deleuze at greenwich

2015-04-24T06:25:00.000-07:00

volcanic lines:

deleuzian research group

Beyond Spinoza

2011-06-16T10:11:00.001-07:00

Three-part conference series exploring the presence of Early Modern concepts in contemporary philosophy and psychoanalytic theory.

To be held at Goldsmiths College, London, in July 2011. Room location will appear on website shortly. Open to all.

Tuesday 12th July 2011, 6 - 8pm

Introduction: Matthew Dennis (Co-organiser) 'The Contemporary Renaissance of Early Modern Philosophy'

Cesare Casarino (Minnesota) ‘The Expression of Time: Deleuze, Spinoza, Cinema’

Charlotte Knox-Williams (Winchester) ‘The Studio Transformed: The Expanded Monad as a Model for the Studio in Practice-based Research’

Tuesday 19th July 2011, 6 - 8pm

Guillaume Collett (Kent) ‘Deleuze and Spinoza: from Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza to The Logic of Sense’

Robin Dunford (Exeter) ‘Assemblage Theory and ‘Emergentic Spinozism’’

Tuesday 26th July 2011, 6 - 8pm

Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmiths) 'The Care of the Self versus the Ethics of Desire (or, Spinoza between Lacan and Foucault)'

Assunta Ruocco (Goldsmiths) ‘Monad and Multitude’ 

Concluding remarks: Nicole Osborne (Co-organiser) 'Spinoza and Contemporary Practice'

Please check website for conference abstracts and further updates: http://beyondspinoza.wordpress.com

beyondspinoza@gmail.com

CFP - Beyond Spinoza

2011-05-10T11:02:00.000-07:00

Beyond Spinoza invite proposals for 30 minute presentations which trace or explore the presence of Early Modern philosophical concepts in contemporary philosophy and psychoanalytic theory.

These could include, but are not limited to:

Spinoza and French philosophy (Badiou, Deleuze),

Spinoza and psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan),

Spinoza and politics (Balibar, Macherey),

Spinoza and self-transformation (Foucault, Lacan),

Spinoza and schizoanalysis (Guattari, Deleuze),

Leibniz and French philosophy (Deleuze, Gueroult),

Leibniz and contemporary art, Leibniz and maths.

Beyond Spinoza is a collective of London-based postgraduate students who wish to enrich and deepen their understanding and enjoyment of contemporary philosophy by exploring its historical and conceptual roots.

The series will run once a week, for three consecutive weeks, at Goldsmiths College in July 2011.

Each session will comprise two 30 minute presentations followed by discussion and drinks. The series will be followed later in the year by a publication of revised papers.

Please submit proposals of around 300 words to beyondspinoza@gmail.com on or before the 1st June 2011

Spinoza Reading Group

2010-04-24T05:49:00.000-07:00

Volcanic Lines research group members will be attending the following reading group and we'd encourage anyone else to do so as well. The 'call' for the group is as follows:

London-based research students will hold a reading group on Spinoza's Ethics and selected correspondence, starting 6pm Tuesday 18th May and continuing for approximately 8 weeks.

The reading for first session will be Ethics Book I (up to Proposition 16) and Letter 12.

Samuel Shirley's useful introduction to Spinoza's terminology can be found in the Translator's Preface of the Hackett edition.

We'll meet weekly, 6 - 7:30pm, in the restaurant area of the British Library.

Everyone welcome.

Please contact matthewjamesdennis@googlemail.com for further details.

2007-04-15T12:25:00.000-07:00

Integrations#1 - reading material

2007-04-12T08:37:00.000-07:00

I have uploaded a copy of the Simon Duffy essay so that people can read it for the workshop and I will also try to remember to bring some printed copies along on the day for those who can't print it out...

You can get it here

It's in PDF format, so you'll need an Acrobat reader, which is readily available on the net (google is your friend in these matters...)

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Integrations #1 - update

2007-04-09T05:33:00.001-07:00

We're all looking forward to the 'Deleuze and Calculus' workshop this coming Saturday (14th April) and a few notes for those already registered and wanting to do some preparation before attending.

1) The first session will be led by Bat and he has suggested as a 'provisional outline' of what he will do the following:
"Re the first session, what I planned to run through was some stuff from Greek mathematics - Pythagoras, the Meno episode, irrational numbers, the method of exhaustion - then move onto Descartes and Newton/Leibniz and a basic exposition of calculus - followed by brief comments on how the question of making calculus rigorous spurred modern developments in mathematics, eg topology, analysis, logic, nonstandard analysis."

2) The second session will focus on Chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition (the first twenty or so pages in particular - in the new Continuum edition I think pages 214-230 contain a very curious and interesting move (this is pp168-182 in the older Athlone edition and there is a 'natural' section break indicated in the Athlone that's missing in the Continuum. This corresponds to pp218-235 of the French Press Universitaire edition of 1968, where the 'natural' section break is also present.)

In addition to this chunk of Chapter 4 of DR the following essay is secondary material we might have time to explore - Simon Duffy, The differential point of view of the infinitesimal calculus in Spinoza, Leibniz and Deleuze contained in Vol37#3, October 2006 edition of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. Scanned PDF's will be available here by Thursday 12th in time for people to read through this material if they haven't received it through the post.

any questions, email http://www.blogger.com/volcaniclines@hotmail.com of course...

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WINTER/SPRING 2007 Workshops on the Essays of Gilles Deleuze

2007-01-13T05:22:00.000-08:00

This workshop series is now completed. We feel that a great deal has been achieved and further workshops are planned both on new topics and developing the work done here. Read reports and join the ongoing discussion by clicking here.

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Mondays 7-9pm

Reading Group Workshops - on the Essays of Gilles Deleuze

Location: QM167, Queen Mary Building, Greenwich Maritime Campus (see below for how to register)

6. Monday, 26th February

Text: 'Spinoza and the Three "Ethics"', Essays Critical and Clinical.

Presentation by Matthew Astill (Greenwich) on 'Spinoza and the Three "Ethics"'

Read the presentation and the workshops discussion here.

5. Monday, 19th February

Text: 'The Actual and the Virtual' , Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, Continuum, London, 2002, pp. 112-5. (N.B. this piece does not appear in the first edition of Dialogues, only in Dialogues II)

Presentation by Nick Midgeley on 'The Actual and the Virtual.'

You can access this text online here.

(many thanks to Nick for this).

Read a report of the workshop discussion here.

Monday, 12th February - No Workshop.

4. Monday, 5th February

Text: 'On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy,' Essays Critical and Clinical and also included in Kant's Critical Philosophy as the preface.

Presentation by Edward Willatt (Greenwich) entitled 'Discordant Accord: Faculties Taken To Their Limits in Four Poetic Formulas'

Read the presentation, a report of the workshop's discussion and comment here.

3. Monday, 29th January

Text: 'Bartleby; or, The Formula', Essays Critical and Clinical.
Presentation by Neil Chapman (Reading) on 'Bartleby; or, The Formula'

An online copy of Melville's 'Bartleby, the Scrivener' is available here.

Read a report of the workshop and comment here.

2. Monday, 22nd January

Text: 'The Method of Dramatisation', Desert Islands and Other Texts.

Presentation by Matt Lee (Greenwich) on 'The Method of Dramatisation'

An online copy of the essay, a different translation to the one included in Desert Islands, is available here.

Read the presentation, a report on the workshop's discussion and comment here.

1. Monday 15th January

Text: 'The Exhausted', Essays Critical and Clinical.

Presentation by Edward Willatt (Greenwich) '"A fantastic decomposition of the Self" - Deleuze on individuation in The Exhausted.'

Read this presentation, a report on the workshop's discussion and comment here.

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Workshop Format, CFP and Registration

These innovative workshops of Deleuze’s essays will explore texts upon which relatively little work has been done but which have a great variety, depth and intensity. The collections from which essays will be selected are

- Essays Critical and Clinical

- Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953-1974

- Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995

- Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life.

The format will involve a short presentation on one essay each week, in depth discussion and the posting of notes online at dialogues at greenwich.

CFP: An invitation is extended to those who would like to give a presentation on one of Deleuze’s essays. E-mail volcaniclines@hotmail.com to discuss a title and date.

All sessions will be held on the Greenwich Maritime campus. The sessions are FREE and open to all but please REGISTER beforehand if you are not already a member of Greenwich University or the Volcanic Lines deleuzian research group – email volcaniclines@hotmail.com and we will send you an information pack.

Organised by Greenwich University Philosophy Department

'Integrations #1' - An Introductory Workshop on Deleuze and the Differential Calculus

2007-01-12T01:55:00.002-08:00

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Integrations#1

SATURDAY 14TH APRIL 10AM-5PM

Greenwich University, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich

Room: Queen Mary 167

The first in an intermittent series of workshops focused on the key background figures and concepts within the work of Deleuze. This first workshop will offer a basic introduction to the calculus followed by a session exploring the philosophical use of concepts from the calculus within Deleuze's work. We will be looking at the opening sections of the fourth chapter of Difference and Repetition (Ideas and the synthesis of difference) as well as some secondary material. Reading material will be provided.

Each session will last approximately three hours, including a tea-break. The sessions are workshop seminars, NOT lectures - an informal and participatory atmosphere is maintained. They are an experiment in collective learning.

Lunch is NOT provided unfortunately. The workshop is FREE but you must register and provide a land address if you want reading materials sent to you.

AGENDA:

10am - 1pm: an introduction to the calculus

1pm - 2pm: LUNCHBREAK

2pm - 5pm: Difference, differentials and Chapter 4

for further information and to register please email:

volcaniclines@hotmail.com

Volcanic Lines: Deleuzian Research Group
Philosophy Department, University of Greenwich

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7 JULY 2007 Timetable and Abstracts

2007-01-12T01:16:00.000-08:00

'The Strange Encounter of Kant and Deleuze'

Saturday July 7th, Greenwich University, Maritime Campus, Old Royal Naval College, London: 10am - 5pm

'My book on Kant is different, I like it very much, I wrote it as a book on an enemy, in it I was trying to show how he works, what his mechanisms are...'
Gilles Deleuze, Letter to Michele Cressole

'Our age is properly the age of critique, and to critique everything must submit.'
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

This conference aims to explore and dramatise the conceptual relations that exist between Gilles Deleuze and Immanuel Kant. Deleuze offers us a 'transcendental empiricism' in direct contrast to Kants' 'transcendental idealism' and the combination of their common ground and their stark oppositions makes this a particularly fertile realm of thought. There has been a growing recognition of the importance of the connections between Deleuze and Kant and this conference aims for the first time to place these relations centre stage. We are strongly encouraging both Deleuzian and Kantian scholars to come together in a constructive encounter that has critical importance for the wider philosophical community.

Timetable

10-10.30
Registration – Room Queen Anne 080 (all the session take place in Queen Anne Court)

10.30-12.00
Parallel Sessions

1. QA38
Joanna Hodge (Manchester Metropolitan)
‘Deleuze, Husserl, Kant: Transcendental Intermediaries ’

2. QA39
Edward Willatt (Greenwich) ‘Reason, Desire and Incompleteness in Deleuze’s Reading of Kant’

12.00-1.00
Lunch (not provided – there are cafes and shops in Greenwich town centre which is close to the campus and the Cutty Sark DLR station).

1.00-2.30
Parallel Sessions

1. QA 38
Matthew Hammond (Exeter) ‘Picking over the Bones of David Hume’

2. QA 39
Filipe P. Ferreira (New School for Social Research)
‘Bergsonism and Critique’

3.00-5.00
Keynote Session – The strange encounter...

QA 080

Daniel W. Smith (Middlesex/Purdue) ‘Deleuze, Kant, and the Post-Kantian Tradition’

Paul Davies (Sussex) ‘Regulating and Inventing Concepts’

Abstracts

1. Joanna Hodge (Manchester Metropolitan): ‘Deleuze, Husserl, Kant: Transcendental Intermediaries’

This paper consists in an exploration of two claims and an emergent problem about how to think the relation between reading texts signed by Deleuze and pursuing the task of inventing concepts. The puzzle about how to think the relation between Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense is set out clearly already by Michel Foucault, in his early response to their publication, in 1970, printed under the title “Theatrum Philosophicum”. My first claim is that this relation will continue to be obscure until and unless the full dimensions of Deleuze’s encounter with Husserl are taken into account, and my longer term ambition, not to be fulfilled here, is to follow through the thinking occasioned by such an encounter. I shall, however, adduce some remarks to indicate why this follow through should be undertaken. Its result would be the conversion of this claim from an interpretative hermeneutical claim into claim about the invention of concepts, which itself would take the form of conceptual invention. My second claim is that there is no sense for Deleuze of some cumulative development and improvement in philosophy, asrealising some teleological process. There is thus no place within Deleuzian accounts of invention for a Husserlian notion of a fulfilment or dereliction with respect to a task uniquely assigned to human beings, to realise rationality. This sets out a separationbetween lines of an encounter between Deleuze and Husserl, and opens out of a gap between a Deleuzian Husserl and the figure more usually construed, as committed to a system of 'ideas in the kantian sense'.

2. Edward Willatt (Greenwich): ‘Reason, Desire and Incompleteness in Deleuze’s Reading of Kant’

Deleuze's reading of Kant offers us an account of his system and of the points at which it is most productive. We find such an account in Deleuze's 1963 book 'Kant's Critical Philosophy'. In this paper I will focus upon this text in order to draw out his insights into the relation of the faculties of reason and understanding. I will seek to show that as well as offering an explanatory account of Kant's system in this text Deleuze also seeks to make it productive within his own thought, anticipating his use of Kant in later work. The account of cognition and its advance given in the 'Critique of Pure Reason' involves reason and its desires, along with a host of characters including the dogmatist and the sceptic. I will seek to relate the activity of the faculties in dealing with appearances to Deleuze's notion of the ‘problem-question complex’. I want to suggest that Deleuze finds the unity of cognition to be open and dynamic in Kant when he develops the role of reason's desires in the problems and questions that occupy the faculties and sustain their activity. This is taken further when Deleuze employs the notion of the ‘object=x’ in his reading of structuralism. I aim to conclude that Kant's account of cognition and its advance as a whole engage Deleuze productively in 'Kant’s Critical Philosophy' and beyond.

3. Filipe P. Ferreira (New School for Social Research): ‘Bergsonism and Critique’

We turn to Bergson, asking him for the body without organs. We find that he responds, that the body he thinks in Matter and Memory gives us a trajectory for stating this body as a problem. It is this question, the one which problematizes this body, that sets our investigation. As we continue, we find with Bergson that this body involves as its condition the astounding thesis that perception, as action, antecedes affection. In developing this thesis, we compose Bergson’s sophisticated account of the human body as a body without affection, without consciousness, a body which perceives and acts. In our desire to further problematize this body, we ask Bergson for this condition, for the difference in kind between perception and affection. He responds in the inverse direction, using this body, an accomplishment which seems to me a central contribution to contemporary philosophy, to restate further philosophical problems. That is, he uses this body as a condition for the unfolding of his philosophy. We associate here the statement of this body as a problem with the question of the genesis of Bergsonism. We also ask whether, in problematizing this body as the genesis of Bergsonism, and given its principal evolution, the project of a superior empiricism, we can develop insight, by making it ours the question of the genesis of this body, into this project. But how to proceed with this body, inquire into its genesis? At this point we know one its conditions: that this body is discovered in thinking perception as prior to affection. But how are we to inquire further? It is here that our discussion turns to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Following a hint in Matter and Memory, we find Bergson describing how it is that Kant does not follow in the direction of this body. We find that it is a problem of sensibility, of how Kant, for Bergson, uses his ‘magician’s wand’ to create representations from sensible conditions which he entirely dismisses. We have our second horizon: that which does not allow Kant to follow are these sensible conditions. But how are we to problematize these conditions without simply returning to the statement of the Bergson’s first accomplishment, his theory of pure perception? We then proceed to set up our discussion. We turn to Bergson’s images, and notice that they presuppose an unlimited totality, where the question for this philosopher is one of how, from this totality, perception is limited to our interest. We note that it is because one of these images is privileged, our body. In taking the question of limitation to the Critique of Pure Reason we find it is thought in the ‘Ideal of Pure Reason’, which discusses the ideal of complete determination of reality presupposed by the transcendental ideas. We then ask how Kant limits this total reality; we find that his Critique is directed to this unconditioned totality, that it is the limitation of this ideal of complete determination which will make this ideal beyond, beyond the possibility of experience and that which it presupposes: the determinable as the forms of intuition. Here we find a second condition for this body without organs: that the plane of pure determination be posited as such, where, in thinking the limitation to ideal determination, we think within the ideal, immanently to the ideal: it is the plane of immanence as a further condition for thinking the body without organs.

