Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Geometric Measure Theory As a Monster Mash Society for Social Studies of Science San Diego 28 October 1999

by Xin Wei Sha

Rethinking Human Nature and the Place of (Wo)Man in the world: Anthropology between Philosophy and Science. A Manifesto

by Giacomo Pezzano

We are knowing more and more about (Wo)Man, but the determination of her/his nature is still problematic: asking «What... more We are knowing more and more about (Wo)Man, but the determination of her/his nature is still problematic: asking «What is (Wo)Man?» is paradoxically possible only in the space left open by (wo)man’s erasure. Whatever human nature is, (wo)man wants to know her/himself, because if (s)he does not know who (s)he is, (s)he can not know where to go: moving from hominitas to humanitas requires a definition of (wo)man’s nature, of her/his «place» in the world, in view of describing ex-istence as a modulation of the «World Openness» and an attempt to find a way of articulate the possibilities, as intrinsically «medial» and «modal» since it is founded on «referral» and «relationship with the outside»

Comunità, immunità, apertura verso l’alterità: una biopolitica affermativa e oltre-umana?

by Giacomo Pezzano

Published in "Trópos. Rivista di ermeneutica e critica filosofica”, IV, 2, 2011, pp. 167-184

Roberto Esposito claims that biopolitics characterizes the entire modernity, and that it is built on the immunity... more Roberto Esposito claims that biopolitics characterizes the entire modernity, and that it is built on the immunity dispositive. Im-munity is the negation of the munus which animates and builds com-munity: inside the immunitarian paradigm, thinking politics and ontology is considering men as ab-solutes beings, without any kind of engagement to each other, inhabited by a vacuum to deny. Esposito believes this means shaping an anthropological paradigm (systematized by philosophical anthropology in the 20th century) in which man is thought to be distinct from the animal since he is capable of denying his own nature and, more generally, his relationship with the world and the other beings – that is, a paradigm in which community has no ‘positive’ place. In order to overcome the immunitarian paradigm, we need to define the outlines of an affirmative biopolitics, a politics ‘of ’ life and not ‘on’ life. This biopolitical shift requires the understanding of the ‘flow of life,’ of its everlasting and unprotected openness: Esposito claims that life is impersonal and intrinsically normative, over-human and perpetually exposed to the ‘outside.’ Finally, this perspective leaves open a crucial question: can over-man exist without man?

"Seeing Immanent Difference: Lorna Simpson and the Face's Affect"

by Laurie Rodrigues

Published in _Rhizomes_, Issue 23 (April 2012).
Special Issue on Deleuze and Photography. Guest Editor, Michael Kramp.

"Seeing Immanent Difference: Lorna Simpson and the Face's Affect"

by Laurie Rodrigues

Published in _Rhizomes_, Issue 23 (April 2012).
Special Issue on Deleuze and Photography. Guest Editor, Michael Kramp.

Material Connectivity, the Immaterial and the Aesthetic of Eating Practices: An Argument for How Genetically Modified Foodstuff Becomes Inedible

by Emma Roe

Published in Environment and Planning A 2006.

Concern about eating biotechnologically produced foodstuffs is embedded within the complex relationship between food,... more Concern about eating biotechnologically produced foodstuffs is embedded within the complex relationship between food, science, politics, and everyday eating practices. In this paper I consider how this concern is expressed less at the reflexive level of opinions and attitudes and more at the nonreflexive level of eating practices. Therefore, I draw upon literatures that talk of a practical everyday aesthetic and literatures that assert the significance of the material to geographical work, and go on to argue for the significance of a material connective aesthetic within eating practices. This argument is developed empirically and theoretically by considering to what extent consumers can discuss the edibility of different types of carrots in terms of superficial material qualities, integral material qualities, and the immaterial. Crucially, the process of edibility formation is thus understood as relationally embedded in the material environment. This provokes a realisation for an ethics and a politics of (im)material connectivities. This work contributes to geographical work in which an embodied affective ethic is employed, by arguing that the transversal qualities of the material are as significant as the transversal qualities of `affect'. It is relevant to those studying consumption, biogeographies, and nonreflexive practices.

