of “becoming”.
Justyna Stępień is an Assistant Professor in Literary and Cultural Studies in the English
Department of Szczecin University, Poland. She is the editor of Redefining Kitsch and Camp in
Literature and Culture (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014) and the author of British Pop Art
and Postmodernism (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). Her research interests encompass
the transmediatization of cultural practices, aspects of everyday aesthetics, and posthuman
subjectivity analyzed from a transdisciplinary perspective. She has published essays on popular
culture, postmodern literature, film and visual arts, combining her interests in philosophy and
critical theory.
stepienjusti@gmail.com
179
Sticchi, Francesco
Abstract Title: Andrei Rublev: The Shame of Being a Man and Artistic Creation as
Resistance and instrument to Discover New Existential Potentialities
Keywords: Time as Creation, Immanence and Invention, Embodied Cinema
Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema is one of the most influencing philosophical contributions to
film theory establishing a strong connection among the affective and abstract dimension in the
seventh art up to the point of affirming that it is a form of thought based on block of sensations.
Therefore, watching a movie is not a passive and contemplative experience, but a constructive
interaction that involves a creative encounter, the possibility to engage a new existential
potentiality on the plane of immanence we live in. For this reason we are not detached from the
work of art, but involved in a becoming (in the middle) an idea that, as Giuliana Bruno noticed,
identifies also another declination of the term medium to indicate a state of in betwenness.
Deleuze’s theory of cinema constitutes, as usual in his work, an intellectual assemblage with
which he re-elaborates and ties concepts from Bergson, Spinoza, and Nietzsche’s philosophy
together with a singular interpretation of Peirce’s semiotics. The idea that cinema expresses body
states and a sensory-motor condition (or their violations) is easy connectable and comparable
with notions deriving from embodied conceptualization and ecological psychology, which are
also the theoretical fields inspiring modern cognitive film theory. At the same time to perceive
and encounter a film is not a neutral performance, it is a ‘becoming active’ which involves our
intellectual participation in every sense, also in its ethical aspects, thus defining what he called ‘an
act of resistance’, a creative opposition to all those forces that mortify and enclose existence. For
this reason, a work of art liberates life, a power to live (a vie puissant), thus resisting to obliged
paths, cliché and countering the complex feeling that Primo Levi defined as the shame of being a
man, the sadness deriving from the recognition of the evil man can do. Andrei Tarkovsky’s
famous biopic concerning the life and the work of the Russian painter Andrei Rublev offers the
possibility to discuss and combine these concepts of Deleuze’s philosophy. The existence of the
main character and evolution of the film are permeated by problematic questions upon the nature
of God, the necessity of Evil, the role of Art within a world of violence and misery and, at the
same time, the tension and the marvel in the discovery of the real. Following the ideas on
spectatorship outlined by the French Philosopher we can say that the film make us perceive these
issues through the embodiment and the engagement of the relations it describes. At the same
time, the movie gives the possibility to re-discuss these terrible questions revealing the active and
productive nature of art, as different sequences (like the enigmatic prologue) demonstrate. Aim of
this paper will be, then, to show how this assemblage of different concepts is possible through
the vivid and interactive dimension of film experience.
Francesco Sticchi graduated in Film Studies on 2012 at the University of Rome 3 with a thesis
concerning the application of Chomskyan cognitive linguistics on film spectatorship. He is a PhD
student at the Oxford Brookes University, under the supervision of prof. Warren Buckland. His
research concerns the connection among Spinoza’s thought, in particular Deleuze’s interpretation
of the Dutch philosopher, with modern theories of embodied cognition, and the observation of
this philosophical encounter on the analysis of film audience. For this reason, he also tries to
combine cognitive studies with critical theory.
francescosticchi@gmail.com / 13080811@brookes.ac.uk
180
Stivale, Charles J.
S as in Style, or Ritournelles and Becomings
Keywords: style, becomings, ritournelles
To enter into the Deleuzean conceptual plateau of style is to discover in many ways the very
processes of difference and repetition, hence the very movement of becomings and ritournelles.
On the one hand, in a range of texts – from Proust et le signes to Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?
and Critique et clinique --, Deleuze emphasizes repeatedly that style functions as “a kind of
foreign language” within one’s own language, but also that “en vérité, différence et répétition
sont les deux puissances de l’essence, inséparables et correlatives” [“difference and repetition are
the two inseparable and correlative puissances of essence”] (Pourparlers 63/Negotiations 49). On
the other hand, the very range of texts in which Deleuze considers style points also to a range of
domains in which styles operate and vary, most notably in philosophy itself, in literary expression,
in the quite specific domain of tennis, and as what Deleuze calls writing as “la tentative de faire
de la vie quelque chose de plus que personnel, de libérer de vie de ce qui l’emprisonne” [“an
attempt to make life something more than personal, to free life from what imprisons it”]
(Pourparlers 196/Negotiations 143). And he adds, “Créer n’est pas communiquer, mais résister.
Il y a un lien profond entre les signes, l’événement, la vie, le vitalisme. C’est la puissance d’une vie
non organique, celle qu’il peut y avoir dans une ligne de dessin, d’écriture ou de musique”
[“Creating isn’t communicating but resisting. There’s a profound link between signs, events, life
and vitalism: the power (of action) of nonorganic life that can be found in a line that’s drawn, a
line of writing or a line of music”, translation modified ] (Pourparlers 196/Negotiations 143). In
many ways, these reflections from Pourparlers (that complement the longer discussion of style in
L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze produced at precisely the same time as the Pourparlers interview,
in 1988) sum up brilliantly and succinctly the differences and repetitions of Deleuze on style
throughout his career, as so many modes of becoming. Thus, in the context of the multi-faceted
thematics of the Rome conference, I propose to reflect on the Deleuzian concept of style in
terms of its necessarily mutating inter-connection and inter-operativity, that is, the ways that the
virtuality of styles points to different becomings and assemblages which, as we know, are the very
bases for a life.
Charles J. Stivale is Distinguished Professor of French, in the Dept. of Classical and Modern
Languages, Wayne State University (Detroit MI, USA). He has written books on French literary
authors (Stendhal, Vallès, Maupassant), on Cajun dance and music culture, and the works of
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; has edited (or co-edited) 5 volumes and journal issues on
critical theory, pedagogy, French culture, and Deleuze & Guattari; and has translated (or cotranslated) into English Logique du sens, L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (on dvd from
MIT/Semiotext(e)), and Franco Berardi “Bifo”’s Félix Guattari.
Dept. of Classical & Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Wayne State University
487 Manoogian Detroit, MI 48202
c_stivale@wayne.edu
181
Stones, Andrew
Wound and Diagram: The Postcolonial Ethics of the Event in Dambudzo Marechera
Keywords: Event, Wound, Diagram, Marechera, Language, Postcolonial
In the thirteenth chapter of The Logic of Sense, “Of the Schizophrenic and the little girl”,
Deleuze articulates his theory of the linguistic sign by opposing the works of Lewis Carroll and
Antonin Artaud. The distinction concerns two divergent series – those of surface and those of
depth – in order to arrive at the concept of the “incorporeal transformation”. Whilst the child
plays with the surface effects of meaning by way of nonsense and portmanteau, the schizophrenic
experiences certain words in their sonic materiality – as malignant forces which penetrate and
disrupt the organization of the body. By using literary texts to experiment with psychoanalytic
theory, Deleuze shows how bodies produce effects as virtual phenomena or “sense events”
which make possible the difference between words and things. Non-sense, therefore, is both an
effect of language and the very conditions of possibility within which sense emerges. Deleuze’s
philosophy of language is predicated on the immanence of text and world, or the ways in which
language both produces and implies the incorporeal transformation of bodies. This paper will
seek to connect two para or infra-concepts relating to ‘the event’ within Deleuze’s philosophy
(‘the wound’ from The Logic of Sense and ‘the diagram’ from Francis Bacon: The Logic of
Sensation) in order to stage an encounter between Deleuze and the Zimbabwean writer
Dambudzo Marechera. Against the background of a growing hostility to Deleuze/DeleuzeGuattari’s corpus within both African and postcolonial studies26, the paper will argue for the
vitalness (as well as vitality, vitalism) of Deleuze’s concept of ‘the event’ for Marechera’s
becoming-exile within his own postcolonial aesthetic praxis. Refusing a politics of resistance to
Empire premised on dialectical negation, Marechera is radically disinterested in the coming-tolanguage of subaltern communities. Instead, Marechera’s texts approach the problem of a
combined and uneven imperialism-of-the-signifier as the opportunity for an escape from
linguistic, national or ontological representation. Reading Marechera’s novel Black Sunlight
(1980) from the perspective of transcendental empiricism and immanence, I will show how a
Deleuzian ethics based on the temporality of ‘the event as wound’ becomes resonant for a
dispersed and anti-systemic generation of postcolonial writers responding to the non-identity of
their respective experiences of globalisation and Empire. In this way, Deleuze’s description of the
event as a wound or scar which traverses material, linguistic and temporal strata becomes (contra
any organicist legacy in vitalism) central to a post-identitarian and post-humanistic politics of life
and becoming.
Andrew Stones: I am a doctoral student in the department of English and Comparative Literary
Studies at the University of Warwick. After obtaining my undergraduate degree in English
Literature from the University of Warwick and my MA in Critical and Cultural Theory from
Birkbeck College University of London, I began my doctoral research in 2014. Working within
the fields of transcendental empiricism, new materialism and systems-theory in anthropology, my
thesis “Writing and Event: Deleuze and World Literature” focuses on the concept of 'the event'
as conceived by Gilles Deleuze across several of his works in relation to contemporary World
Literature and political aesthetics.
a.t.stones@warwick.ac.uk
c.f Hallward, Peter Absolutely Postcolonial 2002. Miller, Christopher “The Post-identitarian Predicament” in Gary
Genosko ed. Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Perspectives 2001.
182
26
Stover, Chris
The Improvisational Moment
Keywords: Music Improvisation, Three Syntheses of Time, Becoming-Molecular, Nomad Space,
Affect
The improvisational moment in music is the event, occasion, or something-doing of musical
process that opens onto a virtual future and seizes some singular force or constellation of forces
in an act of becoming-actual. There are three interrelated issues at stake, which I develop on the
ground of improvised music, by which I mean improvisational aspects of all music. The first
involves interrelationships between Deleuze’s three syntheses of time. The time of the event is
Deleuze’s third synthesis, but the first two syntheses are woven into it, providing two series of
contexts that condition where, and to some extent how the event will unfold. While the
selections that constitute events in musical improvisation are often passively determined, we must
also consider the agency of human performers, interacting with and through musical-objects-asbodies, actively selecting forces and actively projecting affective implications to be taken up
variably by the other ensemble members. “Each chooses his pitch or his tone…, but the tune
remains the same.”27
The second issue has to do with the micropolitics of ensemble interaction; the differential
affective attunements that condition the multiplicity of ways a performer can pick up on and spin
a musical thread. Interaction in a musical ensemble is an ongoing encounter with a plurality of
Others, each of which is “an expression of a possible world”28 brought about by proliferating
series of past worlds, and each participant (performer and musical-object-as-body) is a nomad
moving, free of structuring or reifying subjectivities, through an emergent, creative space. So on
two related levels—of differential affective attunements and nomadic movements—the space of
improvisational interaction proliferates through the very micropolitical relations that condition it.
The third issue involves unpacking conjunctural relationships between the becoming-actual of
the virtual (how the passage of the living present into a virtual future involves selections of virtual
forces to be brought into play) and the becoming-other of identity itself (as a becomingmolecular of the syntatic structures that determine inclusion in a genre, for instance). Through
creative acts, a musical utterance’s “content is molecularized…at the same time as its form [is]
dismantled, becoming a pure moving line.”29 The paradox is that becoming-molecular is
occurring at the same time as the music’s identity is emerging through its temporal enactment.
This paradox of simultaneous becoming-real and becoming-molecular can also be described in
Deleuzo-Guattarian terms: “The one [defined] by these molar structured aggregates that crush
singularities, select them, and regularize those that they retain in codes or axiomatics; the other by
the molecular multiplicities of singularities that on the contrary treat the large aggregates as so
many useful materials for their own elaborations.”30
Chris Stover is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Composition at The New School in New
York City. He has forthcoming articles on Deleuze, time, and affect in M/C Journal and Twentieth
Century Music, he has given talks at numerous Deleuze-related events (Deleuze and Artistic Research,
Sound and Affect, Rancière and Music), and he has written on phenomenology and music, time and
process in diasporic West African musics, intersections between music analysis and post-colonial studies,
and the analysis of musical improvisation and interaction.
stoverc@newschool.edu
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton (Columbia University Press, 1994), 83–84
Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (Columbia University Press, 1990),
310.
29 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi
(University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 290
30 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem, and Helen R. Lane (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 366–367.
27
28
183
Svirsky, Marcelo
‘Deleuze on Palestine’
Keywords: Palestine, politics, resistance
In the field of Deleuze Studies, except for a limited number of cases, there seem to be a
discrepancy between theoretical work invested in understanding the sort of politics Deleuze and
Guattari’s works heralded on the one hand, and practical analyses of case studies on the other
hand. In a sense, this gap points to a certain de-politicisation of this field of study of ours.
As a continuation of my own work on the intersection between Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre
and the case of Palestine, this paper aims at presenting a comprehensive analysis of Gilles
Deleuze’s position on the question of Palestine. By looking into Deleuze’s articles about and
references to the Palestinian struggle and the conceptual underpinnings of this writing, his
friendship with Elias Sanbar since early 1980s when they co-founded the Revue D’études
Palestiniennes, the indirect conversation with Edward Said, his publicised dispute with Foucault
over the question of Palestine, and other biographical materials – this paper has three main goals:
firstly, I aim at extricating a statement of this engagement, namely, the form and substance of
expression or the function of this political discourse. Secondly, based on this inductive approach
to Palestine, another aim of this study is to better understand Deleuze’s political positions from a
more general perspective with a view to politicise the more abstract work in the field; and thirdly,
given these understandings and the background of Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual war
machines, I propose to speculate on what could have been Deleuze’s position on the current
state of affairs in Israel-Palestine, and more particularly on the strategies of Palestinian resistance.
Specifically, I suggest reading the ongoing Palestinian campaign for ‘Boycotts, Divestments, and
Sanctions’ against Israel (launched on 2005) with Deleuze’s articulation of the notion of
‘mediator’.
This paper is part of a forthcoming special issue of Deleuze Studies edited by Ronnen Ben-Arie
titled Deleuze in and on Palestine.
Marcelo Svirsky is a Senior Lecturer at the School for Humanities and Social Inquiry, University
of Wollongong. He researches on questions of social transformation and subjectivity,
decolonisation, settler-colonial societies and political activism. He has published several articles in
the journals Cultural Politics, Subjectivity, Intercultural Education, Deleuze Studies, and Settler
Colonial Studies among others, and various books and edited collections: Deleuze and Political
Activism (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Arab-Jewish Activism in Israel-Palestine (Ashgate,
2012); Agamben and Colonialism with Simone Bignall (Edinburgh University Press, 2012); After
Israel: Towards Cultural Transformation (Zed Books, 2014), and he also edited a special issue of
the Australian journal Settler Colonial Studies under the title Collaborative Struggles in Australia
and Israel-Palestine. Marcelo is currently working on a new monograph together with Ronnen
Ben-Arie titled The Cultural Politics of Settler Colonial in Palestine, to be published by Rowman
& Littlefield International in early 2017.
msvirsky@uow.edu.au
184
Szumilewicz, Ewa
Wandering on the deleuzian sensitivity on the aspect of ‘potentiality’ in the light of wave
function of the universe
Keywords: potentiality, metaphor, wave function of the universe
The term ‘potentiality’ is probably never strictly articulated and defined in deleuzian works, his
philosophical investigations. However, the philosopher’s sensitivity on the aspect of that, what is rather
‘becoming’ than ‘being’, is rather ‘virtual’ than ‘real’, rather ‘to be structuralised as the dimension of actual
time (Aion)’ than ‘the time itself (Aion and Chronos)’ is somehow vivid. The author is aware of subtle
differences or rather nuances between that, what is perceived as formal ‘potentiality’ on the field of
philosophy of science, philosophy of nature and that what wanders throughout the deleuzian approach
and could be grasped as something that is rather, metaphorically speaking, nearly transparent, fragile tissue
(for example: the plane of immanence in relation to a concept) than a structure itself.31 Nevertheless the
author feels that the deleuzian intuition of what is rather ‘to be, to have the potential to happen actually’
and that what we name ‘potentiality’ on the field of quantum mechanic (wave function of the universe)
have the dimensions in common.
Therefore, the author finds it fruitful to introduce the sketch of the notion of wave function of the
universe to depict the deleuzian landscape of philosophical intuition.
Here I would like to stress that the comparison between aforementioned wave function of the universe
and the deleuzian sensitivity is not literally illustrated. An approach like that (to put equal sign between
philosophical conceptualization and the conceptualization that is visible in the contemporary physics) the
author finds as a mistake.
An attempt to search similar intuitions, the one rooted in the field of contemporary physics and the one
rooted in deleuzian philosophy, can be treated rather as a metaphor, rather an illustration than explicit
translation the language of science on the language of philosophy. However, the attempt to grasp the
intuition of aforementioned ‘potentiality’ that is the very core of wave function of the universe the author
finds fruitful to better feel the deleuzian intuitions.32 Of course, the attempt is only a metaphor or even a
metaphor.
References
Deleuze G. The Logic of Sense, The Athlone Press, London, 1990
Deleuze G. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, The Athlone Press, London, 1993
Deleuze G., Guattari F. What is Philosophy, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994
Agamben G. Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy, Stanford University Press, 1999
Wallace D. The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory according to the Everett Interpretation, Oxford University
Press, 2012
Heisenberg W. Physics and Philosophy, George Allen & Unwin, 1958
Tamminen T. Quantum Metaphysics: The Role of Human Beings within the Paradigm of Classical and Quantum
Physics, Academic Dissertation, University of Helsinki, 2004
Ewa Szumilewicz is a PhD student in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy
of Sciences. Her master thesis was ‘On the direction of time flow‘ where she was investigating
philosophical implications of science concepts concerning the nature of time. Currently she is working on
her doctoral project ‘On the paradox of infinity‘ where she is trying to find the linkage between the
contemporary science and philosophical (mostly poststructuralism) concepts concerning the nature of the
notion of infinity, using metaphor as a tool.
She was a co-organizer of two international, philosophical conferences. She was a participant of five
philosophical conferences. She wrote four scientific articles.
eszumilewicz@gmail.com
One of what can be considered as a linkage between scientific approach and the deleusian intuition is 'density of
probability' which is cruicial for the wave function and, as a metaphor, can be compared to the relations: plane of
immanence/ concept and in the deleusian landscape.
32 In the landscape of wave function of the universe one of the hypothesis on the nature of the world is string
theory. String theory and its ontology can be intuitively associated, as a metaphor, with the deleuzian intuitions
mostly articulated in ‘The Fold: Leibniz and Baroque‘.
185
31
Taşkale, Ali Rıza
‘There is Another Turkey Out There’: Gezi Revolt as an Event
Specifically, what made Gezi revolt unexpected is the fact that it occurred at the hands of the
people of Turkey, who demanded freedom and justice. Thus it showed that the ‘event’ is
possible. But how can critical social theory respond to this eventual intervention into history? In
other words, how can critical social theory become ‘worthy of the event’ (Deleuze 1990: 148)?
How do critical approaches contribute to the understanding of Gezi revolt as an emancipatory
social movement?
The evident intention of this paper is to provide a critical theorised reading of Gezi revolt as an
eventual possibility. Based on the participatory observation of the author, which was limited to
Taksim Gezi Park in İstanbul and Kızılay Square in Ankara, as well as primary and secondary
sources, the paper addresses the significance of Gezi revolt from a Deleuzean perspective.