4. Matthew Hammond (Exeter): ‘Picking over the Bones of David Hume’

Towards the end of the First Critique, Kant praises Hume for ‘possibly’ having come up with a synthetic principle, but then failed to understand how that principle demanded that one move beyond the mere empirical repetition of conjoined presences, to form an idea of the agencies that make that conjoining necessary. Kant goes on to argue, that mere empirical repetition cannot found conjunctions, unless those conjunctions were themselves necessarily grounded in inner sense, and therefore already configured within time’s unity. Kant thereby argues that while one needs to accept Hume’s empirical case, one needs nonetheless to ground it elsewhere, in a unity, and the active synthesis of understanding that fashions that unity. This argument forms one of the essential ‘back-stories’, to the ‘Repetition in itself’ chapter in Difference and Repetition. - Deleuze’s position being complicated by the fact that while on the one hand, he certainly accepts Kant’s most basic criticism of Hume, that he lacks any explanation as to how presences come not only to pass, but also to be conjoined, in time; and yet on the other hand, Deleuze wishes to move Hume’s repetition beyond its empirical setting, so that it can become the very principle for a synthesis that requires no other unity beyond itself. Moreover, in making this move, Deleuze hopes to transfix Kant’s critique of Hume as itself an aspect of Hume’s own account of passive repetition. In Deleuze’s eyes, Kant’s understanding of Hume is his Achilles heel, just as much as it is the foundation of the First Critique. A re-thought Hume will allow one to corrode Kantianism from within, as the critique of Hume that lies at the core Kantianism is made to say something otherwise.

In this paper three distinct parts of this corrosion will be examined. Firstly I will consider the difference in the topography of Kant’s treatment of Hume, and of Deleuze’s. For Kant, the problem in Hume remains that he offers no way to understand how the absolute unity of representation in an instant is grounded in a single experience (A99), beyond that is, their mere repetition. Kant proposes the long detour of time to make good this omission. Deleuze however accepts that there is a problem in Hume’s use of the present, and that one does indeed need to think a time capable of ‘rendering’ the present present, and yet disputes whether this theory needs to save that present. On the contrary, for Deleuze, what is substantive is the repetition itself (and not the presences that repeat). The detour through time is not to re-found the ‘true present’, but to unwind the disruptive power of that which repeats. Secondly, Deleuze argues, if Hume’s conception of the self can be grounded in time, the need to suppose an I think which is capable of creating these empirical selves disappears. He thereby argues one needs to grow Humean selves within Kant’s divided self. Finally, there is the status of Hume’s explicitly passive synthesis of Habit. Kant will argue that passivity demands an active synthesis to explain it. Deleuze will reply that it does not (at this stage), and that Kant’s demand for a global active synthesis was not only founded upon one passive synthesis, but also grounded in another passive synthesis. So that, Kant’s all too eager demand for activity, has the effect of imprisoning him within the Humean passive synthesis and therefore within Humean-time (as Deleuze constitutes it).

5. Paul Davies (Sussex): Regulating and Inventing Concepts

The paper moves towards a reading of those passages in the 3rd Critique where Kant seems to admit of a fundamental discord ("a discordant accord") of the faculties and where Deleuze sees one of Kant's great discoveries, "the final Kantian reversal." Deleuze detects in the very movement of the critical project a gradual relinquishing of the hold of regulation and the regulative. The argument of the paper unfolds in two stages. In the first, it attempts to re-imagine the context of Deleuze's encounter with Kant, freeing it from the twofold clarification of the concept and conceptuality (Fregean / Hegelian or "analytical"/"continental") that continues even today to define the institutional and disciplinary profile of philosophy. In the second it re-examines the relation between "concept" and "rule" in Kant's account of judgement, marking the precise intractability that makes it impossible for Kant, but maybe not only for Kant, to reconfigure concepts as inventions.

6. Daniel W. Smith (Middlesex/Purdue): ‘Deleuze, Kant, and the Post-Kantian Tradition’

The last article Deleuze published before his suicide in November of 1995 begins with the question, "What is a transcendental field?" In a certain sense, this Kantian question, which Deleuze here takes up at the end of his career, is the question that has animated his philosophical work from the start. This paper will examine Deleuze's relation to the Kantian (and post-Kantian) heritage from two points of view. From a historical perspective, we will examine the way in which Deleuze make use of the work of various pre-Kantian (Hume, Spinoza, Bergson) and post-Kantian (Maimon, Bergson, Nietzsche) philosophers in his attempt to rethink the Kant's critical project and the nature of the transcendental field. From a systematic perspective, we will attempt to examine the implications of Deleuze's work in five domains that roughly parallel the architectonic structure of Kant's own work: dialectics, aesthetics, analytics, ethics, and politics.

Location

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Click here for directions to the conference location.

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Unfortunately accommodation is not available on campus. Those seeking accommodation may find the following website useful: http://www.visitlondon.com/

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Conference Report
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This can be viewed here.

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Conference organisers

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Matt Lee and Edward Willatt.
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Volcanic Lines - deleuzian research group, an initiative of the Greenwich University Philosophy group.
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JAN 2007 Colloquium - Darren Ambrose (Warwick)

2007-01-11T13:39:00.000-08:00

Friday 12th January 2007 1-3pm

Colloquium #1

Darren Ambrose (Warwick) 'On The Diagram in Deleuze's Work'

Location: SL007, Stephen Lawrence Building, Greenwich Maritime Campus

Organised by Greenwich University Philosophy Department

Read a report on this event and join the ongoing discussion by clicking here

HOW TO GET TO EVENTS AT GREENWICH

2007-01-07T12:07:00.000-08:00

Key

1 - Queen Anne Court
2 - Queen Mary Court
3 - King William Court

(the location of the philosophy department)
4 - Dreadnought Library
5 - Stephen Lawrence Building
6 - Devonport House

7 - Cooper Building

8 - Cutty Sark Hall

Road: Due to the high levels of traffic in Greenwich together with strict parking regulations, please use public transport wherever possible. Please note that parking is not available on the Maritime Greenwich campus.

From central London, head for the A2. At New Cross take a left turn to Greenwich (A206). From North London to the Blackwall Tunnel follow signs for Greenwich. From M25, join the A2 (Junction 2) and follow signs for Woolwich Ferry and on to Greenwich.

Trains: Greenwich and Maze Hill Stations from London Bridge, Cannon Street and Charing Cross and Dartford every 10 minutes, (every few minutes during rush hour).

DLR (Docklands Light Railway): trains to Bank (City of London) and Lewisham.

Buses: 53 - Westminster; 188 – North Greenwich; 180,177 – Lewisham/Woolwich and Thamesmead; 286 – Avery Hill and Eltham.

Riverboat: A regular service is available from Savoy Pier, Blackfriars, Bankside, London Bridge City, St Katherine's, Canary Wharf, Greenland and Masthouse Terrace to Greenwich Pier, which is adjacent to the campus. The journey takes 35 minutes.

Transport for London offers free online travel information here.

Journal - 'Collapse' Volume III: 'Unknown Deleuze'

2007-01-05T03:16:00.000-08:00

COLLAPSE Volume III will be published in mid-October and is now available for advance purchase online by clicking here.

Collapse Volume III: 'Unknown Deleuze' contains explorations of the work of Gilles Deleuze by pioneering thinkers in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, music and architecture. In addition, we publish in this volume two previously untranslated texts by Deleuze himself, along with a fascinating piece of vintage science fiction from one of his more obscure influences. Finally, as an annex to Collapse Volume II, we also include a full transcription of the conference on 'Speculative Realism' held in London earlier this year.

Whilst books continue to appear at an alarming rate which claim to put Deleuze's thought 'to work' in diverse areas outside of philosophy, we submit, in this volume, that his philosophical thought itself still remains enigmatic, both in its detail and in its major themes. The contributors to this volume aim to clarify, from a variety of perspectives, Deleuze's contribution to philosophy: in what does his philosophical originality lie; what does he appropriate from other philosophers and how does he transform it? And how can the apparently disparate threads of his work to be 'integrated' – what is the precise nature of the constellation of the aesthetic, the conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and what are the overarching problems in which the numerous philosophical concepts 'signed Deleuze' converge?

The volume includes two newly-translated articles by Gilles Deleuze along with contributions from Arnaud Villani, Thomas Duzer, Quentin Meillassoux, John Sellars, Éric Alliez & Jean-Claude Bonne, Haswell & Hecker, Robin Mackay, Mehrdad Iravanian, J.-H. Rosny the Elder, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier.

For anyone wanting to go right to the core of Deleuzian philosophy and to experience the challenge of Deleuze's thought, the articles collected in Collapse III will provide a virtually inexhaustible treasury of insights. As the featured authors shed light on this challenge from different points of view, they produce unexpected points of convergence, providing important resources for a more complete conceptual 'portrait' of Deleuze, and suggesting further lines of thought to be investigated. For anyone looking for an alternative to the emerging orthodoxy seemingly bent on broadcasting an 'image of Deleuzian thought', Collapse III provides a wide-ranging but uniformly rigorous and innovative survey of Gilles Deleuze's thought, and an illustration of the fact that, even if it is already fashionable to evoke a 'post-Deleuzian' era, we have not yet begun to draw the properly philosophical consequences of this thought.

– Mathesis, Science and Philosophy, written by a 21-year-old Gilles Deleuze, has never before appeared in print in English and is published in Collapse in a new translation. Written as an introduction to a 1946 republication of a 19th-century esoteric philosophical work by Dr Johann Malfatti de Montereggio, this text offers a fascinating glimpse, set in an unexpected context, into the themes of Deleuze's early work, as they emerge, in an already characteristically-dazzling style. Meanwhile, in the brief but illuminating 1981 interview with Arnaud Villani, Answers to a Series of Questions (also appearing here for the first time in English), Deleuze provides some tantalising intimations regarding the enduring concerns of his work over the years.

– In his own contribution to the volume, philosopher-poet Arnaud Villani (whose 1999 The Wasp and the Orchid was one of the first books to be published in France treating Deleuze's work as a whole) reflects on Deleuze's affirmation that he considered himself a 'pure metaphysician': what, precisely, does metaphysics mean for Deleuze? Through a sophisticated reading utilising the resources of aesthetics, poetics and philosophy, Villani not only defines the object of this metaphysics, but also shows clearly why it cannot be severed from its links with these other realms of thought, or from the question of the political or moral 'decision'.

– This allusion reminds us that an examination of Deleuze today would be unthinkable without reference to Alain Badiou's provocative Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, and in his article In Memoriam of Deleuze, Thomas Duzer undertakes, through a survey of the major axes of Deleuze's philosophy, to locate the precise nature of their now famous 'nonrelationship'; his defence emphasises that the positive features of Deleuze's thought cannot be reduced either to a 'phenomenology' or to Badiou's polemical opposite.

– In an exclusive translated extract from their new book Matisse-Thought: Portrait of the Artist as Hyperfauve, philosopher Éric Alliez (former student of Deleuze's and author of The Signature of the World) and art-historian Jean-Claude Bonne analyse the revolution inaugurated in painting by Matisse during his ‘Fauvist’ period of 1905-6, discovering that the rigorous 'quantitative' conception of the intensive which Matisse proposes allows not only a new understanding of the significance of Fauvism for his later work, but also clarifies and reaffirms the philosophical pertinence of a Nietzschean-Deleuzian thinking of intensity and extensity, the qualitative and the quantitative.

– On the basis of an examination of a 'fragment' from Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?, Quentin Meillassoux, in a philosophical tour de force, meticulously reconstructs the nature and the measure of Deleuzian 'immanence', proposing finally a 'subtractive' reading drawing on Bergson's Matter and Memory, allowing us to understand, step-by-step 'from the inside' the construction of that singular network of concepts found in Deleuze's work.

– Sound artists Russell Haswell and Florian Hecker contribute some strange and beautiful images taken from the electronic 'score' of their new sound work Blackest Ever Black, an 'introduction to synaesthesia' created using composer Iannis Xenakis's computerised UPIC system to transform contemporary images into sound. An accompanying text by Robin Mackay analyses the affinities between Xenakis's conception of a musical 'polyagogy' and Deleuze's 'transcendental empiricism'.

– Examining Deleuze's famous use of the supposedly Stoic theory of Chronos and Aîon in Logic of Sense, John Sellars (author of The Stoics and The Art of Living) examines just how much it owes to actual stoic theories of time, thus providing both a case-study in the Deleuzian 'ventriloquism' in the history of philosophy and an informative example of the 'stratigraphic' time in which, according to Deleuze, philosophy takes place.

– Iranian architect Mehrdad Iravanian constructs a 'graphitext' which, taking as its starting point a page from Deleuze's The Fold, undertakes a non-interpretative 'ex-pli-cation' of its content. Employing a hybrid methodology at once literal, textual and architectural, he brings to light structures secreted within the folds of the text itself.

– One of the many obscure 'personae' in the background of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, the mysterious figure J.-H. Rosny the Elder not only supplied that work's repeated formula for the nature of intensity-as-difference, but, as both philosopher and pioneering science fiction author, was also a living embodiment of the notion that 'philosophy is a kind of science-fiction': in his astonishing 1895 tale Another World, appearing here in English for the very first time, Rosny evokes an alien world of abstract lifeforms intersecting with our own, and examines with philosophical acuity the process of bringing such unknown beings within the purview of scientific knowledge.

– As if all this were not enough ... Following the 'dossier' on Speculative Realism in the previous volume of Collapse, Volume III also includes a full transcription of the colloquium of the same name held at Goldsmith's University of London in April 2007 featuring presentations by Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux on the problems, and the promise, of this renewal of speculative philosophical thought. Running to well over 100 pages, this is an important and exciting document of contemporary philosophy in the making, proposing new conceptual approaches, exploring the borders between science and philosophy, and mining the history of thought for fresh insights into Nature, objectivity, and the legacy of 'correlationism'.

Advance online orders for Volume III are priced (including postage) £10 (UK) / £13 (Europe) / £16 (Elsewhere).
(Unfortunately a vastly increased page count, together with regular unpredictable postal rate rises, have necessitated an increase in price for this volume.)

***4-Volume subscriptions are also available online at a reduced price.***

Readers will shortly be able to download a preview of the introduction to Volume III from the website http://www.urbanomic.com/dl.php, where introductions to Vols I and II are already available.

Help us : if you are able to post a notice in your place of work or study, please download and print the flyer for Collapse Volume III from http://www.urbanomic.com/dl.php. We would also welcome and reciprocate all links into the Urbanomic website from blogs, etc. Finally, please forward this bulletin on to anyone you know who is not on our mailing list but who may be interested.

COLLAPSE Volume III
October 2007.
Paperback 115x175mm 515pp (TBC)
Limited Edition of 1000 numbered copies.
ISBN 0-9553087-2-0

THOMAS DUZER
In Memoriam: Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995
GILLES DELEUZE
Responses to a Series of Questions
ARNAUD VILLANI
'I Feel I Am A Pure Metaphysician': The Consequences of Deleuze's Remark
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and Matter and Memory
HASWELL & HECKER
Blackest Ever Black
GILLES DELEUZE
Mathesis, Science and Philosophy
JOHN SELLARS
The Truth about Chronos and Aîon
ÉRIC ALLIEZ & JOHN-CLAUDE BONNE
Matisse-Thought and the Strict Ordering of Fauvism
MEHRDAD IRAVANIAN
Unknown Deleuze
J.-H. ROSNY THE ELDER
Another World
RAY BRASSIER, IAIN HAMILTON GRANT, GRAHAM HARMAN, QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX Speculative Realism

Still Available:
Collapse Volume II 'Speculative Realism'
RAY BRASSIER
The Enigma of Realism
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Potentiality and Virtuality
ROBERTO TROTTA
Dark Matter: Facing the Arche-Fossil (Interview)
GRAHAM HARMAN
On Vicarious Causation
PAUL CHURCHLAND
Demons Get Out! (Interview)
CLÉMENTINE DUZER & LAURA GOZLAN
Nevertheless Empire
REZA NEGARESTANI
Islamic Exotericism: Apocalypse in the Wake of Refractory Impossibility
KRISTEN ALVANSON
Elysian Space in the Middle East

Collapse Volume I 'Numerical Materialism'
ALAIN BADIOU
'Philosophy, Sciences, Mathematics' (Interview)
GREGORY CHAITIN
'Epistemology as Information Theory'
REZA NEGARESTANI
'The Militarization of Peace'
MATTHEW WATKINS
'Prime Evolution(Interview)'
'INCOGNITUM'
'Introduction to ABJAD'
NICK BOSTROM
'Existential Risk (Interview)
THOMAS DUZER
'On the Mathematics of Intensity'
KEITH TILFORD
'Crowds'
NICK LAND
'Qabbala 101'

Back volumes available online at £7 (UK) / £9 (Europe) / £12 (Elsewhere).