Heidegger et Deleuze, même combat ?

by Pierre-Alexandre Fradet

à paraître dans PhaenEx, vol. 8.1, mai 2013.

Rhizomes and other uncountables: The malaise of enumeration in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta

by Shaylih Ryan Muehlmann

American Ethnologist 2012

Like a Kid in a Candy Shop: Truth and Discourse in DeLillo’s White Noise

by Beau Wuthrich

During the Enlightenment Period of the 19th Century, Immanuel Kant rejected the belief in the ability of the human... more During the Enlightenment Period of the 19th Century, Immanuel Kant rejected the belief in the ability of the human mind to understand the universe in its entirety with his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s claim was that human perception was in fact a unity of manifolds which determinately synthesized experience, binding the human subject into time, space and causality and separating him or her from the ontological, or “real” world. For Kant, there were aspects of the universe entirely indecipherable to and unintelligible by human subjects. Kant termed this transcendental spirit numen. In his breakout novel, White Noise, Don DeLillo explores Kant’s numen and the role it plays in the postmodern age. The perceptions of DeLillo’s characters reflect a certain detachment from and estrangement to the world of the objective. In this era, it is the signs and symbols man has created for himself which transcend and override the ontological cosmos and in effect replace it, attaining a higher order of valence for the individual. For DeLillo’s protagonist, Jack Gladney, the antithesis of this world of Baudrillardian simulacra is the abyss, death, the intangible and unsignafiable state of human consciousness. Death is a state of non-existence, hostile and intangible to the psyche; in other words, the perfect historical expression of Kant’s undetected numen or, as allegorized by Jack’s son Heinrich via scientific narrative, the invisible “neutrinos [that] go right through the earth” (DeLillo, 34), imperceptible “waves and radiation” (38). DeLillo’s novel gestures toward the authoritative systems and structures erected to barricade humanity against death: the abstract and discursive institutions Mark Conroy describes as the “master narratives of cultural transmission in Jack Gladney's universe: the familial, the civic, the humanist and the religious” (“From Tombstone to Tabloid.” 97), or, to use a more concrete example, the psychically-invested dams against death, the Pyramids of Giza or the Great Wall of China invested in by their dead erectors (DeLillo, 159). The rising question relates to the actual nature of truth and whether there truly is a Real-Real to go back to.

Dominant Vertebrates or The Bound Book which Binds Into Bondage: McLuhan’s Constellations and Nebulae in Resonant Acoustic Space

by Beau Wuthrich

Michel Foucault has said that power is “constructed and functions on the basis of particular powers, myriad of issues... more Michel Foucault has said that power is “constructed and functions on the basis of particular powers, myriad of issues and myriad of effects of power" (1980, 188). In other words, power is divined from multifarious institutions, practices and categories. To speak briefly, “Forms”. Macluhan states that "The Gutenberg Galaxy is intended to trace the ways in which the forms of experience and of mental outlook and expression have been modified, first by the phonetic alphabet and then by typographic printing." (1) The mosaic approach becomes the only relevant one, for in order to attain an auditory field beyond the phonetic alphabet and print, McLuhan must fragment the looking glass of print media, which values and enforces a theoretical, linear, individual approach. To do otherwise would be to sabotage his own project. The form of McLuhan’s book is, in a sense, its essence. Following this device, this essay will take a critical applicative approach rather than a reflective one, entering the auditory field and resonating with McLuhan’s text, as opposed to observing it from a unitary point of view.