Deleuzean political theory focuses on the utopian, or rather the virtual, dimension of the
revolution. In this respect, the key methodological question is how to conceptualise the
relationships between revolution and the critical theory tradition, which seeks to focus on radical
change as an ‘event’. I take as a point of departure a topological analysis that employs Deleuze’s
concept of the event, for it provides us to construct new forms of subjectivities and social
relations that are immune to the existing state of affairs. For Deleuze, therefore, the topological
analysis always acts on the present. What is our present situation? What new possibilities of life
do we see appearing today? What are new forms of political subjectivation? And so this paper
aims to theorise Gezi as a revolutionary event, which enables an opening to the virtual within the
actual.
Ali Rıza Taşkale is currently an Assistant Professor of Social and Political Sciences at Hacettepe
University, Turkey. His research fields are social and political theory, political philosophy, cinema
and political theology. His articles have been published in Society & Space, Theory, Culture &
Society and Journal for Cultural Research, along with a number of book chapters in edited
volumes. His book Post-Politics in Context is forthcoming from Routledge in June 2016.
alirizataskale@gmail.com
186
Tercz, Jakub
Deleuzian Table of Becomings in Deruba`s audiovisual art
My thesis is twofold: (1) Philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari provide theoretical framework to
think conceptually modern audiovisual art; (2) Audiovisual art provide a Deleuzoguattarian Table
of Becomings.
Instead of table of twelve Kantian categories as predicates of all possible experience, Deleuze a
few times mentioned about the table of categories of real experience. Taking into account the
entire work of Deleuze and Guattari I will call it the Table of Becomings, that extends beyond
transcendental idealism, however, can be framed as belonging to the Post-Kantian tradition as
transcendental empiricism. Moreover, it is not based on logical classification of sentence, but
more deeply rooted in the sensuality; it is not tailored to fit an object in general but to the
particular; strictly speaking, it do not apply to an object because extends subject-object
dichotomy; it is not made to preserve a status quo, but to make the new possible, to make the
change real; it is not a closed set, but the set always open to experience.
All above mentioned features can be found in works of polish audiovisual artist Radosław
Deruba. Mainly audiovisual art consists in playing visuals generated digitally in a real time along
with the music, or to generate visuals directly from the music itself, thanks to software able to
analyse sounds. However, Deruba arranged some abstractionist style video clip (eg. Flood, Circle,
Pulse
–
https://vimeo.com/derubare/videos),
one
of
which
(Minotaur
–
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgzfECspClI) was even a part of his Master's thesis
'Movement as the synesthetic manifestation of sound'. From enumerated materials many
becoming-images can be extracted: becoming-open, -close, -dissolved, -pulse, -crystal, etc., and,
when gathered together, interpreted conceptually as the open set of categories of changes that
form The Table of Becomings.
During my lecture some selected visuals of becoming-images will be displayed and accompanied
by Deleuzoguattarian and Neo-Kantian theoretical frame.
Jakub Tercz (1986): a PhD Student (Institute of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw). Title
of doctoral thesis: 'Gilles Deleuze`s Philosophy of Difference'. Besides Kantian influences on
continental philosophy interested in humanistic reflexion on psychiatric field. Initiator and
organizer of series of interdisciplinary conferences called 'Philosophical-Psychiatric Open
Seminar'. Publications in many polish journals (inter alia 'Kronos', 'Przegląd filozoficzny',
'Advances in Psychiatry and Neurology'). Participant of numerous conferences, including two
recent Deleuze Studies Conferences.
jakub.tercz@gmail.com // www: https://uw.academia.edu/JakubTercz
187
The Network Ensemble / Oliver Smith and Francesco Tacchini
(permanent installation)
Keywords: resonance, territory, system.
The Network Ensemble is a tool to explore the invisible territory of the wireless networks that sit
between our offline and online experiences.
The networks that connect us also surround us, becoming a permanent layer in our everyday
environment, and the Network Ensemble treats them as a man-made natural force with its own
nature and accompanying mystique. Accompanying the network clairvoyant on their extrasensory explorations, the Ensemble responds to this force, collecting the invisible, airborne
communications infrastructure and bringing it into the realm of human perception through
sound.
Presented here as an audiovisual installation, this transformation allows the audience to view
nearby network territories and highlights structures, patterns and anomalies in the hidden
territory.
The Network Ensemble is a collaboration between London-based Oliver Smith and Francesco
Tacchini. Together, they chair the Demystification Committee
(http://demystification.co/mmittee/), a collaborative framework set up to investigate the
globalised, extra state, covert systems and technologies that shape society through artistic
intervention, custom tools and public engagement.
188
Theobalt, Lara
Text without organs: Deleuze reads Artaud
Keywords: Body without organs, minoritarian language, Antonin Artaud
In his work Logique du sens Gilles Deleuze develops the term Body without organs to describe the
self-perception of schizophrenic. Initially he refers to the poet Antonin Artaud, who pictures his
body as fragmented, dissolving. Deleuze reverts to Artaud together with Félix Guattari. In their
works on Capitalisme et schizophrénie they understand the Body without organs not only as a symptom,
but as a practice, which queries the structuring of the body through social projections. The
creation of a Body without organs is presented as an experiment without instruction. Deleuze and
Guattari claim: "Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it." (A Thousand Plateaus:
151)
I want to discuss in how far the creation of a Body without organs can not only be understood as a
corporeal practice, but also as a linguistic event. Can there be a Text without organs? To approach
this question I want to analyze the relation between the Body without organs and schizophrenic,
minoritarian language on the basis of Deleuzes reading of Artaud. Doing so I will focus on the
terms organism, significance and subjectivation. As these three concepts experience their
dissolution within schizophrenic, minoritarian language the Text without organs is an expression of
becoming-minor: becoming-molecular, -virtual, -multiple. Finally I want to question whether the
idea of a Text without organs is capable to deliver basic approaches to minoritarian language and
text interpretation.
References
Artaud, Antonin. 1992. Mexiko. München: Matthes und Seitz.
Cull, Laura. 2009. How Do You Make Yourself a Theatre without Organs? Deleuze, Artaud and the Concept of
Differential Presence. In: Theatre Research International 34 (03), S. 243.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The logic of sense. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix. 2004. Anti-Oedipus. London: Continuum Press.
Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. London: University of Minnesota Press.
Geisenhanslüke, Achim. 2010. Caput lupinum. Wölfe bei Deleuze, Agamben und Kipling. In: Françoise Lartillot
(Hg.): Corps-image-texte chez Deleuze = Körper-Bild-Text bei Deleuze. Bern, New York: P. Lang, S. 77–
92.
Guillaume, Laura; Hughes, Joe. 2011. Deleuze and the body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Lothringer, Sylvère; Ferdière, Gaston. 2002. Antonin Artaud und der gute Mensch von Rodez. Sylvère Lotringer im
Gespräch mit Gaston Ferdière. Wien: Schlebrügge.
Ruf, Simon; Kleinschmidt, Erich. 2003. Fluchtlinien der Kunst. Ästhetik, Macht, Leben bei Gilles Deleuze.
Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
Sussman, Henry. 2000. Deterritorializing the Text: Flow-Theory and Deconstruction. In: MLN 115 (5), S. 974–996.
Lara Theobalt, B.A., studies Comparative Literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich,
in her first postgraduate year. She studied Comparative Literature and German Studies in
Bochum and Munich and received her bachelors degree in 2015. In her bachelor thesis she
discusses the concept of profanation in the work of Vladimir Mayakovsky. She participated at the
6th Student Congress in Comparative Literature, 2015 in Chemnitz. Since 2013 she works on
Yiddish avant-garde literature and the concept of minoritarian languages.
Publication:
Zwischen Shtetl-Poesie und Revolution. Jiddische Lyrik in Kiew. In: Zentrum für Jüdische
Kulturgeschichte der Universität Salzburg, Zentrum für Jüdische Kulturgeschichte der Universität
(Hg.): Chilufim 16, 2014. Zeitschrift für Jüdische Kulturgeschichte. Wien: Phoibos-Vlg (Chilufim,
16), S. 91–104.
lara.theobalt@campus.lmu.de
189
Theofilopoulou, Valia
Literature Education; From Morphosis to Meta-Morphosis
Keywords: literature, education, metamorphosis
Popkewitz (2004) beautifully depicts pedagogy as “analogous to the medieval metallurgy that
sought to transmit base metals into gold”. Unfolding in modernity as a sophisticated technology
of power that works on and through the bodies, pedagogy today is intrinsically bound to the
morphosis of a same perfect ‘one’; the moral and rational citizen.
For the purposes of this paper I focus on literature education and examine whether and how the
readings of prose and/or poetry in a school class can potentially disrupt the mechanisms and
objectives of the modern pedagogic ethos. In doing so, I attend to Deleuze’s works Critical and
Clinical Essays (1997) and Proust and Signs (2000) which embrace literature for birthing a stream
of life, intrinsically capable of reaching the limits of discourse, flowing around the outer
periphery of language, escaping dominant subjectifying frameworks. The ‘revolutionary potential’
of literature in education calls for an experimentation with the unthinkable. I therefore ask; what
if the teachings of literature welcome the extra-discursiveness of techne rather than concentrate
in mastering logos? What if reading fiction in schools is relieved from exegetic or eisegetic
exercises? What if it escapes practicing a deciphering of poetic language, which closely follows
the mathematics of the grammar rules and of syntactic regularity and thus strictly retains within
the domain of symbol, and instead encourages succumbing to a text’s emotive energy? Reading
would in this case become a sharp experience, cognitive mechanisms left aside, no longer dictated
by the need to discover singularity, to un-blur and demystify or discover messages hidden in the
text, but rather driven by the desire to proliferate with the text and be carried away by a delirium
which escapes usual paths. By freeing the teachings of literature from exercises that circle around
language and instead by urging students to labor aesthetico-affectively a pore towards the new
and unknown is opened. Meta-morphosis is thus possible as education becomes-other itself by
eluding the constitutive dynamics within and through which it operates.
Valia Theofilopoulou: I am currently conducting postgraduate research within the Department
of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin. My thesis titled ‘National Becoming Through Aesthesis’
explores the role of the Modern Greek Literature Curriculum in constructing and solidifying the
national imaginary in both discursive and affective manners.
I hold a Masters of Pharmacy from Liverpool John Moores University (2002) and a B.A. in
Geography and Sociology from Trinity College Dublin (2012). Previous to commencing with my
doctoral studies I was employed as a research assistant for the Department of Geography in
Trinity College and have also worked for numerous years as a community pharmacist in both
Dublin (Ireland) and Piraeus (Greece).
theofilv@tcd.ie
190
Thomas, Allan James
Set Theory and Cinema: a Metaphysical Response to Russell’s Paradox
One of the aspects of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books that has passed by with little comment is
his use of set theory as a point of reference for his conceptualization of the cinema therein.
Deleuze not only defines the shot as a set, he draws on Richard Dedekind’s use of the distinction
between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ cuts between sets to distinguishes between the modes of
montage (and thus of relations constructed between shots=sets) proper to the classical and
modern cinema’s. This distinction is vital to Deleuze’s differentiation of the image of thought
proper to the classical and modern cinema’s respectively, and thus to his characterization of the
cinema’s non-human powers of thought. Subtending all this is Deleuze’s indirect suggestion that
the openness of the whole offers a kind of metaphysical response to, or resolution of, Russell’s
paradox of the set of all sets that places set theory in direct contact with the Deleuzian
characterization of the being of difference. It must be said that Deleuze does little to draw
attention to these aspects of his argument in the Cinema books. Nevertheless, I propose to
explore why and how these uses of set theory in the Cinema books provide an as yet unexplored
pathway into his treatment of the being of difference and its relation to the limits and powers of
human, philosophical, and cinematic thought.
Allan James Thomas teaches Cinema Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He
has recently submitted his PhD, on Deleuze’s Cinema books, titled ‘Deleuze, Cinema and the
Thought of the World.'
allan.thomas@rmit.edu.au
191
Traxler, Tanja
THE VIRTUAL AND THE VOID IN QUANTUM PHYSICS
Keywords: physics, virtuality, void
Influenced by Henri Bergson in Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze writes: ‘The virtual is not
opposed to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real insofar as it is virtual.’ (1994, p. 208)
Following Deleuze, the danger here is to confuse the virtual with the possible. The possible is
opposed to the real; but the virtual possesses a full reality by itself. Interestingly, both in physical
and philosophical thinking, concepts of virtuality have been developed when touching upon the
question of existence and the boundaries of existence and non-existence. In the history of
Western thought, the intellectual engagement of nothingness routes in early atomism. The world
of the pre-Socratic thinker Leucippus consisted of two fundamental and opposed principles –
indivisible bodies called atoms and the void. Atoms move around in the void and they are
separated from the void. All matter is composed of atoms and thus material change is only
possible in the movement of atoms.
Even though Leucippus considered the void rather as non-being than being, for him it was a
fundamental principle for change and evolution – an idea that found a powerful opponent in
Aristotle. The later postulated that nature rejects the void because if there was vacuum, it would
be filled with matter instantaneously. The void as an uncanny area of ultimate extinction was an
idea that was strongly present as modern science developed. It was omnipresent for centuries and
just shifted to the background as quantum mechanics was developed.
In quantum field theory, the idea that there exists somewhere in the universe something like total
vacuum is rejected. Instead, the theory – which is one of the main branches in physics to
formulate scientific models on the void – describes vacuum in terms of so-called _quantum
vacuum fluctuations_. As a consequence of Werner Heisenberg’s _uncertainty principle,_
according to which energy and time cannot be determined precisely at the same time, there exist
temporary changes in the amount of energy even in vacuum. Thus, the idea of a total vacuum
that contains absolutely no matter and precisely no energy stands in conflict with the uncertainty
principle:
For
a
sharp
moment
in
time
energy
cannot precisely
be
determined zero. Quantum field theorists associate the possibility for existence in the void with
so-called _virtual particles_ – by that we meet the physical conception of _virtuality_: These
virtual particles do not materially exist, but nevertheless they are real.
Here, the void and virtuality are interconnected concepts – none of them can exist without the
other. Holding the virtual, the void is no longer the absence of life but on the contrary becomes
the source for any kind of living. Virtual particles have material effects even though they are not
fully materialized – this is their reality.
In contemporary physics, the void is no longer the absence of being like in the classical
conception, but oppositely the source of it: What falls from the quantization of fields is that
space is penetrated by a virtuality that holds all possibilities of existence.
Tanja Traxler is a PhD-student at theUniversity of Vienna. In her interdisciplinary dissertation
thesis between quantum physics and philosophy, she investigates in contemporary concepts of
space and matter in quantum mechanics with a philosophical perspective and a special focus on
the concepts of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Her thesis is part of the interdisciplinary
project “Thinking Space”, funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences 2012-2016.
tanja.traxler@univie.ac.at
192
Tsai, Emily Shu-Hui
Affect, Body, Virtual Becoming: On Eastern Meditation and Deleuzian Immanence
Keywords: immanence, meditation, the fold, body, becoming
This paper aims to understand meditation as a spiritual practice in the eastern wisdom tradition,
which is based on an important concept that a higher spiritual level of transcendence within the
immanence could be developed through a good skill of practicing breathing. Unlike western
psychoanalysis based on the talking cure, eastern meditation in fact invites the subject to
withdraw from any reliance on the therapists for any verbal interpretative analysis, the subject, in
silence, gradually achieves his own inner awakening and builds up a sharper and better sense of
self-recognition and inner security. Despite of the fact that meditation could help reduce anxiety,
stress and anger and develop a good sense of well-being, confidence, compassion and love, it
could restore and empower life energy in the body and as such, it helps achieve a good sense of
reality that would traverse the pathological fantasy that has trapped the subject. Silence functions
as a threshold to transport the subject into the virtual level of becoming within immanence into a
state of the “superject,” the new awakened subject, as discussed in The Fold. It’s a virtual event
that subtly creates a new sense of self, as if taking the line of flight breaking away from what
blocks the desiring-machine of the subject. This eastern sense of the virtual forces within the
body in fact is quite similar with the notion of transcendent forces within immanence as Deleuze
discussed in Pure Immanence. Deleuze, unlike Cartesian dichotomy of the mind and the body,
explains that the soul exists within the body, in other words, the body and the mind are the unity.
Spinoza argues in Ethics that the body and the mind are united because God can be understood
as substance; to him, God and Nature are one and the same thing, and thus the thinking nature is
thinking substance. So with Deleuzian-Spinozian new understanding of the body and affects in
the virtual level, I attempt to understand that the Deleuzian notion of affects within the body is
related with the eastern idea of Chi (氣), the flow of life energy within the body, and thus
practicing meditation is the silent regulation of the creative forces through the good skill of
breathing and it could subtly create a virtual event: an awakened self that builds up a stronger
inner strength and broadens the horizon of the reality.
Emily Shu-Hui Tsai: Her academic research fields focus on Critical Theories, Psychoanalysis,
Visual Arts, Contemporary French Philosophy, Deleuze Studies and Žižek Studies. She is also a
poet, and her two collections of poetry were sponsored by National Culture and Arts
Foundation. She has translated Slavoj Žižek’s Looking Awry into Chinese in 2008 and also has
translated Ian Buchana’s Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: A Reader’s Guide into Chinese,
published in Jan. 2016. She has edited an academic Chinese book, titled as In the Infinite
Duration of Life: Childhood, Memory and Imagination, in 2012. She has published her academic
monograph in 2013, titled as The Unconscious Maze of Love and Belief.
artdream@ms77.hinet.net // emilytsai97@dragon.nchu.edu.tw
193
Tsai, Shan-ni
The Dangerous Affirmation of Death Instinct —A Freudian Rereading of Deleuze’s
Unconscious Memory and its Repetition
Keywords: repetition, (virtual and psychic) memory, death instinct
Deleuze establishes the theory of psychic processes in his life philosophy by affirming the death
instinct and the repetition related to it in such a way that Freud never manages to. Claiming to be
more Freudian than Freud, Deleuze proposes that repetition is more fundamental than
repression in Difference and Repetition: “I repress because I repeat.” While Freud firstly deems
repetition compulsion as an inevitable and unflavored outcome of the repression of drives, in
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” he later discovers the crucial force underlying repetition: the
death instinct. While Freud is frightened or at least confused by his own disclosure of the death
instinct, Deleuze celebrates the repetitions propelled by it as the most energetic and direct
performances of the drives. However, is repetition of what is repressed but cannot stay repressed
as desirable as Deleuze suggests? How does Deleuze explain functions and aspects of the
repressions that Freud suggests to be necessary for a psychic apparatus to be stable? When
Deleuze explores the dangerous field of the death instinct that Freud halts at, does he risk the
secured forms of psychics? Or, what scope of life beyond individual psychics does he see?
In this paper, I reread Deleuze’s development of Freud in a Freudian perspective, examining
Deleuze’s embracement of the death instinct and related repetition in relation to both Freudian
psychoanalysis and Deleuze’s philosophy of life. I start with discussing how Deleuze’s strong
claim would respond to Freud’s nuanced analyzes of repression in earlier writings and evaluating
the significances of Deleuze’s creative reading of Freud. I try to subtly locate Deleuze’s
celebration of repetition and interpretation of repression in relation to the different levels of the
psychic apparatus. While Deleuze praises the unbound drives beyond representation, his
affirmation of the repression of representatives causes dangers to the formed psychics. To
contextualize the dangerous affirmation in Deleuze’s philosophy, I then argue that Freud and
Deleuze’s major discrepancy in attitudes toward the death instinct and repetition compulsion lies
in their different views of memory. While Freud acknowledges that most of the individual
memory is stored unconsciously, he explores more the transformations of the unconscious into
consciousness than the mass of unconscious memory. Freud is concerned with the processes of
memory in psychics instead of the significances of memory itself. Differently, Deleuze’s
Bergsonian take of the virtual memory provides the psychic processes with an ontological basis.