COLLAPSE is available in the following fine bookstores: Vrin, Paris; ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) bookshop, London; Tate Modern bookshop, London; Gleebooks, Sydney.

http://www.urbanomic.com/

2007-01-02T06:22:00.000-08:00

Félix Guattari
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Pragmatic/Machinic: A Discussion with Felix Guattari (19 March 1985)

'The following discussion with Felix Guattari took place in his apartment in Paris. With the help of a number of friends, I had prepared a set of questions, and had contacted him to see if he might be available to answer some of them. He responded immediately, and left messages with the friend in Paris in whose apartment I would be staying. Prior to the trip, I also had contacted Gilles Deleuze to arrange an extended interview, and although his schedule and health prevented him from agreeing to a long session, I did visit him at his apartment the night before the session with Guattari. ...'
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2007-01-02T06:19:00.000-08:00

Experimental Work Inspired by Deleuze
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Radio Deleuze

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2007-01-02T06:12:00.000-08:00

Texts on Deleuze
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Derrida on Deleuze

A translation by David Kammerman of 'I'll have to wander all alone', written by Jacques Derrida in response to the death of Gilles Deleuze.
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‘"Memories of a sorcerer": notes on Gilles Deleuze-Felix Guattari, Austin Osman Spare and Anomalous Sorceries' by Matt Lee

'My aim here is to introduce the philosophers Deleuze-Guattari to readers perhaps unfamiliar with their work and indicate something curious about their work, which is that it appears to have some sort of relation in a practical sense to the concept of the sorcerer ...'
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'Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonian Film Project' by Donato Totaro

'Both Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson were, to extremely varying degrees, philosophers interested in cinema who used cinema to suit their particular intellectual needs. In the case of Bergson, he cultivated his ideas during a zeitgeist that included the invention of cinema (late 19th century). To a large extent, Bergson's philosophical ideas were shaped by the same cultural, economic, and technological climate that gave rise to narrative cinema. Deleuze on the other hand, erected a two-volume Bergsonian philosophy of cinema toward the end of the century that stands as one of the most stimulating studies of time and cinema. ...'
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'Theatrum Philosophicum' by Michel Foucault

'I must discuss two books of exceptional merit and importance: Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense.1 Indeed, these books are so outstanding that they are difficult to discuss; this may explain, as well, why so few have undertaken this task. I believe that these words will continue to revolve about us in enigmatic resonance with those of Klossowski, another major and excessive sign, and perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian." ...'
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'From comparative cultural studies to post-literary study. gilles deleuze and central-european thought. post-literature' by Constantin Severin

'During recent decades philosophy has been besieged by multicultural studies, art and literature by new theoretical challenges, and science/technology by avant-garde artistic experiments. Many thinkers seem to have been convinced that art had become inseparable from technology and information. A phenomenon of hybridization appeared, attempting to produce cultural mutation, resulted in a trans-aesthetic paradigm: post-literary studies in "post-literature." ...'
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'Deleuzian Sensation and Unbounded Consciousness in Anna & Corrina Bonshek’s Reverie I (2002)' by Corrina Bonshek

'The work Reverie I (2002) by Anna and Corrina Bonshek has a special significance when considered against the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in which he proposes the idea that art is experienced as 'sensation' (1981; 1997; Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 1994). This way of thinking about art departs from a traditional Kantian view in which art is a transcendental experience occasioned through the contemplation of form. ...'
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'Notes on Desire and Pleasure' by Arianna Bove

'Certain elements of Deleuze and Guattari stubbornly retain a certain unfamiliarity. Deleuze and Guattari rescue desire from the rethoric of lack and basically remind us that desire is productive. Now with desire they use similar twists and turns of logic as Foucault does when describing power. That is why Deleuze asks in 'desire and pleasure': how can power be desired? ...'
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'On Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus' by Antonio Negri
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Towards a Minor Theatre by Terence Smith

'This thesis suggests that an assessment of the political efficacy of theatre may proceed through a specification of the conditions which make the event possible and of the forms of social relations which the event practically establishes. ...'
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'Immanence and Deterritorialization: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari' byStephan Günzel

'ABSTRACT: In academic philosophy the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are still treated as curiosities and their importance for philosophical discussions is not recognized. In order to remedy this, I demonstrate how the very concept of philosophy expounded by the two contributes to philosophical thinking at the end of the twentieth century while also providing a possible line of thought for the next millenium. To do this, I first emphasize the influence of Deleuze's thinking, while also indicating the impact Guattari had on him. This account will therefore show Deleuze's attempts before Guattari to concieve of a non-dialectic philosophy of becoming. I will turn to rethink this approach given the influence of Guattari and his anti-psychoanalytic analysis of territorial processes. The result is a conception of philosophical activity as an act of 'becoming minor'.(1)'
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'The Vertigo of Philosophy: Deleuze and the Problem of Immanence' by Christian Kerslake

'One of the few terminological constants in Deleuze’s philosophical work is the word ‘immanence’ and it has therefore become a foothold for those wishing to understand exactly what ‘Deleuzian philosophy’ is. That this ancient and well-travelled notion is held to have been given new life and meaning by a Deleuzian approach is evidenced in much recent secondary literature on Deleuze, and, significantly, in one central theoretical section of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, which takes up the theme of ‘the plane of immanence’. Yet on closer inspection it becomes clear that what is at stake in Deleuze’s contribution to the history of this term is actually quite elusive. I will claim here that ‘immanence’, despite appearing to connote philosophical transparency, is in fact a problem for Deleuze; indeed perhaps it is the problem inspiring his work. Not for nothing does Deleuze suggest that ‘immanence is the very vertigo of philosophy.’ ...'
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'Power and Desire in the Political Ontology of Spinoza and Deleuze/Guattari' by Jan Sjunnesson

'In these preliminary notes, I want to incite a discussion on the 17th century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, along with the contemporary French authors Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s joint works , that brings forth a reflection on ontology as political, constituted by powers and desires rather than a reductionist apolitical naturalism. In some sense, every philosophy of being (i.e. ontology, or the wider concpet metaphysics), has to make a place for man and his well- being in the whole of reality. That place is a political question which I do not fully answer here, neither give full account to Spinoza or Deleuze/Guattari, but only hope to open up for further theoretical reflections. ...'
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'Sickness unto life - life and works of philosopher Gilles Deleuze' by Didier Eribon

'The suicide of philosopher Gilles Deleuze at the beginning of November, after he had spent many years suffering from a terrible respiratory illness, was a gesture that struck many in France dumb. Deleuze's thought, however resistant to summary, was above all an affirmation of the life force, of the will to life: "One's always writing," as he put it in Pourparler (1990 [Negotiations, 1995]), "to bring something to life, to free life from where it's trapped." While there is something tragically unbearable about the willful death of a philosopher who always, in the final instance, exalted and summoned the forces of life, it would be a mistake to see a contradiction between Deleuze's philosophy and his final, parting gesture. ...'

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2007-01-02T06:07:00.000-08:00

Deleuze texts and interviews
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The ABC of Gilles Deleuze

An overview prepared by Professor Charles J. Stivale of interviews between Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet that were filmed by Pierre-André Boutang in 1988-1989.
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'The Body, the Meat and the Spirit: Becoming Animal' by Gilles Deleuze

'Instead of formal correspondences, what Bacon's painting constitutes is a zone of the indiscernible, of the undecidable, between man and animal. Man becomes animal, but he does not become so without the animal simultaneously becoming spirit, the spirit of man, the physical spirit of man presented in the mirror as Eumenides or fate. ...'
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'On Human Rights' by Gilles Deleuze

'The reverence that people display toward human rights - it almost makes one want to defend horrible, terrible positions. It is so much a part of the softheaded thinking that marks the shabby period we were talking about. It's pure abstraction. Human rights, after all, what does that mean? It's pure abstraction, it's empty. It's exactly what we were talking about before about desire, or at least what I was trying to get across about desire. Desire is not putting something up on a pedestal and saying, hey, I desire this. We don't desire liberty and so forth, for example; that doesn't mean anything. We find ourselves in situations. ...'
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'Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium' by Deleuze and Guattari
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'Postscript to Societies of Control' by Gilles Deleuze

'Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: ...'
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'Desire and Pleasure' by Gilles Deleuze

'Foucault had just published La Volonté de savoir, the introduction to a Histoire de la Sexualité which challenged the play of categories through which the struggles of sexual liberation reflected itself. The reception of the book, poorly understood, was contemporary with a sort of crisis in Foucault, already wholly bent to the task of bringing out of himself, and converting himself to, what would become the problematic of L'usage de plaisirs and the Souci de soi. ...'
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Deleuze's Empiricism and Subjectivity
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'Review of Jean Hyppolite's Logique et Existence' by Gilles Deleuze
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'Control and Becoming' Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri
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'November 28, 1947: How do you make yourself a body without organs?' by Deleuze and Guattari (from A Thousand Plateaus)
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'Letter to a Harsh Critic' by Gilles Deleuze
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'May 68 Did Not Take Place' by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

'In historical phenomena such as the revolution of 1789, the Commune, the revolution of 1917, there is always one part of the event that is irreducible to any social determinism, or to causal chains. Historians are not very fond of this point: they restore causality after the fact. Yet the event itself is a splitting off from, a breaking with causality; it is a bifurcation, a lawless deviation, an unstable condition that opens up a new field of the possible. ...'
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2007-01-02T06:00:00.000-08:00

Deleuze Studies Resources
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Deleuze International

Texts on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

Web Deleuze

Includes English translation of transcripts of seminars delivered by Gilles Deleuze on subjects including Kant, Leibniz, Spinoza, cinema and Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
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Deleuze and Guattari Web Resources
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A website administered by Professor Charles J. Stivale. Includes online primary texts, secondary texts, details of Deleuze scholars around the world and sights & sounds.
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WWW Resources for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
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Deleuze Links Page
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Online Deleuze texts
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Deleuze and Guattari Course Materials
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Reading Notes on Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism & Schizophrenia
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John Protevi's Website

Includes course materials and research papers.

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Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process, Goldsmith's College London - Online Texts
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Includes texts by and on Deleuze.
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Transmat: Resources in Transcendental Materialism

Online books including Justin Barton's Thought, Bodies and Intensive Cartography: Departures from A Thousand Plateaus, Diane J. Beddoes' Breeding Demons: A critical enquiry into the relationship between Kant and Deleuze with specific reference to women, Bruce McClure's Between The Seen and The Said: Deleuze-Guattari's Pragmatics of the Order-Word, and much more.
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Pli - The Warwick Journal of Philosophy

This website includes pdfs of past articles from volumes of Pli that are now out of print, including many on the work of Gilles Deleuze.
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Brief Deleuze Biography
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La voix de Gilles Deleuze
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Deleuze at Wikiquote

Speculative Heresy (not on Deleuze specifically but a unique resource for an emerging area of philosophy that engages critically with Deleuze's legacy)

'This is a website devoted to the exploration and discussion of the speculative heresies surrounding non-philosophy, speculative realism and transcendental materialism. Along with original commentary on the issues of speculative realism, we also aim to provide a central place from which to keep track of the evolving English speculative realist community. This includes conferences, articles, books, programs, and CFPs, along with any other notable events'.
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Deleuze tagged at ...

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...del.icio.us
.us
...citeulike

...technorati
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2007-01-02T05:56:00.000-08:00

Deleuze Studies Research Groups, Forums and Societies -
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Manchester Metropolitan University's English Research Institute - Deleuze Studies

The home of the online journal Actual-Virtual which features papers filmed by the TMF production company and presented here as streamed movies. The site also includes a network of Deleuze scholars, details of events, conference and calls for papers in the world of Deleuze studies, Deleuze resources and much more.

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A Deleuze Society?

News, information and resources from the world of Deleuze studies from the currently forming Deleuze Society at the University of Exeter.

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Project on Deleuze's and Guattari's 'What is Philosophy?'

Based at the University of Warwick, this research group will seek to investigate the relationship between the three disciplines at stake within Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?.

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Deleuze-Guattari Discussion Forum

An electronic forum for discussion and experimentation rooted both in the separate and the joint works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

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Deleuze and Fellow Travellers Community on LiveJournal

'Community for the purpose of discussing philosophy associated with Deleuze. Let's keep it broad but intelligent- comments on news are welcome when relevant, comments on developments in labor or technology or art or science or theology, etc."Deleuzism" is just a holding place, a way to draw people together who are interesting in philosophies of radical immanence. If you are interested in philosophy without purity, thinking that does not judge the world but instead creates spaces for new connections in the world, if you are interested in Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, Irigaray, Feminist philosophy, Duns Scotus, Agamben, Negri, etc., you are welcome here.'

Deleuze Studies Journal and Conference Facebook Group

Gilles Deleuze was an Extra-Terrestrial Facebook Group

2007-01-01T13:16:00.000-08:00

Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Guattari's "Anti-oedipus": A Reader's Guide

Continuum Publishing

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus" is the first part of a two volume project entitled "Capitalism and Schizophrenia". Challenging the twin orthodoxies of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Althusserian Marxism, "Anti-Oedipus" is an important and exciting, yet challenging piece of philosophical writing. Ian Buchanan's "Reader's Guide to Anti-Oedipus" is the ideal companion to one of the twentieth-century's most influential philosophical works. It provides informed and accessible guidance on: Philosophical and historical context; Key themes; Reading the text; Reception and influence; and, Further reading."Continuum Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to key texts in literature and philosophy. Each book explores the themes, context, criticism and influence of key works, providing a practical introduction to close reading, guiding students towards a thorough understanding of the text. They provide an essential, up-to-date resource, ideal for undergraduate students.
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2007-01-01T13:08:00.000-08:00

If you plan to attend this event and are not a member of the University of Greenwich

please register by e-mailing us at volcaniclines@hotmail.com

2007-01-01T12:18:00.000-08:00

Forum for European Philosophy Event

Dialogues

Thursday 14 February, 12.30-2pm Room J116 (Cañada Blanch Room) Cowdray House, European Institute, Portugal Street, LSE

The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir

Stella Sanford in conversation with Kimberley Hutchings

Stella Sanford, Principal Lecturer in Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy and Religious Studies Programmes, School of Arts and Education, Middlesex University

Kimberley Hutchings, Professor of International Relations, LSE

________________________________

All events are free and open to all without registration For further information contact Juliana Cardinale: 020 7955 7539 J.Cardinale[at]lse.ac.uk
Forum for European Philosophy Room J5, European Institute London School of Economics, WC2A 2AE
http://www.philosophy-forum.org/
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RETURN TO MAIN PAGE

Images of The Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich - Volume 1

2007-01-01T12:07:00.000-08:00

The Old Royal Naval College is a world heritage site on the banks of the River Thames in Greenwich, London. It houses the University of Greenwich (Queen Anne Court, King William Court, Queen Mary Court, the Dreadnought Library, the Steven Lawrence building) and Trinity School of Music (King Charles Court). Directions to the Old Royal Naval College can be found here.

The entrance to Queen Anne Court
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Queen Anne Court.

Queen Anne Court foreground and Queen Mary Court in the background.

Queen Mary Court through the pillars of King William Court.

King Charles Court from the river

King William Court

Queen Anne Court foreground and Queen Mary Court in the background from the gate leading onto the Thames Path.

_____________________________________________

2007-01-01T10:19:00.000-08:00

Please e-mail volcaniclines[at]hotmail.com if you plan to attend this event.

Directions to the Maritime Campus, Old Royal Naval College, and to Queen Anne Court can be found here.

RETURN TO MAIN PAGE

2007-01-01T09:44:00.000-08:00

Italian Thought Today: Biopolitics, Nihilism, Empire

University of Kent, 5th - 6th April 2008 International conference financed by the British Academy, The Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and the School of European Culture and Languages

Conference Organiser: Dr Lorenzo Chiesa (L.Chiesa@kent.ac.uk)

Against the background of a recent and widespread resurgence of Italian contemporary thought, and Italian leftist political theory in particular, the aim of this conference is twofold. First, the conference intends to explore the notions of biopolitics, Empire, and nihilism as elaborated in the recent works of some of the most important Italian living philosophers. Secondly, and more importantly, this conference aims to assess the impact of these notions on academic fields as diverse as political theory, economics, cognitive science, sociology, and literature.