Per un’ontologia del (post)umano

by Giacomo Pezzano

Published in “Vita pensata”, II, 12, giugno 2011, pp. 15-27

An attempt to think a "post-human" ontology, between "dynamis" and "modus" An attempt to think a "post-human" ontology, between "dynamis" and "modus"

Stirner, Deleuze, Esposito: la maschera del diritto e il vitalismo anarchico

by Giacomo Pezzano

Published in “Lessico di Etica pubblica”, I, 2, 2010, pp. 87-96

A short summary of the evolution of the theoretical foundations of anarchism A short summary of the evolution of the theoretical foundations of anarchism

Visuality in a Minor Key: The Photographic Work of Anna Sherbany (2006)

by Janice Cheddie

Catalogue Essay for the photographic Exhibition Beyond Spoken Word. Solo Exhibition by Artist Anna Sherbany. Robert Phillips Gallery, Kingston University, UK, 2006. Artist Website: www.annasherbany.com

The essay discusses the work of the British photographer Anna Sherbany through the work of the French philosophers... more The essay discusses the work of the British photographer Anna Sherbany through the work of the French philosophers Deleuze and Felix Guattari using their text ‘Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature’ (1986), to discuss the concepts of 'deterrotialisation'. Sherbany is located at the margins of many discourses, as an Iraqi Jew living in a Britain within a European Jewish diaspora, a minority within contemporary Britain. These varying displacements and multiple diasporic experiences have formed part of the raw materials of her practice and have been transformed into visual acts of deterritorialisation of dominant languages. Her work references and challenges these multiple perspectives and like Deleuze and Guattari's notion of a minor literature, this deterroritalisation of dominant modes of visuality is not a mode of practice concerned with personal quest for cultural or political identity. Rather Sherbany articulates the interconnections between the social, aesthetic and the discursive.
Key Words: Anna Sherbany; Philosophy, Vision and Visuality Research; Iraqi-Jewish Diaspora; Art Theory; Photography; British Photographers, Diaspora

Schizoid subjectivities?: Re-theorising teen-girls’ sexual cultures in an era of ‘sexualisation’,

by Jessica Ringrose

2012 “Of Camps, Gulags & Extraordinary Renditions: Infrastructural Violence in Romania,” Ethnography, 13(4): Forthcoming.

by Bruce O'Neill

Paper prepared for a special issue of Ethnography (13/4) on “Infrastructural Violence" edited by Bruce O'Neill and Dennis Rodgers.

From fascist prisons to Communist-era gulags, Romania does not simply have a history of torture, but also an existing... more From fascist prisons to Communist-era gulags, Romania does not simply have a history of torture, but also an existing infrastructure conducive to its practice. Romania, human rights organizations have made clear, hosted a number of “secret detention centers” used by the U.S. Government in its program of “extraordinary rendition,” whereby intelligence agents illegally rendered, detained and tortured suspected terrorists. Both Romania’s gulags and its secret detention centers call to mind Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “the camp” – an extra-juridical space where human life is reduced to its bare form – which is why this article pivots on a historical comparison between the two. While both gulags and extraordinary rendition share material infrastructure, and both were organized around the production and management of “bare life,” this article shows that rendition operates through a very different spatial logic than a gulag. As a result, survivors of these different spatial iterations of “the camp” offer qualitatively different accounts of bare life. This observation allows ethnographers to extend Agamben’s analytical reach by spatially contextualizing the form, relations and kinds of violence taking shape inside “camps,” allowing theorists to think about bare life as a historically specific phenomenon.

(2012) Un exemple d'écosophie des risques industriels

by Tobias Girard

Published in "Chimères", 76, 2012, p. 41-52.

En prenant appui sur une enquête anthropologique de terrain réalisée de 2005 à 2007 dans la zone industrielle de... more En prenant appui sur une enquête anthropologique de terrain réalisée de 2005 à 2007 dans la zone industrielle de Marseille/Fos-sur-Mer, cet article propose quelques exemples pour illustrer les manières dont différents dispositifs de sécurité peuvent articuler des questions techniques, liées à la nature des menaces, avec des enjeux de pouvoir, des visions du monde et des rapports sociaux, des manières de traiter les informations ou de composer avec une émotion comme la peur. Ces dispositifs étant eux-mêmes instables, nous verrons ensuite comment leur détraquement peut paradoxalement assurer le fonctionnement de la société de contrôle des risques.