The forces Freud describes as unbound and dangerous may be more positively viewed in a virtual
whole that underlies all the organized and the bound. Comparing the different views of memory,
I want to examine the psychic and the ontological significances of Deleuze’s affirmation of the
repetition of the unconscious and further explores the psychic processes, or processes of life, that
are not confined to the individuals and that he celebrates.
Shan-ni Tsai is a master’s student (or a PhD student since February 2016) in the Department of
Foreign Languages and Literatures in National Taiwan University. Her research interests include
Deleuze, psychoanalysis, literature after modernism, and eastern Asian thoughts and literatures.
She has presented papers in Deleuze conferences on Deleuze’s idea of time, virtuality, language,
and death in relation to literature, such as works by Beckett and Calvino. She wants to construct a
fuller picture of life by making Deleuze and psychoanalysis interact, and she is also working on
establishing dialogues between Deleuze and eastern Asian thoughts.
tsaishanni@gmail.com
194
Unal, Faruk Can and Can Boyacioglu
Finding the right role for Virtual in Architecture
Keywords: Virtual-Real Becoming, Real-Virtual Concept, Virtual Architecture
Architecture is a discipline that its main issue is transforming the space for necessities of society.
On the other hand the necessities of society is a blury concept that virtually emerge in the design
area of architects brain. It means the building designed with that necessities is both an object for
now and an act from the past. People are using the space designed by architect with
thenecessities and the ideas of their current situation. So actually people are living in an old idea
from architects mind, even the building is brand new. If we think the building is an ontological
being the relationship between the building and its users is the becoming.
Technology is rapidly developing at the present time. Technological advances have created virtual
living space, as well as having a place in every aspect of people’s life. Today, virtuality is leaving
its place to mixed form of reality and virtuality. This situation is a way of becoming in a realvirtual concept. Generally, architects are not aware of interactions while designing. It’s important
to find virtual solutions in an augmented space. The proposed discussion helps to construct the
link between architectural designs spatial transformations and virtual interactions in a
philosophical context. Maybe with the proposed work, the architectural process becomes much
more creative than before, by attaching the virtual becoming approach and different disciplinary
knowledge into the architectural process. These approaches enrich the semi virtual - semi real
design process making it more becoming in life.
Can Boyacioglu and Faruk Can Unal
Istanbul Technical University, Institute of Science and Technology, Architectural Design
Computing Programme1, Architectural Design Programme2, Phd Candidate
Gebze Technical University, Faculty of Architecture, Department of Architecture, Research
Assistant1, Teaching Assistant2
funal@itu.edu.tr
cboyacioglu@itu.edu.tr
195
Vasileva, Elizabeth
Postanarchism, ethics, performativity
Keywords: postanarchism, ethics, performativity
Among the many recurring themes in Deleuzeʼs writings is the problem of representation –
starting with Difference and Repetition, his critique of representation has played a major role in
his collaborations with Guattari and even later in his writings such as What is Philosophy.
Deleuze starts his project by constructing a philosophy of difference – the canon of Western
philosophy so far, he claims, has been focused around the concept of identity as primary, with
difference as its negative. Looking at difference as a fundamental ontological category, and not
merely as opposition to sameness or similarity, allows for setting the foundation of a
philosophy/practice that does not rely on representation. Following this line of thought,
Deleuzeʼs conception of reality as both virtual and actual leads to a path where binary
oppositions such as theory and practice are exposed as false and essentialist categories are
dethroned from being at the centre of our understanding of the world. This paper aims at
extending and applying this critique to ethics – and more specifically (post)anarchist ethics. Most
ethical positions inevitably provide a set of limitations and rules of what one should be or how
one should act, which is inherently problematic in a political theory such as anarchism where
having individual freedom, choice and autonomy is essential. Caught in between its own value
system and the necessity to provide an ethical basis for collective action, anarchism needs ethics
that are positive and affirmative, but at the same time donʼt rely on representation or setting
limitations. The main focus of this paper is to identify a specific ʻperformativeʼ aspect of
Deleuzian ethics – drawing on some of his linguistic writings and the immanent account of reality
he sets out in Difference and Repetition, it is possible to arrive at an ethical position that
accommodates anarchist values.
My name is Elizabeth Vasileva and I finished my BA in International Migration and Ethnic
Relations in University of Malmo, Sweden. Afterwards I did Social and Political Thought at
Sussex University, graduating in 2014. My dissertation was dedicated on the topic of political
violence and its ethical justification through a post-anarchist framework. I am currently doing a
PhD at Loughborough University on a similar topic - post-anarchist ethics and how they can be
informed using the works of Gilles Deleuze. My interests are broadly related to radical politics,
subjectivity and power, feminism and queer politics, etc.
e.vasileva@lboro.ac.uk // betti_vasileva@yahoo.com
196
Vieira da Silva, Cíntia
Becoming-clown: how can laughter turn into philosophy
Keywords: Joy, clown, becoming, Spinoza
Deleuze’s love and admiration of Spinoza is well known and documented not only in the books
directly about Spinoza, but also through many concepts composed with spinozian pieces, like the
concept of desire defined in The Anti-Oedipus, the concept of affect in A Thousand Plateaux,
and so on. Joy is not only a major concept for a Spinozist philosophy, but it is also an existential
standpoint and an ethical principle which guides actions. The purpose of this paper is to
approach clown art, specially in its contemporary manifestations, as a way of embodying these
philosophical principles and showing how life and thinking can be cohesively intertwined.
Clowns are able to play with rationality which results not only in pure mockery and destitution of
reason, but also on a superior form of thinking that can embrace joy in all its modalities, from
humour, to irony and sarcasm, from the excitement of a new idea to the Spinozian beatitude as
the joy produced by the understanding that we are a part of Nature. The clown art may be seen
as a way of enacting the power of bodies and experimenting new ways of connecting to others.
Some figures on the philosophical tradition may be seen as clowns, in this precise sense of
provoking thought by the means of actions. It is the case of Diogenes, the cynic philosopher,
which defies the power of Alexander the Great by telling him that the only thing Diogenes
wanted from him was that the Emperor would get away and stop blocking the sun. The
philosopher’s autonomy is such that, being asked by the most powerful man of his time if he
wanted any help, his answer is a refusal of whatever could be obtained with power or wealth,
while being at the same time charged with humour. Contemporary clowns, such as Leo Bassi and
Chacovachi, have this kind of irreverence, and also an engagement which is both ethical and
political in their gags. Clowns like them may be perceived as the new cynics as action
philosophers of our time.
Cíntia Vieira da Silva: Professor at the UFOP (Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto. Minas
Gerais. Brazil) at the Department of Philosophy. Author of Corpo e pensamento: alianças
conceituais entre Deleuze e Espinosa (Body and mind: conceptual alliances between Deleuze and
Spinoza. Editora da Unicamp, 2014). Graduate at Philosophy from Universidade Estadual de
Campinas (1996), master's at Philosophy from Universidade Estadual de Campinas (2000), Ph.D.
at Philosophy from Universidade Estadual de Campinas (2007). Has experience in Philosophy,
focusing on Philosophy, acting on the following subjects: difference, onthology, image and
aesthetics.
cintiavs@gmail.com
197
Voss, Daniela
On the Notion of Virtuality: Deleuze and Spinoza
Keywords: Virtuality, intensity, Spinoza, Deleuze
The notion of virtuality is not used by Spinoza himself, nor does Deleuze elaborate a notion of
virtuality in his two books on Spinoza. Yet it seems to me that virtuality has to be admitted as a
valid Spinozistic notion, which is not synonymous with either fiction or possibility.
Of fundamental importance is Spinoza’s distinction between modal essences and the
corresponding existing modes. A modal essence exists, is real, or objective (which Spinoza
expresses by saying that its idea is in God), even if the mode whose essence it is, does not actually
exist. We thus have to distinguish two modes of existence: virtual and actual existence. But virtual
existence is not to be considered as a logical possibility or metaphysical reality that tends towards
existence (as in Leibniz), but as a pure physical reality, an intrinsic or intensive quantity, in other
words, a degree of power. According to Deleuze’s reading, Spinoza asserts an intensive depth of
the world. But the question then becomes: Is there any difference between „virtual existence“
and „intensive reality“? Or are virtuality and intensity synonymous notions?
The paper explores the conceptual fields of „virtuality“ and „intensity“ and proposes a
Spinozistic notion of virtuality.
Daniela Voss teaches philosophy at the University of Hildesheim. She is the author of
Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas (EUP 2013) and the co-editor of At
the Edges of Thought: Deleuze and Post-Kantian Philosophy (EUP 2015).
vossda@uni-hildesheim.de
198
Wang, Yu-Ching
Walking in the City: Emergence of Life and Landscape in Satoshi Miki’s Adrift in Tokyo
Keywords: Satoshi Miki, Adrift in Tokyo, Deleuze and Guattari, affect, virtuality, becoming, life,
walking, body, landscape
In What is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari articulate that the task of philosophers is to create
new concepts. That is, they are supposed to grasp things in a new light without being thwarted by
the protective umbrella of the already established truth or banal clichés. In a similar vein,
Japanese director Satoshi Miki’s films often present us with events about how his characters
deterrotorialize from the prescribed way of living or life. For instance, reminiscent of western
road movies, Adrift in Tokyo is a film about two antagonistic characters’ aimless walking in the
hustle and bustle of Tokyo. The film raises some interesting questions such as: what may happen
when a loan shark agent and a law student in debt confront each other? Are their identities
already prescribed and unchangeable? Are there any possibilities for new relation to emerge? On
the other hand, what roles do walking and landscape of Tokyo play in shaping the characters’
relation with the world as well as with each other?
The film begins when the loan shark agent Fukuhara breaks into the law student Fumiya’s
destitute rent house threatening him to pay back the debt of 84,000 Japanese yen in three days.
Yet, before the deadline just when Fumiya is caught in a dead end without any promising
solution, Fukuhara suddenly shows up proposing to grant 100,000 Japanese yen to Fumiya if only
he could walk with him in Tokyo. Although Fukuhara reveals the final destination is a police
station, he cannot determine how long the walk will take. It depends on his tempo, or rather how
he is affected by the performative milieu of walking in the city. Along their swerving itinerary,
memories of the past are provoked by the scenes of the city. Meanwhile, the city and the
characters are implicated into each other, constituting a bloc of becoming.
In my point of view, the film addresses Deleuzian concept of virtuality and becoming of life by
presenting us the changing connection between the characters during walking. On the other
hand, the film also invites us to think about what landscape of Tokyo can do to the characters
when they walk together. Their bodily practices are intertwined with spatiality and the multiple
temporalities of the city: past, present, and future. Therefore, apart from drawing Deleuzian
concepts of life, this paper also intends to bring into dialogue some cultural geography debates
on landscape, focusing on the phenomenological ideas of the sensible assemblage between body
and landscape. The paper would argue that the relationship between the characters as well as
between self and the landscape is fluid, context-specific, becoming, rather fixed in structure.
Yu-Ching Wang: I’m a PhD student in Department of Foreign Languages and Literature,
National Taiwan University. Apart from working as part-time business assistant for the
department’s academic journal Chung Wai Literary Quarterly, I also work as research assistant
and had teaching assistant experience on courses such as16th-century English literature and
contemporary French theory about movement, aesthetics and politics. My research interests
range from Deleuzean affect, geophilosophy, cultural geography to Shakespearean plays. My
general concern is about what landscape and body can do and their intertwining relationship in
contemporary literature and films.
d02122002@ntu.edu.tw
199
Wąsik, Elżbieta Magdalena
On the onto-ethological becoming of the (non-)human selves and their worlds of being in
virtual and actual manifestations
In this paper, the concept of the Self, encompassing the “I” and “Me” dimensions of its
corporeal and mental identity, will be applied both to the non-human and human organisms with
regard to their ability of modeling the reality of their surrounding and/or the world, in which they
collectively and communicatively live through intraorganismic sign-constructs that substitute
extraorganismic objects of perception. Accordingly, the primary model of reality is attributed to
the functional abilities of animals endowed with an “ego-quality” to act through their receptors
and effectors while receiving indicative symptoms and emitting emotive signals. The secondary
model, in turn, is defined as extralinguistic reality of everyday life intentionally construed by
verbal means of in the realm of human organisms. The tertiary model of reality including the
secondary one, is viewed as encompassing the totality of the man-made semiosphere of culture
artificially created through verbal and nonverbal means. To expose the onto-ethological
differences between animals and humans, embedded in meaningful relations with their individual
and social environments, their existential states are discussed in accordance with the
phenomenological distinctions between “being-in-itself” and “being for itself”. In consequence,
considering the opposition between the two parts of the “I”/“Me” in the individual “Self” and
the “Other” as an observer’s part of the social “Self”, the emphasis is put on answering in what
way the “Me” as the synthetic and transcendent product of (sub-)consciousness might be also
explainable in terms of “being-in-myself and ”being-for-myself”. Summarizing the
similarities/dissimilarities between the (non-)human subjects in terms of their being in the world
as immanence and being for the world as transcendence, it will be pointed out that immanent
subjects are assumed to exist in, or with, their environments, and transcendent subjects as being
able to go beyond the universe of their life. Animals are admitted to have relations with actual
things in the observable reality through an outward extension of their body, but they are stated to
lack a direct access to the things in themselves and to their various forms of being, because they
cannot transcend the imprisonment of their surroundings. Another difference discussed within
the framework of semiotic phenomenology, is noticeable in the meaning of “life” and “existence”
regarding the organism’s awareness of being alive and taking stand to its existence in the
surrounding and existing for the surrounding. Considering the relations of human subjects to the
world they live in, it is the matter of their becoming in the world and becoming of the world as a
result of these relations. The final sections of the paper will take stand to the semantics of
possible worlds in opposition to the actual world in which humans live with reference to the
epistemological viewpoints confronting materialism vs. spiritualism with realism vs. idealism. To
arrive at the thematic notion of virtuality, the subject matter of an enquiring analysis will
constitute derivational sources and investigative consequences of terminological distinctions
pertaining to such attributes of reality as, inter alia, concrete/abstract, material/spiritual,
real/ideal, sensible/intelligible, observed/concluded, experiential/inferential, factual/imaginary,
homogenous/heterogeneous, isotopic/allotopic, and virtual/actual.
Elżbieta Magdalena Wąsik, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
wasik@wa.amu.edu.pl
200
Wąsik, Zdzisław
On rhizomatic layers of human nature and culture in the discursive becoming of
languages as collective assemblages of enunciation
The subject matter of this paper constitutes an evolutional approach to individual/collective
dimensions of language as a property of its speakers/learners viewed from the perspective of its
discursive becoming in ecologically determined collectivities through transgenerational
transmission of inborn speech faculties and conventionally established verbal signs. Therefore, it
will start with an introduction into the observable and inferable modes in which language exists
through: (1) externalized speech products, (2) internalized thought products, (3) concrete
processes of articulation and audition, (4) mental aptitudes of sign-creation and signinterpretation, (5), relationships between verbal signs, their meaning, and use, (6) mental
associations between verbal signs, (7) observable links between interpersonal collectivities, (8)
assumable links between intersubjective collectivities, (9) physiological and intellectual
endowments of human individuals, and (10) genetic codes transmitted in the evolution of human
species. In the next point of discussion, a synchronic view of language as a system of signs,
known from Ferdinand de Saussure’s lectures of 1916, will be juxtaposed with two diachronic
conceptions, pertaining to the kinship relationships among languages according to August
Schleicher’s theory of genealogical tree published in 1850, and a wave theory of Johannes
Schmidt from 1872. Against the background of divergent evolutionism and convergent
diffusionism, stating that languages have a mixed character while splitting up both into new
branches, and while influencing each other through the dissemination of changes, this paper,
aiming at the explanation of language variability, will investigate the applicative value of the
metaphor of rhizome proposed by Gilles Deleuze in 1976 along with the metaphor of
assemblage created as a parallel term together with Félix Guattari in 1980. In keeping distance to
original definitions of terms, the author will understand the notion of rhizome as a conflation, or
a set of binary relations, formed by multiplicity of interconnected points, or positions; whereas
the notion of assemblage, he will specify as an aggregation, or arrangement, of any kinds of
heterogeneous things and states of affairs, being thematically concatenated with human
expressivity manifested in the intentional production and utilization of verbal signs, referring to
virtual, or actual, things and states of affairs, which form the signified and communicated reality
of everyday life. As regards the speaker-centered view of the becoming of a given language, the
question will be posed how it comes into being due to its discursive realization through collective
assemblages of enunciations. Accordingly, discourse will be referred to expressions/utterances
that link communicating individuals taking part in group interactions as physical persons and
psychical subjects into interpersonal and intersubjective collectivities when they create and
interpret the meanings embodied in material meaning-bearers. The rhizomatic layers of
discourses are seen here as potential owing to an innate speech faculty localized in the genetically
specialized neuronal centers of human brains to communicate by using the verbal means of
signification through the implementation of certain physiological techniques. Such layers might
have emerged as a result of evolutionary adaptations of animal/human organisms to their natural
and artificial surroundings through the extension of their communicational abilities preexisting in
their genetic memory.
Zdzisław Wąsik, Philological School of Higher Education in Wrocław
zdzis.wasik@gmail.com
201
Weeks, Samuel
Becoming-radical: Deleuze and Guattari as dependency theorists?
Given that Deleuze and Guattari came to prominence as collaborators in the aftermath of the
May 1968 events in Paris, many readers have attempted to determine the explicitly political
significance of their co-authored work. The apparent difficulty that some interlocutors, namely
Badiou (1998) and Hallward (2006), have encountered trying to find the implications in these
texts for a political project contrasts with Deleuze and Guattari’s longstanding engagement with a
number of radical causes. In response to this criticism of Badiou and others, a number of
scholars, including Patton (2000) and Tynan (2009), have elaborated on the elements of Marxian
and Marxist thought – sometimes apparent, more often indirect and unconventional – featured in
A Thousand Plateaus and other works. Thoburn (2003) has provided perhaps the most forceful
politico-economic interpretation of the pair’s oeuvre. In Deleuze, Marx and Politics, Thoburn
points to a number of Marxian and Marxist premises in Deleuze and Guattari’s texts; among
others, these include the call for a ‘new earth’ akin to Marx’s vision for a future communist order,
their equation of the ‘minor’ with the proletariat in capitalist society and an active engagement
with a variety of radical currents from the 1960s and 70s, most prominently autonomia from Italy
and what I call the ‘unorthodox turn’ in French leftist critical theory (e.g., Baudrillard 1970, 1972,
1973; Lyotard 1974).
In this paper, I seek to further Thoburn’s analysis with regards to the radical political tendencies
found in the co-authored work, focusing on A Thousand Plateaus. In particular, I wish to discuss
their repeated references to the themes and debates advanced by the ‘dependency theorists’, a
loosely organised group of Marxist-inspired scholars that came to prominence in the late 1960s
and 70s. Influential members of this diverse group of thinkers include historian Andre Gunder
Frank, economist Samir Amin, sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso and world-systems
theorist Immanuel Wallerstein. While connections between Deleuze and Guattari and the
dependency theorists have been made before, notably by Hardt and Negri (2000) and Surin
(2009), I will detail and contextualise the explicit and implicit references to dependency theory
made by the pair in A Thousand Plateaus, in addition to citing a number of the key elements
from this body of work that Deleuze and Guattari omit or (would) reject. Does their engagement
with aspects of dependency theory provide the basis for a possible political project? Furthermore,
can it imply an instance of ‘becoming-radical’ on the part of the pair? My goal in undertaking this
analysis is to contribute to the larger scholarly effort seeking to understand the depth and
complexity of the political implications present in Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre.