"Italian Thought Today" therefore aspires to promote an interdisciplinary dialogue across the humanities and social sciences that should at the same time also problematise the philosophical notions mentioned above in light of their application to a non-philosophical domain. Is Negri's idea that the globalisation of world markets has led to a progressive decline in the sovereignty of nation-states useful to explain the Realpolitik of today's diplomacy? How can Vattimo's emancipatory concept of "active" nihilism be challenged by the "passive" nihilism that seems to pervade much of contemporary Italian popular culture? Shouldn't Agamben analyses of the politics of life be expanded in order to include detailed economical considerations?

Although the notions investigated in this conference have lately been the object of much attention, the novelty of this conference lies in its intention to contextualise them beyond the boundaries of philosophical discourse. This conference will bring together some of the protagonists of today's Italian philosophical scene, a number of well-established critics of their work, as well as a number of leading scholars from across the humanities and social sciences who, in their recent research, have been confronting themselves with the concepts of biopolitics, Empire, and nihilism.

Confirmed speakers:

Professor Gianni Vattimo (Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Turin, Italy): [title t.b.a.]
Professor Roberto Esposito (Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, Istituto Scienze Umane, Naples, Italy): Totalitarianism and Biopolitics
Dr Sergio Benvenuto (Psychoanalyst and Senior Researcher, Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian Council for Scientific Research, Rome, Italy): Return to the Real: Philosophy in the Epoch of Bio-Technologies and Bio-Politics
Professor Andrea Fumagalli (Associate Professor of Economics, University of Pavia, Italy): Ten Theses on Bioeconomy and Cognitive Capitalism
Professor Timothy Campbell (Associate Professor, Italian Studies, Cornell University, USA): From the Impolitical to the Impersonal: Roberto Esposito's Politics of Life
Professor Timothy Murphy (Associate Professor, English, University of Oklahoma, USA): Pedagogy of the Moltitude: Negri on Stage
Dr Jelica Sumic Riha (Senior Researcher, Institute of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia): Giorgio Agamben's Politics of the Remnant
Dr Matteo Mandarini (Lecturer in Management in the Cultural Industries, Queen Mary University, University of London): Not Fear But Hope in the Apocalyspse
Dr Alberto Toscano (Lecturer in Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London): Abstract Life: The Biopolitical Logic of Capitalism and Empire
Dr Ozren Pupovac (Researcher in Sociology, Open University / Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands): Machiavelli, Negri, Althusser: Encounters and Detours
Dr Shane Weller (Reader in Comparative Literature, University of Kent): The Art and Ethics of Distortion: Heidegger, Derrida, Vattimo
Dr Lorenzo Chiesa (Lecturer in Critical Theory, University of Kent): Homo Sacer: A Franciscan Ontology

Conference registration form here.
Conference website here.

2007-01-01T08:21:00.000-08:00

To register for these events please e-mail volcaniclines[at]hotmail.com

Reading

Week 1 - chapter 1. The Desiring-Machines

Week 2 - chapter 2. Psychoanalysis and Familialism: The Holy Family, parts 1-5.

Week 3 - chapter 2, parts 6-9

Week 4 - chapter 3. Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men

Week 5 - chapter 3 continued

Week 6 - chapter 4. Introduction to Schizoanalysis

Time and Location

The sessions will be held in King William Court, Maritime Greenwich Campus (see a campus plan and travel directions here). The sessions will take place in Kent Hall on the first floor of King William Court.

Format

The sessions will begin with a short presentation on the themes of the weeks text. This will be followed by an open discussion of the text. Notes of the discussion will be posted online at dialogues at greenwich, the research group's forum for further discussion.

The Context of this Reading Group Workshop series on Anti-Oedipus

We find Slavoj Zizek writing in his Organs without Bodies of '...the inner tension of Deleuze's thought between Anti-Oedipus and The Logic of Sense, between the Deleuze who celebrated the productive multitude of Becoming against the reified order of being and the Deleuze of the sterility of the incoroporeal of the Sense-Event.' (p. xi) Zizek favours the latter Deleuze. In Alain Badiou's Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, tackled by this research group last Autumn, we find that the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia are neglected. With Guattari's role and its value downplayed by such readers of Deleuze the time seems ripe for a re-assessment of, and re-engagement with, the first collaboration of Deleuze and Guattari. Does it provide satisfying answers to the philosophical questions and problems that Zizek and Badiou emphasise? Should it provide such answers? These and other questions will be posed over the six weeks of the Reading Group Workshops.

Publications of Interest

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2010

New Book - Sjoerd van Tuinen and Niamh McDonnell, Deleuze and the Fold: A Critical Reader

New Book - Edward Willatt, Kant, Deleuze and Architectonics

New Book - Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Idealism

September 2009

New Book - Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze

August 2009

New Issue - Monu #11: 'Clean Urbanism'

July 2009

New Book - Joseph Nechvatal, Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (1993-2006)

June 2009

New Book - Mark Poster & David Savat (eds) Deleuze and New Technology

New Journal - Nessie : New Digital Review of Contemporary Philosophy

New Issue - Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy

New Book - Matt Lee and Edward Willatt (eds) Thinking Between Deleuze and Kant

May 2009

New Book - Laura Cull (ed) Deleuze and Performance

New Book - Janell Watson, Guattari's Diagrammatic Thought: Writing Between Lacan and Deleuze

April 2009

New Book - Graham Jones and Jon Roffe (eds) Deleuze's Philosophical Lineage

February 2009

Journal - MONU #10 - Holy Urbanism

New Book - Merl Storr and Chrysanthi Nigianni (eds) Deleuze and Queer Theory

New Book - Joe Hughes, Deleuze's 'Difference and Repetition' A Reader's Guide

New Book - Constantin V. Boundas (ed) Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction

December 2008

Journal - 'Collapse' Volume V: 'The Copernican Imperative'

November 2008

New Book - Simon O'Sullivan and Stephen Zepke (eds), Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New

October 2008

New Book - Beatrice Monaco, Machinic Modernism: The Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce

September 2008

New Book - Nathan Widder, Reflections on Time and Politics

August 2008

Journal - MONU #9 - Exotic Urbanism

New Book - Joe Hughes, Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

New Book - Ian Buchanan and Patricia MacCormack (eds.) Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema

June 2008

New Book - Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth

May 2008

New Book - James Williams, Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction and Guide

New Book - Ian Buchanan and Nicholas Thoburn (eds.) Deleuze and Politics

New Book - François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States

April 2008

Journal - Collapse Volume IV: 'Concept Horror'

March 2008

New Book - Levi R. Bryant, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence

February 2008

New Book - Ian Buchanan, Deleuze and Guattari's "Anti-oedipus": A Reader's Guide

January 2008

New Book - Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe (ed.), Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts 2007

New Part of Book Series - Verso Radical Thinkers III

November 2007

Journal - 'Collapse' Volume III: 'Unknown Deleuze'

New Book - Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

October 2007

New Book - Anna Hickey-Moody and Peta Malins (eds.) Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues

New Book - Gabriele Schwab (ed.) Derrida, Deleuze and Psychoanalysis

March 2007

New Book - Dorothea Olkowski, The Universal

December 2006

New Book - Paul Ashton, A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens (eds.) The Praxis of Alain Badiou

New Book - Dave Boothroyd, Culture On Drugs

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Philosophy and Film / Film and Philosophy: An interdisciplinary conference

Conference announcement and call for papers

UWE in association with the Arnolfini Arts Centre, Bristol

4-6th July 2008, the Arnolfini, Bristol

Keynote Speakers:
Stephen Mulhall (Oxford)
Vivian Sobchack (UCLA)
Robert Sinnerbrink (Maquarrie)
Catherine Constable (Warwick)
Karin Littau (Essex)
Julian Baggini (editor, The Philosopher's Magazine)

In the last years there has been a growing interest in the relationship between philosophy and film within both analytic and European philosophical traditions. At the same time, film studies as a discipline has always raised philosophical questions and has been enriched by a variety of philosophical traditions. The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars from both disciplines to examine this shared history, as well as display the current range and state of philosophical film analysis. In what ways is film philosophically informative? What methodologies have been developed for philosophical analysis of film? What do various philosophical traditions bring to the study of film? What does the practice of film studies bring to the practice of philosophy? What vibrant areas have developed in these fields? The conference theme is deliberately broad and proposals are invited on any conjunction between film and philosophy. We welcome submissions that range from general and methodological observations about the field to readings and interpretations of specific films, genres, film movements or filmmakers. We encourage submissions from graduate students and will reserve some sessions for graduate papers.

Conference website here.

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Details of Past Events Organised by Volcanic Lines: Deleuzian Research Group

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24 June 2009

Kant, Deleuze and the "great outdoors" of speculative realism, a roundtable discussion to mark the publication of Thinking Between Deleuze and Kant

- details of this event

18 April 2009

On Foucault - A Workshop on Gilles Deleuze's book Foucault

- details of this event

- report on this event

11 December 2007 Colloquium

John Protevi (Louisiana) 'Water'

- details of this event

October-December 2007

Workshops on Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus

--details of these events

- report on 31/10/07 workshop

- report on 7/11/07 workshop

- notes on the mass psychology of fascism

- notes on desyr

- report on 28/11/07 workshop

- links to some secondary materials

- report on 5/12/07 workshop

7 July 2007

'The Strange Encounter of Kant and Deleuze' Conference

- timetable and abstracts

- conference report

7 June 2007 Colloquium

Mick Bowles (Greenwich)

'Understanding: Kant, Spinoza, Deleuze'

- details of this event

- report on this event

14 April 2007

'Integrations#1'

An Introductory Workshop on Deleuze and the Differential Calculus

- details of this event

- reading material

- report on this event

Winter/Spring 2007

Workshops on the Essays of Gilles Deleuze

- details of these events

- report on 'Spinoza's Three Ethics' workshop

- report on 'The Actual and The Virtual' workshop

- report on 'Four Poetic Formula's' workshop

- text of 'Four Poetic Formula's workshop presentation

- report on 'Bartleby: or, The Formula' workshop

- report on 'The Method of Dramatisation' workshop

- report on 'The Exhausted' workshop

January 2007 Colloquium

Darren Ambrose (Warwick)

'On The Diagram in Deleuze's Work'

- details of this event

- report on this event

November-December 2006

Workshops on Alain Badiou's Deleuze: The Clamour of Being

- details of these events

- report on 5/12/06 workshop

- report on 28/11/07 workshop

- report on 21/11/07 workshop

- report on 14/11/07 workshop

November 2006 Colloquium

Brian Smith (Dundee)

'The Limits of the Subject in Badiou's Being and Event'

- details of this event

- report on this event

July 2006

'The Work of Gilles Deleuze' Conference

- conference report

- conference timetable

- conference abstracts

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Research Group Statement of Aims and Objectives
Discussion Forum and Reports: dialogues at greenwich
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Manuel DeLanda on Deleuze and other things, European Graduate School, 2006

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Manuel DeLanda on The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, European Graduate School, 2007

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Gilles Deleuze ABCD Introduction

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7 JUNE 2007 Colloquium - Mick Bowles (Greenwich)

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You can read a report on this event and continue the discussion here.

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Deleuzian Encounters

Studies in Contemporary Social Issues

Edited by: Anna Hickey-Moody and Peta Malins

Reviews

"This timely volume is an antidote to the waning of philosophical theory in social thought. It demonstrates how to study contemporary social issues through Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, putting to work their key concepts on some of the most pressing issues and challenges of our time. The assembled essays boldly step beyond identity politics, producing a-subjective, affective, socially informed ethics adapted to urban and remote rural locations, and plot escape routes from the axiomatization of everything in the time of immaterial labour. Editors Anna Hickey-Moody and Peta Malins and their impressive list of contributors show how theory as practice is a necessary ingredient for social change. Deleuzian Encounters is a rallying point for socially-minded theorists who have not forgotten that the point of philosophy is to change the world." - Professor Gary Genosko, Canada Research Chair, Lakehead University, Canada

Description

Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) is one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century. His ideas have influenced fields as diverse as architecture, science, economics and the arts, and are increasingly being taken up in social research and practice. Yet many social researchers and practitioners remain wary of Deleuze's work, perceiving it to be too difficult to approach or too abstract to be of relevance.

Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues demonstrates that such concerns are unwarranted. It does so by bringing together sixteen accessible, thought-provoking essays which examine the implications of Deleuze's philosophy for different contemporary social issues. Topics explored include: the environment, terrorism, refugees, indigenous reconciliation, gender, suicide, intellectual disability, injecting drug use, classroom teaching and global activism. Each contribution provides practical examples of how to make use of Deleuze's thought in social research, and offers fresh insights into the creative and innovative potentionals Deleuze's philosophy holds for social thought and action.

Contents

Preface; P.Patton

Introduction: Gilles Deleuze and Four Movements in Social Thought; A.Hickey-Moody & P.Malins

PART I: POLITICS BEYOND IDENTITY

A Politics of Non-Being; G.Flaxman

The Revolutionary Dividual; J.Roffe

Intersex: Between Law and Nature; E.Mussawir

Deleuze and Suicide; A.Woodward

PART II: ETHICO-AESTHETICS

Intellectual Disability, Sensation and Thinking Through Affect; A.Hickey-Moody

Toward a Pedagogy of Affect; C.Albrecht-Crane & J.D.Slack

Sensing Beyond Security; E.Manning

Affective Terrorism; F.Colman

PART III: SOCIO-SPATIALITY

Molar Ecology: What Can the (Full) Body of an Eco-Tourist Do?; M.Halsey

City Folds: Injecting Drug Use and Urban Space; P.Malins

Holey Space and the Smooth and Striated Body of the Refugee; H.Frichot

Microsociology and the Ritual Event; K.Dean & T.Lamarre

PART IV: GLOBAL SCHIZOPHRENIA

Indigenous Peoples and a Deleuzian Theory of Practice; S.Bignall

Deleuze and the Tale of Two Intifadas; T.May

The Autonomy of Migration: Animals of Undocumented Mobility; D.Papadopoulos & V.Tsianos

Complex and Minor: Deleuze and Alter-Globalization Movements; G.Chesters

Index

Author Biographies

ANNA HICKEY-MOODY is Lecturer in Creative Arts Education at Monash University, Australia. She is co-author of Masculinity Beyond the Metropolis (Palgrave, 2006) and has published in a range of academic and community forums. Her forthcoming monograph, Unimaginable Bodies, will be published by Sense (Netherlands) in 2008.

PETA MALINS teaches in the School of Political Science, Criminology and Sociology at The University of Melbourne, Australia. She has published research on drug use and urban space in journals such as Janus Head, Continuum and Gender, Place & Culture.

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LINKS TO BLOGS

Object-Oriented Philosophy

Speculative Heresy

Jacques Rancière: Focusing on the work of Jacques Rancière

Fark Yaraları = Scars of Différance

The Differance Engine

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ART, POLITICS, CULTURE AND SCIENCE LINKS

Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

Lecture List

Culture Lab - a unique research infrastructure providing an environment for academics and practitioners working beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. Promoting socially and economically valuable synergies with artists, creative industries, and cultural and scientific institutions, and the development of innovative research with digital tools.

Complete Review - a selectively comprehensive, objectively opinionated survey of books old and new, trying to meet all your book review, preview, and information needs.

Indifference Productions - film makers

Kultureflash - newsletter covering contemporary culture in and around London.

Resources for 18th Century Studies

Rudy Rucker - author, scientist and artist.

Dryden Goodwin - artist.

The Freud Museum, London

Research Centre for Studies of Surrealism and its Legacies

International Dada Archive

Surrealist Documentary

Surrealist Resources and Links

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LINKS TO JOURNALS

Nessie : new digital review of contemporary philosophy

Collapse

'Pursuing fundamental research and development in logical ontological and abstract matters, outside any institutional framework, with no thematic disciplinary or methodological constraints.'

Pli - The Warwick Journal of Philosophy

'A journal of philosophy edited and produced by members of the Graduate School of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, produced with the support of The Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature. Pli currently publishes two volumes a year, in the Spring and the Autumn. Pli has no specific set of philosophical concerns but previous issues have tended to focus upon European philosophical traditions, reflecting the interests of the graduate community at Warwick.'

Deleuze Studies

'Published twice a year, in June and December, and edited by a team of highly respected Deleuze scholars, Deleuze Studies is a forum for new work on the writings of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze Studies is a bold journal that challenges orthodoxies, encourages debate, invites controversy, seeks new applications, proposes new interpretations, and above all make new connections between scholars and ideas in the field.'

Radical Philosophy

'A journal of socialist and feminist philosophy.'

Angelaki

'The journal of the theoretical humanities.'