Deleuze and Guattari’s Historiophilosophy: Philosophical Thought and its Historical Milieu

by Craig Lundy

Critical Horizons, Vol 12, No 2 (2011)

This paper will examine the relation between philosophical thought and the various milieus in which such thought takes... more This paper will examine the relation between philosophical thought and the various milieus in which such thought takes place using the late work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It will argue that their assessment of this relation involves a rearticulation of philosophy as an historiophilosophy. To claim that Deleuze and Guattari promote such a form of philosophy is contentious, as their work is often noted for implementing an ontological distinction between becoming and history, whereby the former is associated with the act of creation and the latter with retrospective representations of this creative process. Furthermore, when elaborating on the creative nature of philosophical thought, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly refer to philosophy as a 'geophilosophy' that is in contrast to history. Nevertheless, this paper will demonstrate that far from abandoning the category of history, Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the relations between philosophical thought and relative milieus suggests to us an historical ontology and methodology that is a critical part of philosophy’s nature.

Deleuze’s Untimely: Uses and Abuses in the Appropriation of Nietzsche

by Craig Lundy

Deleuze and History, eds. Jeffrey Bell and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 188-205

This paper studies the expression of Nietzsche’s untimely within a Deleuzian philosophy of history. The concepts of... more This paper studies the expression of Nietzsche’s untimely within a Deleuzian philosophy of history. The concepts of immanence and the outside form a relation throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s work that leads to their radical conception of the event, and in particular the historical event. As we see in What Is Philosophy?, in conjunction with Foucault’s actual and Péguy’s aternal, the Nietzschean untimely provides a touchstone for Deleuze and Guattari’s explanation of creativity in the historical event: the unhistorical is located as both the force and the site from which the sedimentations of history emerge. But while Deleuze and Guattari share in Nietzsche’s attempt to facilitate creations counter to our historical present, it cannot be said that they explicitly mirror (or indeed faithfully recount) Nietzsche’s analysis of history, its terms, and its effects in society. By tracing the various uses of the untimely throughout Deleuze’s work, a differential ‘becoming/history’ materialises that simultaneously enhances aspects of Nietzsche’s thoughts on the untimely whilst conflating others.

Minor Architecture as Planning Design

by Bradley Angell

Presented at the 2nd International Conference-Workshop on Sustainable Architecture & Urban Design, Penang, Malaysia.

As variants of the dominant culture homogenize, criticism of any local dominant culture is increasingly applicable on... more As variants of the dominant culture homogenize, criticism of any local dominant culture is increasingly applicable on a global scale. This ever greater applicability of critical discourse to local conditions has an enhanced validity in the built environment, where criticism is a reflection of the disenfranchising tendency of modernization upon the bottom billion. Selected communities facing disenfranchisement have reacted by critically producing their own minority form of urbanism within the framework of the dominant culture. As a new method of design, these politically charged expressions of the built environment are dignified as minor architecture. I theorize that these expressions assert a non-violent political proclamation against the dominant culture, manifesting as counter-measures against the ills of global modernization.  I have identified and tested four cases for study, including the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, Student Bonfire, Isla Vista Recreation and Park District, and the Arcata Cannabis Community.  I argue with my findings that those communities who execute a minor architecture not only avoid communal disenfranchisement, but simultaneously counter-modernize against globalization in its power to disenfranchise the community. Such endeavours of minor architecture allow a rare opportunity for self-help development in furtherance of minority equity in the face of widespread global modernization.

"Portals in Duchamp and Pynchon" -- Text Only

by Martin E. Rosenberg

"Portals in Duchamp and Pynchon." Published in _Pynchon Notes_ 34-35 Papers from the Warwick Conference on Pynchon: Schizophrenia and Social Control. Spring-Fall 1994. pp. 148-175
http://independent.academia.edu/martinerosenberg/Papers/172150/_Portals_in_Duchamp_and_Pynchon_--_Text_Only