Samuel Weeks is a doctoral candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of
California, Los Angeles. From 2006 until 2008, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer on the
island in Fogo in the West African republic of Cape Verde. After winning an Ambassadorial
Scholarship from the Rotary Foundation, Weeks completed a master’s degree in social
anthropology at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. He was the 2013 winner of
the Eric R. Wolf Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Work. Weeks is currently a
visiting researcher at the University of Luxembourg on a Fulbright/IIE fellowship.
sweeks@ucla.edu
202
Welchman, Alistair
Deleuze, Phenomenology and the Real
In this paper I argue that Deleuze and Guattari stand between the phenomenological tradition
and the recent resurgence of interest within Continental philosophy in metaphysical speculation
of a realist orientation. The paper has two aims, one interpretive, the other conceptual.
First, the ‘interpretative’ aim: Deleuze and Guattari are an enigma. Even the most basic questions
of fundamental philosophical doctrine remain unsettled: is their project essentially continuous
with the natural sciences (DeLanda forthcoming; Protevi 2010)? Is it by contrast a description of
the specificities of lived human experience, a phenomenology (Williams 2008; Hughes 2008)? Or
are they speculative metaphysicians of the early modern rationalist tradition of Spinoza and
Leibniz (Villiani 1999)? No one seems quite sure.
I think their position can be made clear, but only by seeing them as emerging out of the
intellectual framework of German idealism, a tradition initiated by Kant. The central thought of
Kant’s mature philosophy is the distinction between things as they appear to us, and things as
they are in themselves. Kant’s view sees human experience of the world as having two essential
ingredients: there is a contribution from the world (from, as he puts it, things as they are in
themselves), and a contribution from the human cognitive system. For Kant the contribution the
human mind makes to perception is the condition of possibility of experience of any kind at all.
It follows that if we remove this contribution, even in thought, then the world is resistant to
direct experience, unknowable.
German idealists responded to the inaccessibility of things in themselves in two different ways.
The dominant mainstream of idealist thought dismissed the idea of things in themselves as
paradoxical and unnecessary.
But a counter-tradition, including Schelling, Maimon,
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, took the idea as a challenge and responded by attempting to give a
positive characterization of things in itself that is maximally abstracted from the contribution of
human cognition. Deleuze and Guattari are operating in this German counter-tradition because
they regarded the project of gaining such cognition of the thing in itself as a task that philosophy
must struggle to perform.
On this way of understanding Deleuze and Guattari, there is a phenomenological component to
their thought: they sometimes start from descriptions of human experience (i.e. things as they
appear to us). But Deleuze and Guattari are not interested in establishing invariant structural
features or conditions of experience. Rather they are interested in ‘peak’ experiences, for example
experiences of art works that break everyday experience apart and allow us to see something else.
Equally, they are metaphysical thinkers. Their metaphysics is not, therefore and despite
appearances, of a traditional type; rather it is filtered through Kant’s notion of the thing in itself: a
‘realism’ that goes beyond the real of everyday experience, and hence beyond the invariant
structures that classical phenomenology identifies as its conditions of possibility. Thus
understood, it presents an internal challenge to classical phenomenology.
References
Joe Hughes (2008) Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation (London: Continuum)
Manuel DeLanda (forthcoming) Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press)
John Protevi (2010) ‘Adding Deleuze to the mix’ Phenom Cogn Sci 9:417-436
Arnaud Villani (1999) La guêpe et l’orchidée: essai sur Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Belin)
James Williams (2008) Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense: A Critical Guide and Introduction (London: Continuum)
Alistair Welchman, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Classics
University of Texas at San Antonio
Alistair.Welchman@utsa.edu
203
White, Joel
Formal Anarchy: An Artaudian Philosophy
To talk of virtuality, becoming and life in the work of Deleuze and Guattari likewise invokes the
philosophical and literary tradition from which these terms find their referential origins. Centring
its exploration on the philosophic and poetic writings of French writer Antonin Artaud, this
paper will recover a philosophy of becoming from out of his collected works, a philosophy that
Artaud names in Heliogabalus, or the Anarchist Crowned a 'Formal anarchy.' This paper will
therefore explicate this formal anarchy from a detailed engagement with Artaud’s writings, in
particular from his conceptual use of the terms, virtuality, becoming and life in three of his major
texts The Theatre and its Double, Revolutionary Messages and Heliogabalus, or the Anarchist
Crowned.
The Artaudian philosophy that I will explicate is Formal in the sense that it refers to the problem
of universals introduced by Platonic metaphysics, and anarchic in the sense that Form is
conceived of as an-original. That is, Form, insomuch as it exists, exists as non-singular and as
subject to the necessity of plurality and relational difference. One of conceptual notions that
Artaud uses to conceive of these non-original Forms is ‘a body without organs,’ which is later
called a ‘body without ideas’ and refers explicitly to ideas in a Platonic sense. I argue equally that
‘the Theatre of Cruelty,’ Artaud’s most notable contribution to the history of thought, should be
conceived of in similar terms. The Theatre of Cruelty, as a theatre, permits the reconciliation of
an anarchic political philosophy of becoming with an anarchic aesthetic philosophy of becoming.
This paper explicates this reconciliation through the notion of a ‘Formal anarchy.’ Lastly, due to
the importance of Artaud for Deleuze and Guattari, this paper will take Deleuze and Guattari’s
engagement with him in Logique du sens and Anti-Oedipus as one of its points of departure.
However, instead of reading Artaud “backwards” from out of their work, the idea of this paper is
to recover an Artaudian philosophy from within Artaud’s own work and then place this into
dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari’s own conceptual persona of Artaud.
Joel White: I completed a Double European masters in Contemporary European Philosophy at
Kingston University (CRMEP) and at Paris VIII under the supervision of Andrew Benjamin. I
am currently completing a PhD at King's College London with the title, "Artaud and Philosophy:
Plato, Marx, Nietzsche." My interests include European philosophy, 20th Century French
philosophy, and the philosophy of theatre.
jhmw01@gmail.com
204
Wittmann, Martin
"Speak white and loud" or "make language itself stammer" ? – (De-)Facing power
structures with Minor Literatures
Keywords: faciality, political resistance, minor literatures
In contrast to emphatic conceptualisations of the human face praising it as the main source of
empathy, communication and alterity – as represented for example by Emmanel Lévinas – ,
Deleuze/Guattari express a much more negative view concerning the hidden socio-political
machinery working behind an everyday face-to-face encounter. In "Year Zero: Faciality", the
seventh Plateau of A Thousand Plateaus, they destroy the naive conception of an innocent,
sympathetic gaze into the other's eyes which would not already be haunted by the intervention of
political institutions. They reveal instead the perception of every individual face to be organised
by an "abstract social machine" that renders its shape and expression socially recognisable by
placing it within a hierarchically structured order. This operation of "facialization" reduces alterity
to deviance, mainly racial deviance, and blocks all lines of becoming, virtuality and life. You can
only speak and be heard if you consent to your fixed position within the defining framework of
Faciality. Thus in relation to language the face functions as an "order word", a concept developed
in the fourth Plateau "November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics", where Deleuze/Guattari
formulate their critique of scientific linguistics, which they accuse to systematically ignore the
political, nonindividual character of language. The "order word" cannot be pinned down to a
specific category of words or any other linguistic elements, rather it is the very dimension of
language which is pervaded by social power relations. It is that which causes an otherwise
heterogeneous assemblage of intertwining voices to be perceptible as one unambiguously
meaningful voice. Speech acts of political resistance against power are therefore, in their justified
efforts to make themselves understood, always at risk of complying to the dominant discursive
norms instructing them to "speak white and loud". Out of this impasse literature provides a line
of flight. As Paul de Man describes it in his essay "Autobiography as De-Facement", literature
escapes the reflexive, intersubjective relationship usually associated with communication and
performs a kind of "defacement" of language, cutting its ties with subjectivity and signification.
The Deleuze/Guattari-concept of "minor literatures" lays further emphasis on this "de-facing"
potential of literature. The language of minor literatures is not the expression of a creative
individual subject, but is intimately connected to collective movements of political resistance
and/or migration. By "making language itself stammer", it subverts the implicitly racist and sexist
rules established by the "abstract machine of faciality" and explores new possibilities for the
expression of political desires. My talk will show why traditional scientific linguistics is necessarily
oblivious to the fact that language is infused with social power relations. It will also demonstrate
why re-territorialising concepts such as "German Literature" or "Western Culture" must be
attacked as violent reductions of complexity, especially in dealing with minor literatures. Finally it
will discuss the possibility of a non-facializing critical approach to literary texts.
Martin Wittmann was born July 3, 1989 in Bergisch Gladbach (West Germany). He is currently
graduating at the department of Comparative Literature of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
München on the subject of a theory of foreign discourse, relating concepts of Mikhail Bakhtin to
the critique of linguistics accomplished by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. His
advisor is Prof Dr Robert Stockhammer. He received his Master of Arts in May 2015 with a work
on "formations and deformations of the face" which also focused on theories of
Deleuze/Guattari. His main interest is the relationship between language and politics and how it
is reflected in literary texts.
martinwittmann89@web.de
205
Wojtaszek, Marek
Touching Singularity. Manneristic Meanders of Digital Communication
Key words: airport, haptic interface, mannerism, singularity
[A]s an incorporeal (= virtual) predicate, the world must be
included in every subject as a basis from which each one extracts
the manners that corresponds to its point of view.
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque (1993, 53)
Given the velocity of digital generation of information on the one hand, its global saturation as
well as intensive functionalist recombination and limitlessly extensive customization on the other,
it is legitimate to surmise that the future will unfold through successive digitization of humanity
and its cultures, which consequently makes the necessity to develop a critical-creative ecology of
syntheticization especially urgent. Working with the concept of the interface, an in-between space
of the sensible-communicational encounter between bodies and machines (which materialize the
code and actualize its algorithmic operations), in this paper I focus on its haptic dimension,
which can help us create an affirmative and sustainable image of the code beyond its
contemporary digitalitarian usurpations and abuses. The haptic fold of the digital expresses
affective in-corporeality as the body’s capacity to experience itself as more than itself, thus
deploying its sensorimotor power to create unpredictable and experimental manners of
communicating. Emphasizing natural messiness of the digital world and our bodies, I advocate
immanent mannerism as a singular project of developing new digital media sensible literacy, as an
enterprise of singularity suited to the augmented eco-digital existence. Following Deleuze and
Guattari, who read contemporary “universal schizophrenia” as a problem of “modern brain’s
direct confrontation with chaos,” I argue that the airport offers a—technologically mediated—
spatial (architectural and bodily) response to the mystique/madness of air travel in general and
the digitally sustained virtual real(m) in particular as manneristic any-space-whatever. Handling
the problem of (aero)mobility, it exposes the bodies to multiple im/perceptible interfaces and
digitizes them. In breaking the (representational) link between perception and sensation, digital
technologies of communication produce airport as an alien, paradoxical (i.e., neither agoraphobic
nor claustrophobic) space of experimentation on the senses, revealing a synthetic emergence of
sensibility itself. Moving beyond the phenomenological conception of experience and
functionalist reduction of (digital) communication, I look at the haptic and kinetic manners the
airport space aesthetically transforms our (singular-collective) existence in keeping with its
inherent philosophy of ‘anyness’ (i.e., manneristic irregularity). The airport space emerges as in
itself virtual/volatile encompassing ‘any’ external reality or sensory motor experience, as a space
of training in intensity whose aim is (digital) freedom from particularity.
Marek Wojtaszek holds a PhD in the Humanities and is Assistant Professor in the Department
of American and Media Studies at the University of Lodz, Poland. He is a member of the
Management Committee of the COST Targeted Network on Gender, Science, Technology and
Environment. In 2014–2015 he was a Senior Fulbright fellow at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign, USA. His main areas of research include digital cultures, techno-ecologies,
Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, body and space.
mwojtaszek@hotmail.com
206
Yalcin, Senom and Hatice Kesdi
The Face, Resistance and Complex Assemblages
An analogy to subjectivity, the face, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987) is "engendered by
an abstract machine of faciality (visageite), which produces" (p.168) it. The operation of the abstract
machine of faciality occurs within assemblages of power. A contemporary example of this is
surveillance technologies, the structure of which can be lineated by the traits of the two types of
societies Deleuze outlined in the Postscript on Societies of Control: an apparatus that collects
data, an algorithm that processes the data and a system of punishment that is a potential
consequence of the previous two. While the apparatus that collects the data is one that is
characteristic to the Societies of Control (SoC), the algorithm is one functions through molds,
thus can be characterized by both SoC and Disciplinary Societies (DS), and finally, the system of
punishment a definite attribute of the DS. It is through this assemblage that contemporary
subjectivities are constructed by states and corporations. We are all masses, dividuals, parsed
through algorithms. This assemblage, in its full scale encompasses the apparatuses and workings
of the global economy - the finance sector and global markets. As stated by Sassen (2014),
finance, "a complex assemblage of actors, capabilities, and operational spaces" (p.119), operates
through complex instruments developed by physicists, algorithms at work are entirely different
from that, for example, of the Domain Awareness System used by the NYPD as a crime
prediction platform (Scannell, 2015). We are not just bodies walking on the streets observed
through cameras or Internet users pouring data into the surveillance apparatus, but also dividuals
made part of grand speculations and complex instruments thrown into coils of debt or a similar
apparatus of encapsulation of the SoC. Forms of resistance against an assemblage of this type and
scale will need to match its formation. Our suggestion, then is in line with Williams & Srnicek's
(2013) Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, forms of resistance parallel to the complexity of
the global systems at work, those that are collective and necessarily technologically sophisticated
and mediated.
References
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, Trans. Brian Massumi,
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Deleuze, G. (1992) Postscript on the Societies of Control. October, Vol. 59
Sassen, S. (2014). Expulsions : Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge,
Massachusetts : Harvard University Press.
Scannell, J. (2015). What can an Algorithm Do? DIS Magazine.
http://dismagazine.com/discussion/72975/josh-scannell-what-can-an-algorithm-do/
Williams, A. and Srnicek, N. (2013). Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics in #Accelerate. The
Accelerationist Reader. Urbanomic Press.
Hatice Kesdi is a multidisciplinary researcher. She received her MS degree in Industrial Design
at Anadolu University and worked as a research assistant at Eskişehir Osmangazi University. She
is currently studying the analogy of subject ontologies between democracy and design as a PhD
candidate in Industrial Design at Gazi University and where she is a research assistant.
aydin.s.hatice@gmail.com
Senom Yalcin received her PhD at the Department of Literacy, Culture, and Language
Education at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on network-mediated
thinking and learning. She teaches at the School of Foreign Language Education at the Middle
East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey.
senom@metu.edu.tr
207
Zaprucki, Józef
The Becoming [True] of an Utopia. The Literary Utopian Separatism and Its Political
Emanation in Upper Silesia
Keywords: Becoming, Utopia, Separatism
Responding to a question regarding methods of commentating on texts posed to him in 1972
during a conference, Gilles Deleuze stated: For me, a text is merely a small cog in a extra-textual
practice. It is not a question of commentating on the text by a method of deconstruction, or by
the method of textual practice, or by other methods; it is a question of seeing what use it has in
the extra-textual practice that prolongs the text.
Due to the quoted above statement my paper will focus on a very specific process which refers to
the literary predicting and somehow imposing the political future of a multicultural province in
the south-west part of Poland, i.e. the Upper Silesia. The main task of the paper will be to prove
how the literary utopia of an independent Silesia presented by a German Silesian writer, Horst
Bienek in his 1975 book The First Polka [Die erste Polka] comes nowadays slowly true being
attempted by the Polish Silesian separatistic movements.
The astonishing process of becoming of a social-political desire, which the author of this paper
commentating the mentioned above book, called in 1987 an Utopian Separatism, is today one of
the main topics discussed within the Silesian society. Something which some forty years ago was
considered by most of Polish society as a complete utopia seems today to become a part of the
social practice reality.
A special emphasis will also be put on the processes of intercultural communication between
Polish and German elements of Upper Silesia as well as on the specific discursive manifestations
of Silesianness as a regional identity fostering the separatistic will to independence of the
province.
Dr. Phil. Józef Zaprucki (born 1957 in Jelenia Góra) is a lecturer for German language and
literature at the Karkonosze State Higher School in Jelenia Góra/Poland. He attended the
University of Wrocław and received there his M.A. in 1981 and the Ph.D. in 1987.
Between 1986-1990 he taught as a lecturer in the Institute of German Philology at the same
university. In 1989 he got a scholarship of the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD at
the University of Karlsruhe and then as a lecturer for translation at the Humboldt-University in
Berlin. His research interest includes literature and culture of Germany, semiotic approach to
literature of the lost homeland, semiotic approach to literary translation and poetry. During the
winter term 2015/16 he conducts research in the Department of Communication & Rhetorical
Studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA as a scholar of Kosciuszko Foundation.
Jozef.Zaprucki@kpswjg.pl // joezap@op.pl
208
Zheng, Lei
De/Re-territorializing the floating population under the scheme of scientific
development in contemporary China
Keywords: the Chinese floating population, suzhi (human quality), de/reterritorialization
Since 1990s, the floating population (liudong renkou) has been defined and constructed in
Chinese intellectual works and policies as a real social entity in China, and also as a social
problem to be solved. This essay examines how the Chinese floating population is made as kinds
of people that are socially and biopolitically different from the “majorities” who are seen as the
desirably settled urban/global Chinese citizens. Attention is given to “suzhi (human quality)”, a
Chinese pedagogical notion that both embodies and blurs nature/nurture distinction and is
brought into and assembled in national education agenda and contemporary discursive practices
about “scientific development” and modernization. When examined, however, multiple systems
of differenciation, especially the place-based people branding and classification, were created and
maintained in tandem with the mobilization of suzhi discourse to designate the qualities and
characteristics of the floating population as different and yet in an inbetween space of
inclusion/exclusion.
The argument goes against the grain of recurring educational and other social policies and
researches on the theme of migration and development, which tend to treat migrants merely as a
product of a preordained development of urbanization, modernization, or globalization rather
than situate them as multiplicities in a constantly folding and unfolding process. The intention
here is to unveil the violence and impossibilities embodied in those often taken-for-granted
analytic concepts (e.g., adaptation, assimilation, integration) and scales (e.g., hinterland vs.
coastland, the rural vs. the urban, regional differences), which reterritorialize the migrants as
deficient albeit potentially desirable labor who are “enabled” by scientists, social scientists and
policy-makers and other actors to respond to the particularly designed scheme of scientific
development and modernization. These discursive practices not only render existing social,
cultural and economical hierarchies ahistorical but also immobilize them as the basis of social and
political stability and development of the nation-state. Inspired by the notion of “becomingminorities”, I take up the notion of reterritorialization as simultaneous deterritorialization to
explore how the “problem” of, the rootless floating, the never permanently settled movement,
could produce the transformative power of differentiation, or to say, the ever-present potentiality
of destabilizing those seemingly fixed categories and relations of people-place, which attempt to
define and preclude the emergent virtualities as unlivable and unwanted modes of life.