Actual-Virtual

'1. Deleuzian academic research papers presented as they were meant to be seen... rather than publishing the written word, each paper is filmed by the TMF production company and presented here as streamed movies. 2. A platform for Deleuzian inspired artworks across the international Deleuzian community.'

Paragraph

'Founded in 1983, Paragraph is a leading journal in modern critical theory. It publishes essays and review articles in English which explore critical theory in general and its application to literature, other arts and society. Regular special issues by guest editors highlight important themes and figures in modern critical theory. Recent special issues include: Jacques Rancière, The Idea of the Literary, Theory and the Early Modern, Deleuze and Science, Blanchot's Epoch.'

101: One Zero One

'101: One Zero One is a magazine which uses the rhizome, a non-hierarchical organic system, as its central organizing element.'

AntiMatters

'A quarterly open-access journal addressing issues in science and the humanities from non-materialistic perspectives.'

Contretemps

'Enacting a philosophical engagement with social and political events.'

European Journal of Philosophy

Cosmos and History

'A journal of natural and social philosophy.'

Comparative and Continental Philosophy

'Comparative and Continental Philosophy is a peer-reviewed and fully refereed journal that appears bi-annually and publishes leading edge papers by internationally respected scholars in comparative and continental philosophy. ...'

BRAND Literary Magazine

Inquiry

'An interdisciplinary journal of philosophy.'

Minerva

'An internet journal of philosophy.'

Razorsmile

'A journey of chaotic philosophy, majik, politics and lives.'

Parrhesia

'A journal that aims to gather a range of thinkers to examine the intersections between questions of subjectivity, politics, ethics, aesthetics and truth, intersections which both theoretically and practically form the critical points in our culture and in our time.'

The Philosopher

Continental Philosophy Review

Surveillance and Society

Substance

'An interdisciplinary journal publishing innovative work on literature and culture.'

Enculturation

'A journal devoted to contemporary theorizations of rhetoric, writing, and culture. Publishes academic arguments, broadly construed, in all media forms suitable for web-based publication, including conventional articles, hypertexts, and multimedia projects.'

Crossroads

'A journal that publishes high-quality academic essays and book reviews by students of history, philosophy, religion, and the classics.'

The Philosopher's Magazine

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

'Environment and Planning D: Society and Space is an international and interdisciplinary journal that provides a forum for the discussion of the mutually constitutive relation between the social and the spatial. It seeks to be philosophically sophisticated, practically relevant, and to concretely theorise a range of contemporary, historical, political and cultural contexts.'

Film-Philosophy

Kritike

'...publishing original articles across the whole range of philosophical topics and schools of thought.'

Positions

'Offering a fresh approach to East Asia and Asian American studies, positions employs theoretical and multidisciplinary methods in creating a provocative forum for vigorous debate. Through expansive scholarly articles, commentaries, poetry, photo spreads, and political and philosophical debates, contributors consider a broad variety of pressing questions from a striking range of perspectives.'

Rhizomes

'Promoting experimental work located outside current disciplines, work that has no proper location.'

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

'A journal that provides a forum for new work relating the arts and literature to the exploration of consciousness currently flourishing in many disciplines such as philosophy, cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and physics.'

Shibboleths

'A journal devoted to exploring all aspects of philosophy and theory.'

Aesthetics and Protest

Crossings

'Established to encourage and openly facilitate collaborative projects which, while rigorous in practice and astute in vision, are neither adjudicated by, nor answerable to, purely academic protocols. Bringing together academics and non-academics, technicians and theorists, artists and policy makers, within selected fields of inquiry in order that their ideas—textual, interactive, imagistic—may be exchanged and that through this exchange fruitful collaborations might be forged.'

Philosophy and Literature

Aristos

'A monthly online review of the arts and the philosophy of art.'

Modern Painters

Art Forum

Domus

Offscreen

'A wide-ranging film journal that covers film festivals, retrospectives, film forums, and both popular and more academic events.'

Colloquy

'An electronic journal of interdisciplinary work by postgraduates.'

Psychoanalysis and History

'Explores the dialogue between literary and philosophical studies. The journal offers a constant source of fresh, stimulating ideas in the aesthetics of literature, theory of criticism, philosophical interpretation of literature, and literary treatment of philosophy that challenge the cant and pretensions of academic priesthoods.'

Culture Machine

'A series of experiments in culture and theory. The aim of Culture Machine is to seek out and promote the most provocative of new work, and analyses of that work, in culture and theory from a diverse range of international authors.'

Beehive

'The BeeHive collection is eclectic - made up of original fiction, poetry and critical theory titles, hypermedia works, visual poetry and other forms of creative network practice. Some work takes full advantage of applied technology and can only exist on the web, while other work is presented as pure writing. BeeHive is committed to publishing works that demonstrate the wide variety of styles, forms and interests pursued by online authors and artists.'

Romanticism

'Focusing on the period 1750-1850, it publishes critical, historical, textual and bibliographical essays and notes prepared to the highest scholarly standards, reflecting the full range of current methodological and theoretical debate.'

Electronic Book Review

Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts

'Devoted to maintaining an attitude of respect and openness to the various manifestations of truth in human experience; it strives to foster understanding through meditative thinking, narrative structure, and poetic imagination. Like the Janus head reliefs found over the doorways of old Roman homes, this journal, too, is situated at a threshold. The space within this journal, like the space beyond the Janus head relief, is a space where dwelling can occur, where thinking can take place, and where community can be built.'

MEME

'meme: (pron. 'meem') A contagious idea that replicates like a virus, passed on from mind to mind. Memes function the same way genes and viruses do, propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact between people. The root of the word "memetics," a field of study which postulates that the meme is the basic unit of cultural evolution. Examples of memes include melodies, icons, fashion statements and phrases.'

Other Voices

'Electronic journal of cultural criticism. Publishes provocative essays, interviews, roundtable discussions, lecture transcriptions, audio lectures, multimedia projects, translations and reviews in the arts and humanities.'

Qui Parle

'Twice a year qui parle publishes provocative interdisciplinary articles covering a range of outstanding theoretical and critical work in the humanities. Dedicated to expanding the dialogues that take place between disciplines and which challenge conventional understandings of reading and scholarship in academia.'

Cultrinox

'A journal of art, art criticism and cultural theory.'

Mute

'Culture and politics after the net.'

Diacritics

'Forum for scholars writing on the problems of literary criticism. Each issue features articles in which contributors compare and analyze books on particular theoretical works and develop their own positions on the theses, methods, and theoretical implications of those works.'

The Owl of Minerva

'The official journal of the Hegel Society of America. Publishes articles, notes, discussions, reviews, and translations which pertain directly to Hegel, as well as those which bear upon his contemporaries, his successors, his influence today, or the latest developments in Hegel scholarship, and those which direct a Hegelian perspective toward the resolution of philosophical issues or enter into debate with this approach. Not only philosophers, but also representatives of other disciplines, such as history, sociology, economics, law, German literature, etc., are welcome to contribute papers which specifically relate the particular concerns of those disciplines to Hegelian thought.'

Philosophy Now

Kantian Review

Diametros

'An online journal of philosophy.'

Foucault Studies

Parallel

'Online gallery and journal that presents work from artists and writers who are multi-disciplinary in theory and in practice. Each participant moves between mediums.'

Critical Inquiry

'Critical thought in the arts and humanities.'

Postmodern Culture

'A journal of interdisciplinary thought on contemporary cultures.'

The Symptom

'A Lacanian journal.'

Umbr(a)

'A journal of the unconscious.'

Nietzsche Studies

New Nietzsche Studies

Kritikos

'An interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image. Kritikos publishes work in art, cultural theory and criticism.'

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LINKS TO PHILOSOPHY RESOURCES

Society for European Philosophy

The Mead Project - Collection of Online Texts

Philosophy At Large, University of Liverpool

A webguide for the philosophy community and the philos-l mailing list.

Philosophy Conferences and Calls For Papers

Conference Alerts

EpistemeLinks - Philosophy Resources on the Internet

Forum For European Philosophy, London School of Economics

An educational charity which organises and runs a full and varied programme of philosophy and inter disciplinary events in the UK. Events range from conferences, discussion and reading groups to seminars and book forums, all of which are open to the public and most of which are free.

Continental Philosophy Bulletin Board

British Philosophical Association

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Internet Enyclopedia of Philosophy

Transcendental Philosophy and Naturalism Project, University of Essex

Aims to understand the nature of transcendental philosophy, with the intention of assessing whether it leaves contemporary philosophical naturalism with a cogent case to answer. It runs from October 2005 to October 2008.

The Difference Site

Dedicated to the question of difference at large. The Difference Site aims at a comprehensive understanding, study and expansive treatment of difference itself in addition to those issues that surround it; The Society for the Study of Difference offers active contribution to the study of difference.

Process Philosophy, Whitehead Studies Website

Spinoza Research Network

Spinoza Web Resources

Kant Web Resources

More Kant Web Resources

Kant Glossary

The Rebirth of Stoicism

Friedrich Nietzsche Society

The Nietzsche Channel

HyperNietzsche

Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology

Badiou Web Resources

Badiou-List

Non-Philosophy International

Resources in Transcendental Materialism

Cybernetic Culture Research Unit

Resources in the History of Analytic Philosophy

British Society for Phenomenology

British Society of Aesthetics

Aesthetics On-Line

Plato Transformed

A research project to make Proclus’ commentaries on the major Platonic dialogues (Parmenides, Timaeus, Cratylus) and Damascius' commentary on the Philebus accessible to a modern scholarly public.

Heidegger's Ereignis

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GILLES DELEUZE LINK LISTS

Deleuze Studies Research Groups, Forums and Societies

Deleuze Studies Resources

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Deleuze texts and interviews

Texts on Deleuze

Experimental Work Inspired by Deleuze

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Félix Guattari

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2007-01-01T05:13:00.000-08:00

Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis

Edited by Gabriele Schwab

ISBN: 978-0-231-14308-0

"Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis offers readers eight probing, crackling, and urgently compelling essays that draw out the ways in which Jacques Derrida's work with psychoanalysis refuses the simplistic and falsifying epistemological separation of the psychic and the social, or the psychic and the political. These essays, through their thorough and thoughtful discussions of the convergence and divergences between Derrida's and Deleuze's respective treatments of foundational concepts in psychoanalysis, serve an invaluable goal of dispelling the tendency of critical thought in recent decades to consider psychoanalysis and politics, or the psychic and the political, as separate."—Liz Constable, the University of California at Davis

"This volume stages a much needed encounter between Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, two most influential thinkers of our time, on the ground of a certain resistance to psychoanalysis. The numerous points of intersection addressed in this volume are vertiginous and fascinating: buccality, bestiality, stupidity, perversion, childhood, animality, performance in film and media, race, political resistance and pain. By staging a comparative reading of these two thinkers, this volume opens a space beyond comparison, a monstrous, polymorphously perverse realm of psychoanalysis yet to come."—Dragan Kujundzic, professor of Jewish studies, Germanic and Slavic studies, and film and media studies at the University of Florida. He is also the author of Returns of History, Tongue in Heat, and co-editor of Provocations to Reading.

Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis explores the critical relationship between psychoanalysis and the work of Derrida (Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and his later writing on autoimmunity, cruelty, war, and human rights) and Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus, and more). Each essay illuminates a specific aspect of Derrida's and Deleuze's perspectives on psychoanalysis: the human-animal boundary; the child's polymorphism; the face or mouth as constitutive of ethical responsibility toward others; the connections between pain and suffering and political resistance; the role of masochism in psychoanalytic thinking; the use of psychoanalytic secondary revision in theorizing film; and the political dimension of the unconscious. Placing a particular emphasis on liminal figurations of the human and challenges to discourses on free will, the essays explore shared concerns in Derrida and Deleuze with regard to history, politics, the political unconscious, and resistance. By addressing the need to overcome the split between the psychological and the political, Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis illuminates the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis to critical interrogations of culture and politics.

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Derrida, Deleuze, and the Psychoanalysis to Come , by Gabriele Schwab

2. The Transcendental "Stupidity" [Bêtise] of Man and the Becoming-Animal According to Deleuze, by Jacques Derrida, edited by Erin Ferris

3. Polymorphism Never Will Pervert Childhood , by Catherine Malabou, translated by Robert Rose

4. Buccality , by Sara Guyer

5. Resistance, Terminable and Interminable, by Dina Al-Kassim

6. The Rhythm of Pain: Freud, Deleuze, Derrida, by Branka Arsić

7. The Only Other Apparatus of Film (A Few Fantasies About Différance, Démontage, and Revision in Experimental Film and Video) , by Akira Mizuta Lippit

8. De/Territorializing Psychoanalysis , by Gregg Lambert

About the Author

Gabriele Schwab is Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine and a faculty associate in the department of anthropology. She is a member and former director of the Critical Theory Institute and teaches in the newly founded Program in Theory and Culture. Her books include Subjects Without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern Fiction; The Mirror and the Killer-Queen: Otherness in Literary Language; and, with William Maurer, Accelerating Possessions: Global Futures of Property and Personhood.

From the series A Critical Theory Institute Book

Videos

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Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts 2007

Editor: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe

Date of Publication: 2008-01-01

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The essays collected in this volume were initially presented at the Second International Conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts, held at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, May 5-7, 2007. The conference was organised on the basis of the success of its predecessor in 2005, and on the basis of the success of the Rodopi book series Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, which has to date seen six volumes in print, with another twenty in press or in the process of being written. The conference also marked the launch of the second volume in the Intellect series Theatre and Consciousness with Michael Mangan’s Performing Dark Arts. The 2007 conference and the two book series highlight the continuing growth of interest within the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies, and in the distinct disciplines of theatre studies, literary studies, film studies, fine arts and music in the relationship between the object of these disciplines and human consciousness.

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe is Professor of Drama at the Lincoln School of Performing Arts, University of Lincoln. He has numerous publications on the topic of Theatre and Consciousness to his credit, including Theatre and Consciousness: Explanatory Scope and Future Potential (Intellect, 2005).
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Sample pdf (including Table of Contents)

Forthcoming Events Elsewhere

2007-01-01T03:43:00.000-08:00

Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities Events

CRMEP, Kingston University - Research Seminars

September 2010

24 September - Deleuze in Context Workshop, University of Dundee

May 2011

22nd-24th May - Deleuzian Futures International Conference, Tel Aviv University - CALL FOR PAPERS

June 2011

27th-29th June - Creation, Crisis, Critique: 4th International Deleuze Studies Conference, Copenhagen Business School - CALL FOR PAPERS

The Praxis of Alain Badiou

2007-01-01T03:31:00.000-08:00

Edited by Paul Ashton, A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens

Price: $35.00 AUD $23.00 USD €25.00 Euro £16.00 GBP

ISBN-10: 0 9803052 0 9

ISBN-13: 9780980305203

Publication date: 1 December 2006

Pages: 436

Format: 234x156 mm (6x9 in) Paperback

Series: Anamnesis

Description

Following the publication of his magnum opus L’être et l’événement (Being and Event) in 1988, Alain Badiou has been acclaimed as one of France’s greatest living philosophers. Since then, he has released a dozen books, including Manifesto for Philosophy, Conditions, Metapolitics and Logiques des mondes (Logics of Worlds), many of which are now available in English translation. Badiou writes on an extraordinary array of topics, and his work has already had an impact upon studies in the history of philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, political philosophy, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and ontology. This volume takes up the challenge of explicating, extending and, in many places, criticising Badiou’s stunningly original theses. Above all, the essays collected here put Badiou’s concepts to the test in a confrontation with the four great headings that he himself has identified as essential to our humanity: science, love, art and politics. Many of the contributors have already been recognised as outstanding translators of and commentators on Badiou’s work; they appear here with fresh voices also destined to make a mark.