Lei Zheng is a doctoral student of Curriculum Studies and Global Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Her research concerns with historical epistemology embodied in
discursive practices that mobilize and are mobilized by social, political, economical, and cultural
hierarchical grids of inclusion and exclusion, generally in society and particularly in educational
settings. She is currently examining a particular Chinese pedagogical term suzhi, which is
pervasively used to compare people but hardly questioned for its use in making up differential
relations of people and places in the post-Mao China.
lzheng29@wisc.edu
209
Panels
Countless Life. For a Liberation of Thought Wherever it is imprisoned
A stream edited by La Deleuziana philosophical journal
This stream aims to develop a meaningful path through three of the main topics in Deleuze, from
the point of view of our philosophical and political present: Life, Control, Acceleration. Through
this path it will become possible to describe the adventures of Life as immanence in a way
capable of dealing with both the dramatic actualizations of control societies and the
anthropomorphization of the very Earth, which leads to the so-called Anthropocene as a
completion of Nietzschean nihilism through hyper-industrialized capitalism. It is precisely in that
“geological” era, dangerously shaped by a hegemonic model of the “human”, that a wide set of
Deleuzian concepts may allow us not only to criticize the present world (as neo-liberal, polluting,
cruel, anthropocentric, etc.), but to imagine a future world in which to believe, a world no longer
either anthropocentric or white-western-male, as is the basis of financial totalitarianism. But in
order to avoid the risk of confining Deleuze’s concepts within a useless rhetorical dimension –
that is, repetition without difference – these concepts must be extracted from the contingency of
our reality and thrust towards the creation of new, multiple differences. From such a perspective,
concepts, such as becoming, immanence, virtuality, quasi-causality, event, haecceitas, difference
and nomadology, will be drawn into a constellation with a set of ongoing processes that threaten
all the qualities and things most loved by Deleuze: affects, thinking, desire, singularity, animals
and the Earth.
The stream will begin with the panel “Becoming (A)lives”, which will be focused on some
powerful elements that compose the paradoxical dimension of life as immanence and vitalism in
Deleuze, such as the impersonal, the haecceitas and the affects (Emilia Marra), quasi-causality and
the event (Alexander Wilson), and the univocity of difference or equivocity (Guillaume Collett).
Such concepts will be stretched far beyond the context of scholastic discourse, linking Deleuze’s
thought to the most contemporary perspectives and using a transdisciplinary methodology. This
means that, rather than an abstract or scholarly appropriation of the thought of Deleuze (and of
other philosophers, such as Agamben and Foucault), these papers aim to transpose the
theoretical heredity of this thinker to the new political challenges that have to confront a century
that seems anything but Deleuzian, and in so doing they prepare the conceptual ground not only
for a creative diagnosis of our present but also for developing that “art of control” imagined by
Deleuze in the 1990s.
The creative diagnosis of the present will be the goal of the second panel, “Controlling the Living
Thought”, which will focus on the actualisation of the key statements of the Postscript.
Antoinette Rouvroy has in this regard outlined a brilliant and concrete analysis with her concept
of "Algorithmic Governmentality" as the completion of an immanence divested of all
revolutionary elements, where desires, affects and wishes are pre-empted and pre-shaped by
algorithms that eliminate every form of singularity. In such a situation it becomes critical both to
emphasize and re-evaluate the notion of nomadology, in order to compose strategies capable of
escaping from the operations of control and surveillance that regulate and govern subjects,
annihilating what is incalculable in society (such as desire), and treating refugees and immigrants
as potential parasites (Anaïs Nony). Furthermore, debt, described magnificently by Deleuze and
Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, has played a role in these technological transformations, and this must
be taken into account by analyzing the new ways in which digital society structures judgment,
accusation, guilt and punishment, and by showing the new physiognomy assumed by infinite
debt, as the product of a judgment of pre-emptive guilt based on the computational registration
of traces (Gianvito Brindisi). The concept of noology, defined by Deleuze and Guattari as the
study of images of thought and their historicity, thus becomes strategic for a creative critique
capable both of diagnosing the relations between technology, politics and philosophical thought
210
and of suggesting a concrete line of flight from algorithmic governmentality (Benoit Dillet). A
possible way of drawing such a line of flight could be found by connecting the Leibnizian and
Whiteheadian content of Deleuze’s The Fold to so-called “data behaviourism”, with its
modulation of subjectivity that produces “dividuals” as calculable, controllable elements (Sara
Baranzoni). This connection calls for a Nietzschean and Burroughsian reversal of control in a
sort of “art of control”, even of hyper-control, that should consist in “a production of novelty, a
liberation of true quanta of ‘private’ subjectivity” (Deleuze).
The third panel, “Deterritorializing Nietzsche”, deals with the complex relations between the
role of Nietzsche’s thought in Anti-Oedipus and the “accelerationist” movement. Starting from
the famous passage known as “accelerate the process”, whose reference is Nietzsche’s fragment,
“The Strong of the Future”, two analyses will be developed: first, a genealogical recognition of
what Anti-Oedipus’s will to accelerate the process of capitalist civilization (Obsolete Capitalism)
really involves; second, a theoretical investigation concerning the concept of movement in
Aristotle, Deleuze and Stiegler, a concept that might be thought to lie behind acceleration as it is
experienced in our societies of control (Fabio Treppiedi). These analyses, as with the entire path
followed by this stream, will allow for both an alternative to accelerationism and an affirmative
way of escaping what is controlling, imprisoning and levelling both life and thought (Paolo
Vignola): finally bringing Nietzsche, and allowing him to be brought, into the Amazon jungle, in
the search for a thought capable of thinking a countless life beyond computational nihilism.
1) Becoming (A)live(s)
Marra, Emilia
Theoretical Elements for a Deleuzian Speed Race
Keywords: immanence, haecceitas, affects
According to Giorgio Agamben, the idea of an impersonal life, as Deleuze describes it in his very
last text, Immanence: a life…, is exactly what Deleuze leaves us as a theoretical heredity and a
political challenge. Less than an identity and more than an agencement, this way of thinking life
allows to propose a reflection on immanence and transcendence which is not limited by common
borders, historically composed by the reference to a Cogito and by the link with the truth. In the
wake of Spinoza and Nietzsche, Deleuze draws his own direction, in order to understand how to
oppose immanence to foundation. What we suggest is that “a life” is not a synonym of “bare
life”, as Agamben proposes us, precisely because what is peculiar of the deleuzian life is: 1) his
own dynamism; 2) his fight against original conceptual pairs, like bìos and zoé; 3) his being the
plan of immanence, not a concept, but a set of connections and relations in motion. These initial
conceptual coordinates once established, the political stake is open: as a matter of fact, reflection
on life is a reflection shared by biopolitical power, so that our very first need is to wonder how
we can use this theoretical acquiring in order to understand how concepts related to life, such as
work and power, accordingly change. The main defy of this paper is to propose a deleuzian speed
race to outflow from the automated prediction of public and private life, based on an alienating
identification, where a numeral may be equally the identity card of a migration, a transit of capital,
a Facebook profile. For this purpose, we are going to start taking cue from Spinoza, following
Deleuze when he affirms without a doubt that, if we accept that collective assemblages are
composed by haecceities and affects, instead of subjet individuations, we can easily sustain that it
is possible to understand them in terms of speeds and slowness.
211
Emilia Marra holds a Master in « Philosophies allemande et française dans l’espace européen »
from Europhilosophie Erasmus Mundus (UTM, UCL, BUW), and she is now a PhD student at
the University of Trieste. Her researches mainly investigate the French contemporary Spinozism,
with a special focus on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. She has been published in journals such
as Esercizi filosofici, Interpretationes and La Deleuziana, of which she is member of the editorial
board. She recently translates Macherey’s Hegel ou Spinoza, from French to Italian.
emiliamarra91@gmail.com
Collett, Guillaume
“A single phantom for all the living”. Incorporeal Life in Deleuze
Keywords: life, univocity, immanence
While Deleuze described himself as a vitalist, it would be a mistake to consider this as entailing a
kind of spontaneous or unmediated fleshy materialism. Using two case studies – Deleuze’s
univocal ontology of the 1960s and particularly The Logic of Sense, and Deleuze’s philosophy of
immanence of the 1990s and particularly “Immanence: A Life” – I will argue that life in Deleuze
is, rather, incorporeal, expressed by (non-human) thought, and dynamically co-present with
death.
In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze characterises univocal being as “a single phantom for all the
living” (Continuum, p. 205). Taking this quotation literally, I will argue that for living bodies to
take on univocal being they must divest themselves of their ties to materiality by redoubling
themselves as an incorporeal event. This can be understood psychoanalytically in terms of the
phantasm’s desexualisation of the body’s libido. However, since univocity for Deleuze is the
univocity of difference or equivocity, including the equivocity of living/dead, the event retains a
dynamic co-presence with living bodies even after it redoubles them, hence it is a ghostly vitalism
and not a theory of the afterlife.
Likewise, when writing of the character Riderhood in “Immanence: A Life”, Deleuze claims that
it is at the point of a living body’s maximal proximity with death that it releases a singular life
equipoise between the body it formerly inhabited and the universal and general concepts which
fail to describe it. A life is irreducible to being and thinking, bodies and language, when taken
separately, being the space between them and thus the site of immanence.
Whether life is considered univocally or immanently, in Deleuze, it must be viewed in its
inconsistent totality as a solely thinkable incorporeal substance expressed by non-human thought
yet irreducible to thinking.
Guillaume Collett received his PhD from the University of Kent and l’Université Paris-Diderot
in 2014, which focused on Deleuze’s ontology of sense. He is currently a Research Fellow in the
Centre for Critical Thought at the University of Kent, and the author of The Psychoanalysis of
Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press, as well
as the co-editor of the special issue of Deleuze Studies “Deleuze and Philosophical Practice”.
guillaume.collett@hotmail.co.uk
212
Wilson, Alexander
Life and the Pragmatics of Quasi-Causality
Keywords: quasi-causality, event, becoming
Even Deleuze’s most vitalist passages betray a deeper sense of what we may call quasi-causalism.
If the vitalist believes in and celebrates a speculative worldly thrust toward life, the quasi-causalist
sees the emergence of life from non-life as the result of an ontological principle that resonates
throughout being. There are thus two distinct movements to account for in the chaosmos
Deleuze describes. The chains of causality, which account for the cosmos, travel from the
improbable to the probable. Conditioned by the material constraints of extension and locality, the
causal system is dominated by the principle of least action and descends onto its most probable
state, the attractor. But to account for aesthesia, that is, for the privacy of subjective experience,
we must involve a less obvious movement: a synthesis, an individuation, a concrescence, an
integration. It flows in the inverse direction and obeys the principle of what Deleuze calls “quasicausality”. If the cosmos moves from improbable to probable, just as Leibniz’s principle of
sufficient reason moves from necessary to contingent, quasi-causality evolves in the opposing
direction. It is a spontaneous leap from the probable to the improbable. And as such, it concerns
life’s improbable jump from the contingency to necessity. It is the condition of a retro-projected
origin, and the necessity of its deferral. It is an Aionic cut, a break in symmetry, that defines the
particular asymmetry of a given perspective, and that is carried over as a condition of the next
bifurcation. It describes, therefore, not a vitalism in the sense of a continuity between life and
non-life, but an a-logical principle of causal indeterminacy, a clinamen or potential to swerve, that
is never consumed by its actualization. It thus never follows from the lines of causation that
define the symmetries, invariances and orderings of our metastable life, for it only induces the
event in the future-perfect tense: it decides what will have been. But if this is the case, and the
event is perpetually bootstrapped by its own future, then is there such a thing as a pragmatics of
quasi-causality? Are there any tricks, any strategies, that will allow us to harness quasi-causal
influences and actively choose what will have been? In this exhausted age, incapable of thinking
the future, the question is of ever-greater importance. In this spirit, my paper explores the
mechanism of quasi-causality from the standpoint of life, biology, matter, and becoming.
Alexander Wilson is a Canadian postdoctoral researcher in communications and culture at
Aarhus University (Denmark), where he examines the logical and material conditions of
experience with regard to technogenesis, ecology, and the spectre of the posthuman. He holds a
PhD in philosophical aesthetics from UQAM (Montreal, Canada), where he investigated the
question of mind and memory beyond the human, drawing from theories of complexity,
emergence, systems theory, evolutionary dynamics and philosophies of process.
alexanderwilson@dac.au.dk
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2) Controlling the Living Thought
Nony, Anaïs
Standstill Nomadology and Operations of Digital Capture
Keywords: migration, surveillance, algortihmic governmentality
We live in an era of migration: migration of goods and services, capital and cultures, ideas and
images, and—most importantly—people. The status of migrants, refugees, and the exiled has
mainly been debated in contemporary philosophy from the standpoint of the land, the territory,
and people’s movement within it. Much emphasis has been given to Deleuze and Guattari’s
distinction between the nomadic and the non-migrant as a means to highlight new modes of
distributions, thus offering counter narratives to the idea of sovereign nation states and their
sedentary modes of distribution. However, little account has been given to the specific operations
of control that prevent more territorialized relationships of collective movement. In an era when
we witness the collapse of the distinction between war machines and state apparatuses, one needs
to reevaluate the notion of nomadology from the standpoint of the operations of control and
surveillance that stigmatize, regulate, and govern individualized subjects in the digital age. In my
paper, I address the increasing use of medical tools such as X-Ray, Scanner, and DNA profiling
to manage flux of people and migrations. Specifically, I will be looking at the video production
Hiver. La mort de Robert Walser [Winter. The death of Robert Walser] from French theorist and
video artist Thierry Kuntzel to highlight the operations of digital capture that treat bodies in
motion as potential parasites. Drawing from Antoinette Rouvroy’s concept of algorithmic
governmentality and Mark Hansen’s account of the preemptive power of new media technologies
this paper aims at tackling new modes of surveillance in light of the operations of medical and
political capture developed in our increasingly digitally monitored era.
Anaïs Nony is a PhD candidate in French and Moving Image Studies at the University of
Minnesota, USA. Her research investigates the impact of screen culture and digital technology on
both psychic and collective life. She has been published in journals such as French Review, The
Third Rail Quaterly, La Deleuziana, Cahiers de la Nouvelle Europe, Africultures, and Mélanges
Francophones as well as multiple edited volumes.
boit0005@umn.edu
Brindisi, Gianvito
Law as Life? The Forms of Judgment and Control Between Deleuze and Foucault
Keywords: law, judgment, control
Deleuze has always fought the doctrine of judgement, arguing that a life can affirm itself only by
fighting against the judgment, namely the abominable power to segment and weaken the
existence indebting it to infinity. At the same time, however, Deleuze has continually praised the
jurisprudence, which is the activity of judgement for excellence. How was it possible for him to
think a similar jurisprudence beyond the judgment? Because Deleuze has identified the sphere of
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the doctrine of judgment with the transcendence (of the law), and that of the jurisprudence with
the immanence (of the life). This would be an experimental jurisprudence able to gather the
concrete experience and to accompany its development without putting it into the grids of the
prior juridical experience and in the direction of its integration into a formal unity: a
jurisprudence, therefore, compliant with the natura rerum, which expresses the becoming and not
falls back into history. But how can you separate the jurisprudence from the knowledge and the
powers with whom it has relations, to quote Foucault? In the end, there is no criterion able of
guaranteeing the not regressive nature of a decision. In this paper, I will try to show the critical
points of Deleuzian partition and the concrete difficulties that such a definition of the
jurisprudence comes across. In particular, I will argue that to assign a critical value to
jurisprudence is necessary to inscribe in it a genealogical side that shows the ways in which the
judgment is produced, in relation to forms of knowledge, technologies of power and forms of
subjectivity. I will do it by comparing Deleuze and Foucault on the complex relationship between
disciplinary societies and societies of control, and displaying how the jurisprudence works in the
economy of power based on control. Analyzing the new ways in which they structure judgment,
accusation, guilt and punishment, I will try in addition to show the new physiognomy assumed by
the infinite debt, even in its subjective reflexes, highlighting that it is no longer a judgment that
evaluates in a permanent way the gap respect to an inaccessible norm, but a judgment of
preventive guilt based on the computing registration of the traces. And precisely the paradigm of
traceability risks to modify profoundly our way of understanding ourselves and the others.
Gianvito Brindisi is a Research Fellow in Sociology at the Universi­tà degli Studi di Napoli
“Suor Orsola Benincasa”. He collaborates with the Chairs of Sociology and Philosophy of Law in
the same University. His main research interests focus on the relationship between theories of
power and theories of law and on the philosophical and sociological analysis of judgment and
judicial practices, especially in relation to powers, knowledges and forms of subjectivity. He has
published, among other articles, some papers on Bourdieu, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault,
Neumann, Sophocle, and the books Potere e giudizio. Giurisdizione e veridizione nella
genealogia di Michel Foucault (Napoli 2010), Il potere come problema. Un percorso teorico
(Napoli 2012).
gianvitobrindisi@gmail.com
Dillet, Benoît
Noology Critique after Ideologiekritik
Keywords: ideology, technics, image of thought
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari introduced very briefly the notion of noology, I
propose in this paper to reassess their project of renewing Ideologiekritik as ‘noology critique’.
To do so, I draw on a very brief history of ideology and ideology critique, from Destutt de Tracy
and Napoleon to Marx, Mannheim and the contemporary uses of the word, in order to
appreciate the full challenge of noology in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. I rely here particularly
on Pierre Macherey’s recent articles on ideology.
I demonstrate that Deleuze and Guattari cannot be said to have left the critique of ideology but
to have transformed it, at least for two reasons. First, it is precisely because the immanent
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ideology critique does not take into account the configuration of desires and affects that Deleuze
and Guattari introduced noology, defined as ‘the study of images of thought and their historicity’
(Deleuze and Guattari, ATP, 376). Second, Deleuze adopts Foucault’s displacement of traditional
Marxist categories, from repression and ideology to normalisation and disciplines, not only to
move away from Marxist debates but in order to refine them: noology critique begins in affirming
that capitalism has absorbed Marx’s project to critique the denial of the material production of
ideas first set out in The German Ideology. The project of noology critique proposes to analyse
historically the specific regimes of affects that supplement the material relations of production,
but also to create new images of thought rather than to simply study them.
Many Marxists would rightly claim that the passage from the terrain of ideas and the content of
thought to their forms and their expressions is already contained within the project of ideology
critique. The category of ideology is used by Marxists when the priority is given to the inverted
world of ideas over their material production. One of the problems of ideology critique that we
can first refer to is the position of exteriority that it is assumed, the state apparatus, the
infrastructure and the superstructure condition individuals to believe that ideas are real and
should be treated as such in order to divert them from their natural and material existence as
workers.
Benoît Dillet holds a Ph.D in Politics and Government from the University of Kent (UK), and
is currently a Junior Research Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of
Freiburg (Germany). He is the co-editor of two volumes: The Edinburgh Companion to
Poststructuralism (EUP, 2013) and Technologiques: La Pharmacie de Bernard Stiegler (Cécile
Defaut, 2013).
benoit@dillet.net
Baranzoni, Sara
Immanence: a (point of) view
Keywords: algorithmic, perspectivism, hypercontrol.
What Deleuze called societies of control, founded on continuous modulation, has now entered a
new stage that Stiegler calls hyper-control, generated by self-produced, self-collected and selfpublished personal data, exploited through the application of high-performance computing. This
automatized modulation establishes what Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouvroy have called
algorithmic governmentality: the possibility of becoming able to forecast and anticipate
(preventing or pre-empting) almost all phenomena (including human behaviours) found in the
physical and digital worlds, thanks to statistical inferences made on the basis of correlating past
and present data.
The world, thus understood, becomes an immanent set of algorithmically produced and refined
patterns or profiles, in which people and situations become immediately and operationally
‘meaningful’: massive flows of persons, objects and information can be detected and contribute
to their automatic subsumption into a general model that needs to consider neither causes nor
intentions.
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At first sight, this seems reminiscent of a kind of Leibnizian world, defined by the convergence
of individual points of view, and of which the multitude of individual differences becomes a
function. A world with respect to which everybody becomes essentially definable.
But if then we proceed through Whitehead’s philosophy, which in The Fold Deleuze
understands as an outgrowth of Leibniz’s, we also find that the collection and unification of data
is what characterize prehension, that is, the activity through which an individual can structure
multiplicity: putting together (prehending) a concrescence of elements (data) from the chaos of
the world, the individual becomes a subject, or more precisely, a superject. And the world
becomes a structured multiplicity (manifold) of prehensions. Through this, Deleuze arrives at the
point of offering an interpretation of a ‘point of view’ as an opening onto an infinite series of
variations – the world and its virtuality, the set of all the com-possibilities – that includes the
subject as mirroring those possibilities and proceeding towards the truth by organizing the visible.
If the situation of hyper-control is the place of visibility par excellence, where it becomes possible
to collect every piece of data related to every single individual, it is precisely this latter sense of
point of view that disappears. Indeed, what is created no longer corresponds to the behaviour of
a singular subject, but to impersonal, disparate, and dividualized facets of daily life and
interactions, where multiplicity is reduced to the impersonality of patterns, independent of any
system of differentiation, and immanence reduced to an ideology directed towards the exhaustion
of the virtual.
So, just as, in 1990, Deleuze hypothesized about the possibility of an “art of control” to escape
from control and modulation, might it be possible today to imagine a perspectivist ‘art of hypercontrol’, which could allow the subject to reappropriate its predicate (Leibniz) so as to enable a
self-enjoyment of its own becoming (Whitehead), and which could ultimately lead to ‘a
production of novelty, a liberation of true quanta of “private” subjectivity’ (Deleuze) in order to
fight against the algorithmic erosion of difference?
Sara Baranzoni, PhD in Performance Studies with a dissertation on Gilles Deleuze, has been
Research Fellow in Bologna University and is currently Prometeo Researcher at Yachay Tech
University (Ecuador), where she teaches “Science, Technology and Society”. Her research
interests concern contemporary French philosophy (Deleuze, Foucault, Stiegler), performance
theory and philosophy of technology. She is co-founder of the philosophical journal La
Deleuziana and collaborates with many journals and networks. Sara Baranzoni has published
several essays in Italian, English and French, and edited three collective books.
sbaranzoni@yachaytech.edu.ec
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3) Deterritorializing Nietzsche
Obsolete Capitalism
"Revolutionary path and accelerate the process" in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus
Keywords: infinite money, becoming-revolutionary, community of singularities
The essay will deepen the role of Nietzsche’s thought in Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti Oedipus”
(1972) with particular attention to the chapter entitled “The Civilized Capitalist Machine” defined
as locus classicus of the two French philosophers' anti-authoritative thought and in more recent
times of the «accelerationist» movement. Not only will the essay unveil the real political and
philosophical meaning of the famous passage known as «accelerate the process» but will also
evaluate its use in different social, political and economic fields analyzing the original Deleuze
and Guattari’s passage of Nietzsche’s fragment “The Strong of the Future” inserted in Colli and
Montinari’s edition entitled "Fragments: Fall 1887–Winter 1888”, Vol.17 number (105) 9 [153].
Deleuze and Guattari's objective hyper-textuality will be nevertheless taken into consideration
with reference to other contemporary exponents of the “vicious circle” like Foucault and
Klossowski so to establish frequent connections, alliances and extensions in the above mentioned
essays.
Obsolete Capitalism is a collective for pure independent research. Self-defined as “gypsy
scholars”, the collective deals with philosophy, art and politics. Obsolete Capitalism edited and
published Moneta, rivoluzione e filosofia dell'avvenire. Deleuze, Foucault, Guattari, Klossowski e
la politica accelerazionista di Nietzsche (OCFP, 2016), Archeologia delle minoranze (OCFP,
2015) and The Birth of Digital Populism (OCFP, 2014). The collective also edits the online blogs
Obsolete Capitalism, Rizomatika and Variazioni foucaultiane.
paolodavoli@me.com
Treppiedi, Fabio
Acceleration society
Keywords: transcendental empiricism, mouvement, acceleration
The eccentric development of Deleuzian philosophy, as recently shown by Stiegler, demonstrates
the relevant connection between acceleration and control. Therefore, we can see that the
philosophical prophecies of yesterday, which foresaw what Deleuze defined as a control-society,
have become reality today. Our societies are individuation fields which are conditioned by
rhythms, dynamism, the speed of a ‘hyper-industrial reality’ and ‘algorhythmic governamentality’
(Rouvroy). The connection between acceleration and control enables us to experience and
contrast our milieu of individuation at the same time. This connection can also be delineated
through returning to the core of Deleuzian thought. This can also be defined as transcendental
empiricism, of which the Leitmotiv is considered to be the radical substitution of ‘conditioning’
with ‘genesis’ (i.e. subjectivity, life-forms, resistance, ‘guerrilla’ practices and ‘new weapons’). The
objective of my contribution is to explore the connection between these terms by following the
genealogy of the philosophical concept of ‘movement’ (from Aristotle to Stiegler).
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Fabio Treppiedi (1984) graduated from the University of Palermo with a batchelor’s degree in
philosophy, before receiving his PhD from the same university. He studied with Frederic Worms
and Anne Sauvagnargues at the International Centre for the Study of Contemporary French
Philosophy (Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris). Trained in the classics of the history of
philosophy, Treppiedi focuses his studies on metaphysics, aesthetics and biopolitics. His main
research interests are in the origin and development of Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism’.
Together with Giuseppe Bianco, Treppiedi has translated and edited the early writings of
Deleuze. Da Cristo alla borghesia e altri scritti, Milano 2010). Treppiedi is the author of
Differenti ripetizioni, Pensare con Deleuze (Napoli 2015).
fabiotreppiedi@gmail.com
Vignola, Paolo
Nietzsche in the Amazon: For a Nomadology Beyond the Anthropocene and
Accelerationism
Keywords: perspectivism, algorithmic governmentality, nihilism
The famous Nietzschean fragment on the necessity of hastening the process of nihilism has
recently been taken – via Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of accelerating the process of market
deterritorialisation – as a conceptual driver for an emancipatory political narrative:
accelerationism. Yet this same statement by Nietzsche also gestures towards the fulfilment of
nihilism, the social effects of which we are currently discovering. Taking one of the giants of the
Web, Amazon.com, as a symptom of the completion of the very nihilism whose process has been
empowered by neo-liberalism in its financial and digital form, this paper will attempt to effect a
bifurcation from the Promethean narrative drawn by so-called leftist accelerationism. Such a
bifurcation should essentially consist in the elaboration of another image of thought, aimed
towards a new kind of relationship between technology, environment and social ties, so as to
make possible the creation of a future in which one can believe. Following Deleuze’s suggestion
of “not to cry, not to hope, but to find new weapons” within the control regime, the argument
here is underpinned by belief in the need for a shift in our anthropocentric worldview.
On the one hand, we could follow Stiegler’s suggestion of becoming the quasi-cause of what is
occurring to us, that is, the completion of nihilism, whether this refers to algorithmic
governmentality or the Anthropocene qua capitalist apocalypse. If Western rationality, derived
from the mathesis universalis, i.e., from calculation, is leading humankind to the end of its world,
it would seem that we need a radically different reason, the thinking of which should be based on
a general ecology. On the other hand, we could radicalize this suggestion in a Deleuzian direction
by affirming Life as the immanent plane of multiple worlds, that is, of multiple points of view,
attempting to build a bridge from Nietzsche’s perspectivism to the Amerindian multinaturalism
described by Viveiros de Castro in his formidable ethnographic actualization of Deleuze’s
concept of becoming. The ultimate goal would then be to let Nietzsche’s diagnosis of nihilism
travel from its actualisation as user-profiling, an identification made possible by corporations
such as Amazon.com, to the affirmation of a new image of thought, whose principle, like
Amazonian perspectivism, is difference and not identity. Starting from this consideration,
nomadology could be understood as a way of placing Nietzsche in the Amazon, with “all the
names of history” he always carries with him. Paddling and rowing with Nietzsche on that raft of
the Medusa, we will traverse the Rio and meet the Earth, for an ecology and a decolonization of
thought, before it becomes too late.
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Paolo Vignola, PhD in Philosophy, after an international post-doc on “Media innovation and
development of subjectivities” is currently a Prometeo researcher at Yachay Tech University
(Ecuador), where he teaches “Science, Technology and Society”. He is a scholar of contemporary
French philosophy and philosophy of technology. He is the co-founder of the philosophical
journal “La Deleuziana” and he collaborates with many journals. Vignola published several essays
in Italian, English and French, he edited five collective books and is also the author of four
books: Le frecce di Nietzsche. Confrontando Deleuze e Derrida (2008), La lingua animale.
Deleuze attraverso la letteratura (2011), Sulla propria pelle. La questione trascendentale tra Kant e
Deleuze (2012) and L’attenzione altrove. Sintomatologie di quel che ci accade (2013).
pvignola@yachaytech.edu.ec
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Deleuze in Padua
With these two consecutive panels, we would like to present to the Deleuzean scholarship the
work we have been carrying out in the last years on Deleuze’s philosophy, within a doctoral
seminar held at the University of Padua since 2006 under the direction of Professor Gaetano
Rametta. We would like to discuss our ideas with other scholars, hoping to foster a productive
usage of the French philosopher’s philosophical device and to benefit from criticisms,
suggestions, questions and inspirations, which might come from the many different
hermeneutical insights that will be represented at the conference.
In the first panel, Professor Gaetano Rametta will frame the theoretical and historical picture
underpinning our interpretation of Deleuze’s work, which consists in placing it within the wide
tradition of transcendental philosophy, although deeply reconsidered. Professor Rametta will face
the question concerning the Transcendental as the conceptual frame inside of which a
progressive de-subjectivation of philosophy takes place. By de-subjectivation we mean a process
in which the connection between philosophy and production of concepts, as well as between
traditional forms of thought and creation of new ways of thinking leads us to a marginalization of
the role of consciousness.
Understanding the transcendental question obviously requires us to face the so-called classical
German philosophy. In particular, our thesis is that the process of desubjectivation of this
concept starts with Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, during the continuous and troublesome reelaboration of which the “I” ceases to be ground (Grund) and principle (Grund-satz) in order to
become a mere scheme and image of an infinite and impersonal becoming called “life” (leben, to
be understood not as substantive but rather as infinitive). This process reaches then a crucial
stage – this is the thesis we are going to present – with the Deleuzian doctrine of transcendental
empiricism. Indeed, on a more profound level, Deleuze destroys the very possibility of the
concept of consciousness itself. Difference without identity, a pure “multiple” without any form
of a dialectic between the one and the many, or unity and multiplicity: this is what Deleuze’s
theory of “transcendental empiricism” has attempted to establish. In our opinion, this theory
represents the first example of a philosophy conceived of as a transcendental production of
concepts without subjects.
This first session will be concluded by a paper by Nicolò Fazioni, who will further explore the
relationship between Deleuze and classical German thought, with a focus on Hegel’s thinking. As
Fazioni will show, although the interpretation of this relationship usually consists in making the
case that Deleuze simply refuses Hegel’s philosophy, it is instead possible to track down a
productive engagement of Deleuze with the German philosopher, which turns out to be very
useful in order to underline the theoretical features of Deleuze’s own version of transcendental
philosophy.
In the second panel, we will address Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism via a critical assessment
of his complex relationship with the phenomenological tradition – with a focus on the writings of
the early Sartre and Husserl – and with the philosophy of Bergson.
Within this second path, Giulia Gamba will explore Deleuze’s “bergsonism”, which has to be
considered in a close relationship with his critical approach to phenomenology. The rediscovery
of Bergson is crucial in Deleuze’s philosophy, not only for the creation of key concepts such as
virtual, multiplicity and difference, but also for the peculiar union of transcendental and
ontological that supports his theory of immanence, in a critical and uninterrupted confrontation
with phenomenology.
In his paper, Simone Aurora will investigate the importance of Sartre’s legacy for the
development of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism. Indeed, as Deleuze wrote in a journal
article published in 1964, just a few years before the publication of “Difference and Repetition”,
Sartre’s “whole philosophy was part of a speculative movement that contested the notion of
representation, the order itself of representation: philosophy”, Deleuze observes, “was changing
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its arena, leaving the sphere of judgment, to establish itself in the more vivid world of the "prejudgmental," the "sub-representational". Five years later, this speculative movement would find
one of its most radical outcomes in Deleuze’s doctrine of transcendental empiricism that makes
its appearance in “Difference and Repetition”.
Matteo Settura will finally introduce a confrontation between Husserl’s and Deleuze’s concept
of “sense”, as a clue for the disclosure of transcendental philosophy. Deleuze’s fundamental
claim that transcendental philosophy is characterized by “the discovery of sense” (Logique du
sens) will operate as a length to shed light on the development of Husserl’s doctrine of Noema
and Sinn. Furthermore, Deleuze’s interpretation seems to provide an innovative solution to the
long-standing debate about the statute of the noema in Husserl’s philosophy, overtaking the
opposition between theory of meaning and theory of knowledge by means of an original
understanding of “transcendental experience” as a noematic field.
In both panels we will leave ample room for debate. Indeed, the two panels will have a dialogic
framework and are meant to be seminar-like structured.
Gaetano Rametta is Professor for the History of Philosophy at the University of Padua. His main areas of research
are Political Philosophy, German Idealism and French Contemporary Philosophy. He has published various articles
on Sartre, Althusser, Foucault and Deleuze, and he is Director of the Seminar on German Idealism and French
Contemporary Philosophy at the School for Post Graduate Studies of the University of Padova, whose main results
have been published in different collective volumes (Les metamorphoses du transcendantal, Olms, Hildesheim New York 2009; Metamorfosi del trascendentale II, CLEUP, Padova 2012; L'ombra di Hegel. Althusser, Deleuze,
Lacan e Badiou a confronto con la dialettica, Polimetrica, Monza 2012).
Nicolò Fazioni holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Padua. His research mainly focuses on Classical
German Philosophy and French Contemporary Thought. He collaborates with many Italian and International
journals. He has published the book Il problema della contingenza. Logica e politica in Hegel (Franco Angeli 2015),
various articles and edited two monographical issues on the Philosophy of Badiou and Lacan. He is the Italian
translator of Rediscovering Empathy. Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences by Karstan Stueber.
Giulia Gamba took her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Padua, with a thesis on the relationship between
sciences and metaphysics in Bergson's philosophy. Currently she is research assistant (cultore della materia) in
History of Philosophy in the FISPPA Department in Padua. She wrote the monograph Metafisica e scienza in
Bergson (Cleup 2015) and differents articles and reviews on Deleuze, Foucault and Bergson. She also edited, with M.
Settura e G. Molinari, Pensare il presente, riaprire il futuro. Percorsi critici attraverso Foucault, Benjamin, Adorno,
Bloch (Mimesis 2014).
Simone Aurora holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Padua. His main research interests are in
transcendental philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, phenomenology and their mutual historical and
theoretical relationships. He has published various articles on Deleuze, Guattari, Husserl and Canetti. His doctoral
dissertation (Filosofia e scienze nel primo Husserl. Per una interpretazione strutturalista delle Ricerche logiche,
forthcoming 2016) tries to advocate an innovative reading of Husserl’s early phenomenology, showing the extent to
which it constitutes, despite the prevalent historical reconstructions, one of the first and most important outcomes of
that epistemological rupture represented by the emergence of structuralist tendencies in many fields of scientific
research between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century.
Matteo Settura is a PhD Candidate at the University of Padova. His current research concerns the idea of
transcendental philosophy in the works of Edmund Husserl and Gilles Deleuze. In 2013, he graduated from the
University of Milano with a Master thesis on Deleuze’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. His research field is
History of Philosophy, with particular focus on Phenomenology, French Post-structuralism and Critical Theory.
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Deleuzian Childrenlands: A Child in Time and the Politicalities of
Exocentric Movement
"Where did that voice come from, when there is no one around? Might it be that this piece of wood has learned to
weep and cry like a child? I can hardly believe it. Here it is--a piece of common firewood, good only to burn in the
stove, the same as any other. Yet--might someone be hidden in it? If so, the worse for him. I'll fix him!"
(Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1883)
A number of Deleuzian scholars in the last decade or more detected and occasionally even tried
to taxonomize Deleuze’s (and, partly, Guattari’s) children, thinking about the specific position of
a child, of becoming child and of the childhood in Deleuzian universe. Stretched between
somewhat blunt statements on “metaphysical beings” and “ideal Spinozists”, a number of
different figurations of childhood are generating an asymmetrical and rough conceptual and
political cartography. At one hand nothing but the fold of paradoxical energies, hanging at the
edge of virtual, child is also peculiarly gendered, and even invoked as the crucial ingredient of
Deleuzian post-psychoanalytical analogy between familiality and sociality. The vector of affect,
the burst of pure immanence, yes, but whose temporal organization remains peculiar and the
molar regulation always impending, even within the Deleuzian imagination. If “ideas are
potentials”, it is also true, according to Deleuze, that these potentials never float as the
unresolvable disjunction, but are rather: “already engaged in a particular mode of expression”,
while “concepts”, the very substance of every philosophizing, need “necessities”: they are
“regimented” and even more so, they “come in cohorts” (On Creation, 1987). How is, then, the
idea of child “engaged”, and what happens to the concept of child if its molecular promise needs
to be “regimented” within the specific regime of meaning, i.e. the art of politics.
How is Tocqueville’s democratic infancy, the sheer potentiality of the West to engender new
forms of the societal and of the political dreamt of in Deleuzian universe? What is the communal
aspect/mode of it, in the philosophical edifice that invokes community and communality only
rarely and tangentially? How is that figuration played beyond (perennially criticized, by Deleuze)
liberal or neoliberal West? Where is the voice that evades ideology and remains but a
diagrammatic trace hazily underpinning the exocentric stumbling rather than some visible vector
that cuts across the mortified formations of political childhood and adulthood alike. One thinks
of Collodi again: "Oh, I'm tired of always being a Marionette!" cried Pinocchio disgustedly. "It's
about time for me to grow into a man as everyone else does." "And you will if you deserve it--"
"Really? What can I do to deserve it?" "It's a very simple matter. Try to act like a well-behaved
child."
This reterritorializing, this molar and majoritarian child, a colonized child, a childish Oriental, a
child of “your hands are dirty”, child of a “childish woman”, child of the temporal lag, finally a
child that “needs to behave” or, even worse, that “will behave” thus assuring both maturation
and quick replacement of its own molar modality, such a child remains straightforwardly uneasy
and repulsive for what is self-celebrated as the progressive academia. Still, it is easy to detect how
such figuration works so uncomfortably close to the leftist, utopian political child of the Parisian
taste, the one that joins “the ensemble of processes of minority becomings” (Abécédaire, 1988),
where a short-lived childhood is a golden age/paradise lost of what are now the cynical iron years
of postfordist capitalism, but is also always seen as the currency of some better future. That one
is the childhood of “save your inner child”, and of “save the world for our kids”, the promising
romantic and modernist uchronia of the creative-postponed, the bright capsule of pure
potentiality whose clumsy pre-individuated and non-personal gestures provide the next-toecstatic dimension of good old anthropological communitas, possibly, and that remains to be
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seen, utterly devoid of the communal: "Through all their sufferings and weakness, [children] are
infused with an immanent life that is pure power and even bliss" (Pure Immanence, 2001).
It is not hard to assume how both of these large formations of political childhood, even the
softer one that allows the singularities to only subtly regulate the chaotic movement, remain
problematic. Both figurations often assume unbearably linear or even eschatological temporal
shapes, both remain suffocatingly teleological, both are dealing with mortified childrenlands in
the heart of motherlands and fatherlands, a frozen “flash of life”. What these figurations share is
the assumed innocence and the violence of childhood, the bittersweet horror of the monstrous
African child-warrior with the embarrassment of the autistic or hyperactive middleclass child.