Contents

Introduction

Masters & Disciples: Institution, Philosophy, Praxis

Paul Ashton, A. J. Bartlett & Justin Clemens

What is a Philosophical Institution? Or: Address, Transmission, Inscription

Alain Badiou

Science

The Law of the Subject: Alain Badiou, Luitzen Brouwer and the Kripkean Analyses of Forcing and the Heyting Calculus

Zachary Fraser

The Limits of The Subject in Badiou’s Being and Event

Brian Anthony Smith

Had we but worlds enough, and time, this absolute, philosopher…

Justin Clemens

Love

Count-as-one, Forming-into-one, Unary Trait, S1

Lorenzo Chiesa

Introduction to Sam Gillespie

Sigi Jöttkandt

Giving Form to Its Own Existence: Anxiety and the Subject of Truth

Sam Gillespie

Conditional Notes on a New Republic

A. J. Bartlett

Art

An Explosive Genealogy: Theatre, Philosophy and the Art of Presentation

Oliver Feltham

Ontology and Appearing: Documentary Realism as a Mathematical Thought

Lindsey Hair

Can Cinema Be Thought? Alain Badiou and the Artistic Condition

Alex Ling

Politics

Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude: Badiou and the Political Subject

Nina Power

The Bourgeois and the Islamist, or, The Other Subjects of Politics

Alberto Toscano

Philosophy and Revolution: Badiou’s Infidelity to the Event

Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos

Follysophy

Dominique Hecq

Bibliography of Work on and by Alain Badiou in English

Contributors

Index

2007-01-01T03:16:00.000-08:00

Radical Thinkers III - new from Verso

Ahmad, Balibar, Althusser, Baudrillard, Bhaskar, Marcuse, Ross, Sartre, Derrida, Therborn, Virilio, Zizek

Following the success of the first two sets of Radical Thinkers (published November 2005 and January 2007) Verso is pleased to announce a new set of twelve titles in this very well received series. The third set features some of the most notable authors in the Verso canon, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Zizek, and makes available once again, long out of print titles by author such as Roy Bhaskar and Aijaz Ahmad. Beautifully designed, with new liquorice all sorts-like jackets, the latest twelve titles are available at the same competitive price as the previous set: £6.99/$12.95 each.

'A golden treasury of theory' - Eric Banks, BOOKFORUM

'Verso's beautifully designed Radical Thinkers series, which brings together seminal works by leading left-wing intellectuals, is a sophisticated blend of theory and thought. The 12 authors whose writings are included in the series have worked tirelessly to expose the mechanisms by which culture and knowledge are manufactured, managed and controlled.'
- Ziauddin Sardar, NEW STATESMAN

Radical Thinkers III:

**In Theory, Ahmad (2008), PB 978-1-84467-213-4
Further details here

**Spinoza and Politics, Balibar (2008), PB 978-1-84467-205-9
Further details here

**On Ideology, Althusser (2008), PB 978-1-84467-202-8
Further details here

**The Perfect Crime, Baudrillard (2008), PB 978 1-84467-203-5
Further details here

**A Realist Theory of Science, Bhaskar (2008), PB 978-1-84467-204-2
Further details here

**A Study on Authority, Marcuse (2008), PB 978-1-84467-209-7
Further details here

**The Emergence of Social Space, Ross (2008), PB 978-1-84467-206-6
Further details here

**Between Existentialism and Marxism, Sartre (2008), PB 978-1-84467-207-3
Further details here

**Ghostly Demarcations, Derrida et al. (2008), 978-1-84467-211-0
Further details here

**What Does The Ruling Class Do When It Rules?, Therborn (2008), PB 978-1-84467-210-3
Further details here

**Open Sky, Virilio (2008), PB 978-1-84467-208-0
Further details here

**For They Know Not What They Do, Zizek (2008), PB 978-1-84467-212-7
Further details here

Images of The Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich - Volume 2

2007-01-01T03:09:00.000-08:00

King William Court

The Entrance to King William Court

King Charles Court (Trinity School of Music) on the left and on the right King William Court (University of Greenwich).

King Charles Court foreground and King William Court in the background from the gate leading onto the Thames Path.

The East Gate of the Old Royal Naval College, with Queen Mary Court on the left and Queen Anne Court on the right. King William Court and King Charles Court, on the left and right respectively, are seen in the distance.

Queen Mary Court through the pillars of King William Court

King William Court

________________________________________

New Book - Ray Brassier, 'Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction'

2007-01-01T01:09:00.000-08:00

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Description

Nihilism is not an affliction to be overcome, but a vector of intellectual discovery which philosophy should try to push to its ultimate conclusion. Rather than trying to safeguard the experience of meaning-construed as the defining feature of human existence-from the incursions of science, philosophy should strive to demystify it and deploy its considerable speculative resources to facilitate science's labor of disenchantment. Disregarding the orthodox division between analytic and continental traditions, this book tries to forge a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and speculative realism in contemporary French philosophy.

Contents

Preface

PART I: DESTROYING THE MANIFEST IMAGE

The Apoptosis of Belief

The Thanatosis of Enlightenment

The Enigma of Realism

PART II: THE ANATOMY OF NEGATION

Unbinding the Void

Being-Nothing

PART III: THE END OF TIME

The Pure and Empty Form of Death

The Truth of Extinction

Bibliography

Author Biography

RAY BRASSIER is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, London, UK.

Further details and a sample chapter can be viewed here.

2007-01-01T01:03:00.000-08:00

The British Society for Phenomenology

2008 Annual Conference

With the support of the British Academy

Hermeneutics: Contemporary Prospects (Tradition, Transmission and Treason)

April 4- 6 2008

St Hilda's College, University of Oxford

Hermeneutics lies at the centre of debates about method, and the status of interpretation within ethics, aesthetics, theology and philosophy in general. The conference brings leading figures in the field together to examine the nature and implications of current debate within hermeneutics and to assess the contribution that hermeneutics can make to methodological controversies in the humanities today.

Programme

Gianni Vattimo (University of Turin)
The Cultural Relevance of Hermeneutics

Gunter Figal (University of Freiburg)
Hermeneutics as Phenomenology

Istvan Fehrer (Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest)
Hermeneutics and the Philosophical Tradition

Jens Zimmerman (TW University, Canada)
Towards a Critique of the Theological Dimensions of Vattimo's Hermeneutic

James Risser (University of Seattle)
The Incapacity of Language

Annette Hilt (Ruprecht-Karls-University)
The Boundaries of Comprehensive Sense: Towards a Hermeneutics of Emotional Expressivity

Sinead Murphy (University of Cork)
Is Philosophical Hermeneutics Constructive?

Daniel Tate (Bonaventure University, New York)
Art as Cognitio Imaginativa: Gadamer on Intuition and Imagination in Kant's Aesthetic Theory

Morny Joy (University of Calgary)
Paul Ricoeur and a Hermeneutics of Human Capability and Fragility

All of the papers are on April 4-5. The final day of the conference is reserved for the AGM of the British Society for Phenomenology and other meetings. The full programme and the registration form for the conference are both available from the BSP web-site: www.britishphenomenology.com

If you have any queries about the conference, please contact David Webb:
d.a.webb[at]staffs.ac.uk.

NOV-DEC 2006 Workshops on Alain Badiou's 'Deleuze: The Clamour of Being'

2006-10-20T02:16:00.000-07:00

Workshops on Alain Badiou's 'Deleuze: The Clamour of Being':

Tuesday 14th November
6-8pm ‘Clamour of Being’ Workshop: intro, chapters 1 & 2.
Tuesday 21st November
6-8pm ‘Clamour of Being’ Workshop: chapters 3 & 4.
Tuesday 28th November
6-8pm ‘Clamour of Being’ Workshop: chapters 5 & 6.
Tuesday 5th December
6-8pm ‘Clamour of Being’ Workshop: chapters 7 & 8.

Location: Queen Anne 139

All sessions will be held on the Greenwich Maritime campus. The sessions are FREE and open to all but please REGISTER beforehand if you are not already a member of Greenwich University – email volcaniclines@hotmail.com and we will send you an information pack.

The workshops on Alain Badiou’s text ‘Deleuze: The Clamour of Being’ (ISBN 0-8166-3140-9) are intended as a focused reading group. Each will begin with a ten minute presentation to provide the focus of the session.

Read reports of these workshops and join the ongoing discussion at:

Workshop 1 - 14/11/06

Read the report by clicking here

Workshop 2 - 21/11/06

Read the report by clicking here

Workshop 3 - 28/11/06

Read the report by clicking here

Workshop 4 - 05/12/06

Read the report by clicking here

Organised by Greenwich University Philosophy Department

‘…another time in the broken chain of scholia, a discontinuous volcanic line, a second version underneath the first, expressing all the angers of the heart and setting forth the practical theses of denunciation and liberation.’

Gilles Deleuze

NOV 2006 Colloquium - Brian Smith (Dundee)

2006-10-19T02:17:00.000-07:00

Tuesday 7th November 2006 7-9pm

Colloquium

Brian Smith (Dundee) 'The Limits of the Subject in Badiou's Being and Event'

Location: Queen Anne 020

Organised by Greenwich University Philosophy Department

Read a report on this event and join the ongoing discussion here.

2006-08-29T20:59:00.000-07:00

Volcanic Lines: Deleuzian Research Group

Statement of Aims and Objectives

‘Depth is like the famous geological lines from NE to SW, the line which comes diagonally from the heart of things and distributes volcanoes: it unites a bubbling sensibility and a thought which “rumbles in its crater”.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

‘It's the mouth of a volcano. Yes, mouth: and lava tongue. A body, a monstrous living body, both male and female. It emits, ejects. It is also an interior, an abyss. Something alive that can die. Something inert that can become agitated, now and then. Existing only intermittently. A constant menace. If predictable, usually not predicted. Capricious, untameable, malodorous.’

Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

Staging Encounters

Volcanic Lines: Deleuzian Research Group is based in the University of Greenwich Philosophy Department. The department is located on the Maritime Greenwich campus of the University in one of the baroque courts that make up the Old Royal Naval College, a World Heritage Site on the banks of the River Thames. The launch of the Research Group in Autumn 2006 followed the success of The Work of Gilles Deleuze International Conference in July 2006. Its aim is to organise events focusing on a diverse range of philosophers.

The Deleuzian inspiration is to stage encounters between different figures and test the limits of this approach. It will not be restricted to considering only the encounters Deleuze himself staged and developed. It will seek to continue his approach of seeking more challenging encounters and indeed questioning whether his own work was either too narrow, in excluding figures such as Hegel, or too broad in its range to be effective. Does it make sense to talk about encounters if they can produce anything and involve any thinker? The research group will also have an interdisciplinary edge, tapping into Deleuze research in departments other than philosophy. In this way it will be both radical and boundary breaking whilst being rigorous and critical in testing the limits and depths of the Deleuzian practice of encounter.

To achieve this the group will seek to extend a broad range of encounters and pursue their depth and productivity in each case. This will involve much consideration of what is learnt about the other partner in the encounter and not only about Deleuze’s philosophy. This should ensure a balance between the partners and stretch the capacity of encounter to produce something new and productive given all the differences involved. This should provide a rigorous testing ground for Deleuze’s reading of different thinkers and for his capacity to encounter those he neglected or who have come after him. It will test the limits of their influence upon his thought and the capacity of both sides to survive the rigor and violence of encounter. Thus we ask, is the encounter ever exhausted? Is it ever unproductive? The range of thinkers will extend to contemporary concerns with the limits of Deleuze’s thought in areas such as political resistance.

Colloquia will feature the presentation of a paper relevant to Deleuze studies although it may focus upon another thinker and potential partner in encounter and in this way allow the depth of this alternative to be considered on its own terms. Online discussions of papers will be designed to extend the question session at the end of the paper.

Colloquia organised by the research group:

Michael J. Olson (Villanova), Matt Lee (Greenwich) and Edward Willatt (Greenwich), 'Kant, Deleuze and the "Great Outdoors" of Speculative Realism', 24 June 2009

John Protevi (Louisiana), 'Water', 11th December 2007

Mick Bowles (Greenwich), 'Understanding: Spinoza, Kant, Deleuze', 7th June 2007
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Darren Ambrose (Warwick), 'Deleuze and Francis Bacon: The Diagrammatic', 13th January 2007 -

Brian Smith (Dundee), 'The Limits of the Subject in Badiou's Being and Event', 7th November 2006

Reading group workshops will be focused workshops. They will involve short presentations or short papers to provide the themes of each session. These will not be papers to be discussed and the sessions will not be chaired. Rather the intention is to provide the focus to get through the text in a limited time frame and to allow conclusions to be reached about particular themes. Workshops will either meet over a number of weeks with sessions held on a particular evening every week or will be one day workshops with several sessions.

One day workshops organised by the research group:

On 'Foucault' - A Workshop on Gilles Deleuze's book 'Foucault', 18th April 2009

Integrations #1 - 'An Introductory Workshop on Deleuze and the Differential Calculus', 14th April 2007

Weekly reading group workshops organised by the research group:

Anti-Oedipus: A Six Week Reading Group, October-December 2007

On The Essays of Gilles Deleuze, Winter/Spring 2007

On Alain Badiou's Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, November-December 2006

Conferences will provide the time to stage an encounter with a number papers and discussions involving scholars from further afield.

Conferences organised by the research group:

'The Strange Encounter of Kant and Deleuze', University of Greenwich, 7th July 2007

'The Work of Gilles Deleuze', University of Greenwich, 1st July 2006

Further details and reports of our events can be viewed here.

Research Output

In Print

An edited collection of essays will be published by Continuum Press under the title Thinking Between Deleuze and Kant. For further details click here.

Online

The deleuze at greenwich website exists to provide information about Deleuze related events, calls for papers and publications at Greenwich and beyond. Anyone wishing to contribute information or suggested links is most welcome to e-mail these to volcaniclines[at]hotmail.com

The dialogues at greenwich blog allows for reports on events to be posted and for discussion begun at these to be continued and developed. We would also like to invite people to post their work in progress or pre-prints for discussion. If you are interested in contributing pieces we’d be delighted to hear from you and will send you details about posting. Please feel free to contribute to any discussion in the comments box at the bottom of each post. We hope this will provide a valuable terrain for testing ideas and readings for those who cannot make the events at Greenwich as well as developing and making available the work done at these events. Online publishing should allow the research group to make a contribution to the wider research community by disseminating contributions to key debates and trajectories in Deleuze studies and to the study of (potentially) related thinkers.

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Future Plans

Further reading groups and colloquia are planned that will test the limits and depths of the Deleuzian encounter. The blog will be regularly updated with details of these. Unless you are a member of Greenwich University registration is necessary for each event attended because of security measures in place at Maritime Greenwich campus. When registering please state each event that you plan to attend (volcaniclines[at]hotmail.com).

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Registered Members

Members of The Volcanic Lines Research Group attend events at Greenwich and contribute to conference, colloquium and workshop discussions and to online discussions. There is also the opportunity to contribute colloquia papers, workshops presentations and conference papers. Members are drawn from different faculties at Greenwich and from a number of other Universities. There are no membership fees and becoming a member of the research group simply involves registering for one of our events.

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Organisers

Events are organised by Matt Lee, Lecturer in Philosophy, Edward Willatt, who recently completed a PhD in philosophy at Greenwich, and other members of the Philosophy Department at The University of Greenwich.

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Contact Us

E-mail the research group organisers at volcaniclines[at]hotmail.com

New Book: Dave Boothroyd, 'Culture On Drugs'

2006-08-07T04:48:00.000-07:00

Never has a reconsideration of the place of drugs in our culture been more urgent than it is today. Dave Boothroyd (University of Kent, UK) investigates modernity's relationship to drugs and drug culture through innovative readings of texts by Freud, Benjamin, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. This book will be of interest to researchers, teachers and students of cultural theory and philosophy.

Available from Manchester University Press.

Paperback ISBN 0-7190-5599-7
Hardback ISBN 0-7190-5598-9

"With verve and clarity this book pulls off a remarkable feat. Brilliantly executed, elegantly written, its original approach to cultural theory opens up the texts of a series of important and influential thinkers from the inside out by means of 'narcoanalysis.' "
Tina Chanter, Professor of Philosophy, De Paul University, Chicago, USA

"A quality piece of work...it shows an impressive depth and range of scholarship regarding some of the twentieth century's most important thinkers." Gary Hall, Senior Lecturer, Media and Cultural Studies, Middlesex University
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JULY 2006 'The Work of Gilles Deleuze' Conference Report

2006-07-02T13:35:00.000-07:00

‘The Work of Gilles Deleuze’ Conference took place on Saturday on a very sunny day amidst the baroque splendour of the Maritime Campus. Greenwich played host to a fruitful meeting of Deleuze scholars and featured a series of fascinating and vital papers at the cutting edge of this field. Three parallel session ran in the morning and three in the afternoon. Scholars attended from across the UK and abroad, some having made long journeys to be here.

In the morning one session featured two papers that used artworks in order to explore and develop aspects of Deleuze’s work. This included Juan Usle’s work in Cath Ferguson’s paper, where it was related to bio-semiotics. A film made by Steven Eastwood, the second speaker of the session, was shown and raised issues about the practice and value of editing. The session also engaged with Deleuze’s critique of representation, his problematisation of sensation and work on the rhizome and body without organs.

A session featuring Matt Lee, Maria Lakka and Michael McGuire was animated by a common thread: the problem of the political for Deleuze. A further session featured Dror Yinon on the relation of Kant and Deleuze, Tristan Moyle on McDowell and Deleuze, and Patricia Farrell on paratactic narrative in Deleuze. These pushed the boundaries of research on Deleuze.