Pinocchio experienced it, he saw how it works: The Land of Toys (Paese dei balocchi) appears to
be the ludic anarchy of childhood only to be revealed as the mimicry of slave trade: a (little) hope
of (capitalist) maturation/growth reassembles yet another hopeful marionette into an enslaved
ass.
Panelists will, therefore, try to re-think Deleuzian landscape of (possibly) political childhood,
while exploring different spatiotemporal modalities of how we see the political figure of a child,
and will try to do it genealogically, metatheoretically and even ethnographically.
Aleksandar Mijatovic (University of Rijeka, Croatia) will think and talk about Bergsonian
genealogies and the modernist hope of “childhood” in the work of Gilles Deleuze, trying to
engage with earlier Deleuzian chapters on time and difference.
aleksandar.mijatovic16@gmail.com
Anthony Curtis Adler (Yonsei University, Republic of Korea) will try to comparatively think
Agamben’s idea of infancy and Deleuze and Guattari’s child of the Anti-Oedipus and A
Thousand Plateaus, exploring the elusive political communality in the Deleuze’s project.
anthony.adler@gmail.com
Aljosa Puzar (Yonsei University, Republic of Korea), will entertain the audience with his
feminist account of the Deleuzian ethnographies of South Korean adolescent masturbation,
testing the political promise of rubbing-machines that add and remove corporeal and mediatic
intensities in the tensive field of Post-Neo-Confucian sexual politics that operates as a
troublesome vacillation between the now of the then and the then of the now.
aljosa.puzar@gmail.com
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Deterritorializing the Child: Child-Becomings
Continuing the previous discussions of this childhood panel at Deleuze conferences, this panel
introduces deterritorializing vectors of becoming child and child-becomings to challenge popular
ideas of children and childhood. Members of this panel expand on Deleuze’s writings on
becoming-child as unfolding along the child body, affects, surfaces, depth, language, and
becoming-plant, while visiting some of the implications and applications that these vectors invite
us to consider.
Markus P.J. Bohlmann and Anna Hickey-Moody
Surfaces, Depths, and the Child Body in Deleuze
Keywords: surface, body, affects
This paper examines the child body as surface/s and depth. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze
conceives the body as an interplay of surfaces and depths. He writes, “The question is now about
bodies taken in their undifferentiated depth and in their measureless pulsation. This depth acts in
an original way, by means of its power to organize surfaces and envelop itself within surfaces. …
The surface is neither active nor passive, it is the product of the actions and passions of mixed
bodies” (Deleuze, 1990: 142). Deleuze’s mixed bodies constitute assemblages that continue to
enter into new relations and new formations. This shows us that the child-body is not something
to be grown out of, that childhood is not a state to be left behind, but that the child-body,
understood as a mixture, always folds back into adult subjectivity where the affective capacities of
the child are part of the mixtures that unfold to constitute our mobile limits of becoming (and of
being) in the world (Hickey-Moody, 2013: 283). In other words, the virtual possibilities for
change will always have ‘childhood’ parts, or affects, which may be mobilized in processes of
becoming. Such an interplay of surface/s and depth, of the virtual and the actual, further renders
childhood innocence not a blank state but a site of production of sense: ‘in-no-sense’ (Bohlmann,
2014: 407), a ‘generative principle’ (Bohlmann and Moreland, 2014: 107), which calls into into
question conventional notions of the child as an inferior subject to the adult and of childhood as
a framed realm that needs to be crossed and lost in order to for the child to emerge as an adult.
Helen Palmer
Nomad in Wonderland: Deleuze’s Alice
Keywords: Alice, language, surface
Alice is a paradoxical figure who navigates the multidimensional worlds of Deleuze’s Logic of
Sense with courage and dexterity. Changing dimensions and directions at every turn and
thwarting attempts at the dismantling of her subjectivity, Deleuze’s Alice presents an interesting
reconfiguration of Carroll’s Victorian schoolgirl. Alice is variously anorexic, schizophrenic, a
Stoic sage and a Wittgensteinian grammarian, but often her proper name operates as a conduit
for these conceptual personae in order to demonstrate the frustrating edges or stalemates of a
problem rather than a dynamic shift or leap. Alice encounters ethical dilemmas, geometrical
impossibilities, social embarrassments and moments of intense existential ultimatum. Through
the prisms of psychoanalysis, structuralism and ontology Deleuze steers Alice across metaphysical
surfaces of sense and nonsense whilst the surfaces of her own body and mind are subjected to a
series of fierce challenges.
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This paper will explore the ways that Alice enacts and expresses the challenges Deleuze presents
to linguistic agency, power, identity and representation in the sense of a more ‘affirmative’
negation (Braidotti, 2005). Deleuze’s Alice has been explored as sexual subject (Irigaray, 1977), as
cyborg (Pisters, 2003), as Fregean logician (Olkowski, 2008) and as ‘challenge to the phallic
materialisation of meaning’ (Driscoll, Garland and Hickey-Moody, 2011: 128). This paper uses
the figures of the nomad, the border and the surface to explore Deleuze’s Alice in terms of her
spatiotemporal mobility, the production and determination of her feminine subjectivity and the
stretching of her linguistic and experiential limits.
Jane Newland
Becoming-plant in children’s literature: the case of J-M G Le Clézio’s Le Voyage au pays
des arbres
Keywords: becoming-plant, children’s literature, molecularity
Deleuze and Guattari refer to French writer André Dhôtel who was able to create strange plantbecomings, becoming tree or aster, for his characters. In children’s literature, young protagonists
undergo many becomings, but very rarely are these becomings vegetal. In Jean-Marie Gustave Le
Clézio’s Voyage au pays des arbres, his only text written intentionally for young readers, a little
boy (Hihuit) fuelled by his desire to travel wanders into the forest where he gains access to the
trees’ secret world and undergoes an exemplary becoming-plant.
This paper considers how becoming-plant comes about in this text. In the first part, this paper
considers the child protagonist’s imperceptible movement towards the trees and how this is
accompanied by a double ritournelle: the whistling of the trees and whistling his own personal
refrain allows Hihuit to leave the confines of his home and secretly slip out at night back to the
forest when everyone is sleeping. There, through his desire to be close to the trees that surround
him and sitting motionless amongst them, his deterritorialisation begins. Observing their
slowness and their sounds, whistling both to himself and to the trees, Hihuit reaches a zone of
proximity where neither entity, child nor plant, is distinguishable from the other. This paper
finally considers the young reader accompanying Hihuit on this adventure, who, like Hihuit
himself, is invited to join the dance of becoming. In doing so, a line of flight opens up – the
possibility to become other, to move away from the constraints of socially imposed majoritarian
boundaries and subjectivities, to be contaminated on a truly other level, the molecular level of
plantness.
References
Bohlmann, M. (2014). ‘In Any Event: Moving Rhizomatically in Peter Cameron’s Someday This
Pain Will Be Useful to You,’ Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 39.3, 385-412.
Bohlmann, M., & Moreland, S. (2014). ‘‘If You Rip the Fronts Off Houses’: Killing Innocence in
Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt’(1943)’. In D. Olson (Ed.), Children in the Films of
Alfred Hitchcock (pp. 87-112). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Deleuze, G. (1990). The logic of Sense (M. Lester & C. Stivale, Trans.). New York: Columbia
University Press.
Hickey-Moody, A. C. (2013). ‘Deleuze’s children’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45:3, 272286.
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Markus P.J. Bohlmann is a professor of English at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada. His
research and teaching interests include American literature and film, queer literature and theory,
childhood studies, and Deleuze studies. He has published in venues such as Routledge, Children’s
Literature Association Quarterly, and Post Script: Essays in Film and Humanities. He he is coeditor of Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors
(McFarland 2015). Markus is on the editorial board for Red Feather Journal: An International
Journal of Children’s Visual Culture and Children and Youth in Popular Culture, a Lexington
Book Series.
markus.bohlmann@senecacollege.ca
Anna Hickey-Moody is Co-Director of the Disability Research Centre, Head of the PhD in
Arts and Director Learning at the Centre for The Arts and Learning, where she leads the research
collaborations of an interdisciplinary team of practitioners and researchers. Anna has developed a
philosophically informed, cultural studies approach to youth arts as a subcultural form of
humanities education. Through developing a concept of little public spheres, her recent book
'Youth, Arts and Education' theorises young people's creative practices as a form of civic
participation. Her 2009 book Unimaginable Bodies creates a Spinozist concept of an open body,
an assemblage of affects made through collaborative arts practice that breaks apart dominant
medical and social codings of young people with disabilities. Anna also researches and publishes
on masculinity. She is interested in the politics and aesthetics of masculinity read as embodied
critique of institutionalized patterns of hegemony. Her 2006 book Masculinity Beyond the
Metropolis is a global ethnographic study of the lives of young men in 'out of the way' or hard to
reach places. The book considers ways the everyday lives of these boys are mediated by global
scapes of media production and consumption, economic globalisation, generational change,
spatial and temporal configurations of subjectivity. Anna has edited a number of collected works
- recently she published an anthology on pedagogy, media and affect called Disability Matters
which explores how ideas and experiences of disability come to matter across assemblages of
media, through vectors of affect and experiences of pedagogy. Other collections and publications
are listed on the 'publications' page. Anna teaches and supervises in the areas of arts practice,
youth culture, masculinity, the cultural politics of schooling and aesthetics.
a.hickey-moody@gold.ac.uk
Jane Newland is an Assistant professor of French at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research
marries the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze with children's literature. Her doctoral thesis defined a
new critical approach for children's series fiction reassessing the inherent repetition in series
fiction, requiring it to be thought for itself and thus shifting the focus from one of comparative
difference to pure repetition. Her current project focuses on notions of the child, childhood and
children's literature in the children's texts written by some of Deleuze's favoured authors. She has
published articles in journals such as Modern and Contemporary France, International Research
in Children's Literature and Jeunesse: young people, texts, cultures.
jnewland@wlu.ca
Helen Palmer is a lecturer, queer theorist, writer and performer, working in the Department of
English at Kingston University. She has published work on Deleuze, the avant-garde, new
materialist feminisms and queer theory, with a particular focus on linguistic defamiliarisation,
formalism and nonsense. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense,
and her current project is a monograph entitled Queer Defamiliarisation: A Reassessment of
Estrangement.
h.palmer@kingston.ac.uk
227
Ecosophical Aesthetics: Becoming, Life and Art
Speakers: Colin Gardner (UC Santa Barbara), renée c. hoogland (Wayne State University),
Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University)
Panel chair and organizer: Colin Gardner
Given the conference theme of “Virtuality, Becoming and Life,” this panel explores the many
ways in which aesthetics produces encounters (a combination of rupture and affirmation) that act
as the catalyst for producing something new, as a way of seeing the world differently, beyond
traditional modes of representation. In this sense, an ecosophical aesthetic methodology has a
direct parallel to Deleuze and Guattari’s own attempt to break down the 19th-century Kantian
dialectic between man, art and world in favour of a non-hierarchical, transverse structure based
on assemblages, connectivities and relations between and across aesthetics. Through combinative
deterritorializations and different lines of flight, their creative and machinic subjectivities thereby
produce a new vision for a more ethical and ecologically sensitive world.
In short, the panel argues that aesthetics can open up the human to a more ethical relation with
life-as-becoming without prejudice on either side. In this respect, the panellists aim to ask the
following questions: How can we interact with the world in a non-dominant and non-destructive
way? In what way can art produce affects which create the catalyst for new ethical relations with
non-human entities and the environment? How can philosophy rethink structures of interaction
which change common perceptions of subjectivity both within and as part of the world?
renee c. hoogland
Neo-Aesthetics and the Ethics of Becoming (with Guattari and Whitehead)
Keywords: sense-event, ethico-aesthetics, art
The event, in a Deleuzian sense, is “unlimited becoming.” This idea is the principal target of
Alain Badiou’s (in)famous critique of Deleuze. Badiou accuses Deleuze of an “aestheticisation of
everything” by forging a “chimera, an inconsistent neologism: the ‘sense-event.” While Badiou’s
critique should not be offhandedly dismissed, I propose that it is precisely Deleuze’s notion of
the “sense-event” that renders his ontology of crucial importance for a neo-aesthetics, for a
theoretically informed approach to the arts in the wake of the affective turn.
What I wish to do in this paper, then, is use Badiou’s accusation as a starting point for exploring
the political potential of affect, especially in its specific, even privileged interconnection with art.
In doing so, I will turn to both Deleuze’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s writings on the event,
while taking additional recourse to Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on aesthetic activity and Félix
Guattari’s ethico-aesthetics. My overall claim will be that art is not a Sunday afternoon activity
but a “project” with both subjective and collective, both individual and sociopolitical
implications, both now and in worlds yet to come.
renée c. hoogland is Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, where she
teaches literature and culture after 1870, visual culture, critical theory, and gender & sexuality
studies. Her third book, A Violent Embrace: Art and Aesthetics after Representation came out in
2014 with the University Press of New England. hoogland leads an inter-departmental Visual
Culture Working Group at WSU and is the editor of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the
Arts as well as Senior Editor in Chief of MacMillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender.
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hoogland is currently working on a book project entitled “Urban Encounters: Towards an
Aesthetics of Everyday Existence.”
renée c. hoogland, Dept. of English, Wayne State University, 5057 Woodward - Suite 9408,
Detroit, MI 48202, U.S.A.
reneehoogland@wayne.edu
Patricia MacCormack
Nonhuman affects: art, nature, ethics
Keywords: nonhuman, ecosophy, becoming
The anthropocene has seen the human not only manipulate nonhuman forces but territorialise all
forces so that they may be understood or valued only via anthropocentric formal logic. This
paper uses Deleuze’s book on Spinoza and his work with Guattari on ecosophy to explore the
ethical urgency of the need to open up new spaces, primarily via the deformalised (or at least
non-anthropomorphic) flesh, where we can explore the concept of the nonhuman. In the context
of the paper, the nonhuman does not only refer to nonhuman animals, but also the human’s
necessary becoming-nonhuman, in order to liberate the Earth from the violent tendencies of
anthropocentric ideology and/as action - the ahuman.
The paper does address our human relations with nonhuman animals as part of the need to
become-nonhuman without fetishizing other life forms or human minoritarians. This is suggested
via three trajectories elaborated through What is Philosophy? – nonhuman becomings via art, via
nature and via radical abolitionist ethics. All three offer ways in which the subject can find escape
routes and philosophical fissures through which new pathways may emerge to alter interactions
between humans, humans and nonhuman animals and the world itself as a system of relation
rather than human occupation.
Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University,
Cambridge. She is the co-editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (2008) and the
editor of The Animal Catalyst: Toward Ahuman Theory (2014) and the author of Cinesexuality
(2008) and Posthuman Ethics (2012). She has published extensively on Deleuze, Guattari, desire,
perversion, feminism, ethics, animal rights and horror film. Her forthcoming projects are coedited with Colin Gardner: Deleuze and the Animal (EUP) and Ecosophical Aesthetics
(Bloomsbury).
Patricia MacCormack, Department of English, Communication, Film and Media, School of Arts,
Law and Social Science, Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, Cambridge CB1 1PT, United
Kingdom –
Patricia.Maccormack@anglia.ac.uk
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Colin Gardner
Constructing the Transversal Time-Image: Ecosophy, Immanence and Corporate
“Land” in James Benning’s California Trilogy
Keywords: time-image, immanence, transversality
In The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari noted that “Vectors of subjectification do not necessarily
pass through the individual, which in reality appears to be something like a ‘terminal’ for
processes that involve human groups, socio-economic ensembles, data-processing machines, etc.
Therefore, interiority establishes itself at the crossroads of multiple components, each relatively
autonomous in relation to the other, and, if need be, in open conflict” (36). Applying this
principle to James Benning’s California Trilogy -- El Valley Centro (1999); LOS (2000) and
Sogobi (2001) – this paper will explore the ecosophical ramifications of Deleuze’s time-image,
specifically the duration of the extended static shot, as a transversal connectivity between
landscape (the perceptual view of the land) and the corporate ownership of “land” (with its
concomitant exploitation of cheap immigrant labour); the transcendental and the immanent, the
virtual and the actual. Benning’s seeminglyself-reflexive structuralism – each film is composed of
35 static shots of exactly 2 ½ minutes – actually turns out to be a contingent poststructural
“container” whereby duration puts the political back into the shot, so that he is able to disclose
an ecosophical relation between the corporate wealth of Los Angeles and the irreversible
despoliation of Owens Valley, the historical source of its water supply. In this way, water – where
it comes from, where it goes to, and who owns it -- becomes the virtual vector that ties the films
together as an ecosophical project, constructing a pure immanence that is also, as Deleuze puts it,
“a life” – “complete power, complete bliss.”
Colin Gardner is Professor of Critical Theory and Integrative Studies at UC Santa Barbara
where he teaches in the departments of Art, Film & Media Studies, Comparative Literature and
Art History. He is the author of critical studies on Joseph Losey and Karel Reisz for Manchester
University Press and Beckett, Deleuze and the Televisual Event: Peephole Art for Palgrave
Macmillan. He is currently co-editor of two anthologies with Professor Patricia MacCormack
(Anglia Ruskin University): Deleuze and the Animal (Edinburgh University Press) and
Ecosophical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury).
Colin Gardner, Dept. of Art, Univesity of California, Santa Barbara, Building 434, Room 123,
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-7120, U.S.A.
gardner@arts.ucsb.edu
230
The Speculative Paradox in Deleuze and Guattari
Speakers: Prof. Felicity Colman, Prof. Elizabeth de Freitas, Dr. Anna Hickey-Moody
Respondent: Prof. Janell Watson
The speculative dimension of Deleuze and Guattari’s work can be found in their affirmation of
non-representational intensive thought and time, capable of counter-actualizing the virtual. For
Deleuze, thought is capable of generating radically unthinkable futures, while lines of flight zigzag
into multiple contradictory becomings. This speculative dimension is often associated with a
“naïve” willingness to do metaphysics, to draw from philosophers like Leibniz and Spinoza in
search of some fundamental ontology. But speculation for Deleuze also fuels an irrational
vitalism, a way to live within the milieu, a creative complicity with materials. Thus becomings do
not serve idealism, and speculation is both rigorous and creative in a reckless way. This panel
explores how this kind of radical immanence might entail an ethics. Panelists explore how
Deleuze’s speculative philosophy is pivotal for understanding the material configurations of
ethical structures, that is, configurations of life, death, capital and joy.
We see speculative experiments across academic disciplines today, reflecting a renewed realist and
materialist engagement with the world. Tensions between various contemporary projects are
evident, but there is a need to form alliances across these projects, as the ethico-political stakes
are high (Asberg et al, 2015; Sheldon, 2015). Our concern is how to pursue a speculative
philosophy without returning to a dogmatic metaphysics or onto-theology, while, at the same
time, and in more practical terms, to plunge into a speculation that might trigger a more than
human ethics. Stengers (2009) will claim that the task of “speculative constructivism” is not to
identify conditions for valid knowledge, “but to care for the consequences of the event”.
This interdisciplinary panel will consider speculation as an orientation to ontology, knowledge,
and to the future. Indeed speculation actualizes the production of disciplinary practices of
mathematics, feminist, and socially inclusive futures. This panel consists of three presentations,
followed by a discussant response.
References
Åsberg, C., Thiele, K. & Van der Tuin, I. (2015). “Speculative before the turn: Reintroducing
feminist materialist performativity.” Cultural Studies Review, 21 (2), 145-172.
Sheldon, R. (2015). “Form/Matter/Chora: Object-oriented ontology and feminist new
materialism.” In R. Grusin (Ed.). The nonhuman turn. University of Minnesota Press. 193-222.
Stengers, I. (2005). Deleuze and Guattari’s Last Enigmatic Message, Angelaki:
Journal of Theoretical Humanities 10 (2), 151-67.
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Felicity Colman
Codified Speculation; generating the conditions of an ethical life through feminist futures
Deleuze and Guattari created a number of speculative tools for thinking, devising neologisms,
and putting disciplinary specific concepts and words to work across different disciplinary fields.
In their play with thinking and language, framing how conceptual personae are actioned, they set
the terms for subsequent generational work on how communicative political ontological
positions are generated, and how speculative tools might enable change to be enacted in those
positions. As I have previously argued, Guattari’s position on creative change is that it “can only
occur when dominant authorial coding systems (psychoanalysis, capitalism, communicative
language[s]) are ruptured, shifted, or mutated…” (Colman 2008: 69). Deleuze continually
questioned how concepts are created, and how creative acts occur, drawing upon Serres,
Whitehead and Kant with which to describe the subject that speculates; “the self” as it changes
over time (Deleuze 1984). Deleuze’s work through the 1980s indicates his thinking on the action
of creative change through what was referred to in France in the late 1970s as the informatization
of society (what in the 2010s is described as algorithmic networked environments). In this paper I
want to examine the affect upon this speculative self by the mutation of coding systems of
communicative languages to which Deleuze and Guattari refer in their work in the late 1970s1980s. I do so through the terms of the creative impetus that Guattari articulated, and in addition,
how the choice of affirmation of life that Rosi Braidotti (2002) contends is an absolute
requirement for an ethical life, and through the imagination of the worlding of a different place,
with the technological ontological change that informatization has enabled (Haraway 1995; 1998).
Despite the differences in thinking that Haraway and Deleuze and Guattari take (Stivale 2011),
the paper argues that an ethical life can be generated through the materialist, empirical position
that feminist thinking (Braidotti, Haraway, van der Tuin 2015) about the situated immanence of
the technological self examines. This active speculation provides us with the context for
generating a twenty-first century ethics; new materialist feminist futures.
References
Braidotti, R. (2002) Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge, Polity Press.
Colman, F. (2008) “Affective Vectors: Icons, Guattari and Art” in O’Sullivan & Zepke, Deleuze, Guattari and the
Production of the New. London: Continuum: 68-79.
Haraway, D. (1988) “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective”, Feminist Studies, (14: 3) doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Haraway, D. (1985) “The Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Later Twentieth
Century”, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Free Association Books, London.
Serres, Michel, (1992) The Natural Contract. Translated by Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson . University of
Michigan Press.
Stivale, C. J. (2011) “When Philosophers Meet (sort of): Animals, Deleuze, and Haraway.” Paper given at the
Colloquium on Twentieth/Twenty-First Century French Studies, San Francisco University.
Van der Tuin, I. (2015) Generational Feminist: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach. Lexington.
Felicity Colman is Professor of Film and Media Arts at the Manchester School of Art,
Manchester Metropolitan University. She is the author of Film Theory: Creating a Cinematic
Grammar (Columbia University Press, 2014), Deleuze and Cinema (Berg, 2011), and editor of
Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (McGill-Queens University Press/ Routledge
/Acumen, 2009), and co-editor of Global Arts & Local Knowledge (Lexington, 2016), and
Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (Cambridge Scholars, 2007). She is Co-Editor [with Dr David
Deamer and Prof. Joanna Hodge] of the A/V Journal of Practical and Creative Philosophy. Her
current book projects are on “Digital Feminicity” and “Materialist Film”.
f.colman@mmu.ac.uk
232
Elizabeth de Freitas
Speculative mathematics
Mathematics often figures prominently in speculative philosophy. Whitehead (1985) defines
speculative philosophy as “the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of
general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted” (p. 3). This
seems a project of reasoned world building, where logical coherence and necessity supply a tight
and perhaps all too vigilant rationality. Speculative philosophy might then be a matter of installing
an “absolute necessity” that refuses to furnish the world, but finds solace in the mathematics of
the transfinite (Meillessoux, 2008). Oddly, such projects often misrecognize the creative, material
and indeed speculative activity of mathematics itself, treating it only as that which serves the
logical foundations of thought and reason. The diverse material activities of speculative
mathematics – mammalian or otherwise – are overlooked. If the act of speculation also taps the
imagination, refuses reason in creative ways, and works on the material plane, then we should
look for how a speculative mathematics pursues this kind of artful (often monstrous) technicity,
mutating thought in the process.
In this paper I explore how Deleuze and Guattari delve into the speculative dimensions of the
mathematical event, and I link this work to the ethical concerns raised by Stengers and others
about the speculative. I explore the extent to which Deleuze and Guattari show us how to disrupt
regimes of axiomatics through the affirmation of the event-nature of a speculative mathematics.
Elsewhere, I have focused on how their use of infinitesimal calculation expresses the “reciprocal
immanence” or “mutual immanence” of matter and the infinite (de Freitas, 2015). Deleuze and
Guattari (1987) describe the infinitesimal as that “intense matter” and “continuum of variation”
that conjugates content and expression in “reciprocal presupposition” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987,
p. 108-109). They describe the infinitesimal as that which quivers between two different kinds of
difference, joining these differences together in a folding continuum. In this paper, I extend that
discussion, exploring the implications of this mixture of the finite, infinite and diagrammatic, by
focusing on potential relationships between mathematics and the speculative.
References
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (Trans. B. Massumi).
Minnesota, U.S.: University of Minnesota Press.
De Freitas, E. (2015). Number sense and the calculating child: Measure, multiplicity, and mathematical monsters.
Discourse: Studies in the cultural politics of education. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2015.1075703
Meillassoux, Q. (2008). After finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency. London: Continuum International
Publishing Group.
Whitehead, A.N. (1985). Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, New York: The
Free Press.
Elizabeth de Freitas is Professor of STEM Education, in the Education and Social Research
Institute, at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on philosophical
investigations of mathematics, science and technology, pursuing the implications and applications
of this work in the learning sciences. She is co-author of Mathematics and the body: Material
entanglements in the classroom (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Her current book projects
are an edited collection, entitled What is a mathematical concept? (Cambridge University Press)
and a book series on Deleuze and Education Research (Edinburgh University Press).
defreitas@mmu.ac.uk
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Anna Hickey-Moody
Feeling futures: embodied imaginations and intensive time
“… people who speak these days of the social ‘exclusion’ of those who apparently have no
‘future’, who complain and protest because [of] their assignation to a miserable and continuing
present is experienced as the equivalent of a death sentence” (Marc Auge, The Future, 2014: 3).
The excluded people to whom Auge so dismissively refers are largely young people with tenuous
relationships to schooling and education. ‘Educational failure’ and associated ‘miserable and
continuing presents’ are socially produced. In order to understand this complex social
production, I develop an appreciation of the influence of embodied imagination. I draw on
Deleuze’s Spinozist thinking on the affective, and gesture towards embodied imagination as a
form of intensive time that arrests possibilities of some kinds of future imaginings (Deleuze
1988). Young people who ‘fail’ in educational terms do so for practical reasons: reasons that
relate to relationships between class, gender, 'race', geography and experience. There are
dimensions of this experience of ‘failure’ and cultural disengagement that can be read as youth
resistance to governmental imperatives, modes of resistance that are conscious and unconscious
expressions of some young people’s experiences of alienation.
Through Spinoza’s work on
embodied imagination, I move in to examine Deleuze’s work on intensive time, and outline how
these ideas can be put to work to provide new insights for understanding just how critical feelings
are to the production and disavowal of educational futures. The exclusion of students’ feelings
from existing studies of widening participation is a way of further excluding and silencing
students whose voices and experiences should be at the center of this debate. I develop a
framework that positions young people’s bodies, experiences, voices and emotions firmly at the
center of theoretical work.
References
Auge, M. (2014) The Future, (trans. John Howe), Verso: London and New York.
Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. City Lights Books.
Dr Anna Hickey-Moody is Head of the PhD in Arts and Learning at the Centre for Arts and
Learning, where she leads the research collaborations of an interdisciplinary team of practitioners
and researchers. With Rob Imrie, Anna also co-directs the Disability Research Centre. She is
known for her philosophically informed empirical research and has recently published on young
publics (Review of Education, Culture, Pedagogy and Society), disability and dance (Sport,
Education and Society) and diffractive pedagogies (Gender and Education).
a.hickey-moody@gold.ac.uk
Respondent
Janell Watson is Professor of French at Virginia Tech, USA. She is author of Literature and
Material Culture from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge UP, 1999) and Guattari’s Diagrammatic
Thought (Continuum, 2009). She is editor of The Minnesota Review: a journal of creative and
critical writing (Duke UP).
rjwatson@vt.edu
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Uses of the Virtual
Participants: Sandra Lemeilleur, Oleg Lebedev, Jean-Sébastien Laberge, Catarina Pombo
Nabais, Aurélien Chastan
Panel argument:
The panel proposes to reflect upon different facets of the virtual. Metaphysics, aesthetics, politics
and anthropological philosophy meet in order to explore what Deleuze and Guattari called the
“components” of a concept in “What is Philosophy?”. Nobody knows what the virtual, as a
conceptual tool, can do. We therefore propose to experiment different uses of the virtual to draw
some plans and to trace some intersecting lines.
Sandra Lemeilleur asks the following question: World Wide Web a sort of simulacrum of the
Virutal? As an interstitial territory, it has a substantial proximity to production of subjectivity
because both are always in progress. Internet continually weaves its network connection, so, it is
never finished and subjectivity is but an infinite production. However, this area is an imperfect
layer of current existential territories creating feelings of inconsistency and confusion. Because
what is "written" on Facebook or a dating sites functions as referent. This mismatch causes
tension in exchanges because subjectivity operates entries to and exits from territories faster than
the projection of assemblages of desire are published on Web. And its ancient assemblages of
desire have changed in this interval of time. Web gives an inconsistent representation to
subjectivity with regard to its production. This trouble transforms this production and the
conceptualisation of Virtual.
Olef Lebedev focuses on why the disavowal of personal consciousness is needed for a genuine
philosophy of the virtual, and analyses the dispersion of the subject every genuine thinking
implies. By doing so, he shows the importance of Sartrean philosophy in the elaboration of some
key aspects of the virtual and therefore in any potential use of this concept..
Jean-Sébastien Laberge is interested by an ecological use of the virtual to articulate his relation
to the plurality of actual existential territories. Since Guattari presents ecosophy, on one hand, as
an ecology of the virtual and that it is also, on the other hand, a political ecology and a pluralism.
What does Guattari mean, firstly, by an ecology of the virtual, and secondly, how does it relate to
the actual political ecology and the pluralism that ecosophy promotes?
Catarina Pombo Nabais analyses the concept of virtual in “Superpositions” in order to
understand its double definition both as potentiality and power (puissance). To think this double
definition of the virtual, is to understand Deleuze’s approach to the concept of minor literature in
this book, as the minoration of the real as political power.
Aurélien Chastan proposes an approach of the deleuzian idea that the “law governing the
development of ‘the natural man’” is “a development that is in the making from the origin and
the directions virtually contained in the origin” — an idea which one can find in the 1959-1960
Sorbonne course by Deleuze on Rousseau: “what is natural is no longer the primitive.” Aside
from “the great Spinoza-Nietzsche identity” at the heart of which Bergson is, does not Deleuze’s
philosophy tends to a more discreet ontologico-political identity between Rousseau, Sartre and
Spinoza as we can learn reading the 1980 courses by Deleuze on Spinoza? And could we
understand in this sense the Deleuzo-Guattarian paradox that desire or the plan of immanence is
not back to Nature but artifice?
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The meeting of these researchers at the International Deleuze Studies Conference in Lisbon is
underlying this proposal. Since that time we have extensively exchanged among each others on
the possible evolution of Deleuze's philosophy in our time. The strive for interdisciplinarity
present in this panel aims at a renewal of philosophy, always in touch with concrete problems.
Sandra Lemeilleur
The Web, a Simulacrum of Virtual for the Production of Subjectivity?
Keywords: Production of subjectivity, Dating sites, Assemblage of desire
Sandra Lemeilleur is interested in the evolution of senses of concept of Territory within new
seduction loci: dating websites. To meet a partner, we no longer need space as a nightclub, a party
or a bar, we can make meetings in a new space without being physically together. Then, can we
talk about this space in terms of an existential territory? What does this modify of love
relationships? Territory as an element of desire assemblage needs to find a new definition with
the invention of the Web. What are the similarities and differences between Virtual and internet?
What does it change for production of subjectivity? We can read on these websites lots of
intimate discourses in order to make ourselves look attractive. Is this new utterance capacity
(capacité d’énonciation) also a new way of resingularising subjectivity? Inevitable distance
imposed by devices gives the possibility to express ourselves more easily. More attractive and
featureless expressivity to serve the abolishing of virulence of meeting someone else seems to be
the virtue. The profiles of registered users reveal a glossing over of the norms of self-presentation
through the reuse and the update of differents shapes of intimate. Web as a territory of the
intimate?
Sandra Lemeilleur is a PhD student in communication sciences. After graduating in clinical
psychology, she turned to communication sciences with an anthropological and epistemological
perspective, focusing on « the Expression of the Intimate in the Virtual Space » and more widely
on the uses of this new space. Website: http://iev.hypotheses.org/
sandralemeilleur@yahoo.fr
Oleg Lebedev
On the Possibility of Thought without Subject: Sartre and Deleuze
Keywords: Consciousness, Subjectivity, Sartre
Oleg Lebedev explores the fundamental influence of Sartre’s “La transcendance de l’ego” on
Deleuze’s philosophy of the difference. When the transcendental field becomes impersonal and
purified from the presupposition of a unified ego, the “cracked I” finally acquires the power of
the differential unconsciousness and puts us on the way for thinking. For we have to be delivered
from the “internal life” in order to promote the new image of thought where everything is
outside: everything, even ourselves. Hence, the paper demonstrates in what respect the legacy of
Sartre’s impersonal consciousness affects Deleuze’s concept of the virtual found in Difference
and Repetition.
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Oleg Lebedev is a teaching assistant in philosophy at the Université Catholique de Louvain
(Belgium). His research interests focused so far on cinematic realism (especially among French
theoreticians and film critics influenced by Bazin, such as Daney or Comolli), and on the
conceptualisation of the link of politics and aesthetics proposed by Jacques Rancière. His current
research pertains to the theory of subjectivity and individuation in the philosophy of Deleuze.
lebedev.oleg.sergeevitch@gmail.com
Jean-Sébastien Laberge
Ecosophy: an Ecology of the Virtual and a Political Pluralism
Keywords: Ecosophy, Ecology of the virtual, Political pluralism
Jean-Sébastien Laberge focuses on Guattari's ecosophy to show how this ecology of the virtual
articulates a plurality of existential territories and their singular, polyphonic and heterogenetical
grasping. By this means, we will look at the new political-ethical-aesthetical paradigm that
Guattari proposes and hence the relation between an actual political ecology and its virtual
counterpart. This paper will therefore approach some components of Guattari's existential
political ecology of the virtual, bringing together his Sartrean legacy, the innovative Deleuzian
virtual and the unique transversal Guattarian activism in order to highlight some peculiar and key
aspects of Guattari’s ecosophy.
In “Chaosmosis” Guattari talks about ecosophy as an ecology of the virtual. This ecology has to
be understood in keeping with the four axes of the ecosophic object that he proposes in the same
book, and is therefore linked to a cartography of the virtual. The first aim of our proposition is to
explain how ecosophy articulates an ecology of the virtual. Moreover, keeping in mind the strong
political connotation that ecosophy has, how does this ecology of the virtual relate itself to an
actual political ecology and the articulation of the plurality of existential territories? As Guattari
says, an ecology of the virtual implies that we think politic praxis anew.
Jean-Sébastien Laberge is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Ottawa
(Canada) and in Philosophy at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense (France). After
having been interested in Deleuze's appropriation of Spinoza's metaphysics, his researches now
focuses on the relationship between Spinoza's practical philosophy and the work of Deleuze and
Guattari. He is particularly interested in the links that can be established with Guattari's ecosophy
in regard of issues related to pluralism.
jeanseblab@hotmail.com
Catarina Pombo Nabais
The Concept of Virtual in “Superpositions”
Keywords: Virtual, Power, Puissance
Catarina Pombo Nabais analyses the concept of virtual in “Superpositions” in order to
understand its double definition both as potentiality and power (puissance).
Minor literature is the literature of an asphyxiated real, of a real as a political act of resistance. It is
minor by a subtraction from a main language. It is the result of a political decision to “minorate”
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power. According to Deleuze in “Superpositions”, Carmelo Bene is the author of continuous
variations by minoration of the power. And these variations are ways to bring about new
possibilities. What Deleuze emphasizes in Bene is precisely the idea that one has to remove all the
power marks in order to release the potentialities that were oppressed inside the text.
Mercutio, for example, is virtually in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet because he has the power
(puissance) to become in Bene’s piece. The virtual contains the power (puissance) – and the
power (puissance) is always the power (puissance) to become. Thus the power (puissance) is the
opposite of the petrification of a state, of the form of all power (le pouvoir).
Catarina Pombo Nabais has a PhD in Philosophy by Université Paris VIII, Vincennes - SaintDennis, under the supervision of Jacques Rancière, with a dissertation untitled: «L’Esthétique en
tant que Philosophie de la Nature: le Concept de Vie chez Gilles Deleuze. Pour une Théorie
Naturelle de l'Expréssivité. Regards sur la Littérature», 2007.
Pos-doc Researcher at the Centre of Philosophy of Science of University of Lisbon (CFCUL).
Head of the CFCUL Science-Art-Philosophy LAB since 2014.
Head of the CFCUL Science and Art FCT Research Group from 2008 up to 2014.
Author of «Deleuze: Philosophie et Littérature», Paris, L’Harmattan, 2013.
catarinapombonabais@gmail.com
Aurélien Chastan
An Intersectional Unconscious? Perspectives on a Cinema Caught between the EnergyImage and Crystal-Image Crisis
Keywords: Virtual, Cinema, Artifice
Aurélien Chastan proposes perspectives on a Cinema Caught between the Energy-Image and
Crystal-Image Crisis. Starting from the Guattarian conception of an intersectional unconscious,
perhaps one could claim that it may be possible to see movies made by Nicolas Roeg, Peter Weir,
Stanley Kubrick, John Boorman, Ken Russell, David Cronenberg or Paul Almond differently,
and to approach them as signs of a peculiar cinema, historico-geographically rooted in British
Commonwealth territories and the postcolonial problems that arise from them. This implies to
take into account the singularity of a cinema caught between what Gilles Deleuze conceptualized
as the American Action-Image and European Crystal-Image crisis. If there is agreement on the
fact that some texts written by Guattari recommend that the unconscious be approached in
intersectional terms and to desert Kleinian and Lacanian psychoanalytic formulas for more
Peircean, Braudelian and Labovian ones, to what extent do Deleuze’s books’ devoted to cinema
allow us to understand the diversity of signs and styles emitted by movies—which differ from
those of US and European films, although they borrow elements from each other?
Aurélien Chastan is a PhD student in Political Thought at the University of Ottawa (Canada).
His research interests include what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari conceptualized as the
politics of desire and their critical rethinking (Miguel Abensour, Gilles Châtelet, Maurizio
Lazzarato, Giorgio Passerone, Fredric Jameson, René Schérer, Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Noël
Vuarnet, François Zourabichvili, etc.).
aurelien.chastan@gmail.com
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La Mystique and Le Mystique
Tony Yanick: Mysticism and Mathesis: Creative re-ordering of the universe
Yvette Granata: From the Virtual to Mediumless: The Generic Gnosis of Repetition and Cyber-Mysticism
Florin Berindeanu: Deleuze and Meaning
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