After lunch the grand council chamber was the setting for a papers on Deleuze and Stoicism, by John Sellars, and Deleuze and Whitehead, by Keith Robinson. These stimulated keen discussion and offered new directions for Deleuze scholarship in the further development of these dimensions of his thought.

Across the courtyard of Queen Anne Court another session featured a paper by Ed Romein and Sjoerd van Tuinen on the ‘City Without Predicates’ and one from Wim Christiaens on ‘Bergson and Quantum Theory.’ These papers explored themes at the heart of Deleuze’s work. The role of Leibniz and Deleuze’s interest in the urban were at the fore. The second paper presented classical and quantum systems in order to open up and develop highly productive areas in Difference and Repetition. A further session took place in which Gulsen Bal spoke on art production and the political, while Ils Huygens developed ideas of affect and image.

Given such a great set of sessions I for one wished that I could be in three places at once. This review reflects the fact that its author, of necessity, attended only two sessions and so relied upon reports about the other four. Readers are welcome to e-mail we36[at]greenwich.ac.uk if they would like to add to this report with anything the author missed or neglected.

The speakers and participants deserve great thanks for the papers and discussions that were at all times first rate and of great contribution to Deleuze scholarship.

RETURN TO MAIN PAGE

JULY 2006 'The Work of Gilles Deleuze' Conference Timetable

2006-06-10T17:22:00.000-07:00

A ONE DAY, INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
ORGANISED AND HOSTED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY,
UNIVERSITY OF GREENWICH,
AT THE MARITIME CAMPUS, OLD ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE
QUEEN ANNE COURT, GROUND FLOOR

SATURDAY, 1st JULY 2006, 10-4.30

TIMETABLE [updated on Wednesday 28 June]

[This is liable to change - PLEASE CHECK REGULARLY]

10-10.30 REGISTRATION [location will be sign posted]

10.30-1.00 PARALLEL SESSIONS

A. QA039

Tristan Moyle (Anglia Ruskin)
Transcendental Empiricism in Deleuze and McDowell

Dror Yinon (University of Paris I: Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Dispensing with the image of thought: Deleuze on the distinction between thought and reason

Patricia Farrell (MMU)
The Story of the Larval Subjects: a Paratactic Narrative in Difference and Repetition

B. QA063

Kostas Koukouzelis (Athens)
Deleuze and Kant on the notion of the ‘transcendental field’

A. Eylem Atakav (Southampton Solent)
Women’s Cinema as “Minor” Cinema

José Carlos Cardoso (Évora University, Portugal)
The Hanging of Ariadne

C. QA065

Cath Ferguson (MMU)
Title tbc

Steven Eastwood (SUNY, Buffalo)
Unknown Bodies: Some Thoughts on Gilles Deleuze and the Moving Image

D. QA075

Matt Lee (Greenwich)
What is the force of counter-actualisation?

Maria Lakka
The caesura of the will: Deleuze’s Nietzschean turn

Michael McGuire (LMU)
Deleuze and the Articulation of Control

1.00-2.00 LUNCH [not provided]

2.00-4.30 PARALLEL SESSIONS

A. QA065

Gulsen Bal (Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design)
……………………………………… modus operandi
a small step towards another ‘intriguing’ proposition…

Ils Huygens (Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht) Thinking affect: a new perspective for visual studies

B. QA063

John Sellars (KCL)
Deleuze’s Stoicism

Keith Robinson (South Dakota)
An Ontology of the ‘Virtual’ in Whitehead’s Metaphysics

C. QA039

Ed Romein (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) & Sjoerd van Tuinen (Gent)
City without Predicates

Wim Christiaens and Sjoerd van Tuinen (Gent)
Bergsonism and Quantum Theory. Some Notes on a Deleuzian Philosophy of Nature

4.30 CONFERENCE ENDS

RETURN TO MAIN PAGE

JULY 2006 'The Work of Gilles Deleuze' Conference Abstracts

2006-06-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

Steven Eastwood (SUNY, Buffalo)

unknown bodies
Some thoughts on Gilles Deleuze and the moving image

What is the nature of a thought that is at once brain, screen and world? Gilles Deleuze, progenitor[1] of schizoanalyis, navigator of ideational lines of flight, and author of the film philosophy books Cinema 1: the movement-image and Cinema 2: the time-image, writes of an "unknown body". It is not the corporeal body that seals an inside, or a screen, which is outside, but a body between them, a body that is both thinking and screen. How is it that I can react to moving images as simultaneously like a world, and a world? Deleuze, calls this unknown body a spiritual automaton in the brain made possible by cinema - a new thought in thought. 1895: along comes the moving image as an eruption for cognition, an anomaly for the brain, offering a gap in sensory-motor perceptual regulation, interrupting the habitual thinking of the brain, providing a fissure in thought, what Deleuze calls a nooshock that forces thought to think itself by perceiving thought-like events other than its own, out there in the outside, on the screen. This is quickly suppressed by story, by impossible continuity, by propaganda, prompting Deleuze to lump together Hitler and Hollywood. Throughout Deleuze's philosophy he refers to a "plane of immanence," upon which emergent beings become, in their own temporality. Developing ideas from both Nietzsche and Bergson, Deleuze suggests that habitual sensory motor mental behaviour has lead to static, teleologically rooted identities whose thoughts and experiences (and films) transpire in the form of cliché, over-determined by what has come before. "Becoming", for Deleuze, is the human identity as various flight lines, and the plane of immanence is the site for this cartographic invention. This is an emergent space, an open-whole, consisting of intervals in thought between stimulus and response. The cinema philosophy of Deleuze re-discovers every image as potential "time-image", as a durational space that can be divorced from narrative or representational habituation, in order to enable temporal, ideational and corporeal otherness. The spiritual automaton finds new networks and connectivities, as unknown body, as mind in flight. The cinema becomes a peculiar prosthesis, a situatedness for the other thinker in thought, the situation of time in time, of space in space, where the body finds extensivity and new virtualities. In Deleuze we discover a siren call to engage with film and video as lovers, as fools, as intercessors with our heads spinning into the unspeakable, as cartographers endlessly writing over existing maps, as filmmakers whose films are our own. Somebody once rang me and in broken English spoke of a "Three-year long film" she wanted to show me. At the 1999 total eclipse of the sun my video camera picked up someone commenting that, "It's like the lights going down in the cinema." Digital video editors experience a phenomenon referred to as "interfacing," where, exhausted, they, for example, find themselves attempting to slow and reverse traffic on their journey home in an oneiric configuration between film/video temporality and their own. This paper follows emergent trajectories of cinematic unknown bodies. There will be elements of free-indirect discourse between reasoned and sourced ideas (including Deleuze, Irigaray, Badiou, Sobchack, Merleau Ponty, Grosz), accidental ideas, anecdotes, and contingent activity. The presentation will most likely emerge in the form of a video/film essay, or a live performance, willfully slipping into gaps.

A. Eylem Atakav (Southampton Solent)

Women’s Cinema as “Minor” Cinema

“How many people today live in language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to use?”
(Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari)

When feminist theories of women's cinema first appeared in the 1970s, there were so few films by women whereas today, although women's filmmaking is still very much a minority activity, there is enough work in a wide range of styles and from a variety of cultures. The plurality of forms, concerns and constituencies in contemporary women's cinema now exceeds even the most flexible definition of counter cinema. Women's cinema thus seems 'minor' rather than oppositional.

The idea of the minor comes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of minor literature. A minor literature is not like a literary genre or period, nor is classification as minor an artistic evaluation. A minor literature of a minority or marginalised group, written, not in a minor language, but in a major one, just as Kafka, a Czech Jew, wrote in German.

Inspired deeply by Alison Butler's 'Women's Cinema: the Contested Screen', this paper intends to examine women's filmmaking whilst questioning the possibility and -in Deleuze's terms- the impossibility of women's filmmaking in a patriarchal society.

As Meaghan Morris points out “this question is echoed obliquely in the concerns of early feminist film criticism and Claire Johnston’s work on women’s films made within the system of Hollywood’s social and cinematic codes. A minor literature is not ‘marginal’; it is what a minority constructs in a ‘major language’, and so it is a model of action from a colonised position within a given society.”

It is, then, apposite to ask here one other question: are women filmmakers not living in a language of their own?

Butler argues that the notion of minor cinema is functional to the debate that the existence of women’s cinema needs not to be premised on an essentialist understanding the category of ‘women’. The communities imagined by women’s cinema are as many and varied as the films it comprises, and each is involved in its own historical moment. Thinking of (some) women’s cultural production as ‘minor’ (in some ways) does not depend on a belief in women’s absolute alienation from language and culture.

Here, again, Deleuze’s understanding of the effects of the experience of marginalisation is useful: “Sometimes the minority filmmaker finds himself in the impasse described in Kafka: the impossibility of writing differently and behind it, a ‘double impossibility’, that of forming a group and that of not forming a group.”

Therefore, as Butler points outs the distinctiveness of women’s filmmaking is not based on an essentialist understanding of gendered subjectivity, but on the position –or positions- of women in contemporary culture in Kafka’s impasse: neither included within nor excluded from cultural tradition.

To sum up, to call women’s cinema a minor cinema is to free it from the binarisms (popular/elitist, avant-garde/ mainstream, positive/ negative) which result from it as an oppositional cinema.

Ed Romein (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) & Sjoerd van Tuinen (Gent)

City without Predicates

By the end of the twentieth century we saw the demise of the city as a concept for describing the contemporary urban condition. The proliferation of prefixes like post, ex, sub and dis to the ‘urbs’ of contemporary life signal an increasing difficulty of conceptualizing the ongoing processes that shape, reshape, fragment and reconfigure it. Our impression is that this unbridled proliferation of prefixes attests to the deep inadequacy of a nineteenth century conception of urbanity and to the end of the nineteenth century conception of the city. This observation is paralleled by the recent discourse about ‘the end of the social’. In our view these debates evolve around a social ontology which is based on, what we will call, a dogmatic image of sociological thought, i.e. on transcendent objects and metaphysical essentialism, and which is directly responsible for the theoretical incapacity to understand the current urban condition. To get out of this cul-de-sac we propose to turn towards a Deleuzian ‘flat’ or processual social ontology. By developing a contemporary conception of the ‘urbs’, using the Deleuzian ontology of the virtual-actual – especially in its Leibniz-Tarde lineage – we hope to contribute to a sociological theory of cities. We will call this concept a city without predicates, which we derive from Leibniz’ monadological transformation of Plotinus’ and Augustine’s notion of the ‘city of God’ into a logical and metaphysical understanding of the Baroque city as a virtuality that can no longer be the subject of any series of predicates or essential properties, but which rather subsists as the transversal of these differentiated series. This concept can be operationalized by using the work of the recently rediscovered sociologist Gabriel Tarde, who held the reductionist starting point that “every thing is a society”. In Tarde this singularity is played out in society through the concepts of invention and imitation. Through such a conceptualisation of the urban condition in terms of singularities we hope to light up a different side of urban phenomena as diverse as terrorism, counter-terrorism measures, surveillance, insurance and architecture.

Wim Christiaens and Sjoerd van Tuinen (Gent)

Bergsonism and Quantum Theory. Some Notes on a Deleuzian Philosophy of Nature

Gilles Deleuze wanted a philosophy of nature in a pre-kantian, almost archaic sense. A central concept in his philosophy is ‘multiplicity’ which he adopted from Bergson. Although the concept is philosophical through and through, it has roots in mathematics and physics. Deleuze was attracted to this term because he believed it indicated a break with the dogmatic image of thought (which constrains itself into producing representations of reality conceived as particular things with strict borders, behaving and interacting according to invariant laws covering all possible states). We believe that the discussion concerning the ontological status of quantum phase space induces a similar break with both the ‘naive’ realism and empiricism that is upheld by many analytical philosophers and with the transcendental idealism of continental philosophy. Even though it is true that a transcendentalist understanding of phase space representation of a physical entity is not a typical materialist picture of reality, it derives from a normal Euclidean representation, and can in principle be reduced to it.

There are two fundamental characteristics that indicate that one could interpret the state vector with the concept of disjunctive unity and the bergsonian correlation actuality-virtuality: 1. The state vector of a quantum system comes very close to a multiplicity: the variables that describe it are incompatible (for example position and momentum) without transcending the unity of the state space. 2. Although there is always a variable for the entity it describes that is actual in the classical sense (we are sure to obtain a determinate value upon measurement), for the main part its variables are indeterminate. This indeterminacy is at the same time less and more than a classical possibility.

In conclusion we want to show how bringing together certain interpretations of quantum mechanics and Deleuze’s bergsonian ontology would contribute to a renewed philosophy of nature. Although the interpretation of quantum mechanics is an industrious subdiscipline in philosophy of science, regular science still marginalizes its importance. Wee see the lack of success of that marginalization - the mathematical structure and its algorithms never really suffice, and seem unable to leave the philosophical-ideological context behind in which it arose, contrary to antecedent successful physical theories - as a positive phenomenon. Contrary to previous physical theories, the Outside/unthought destabilizes marginalization and fuels interpretation in its constructivist sense. The relation between QM and its interpretations is a fine and significant example for a contemporary metaphysics, which follows Deleuze’s motto: “Science is never ‘reductionist’ but, on the contrary, demands a metaphysics - without which it would remain abstract, deprived of meaning or intuition” (Gilles Deleuze in Bergsonism). Ultimately, Deleuze’s ontology of multiplicities has a capacity to account for the epistemological success of the concept of Hilbert space. It does not dismiss the transcendental critique, but radicalizes it in a ‘transcendental’ or ‘superior empiricism’, i.e. a post-Kantian philosophy of nature.

John Sellars (KCL)

Deleuze’s Stoicism

This paper will examine the Stoicism within the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. It will not be primarily concerned with Deleuze’s explicit comments regarding Stoicism in The Logic of Sense (although these will be touched upon) but rather with a more pervasive Stoicism running throughout his work, both with and without Guattari. The case for the existence of this deeper Stoicism within Deleuze’s philosophy will be advanced on six fronts: 1) the Stoics stand at the beginning of Deleuze’s counter tradition of philosophies of immanence running through Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, and Bergson; 2) the Stoics were the first to reverse Platonism, a task that Deleuze presents as the principal task for modern philosophy; 3) Deleuze shares with the Stoics a practical conception of philosophy, notwithstanding the definition of philosophy as the creation of concepts advanced in What is Philosophy?; 4) Deleuze follows the Stoics in proposing the dissolution of the boundaries between the individual and cosmos; 5) Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology stands within the Stoic cosmopolitan tradition; 6) Deleuze presents Stoicism as an ethics of amor fati and, as such, the only meaningful form of ethics there is.

Keith Robinson (South Dakota)

An Ontology of the ‘Virtual’ in Whitehead’s Metaphysics

A good deal of recent work on Deleuze has focused on his importance as a philosopher of the ‘virtual’ and the intensive processes that emerge from it. That Deleuze finds the ontological and metaphysical expression of these virtual processes in the work of Nietzsche, Spinoza and Bergson is perhaps now well known. The ‘trinity’ of Deleuzian thought –with Spinoza as the ‘Christ’ of philosophers - is now established in the commentaries. Far less appreciated, at least in the Anglo-American reception of Deleuze, is the extent to which he ‘returns’ with a difference to the inestimable -yet abandoned (Deleuze says ‘assassinated’) - work of Alfred North Whitehead in order precisely to experiment with the virtual logic of becoming and difference and to continue the work of creating transformative and transversal relations in between science and philosophy.

In what follows I would like to draw out a more detailed resonance between certain elements of the ‘virtual’ metaphysical framework developed in Whitehead’s later works, especially Process and Reality, and Deleuze’s own virtual philosophy especially in Difference and Repetition. It is hoped that this will not only open up new perspectives on Deleuze’s thought but it will also show the extent to which Whitehead’s work is ready for what one commentator calls ‘rehabilitation’, opening a space in which Whitehead’s philosophy becomes once again a living and creative possibility for thought.

Patricia Farrell (MMU)

The Story of the Larval Subjects: a Paratactic Narrative in Difference and Repetition

“The story of the larval subjects” – that is, the account of individuation – in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, is a form of paratactic narrative, implicated in and complicated with another paratactic narrative: Deleuze’s account of the three passive syntheses of time. Using the “larval subjects” – and the reworking of a broken lithographic plate by Odilon Redon – as examples, this paper will consider the idea of an emergent paratactic narrative, how it might be generated and what it does within the experience of reading it.

As a written work, the account of individuation is a form of “potential literature” as practised by the French literary group OULIPO, employing structural constraints to make works which generate multiply diverse ways of being read. Deleuze frames a theory of the production of subjectivity, as a passive synthesis derived from Bergson and Gilbert Simondon, with the dissensual adjacencies of the presentation of time in Bergson and Nietzsche. The result is a mapped space which articulates two co-existent but divergent readings We can read its technical invention in terms of its content leading to a reinforcement of its fictive qualities, binding it into its narrative form: reading it semantically, reading it syntactically to derive from it a recounted history of subjectivation: and we can read it pragmatically, as a series of poetic strategies or as a set of structural principles for a performance: something like a dance-score which maps out a space a performer can distribute their moves across. Such a performer has to learn to be able to read and express congruently. Ideally then, through reading, a process of articulated individuation takes place – and that constantly, never completing its performance so that the function of Deleuze’s story of the larval subjects is increasingly less representational and more physically affective. The crux of the matter is how we learn to read this potential of pure expression and become disposed to its purpose.

The purpose of this pure aesthetic can be seen as the genesis and evolution of a pure ethic – or an ethos as way of living, a move through and beyond the synthesis of empirical habit toward a transcendental habit of thinking. This story requires a progressively more engaged reader and a progressively more dissolved subject: a contemplative reader passively synthesised and set in motion. With Deleuze’s exemption of consciousness from the transcendental realm and, as I argue, the emergence of a paratactic narrative from the congruence of semantic and pragmatic readings, what can we say about that narrative’s emergent history, its emergent personae?

Dror Yinon (University of Paris 1: Panthéon-Sorbonne)

Dispensing with the image of thought: Deleuze on the distinction between thought and reason

In his critique of the “image of thought” (Difference and Repetition Ch. 3), Gilles Deleuze advances the thesis that a sharp distinction should be made between thought and representation. By failing to maintain this distinction, he argues, philosophy has fallen into a certain illusion, that of a dogmatic image of thought, which consists of grasping thought exclusively in terms of representation or recognition. As Deleuze explains, transcendental philosophy generates this illusion by conceiving of the condition in terms of the conditioned, an operation which Deleuze characterizes as a duplication of the empirical onto the transcendental.

How is one to understand this critique? Interpretations (for example, James Williams’ commentary on Difference and Repetition) tend to connect it with Deleuze’s analysis of the structure of recognition based on the functions of subject and object as fixed poles (called by Deleuze “common sense”) and concrete acts of recognition understood as falling under that form (named “good sense”). According to this line of thought, Deleuze’s critique is designed to show that this structure is erroneously conceived of as transcendental, while it is only an illegitimate product of the abovementioned duplication. Instead, Deleuze calls for a radical change in the doctrine of the faculties which consists in studying them in their disjointed state, that is, out of their collaboration with recognition.

I think this interpretation does not offer the required critique of Kant: viewed from a Kantian perspective, the above interpretation of Deleuze’s critique is insufficient; it only stresses the necessity of admitting of a thought which is distinct from the understanding (the faculty of recognition) but does not explain its nature. However, Kant insists that thought cannot be exhausted by recognition, hence his distinction between reason and understanding. Half of the Critique of Pure Reason is dedicated to unfolding the structure and function of reason. Thus, in order to realize Deleuze’s critique of the image of thought, it is necessary that it confronts Kant’s notion of reason, particularly his notion of ‘Idea’.

In this paper I show that Deleuze’s notion of ‘Idea’ in its relation to Kant’s should be taken as the focal point of his critique. That is, Deleuze’s notion of Idea is based on the Kantian demand to distinguish thought from understanding. Deleuze sustains this critique by showing that Kant fails to meet this demand in his analysis of reason, i.e. that Kantian reason is still thought of in terms of representation.

My claim is that the reason why kant duplicates the empirical onto the transcendental is that his notion of reason stays within the limits of object-oriented thought. On the other hand, Deleuze’s notion of Idea, with its problematic nature understood anew, constitutes a thought that is not object oriented. Hence, instead of having regulative reason guide the subject’s cognitive activity (i.e. Kantian reason), the subject is confronted with problems imposed upon him by creative thought (i.e. thought elicits the subject’s experience rather than guides it).

Tristan Moyle (Anglia Ruskin)

Transcendental Empiricism in Deleuze and McDowell

Both Deleuze and McDowell – commonly thought of as very different philosophers engaged in very different projects - call the conception of experience they offer a ‘transcendental empiricism’. This paper asks two questions. First, are there any underlying similarities between Deleuze and McDowell that allows us to name both of them ‘transcendental empiricists’ in a meaningful sense? Second, what differences are there between the transcendental empiricism of McDowell and Deleuze? In relation to the first question I hope to demonstrate that both philosophers seek to avoid Absolute idealism and traditional empiricism by modulating Kant’s transcendental idealism. Specifically this modulation takes the form of a re-working of the Kantian notion of transcendental, a priori sensibility. In relation to the second question I hope to demonstrate that there are in fact two quite distinct models of transcendental empiricism, which I shall call transcendental empiricism I (McDowell) and transcendental empiricism II (Deleuze). I will argue that transcendental empiricism II is a more satisfactory conception of experience because it avoids the threat of idealism that contaminates McDowell’s version of transcendental empiricism. I will argue that Deleuze neutralises the threat of idealism - in a way that echoes themes from later Merleau-Ponty and later Heidegger - by conceiving an immanent relation between transcendental sensibility and the ‘aesthetic form’ of experience.

Ils Huygens (Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht)

Thinking affect: a new perspective for visual studies

In Deleuze and Spinoza’s view the body is not considered as a substance but as a kinetic and dynamic thing that is fundamentally organised by “a capacity for affecting and being affected.” Affect exists only as relation between two bodies and transgresses the borders between self and other, between subject and object. In the cinema, the viewer is confronted with a double inter-affective relation, with the body on the screen, but also with the screen itself which is also a kinetic body in the dynamic worldview of Deleuze/Spinoza.

Since the last few years in film– and mediastudies, the concept of affect has become a central term. Affect, as in psychology, is considered as something that takes place on a bodily, sensational level, not consciously registered unless it is actualized into feeling or emotion. Deleuze scholars like Brian Massumi and Steven Shaviro claim that the effects of affect, even when it is not consciously perceived, are real and need further attention, especially in relation to media like cinema or television that have the capacity to intensify, alter or distort the affective dimensions of an image, sound, voice, face or gesture.

According to Brian Massumi, who has developed Deleuze’s notion of affect quite extensively by connecting it to scientific research and cultural studies in his book The Autonomy of Affect, image-reception is two-sided: there’s the personal, actualized level and there’s the superlinear level of intensity. Whereas the first level is that of socio-linguistical codification and of clear cut cognitive emotions, the superlinear level can break the level of logical expectations and cause a sudden disruption. The superlinear level does not register words or symbolic content but intensity, “the effect of an image’s duration”. What Massumi is talking about is the level of affect: body movement, voice timbre, facial expression all produce real effects in the viewer of which he himself is not yet consciously aware of, surface stimuli that are registered by our skin and visceral senses.

In this essay I will try to expand a little more on the development of an affective approach to images. What might such an approach mean? How can we approach affect in language? And how can we turn it into a productive tool of analysis for the study of images? Which concepts need to be looked at and what connections can be made to other non-philosophical research? Some promising linkages that we believe might help develop an affective approach further lie for instance in empirical psychology (William James), the psychology of emotions (Silvan Tomkins) or neurology (Damasio) which will also be briefly discussed.

Matt Lee (Greenwich)

What is the force of counter-actualisation?

One of the central problems in understanding Deleuze lies in the idea of ‘counter-actualisation’. Deleuze’s shift from Kantian ‘conditions of possible experience’ to the formula of his transcendental empiricism (‘conditions of real experience’) involves a rejection of the priority of the thinking subject. Yet without the thinking subject, who is it that counter-actualises, how is it done and why does it happen?

Deleuze’s answer seems to rest on an ‘encounter’ with force but this encounter is read as fully positive. If this is so, where is the space for a counter-actualisation? How can a counter-actualisation occur without some lack, negation or nothingness forcing it? To give the answer, ‘the intensity of the encounter’, avoids the necessary characterization of a direction to counter-actualisation. The key question becomes one of establishing where we can find the point of actualization turning on itself, countering itself. In effect this is an attempt to establish an account of the materiality of counter-actualisation.

To establish such a materiality of counter-actualisation it is useful to examine the role learning plays within Deleuze’s work. In particular, by examining learning we can begin to encounter key tensions between Deleuze’s work as an account of materiality as against a thinking of materality, in particular locating the radicality of Deleuze’s thought, almost paradoxically, in the way he articulates thinking itself.

José Carlos Cardoso (Évora University, Portugal)

The Hanging of Ariadne

In the intellectual progression of Deleuze we sees two directions, seemingly, absolutely incompatible: the ontological one and the transcendantal.

When we seeks where its two parallel approaches meet - the battle field of the Deleuze’s philosophy - we realizes that that occurs in the development from "the same" idea: the transcendental field (Logique du sens), the plan of immanence (Mille Plateaux ; Qu’est-ce que le philosophie ?).

However, the setting in question of the concept of immanence makes emerge a thought of the experiment; but of an experiment which releases in its concreted reality its own conditions of possibility - here the debate is, clearly with Kant - i.e., a renewal of the matter of transcendental aesthetics. The search for an empirico-transcendantal aesthetics, to speak with the deleuzian way.

It is tried, therefore, in this paper, to try to understand the essential role of the aesthetic laboratory - in particular the book on the painting of Francis Bacon and the two volumes on the Cinema - in this radical setting in question the conditions of the thought itself, therefore of the destruction of the dogmatic image of the thought.

Gulsen Bal (Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design)

……………………………………… modus operandi

a small step towards another ‘intriguing’ proposition…

The focus of attention in this presentation is to explore what practice comes down to transcending its own context with the politics of production towards the ‘processual’ intensities through critical modalities within a philosophy of practice in a critical function of theory. Methodology wise practicing philosophy to some extent is taken into account as if such was “theory is simply a challenge to the real. A challenge to the world to exist.”[2]

The key which opens the “axiomatics” of Deleuzian projects to the paradox, therefore, lies in the extent to which it questions philosophy itself as a “reading machine.”[3]

Through opening this kind of discursive space by means of creating a complex mode of production site, art production therefore can be brought together under the rubric of the creation of new philosophical concepts in its reference to a philosophical encounter. In other words, almost the im-/possibility of the engagement, which opens up the creative process to a dialogical interaction the routes taken per se…

Thus the ‘dialogue’ becomes one of the issue that worth pondering. Let’s start by asking what takes the place of communication, which infused with elements drawn upon attention on a sphere of ‘contact zones,’ where dialogues reside within its latent omnipresence in its manifold modalities.

The direction of this argument leads towards how one can describe the constituency of dialogic art practice and create a cross-border communication through the axes of trans-cultural practices, which open a new space formed, by a space of interruptions and a space of enunciation.

This opens up the question of the political and the mechanism for the critical engagement of artistic production. Therefore a multitude of rhizomically self-transformative pluralistic approaches, what the ‘other’ wants to show us through the parameters of what the ‘other’ is showing is still intriguing.

During this intellectual quest, the issues will cover the differential structures in representational boundaries as well as some complementary ideas, including the border phenomena in trans-local and trans-national location within cultural geography.

Maria Lakka

The caesura of the will: Deleuze’s Nietzschean turn

Deleuze’s philosophical project, as instantiated in Difference and Repetition, is profoundly informed by Bergson’s conception of time – an unceasingly creative reality rather than an abstract form, and such an influence becomes explicitly apparent in the elaboration of the passive syntheses of time. However, Deleuze does not limit himself to the two forms of contraction-memory (corresponding to the first and the second passive syntheses) but he also recalls Nietzsche’s eternal return, which he calls “the empty form of time” as “universal ungrounding”. In this paper, I want to focus on the “disjunctive synthesis” of the eternal return and to explore the reasons for Deleuze’s implementation and how it becomes significant for his idea of ‘becoming’.

The concept of duration appears to emphasize the centripetal force of repetition and memory and although Bergson also mentions a centrifugal force in parallel operation, it is Nietzsche who conceptualized a force of expulsion within eternal recurrence. The Nietzschean notion differs from the ancient conception of the eternal return of the Same, which views repetition in natural and astronomical cycles and remains an empirical doctrine. His doctrine prevents time from being merely qualitative change or variation, as it was also conceived by the scientific law of the conservation of energy. Although the latter sustains the timelessness of being, Nietzsche’s and Deleuze’s concept make it a condition of becoming, which brings a redistribution of the whole.

The doctrine of the eternal return cannot be conceived separately from the will to power and it therefore attains, according to Deleuze a double status: on one hand, as an ethical thought it is the formulation of the “practical synthesis” which moulds the will into action. On the other hand, it is an esoteric doctrine which makes the will not only a power of creation but one which necessarily also entails the risk of self-annihilation. This is the “paradox of passion” as Agamben has called it. Deleuze’s incorporation of Nietzsche’s eternal return diverts him from the Levinasian notion of radical passivity, and emphasizes how it is an energetic will that envelops its own caesura.

Kostas Koukouzelis (Athens)

Deleuze and Kant on the notion of the ‘transcendental field’

Deleuze in one of his last writings, namely ‘Immanence: a Life…’, gives a compressed, yet quite illuminating diagram of his entire philosophical project. It is there that the notion of a ‘transcendental field’ is unveiled to be of crucial importance for the superior (transcendental) empiricism he is claiming to defend. The paper is an exploration of the ambiguous, yet quite important, relation to Kant’s transcendentalism. I am arguing, against recent influential interpretations (Hardt and Negri stress exclusively Deleuze’s Spinozism) that Deleuze has been influenced by Kant in more than one ways. Thus, the argument is as follows. First, I will argue for the necessity, role and nature of the transcendental in both Kant and Deleuze. Second, I will just focus on the notion of the ‘transcendental field’, important for philosophies of reflection, like Kant’s. It is of huge importance for us to locate some common ground on the significance of anti-Cartesian internal difference for both thinkers. Of equal importance is also Deleuze’s own critique and revision of the Kantian project in terms of the introduction of time. The transcendental is not the condition of possible experience, but becomes the genetic account of real experience. It provides determinability instead of rational determination or empirical indetermination. Deleuze wants to replace the synthetic a priori consciousness with an impersonal, pre-individual yet singular field (plane of immanence). Is such a move successful or does it commit what Kant terms the fallacy of ‘amphiboly’?

Cath Ferguson (MMU)

Title tbc

The relation between theoretical discourse and Fine Art practice continues to be problematic. It would be contradictory to suggest that artistic invention has its cause in specific theoretical or philosophical ideas but on the other hand ideas are always involved in making art on some level. The danger is that discourse would reduce the problematic nature of art to a function of a priori criteria of judgment. If the ambition of art is to operate as what Deleuze would term an object of a ‘fundamental encounter’ rather than an object of recognition then ideas should have a liberating role both when it comes to making art and in expanding our perception of it through discourse.

This issue will be explored through a discussion of the paintings of the New York based Spanish artist Juan Usle. A significant aspect of Usle’s work is their close resemblance to his photographs despite the fact that the paintings are ostensibly abstract. This ‘resemblance’ is not a matter of imagery, however, and could be more accurately described, perhaps, in terms of a repetition in painting of relations formed in photography between its subject and the act of capture on film. The difficulty here is that there is at once a sense of association but without identifiable similarities that could be pointed to as ‘evidence’. The challenge of interpretation is to remain close to the material specificity of the paintings (without bracketing the relation as a function of cultural change, for example) and demonstrate the relation as a vital force in the work.

This difficulty will be addressed by approaching the work as evolutionary process drawing on aspects of Deleuze’s biophilosophy and a model of biological evolution developed in the field of biosemiotics. Following this model such a photographic ‘influence’ could be understood as an element in the environment which becomes interpreted by each painting (as a kind of organism). As such the interpretation is a function of the work’s specific ‘genetic code’: the pictorial history or legacy encoded and the materials and processes selected to express it.

In approaching the interrelation of theory and fine art practice from this direction the aim is also to investigate the nature of a ‘transcendental empiricism’ and the challenge the widespread tendency for art discourse to unwittingly (or wittingly) adopt a representational image of art practice.

Michael McGuire (LMU)

Deleuze and the Articulation of Control

The work of Deleuze has begun to find increasing application in the field of Criminology, especially with regard to his briefly sketched idea of a ‘control’ society. The problem of the regulation and control of the social order constitutes an important area of research within the discipline - one with theoretical underpinnings in the work of a range of important criminologists such as Stan Cohen and David Garland as well as in the influential models of disciplinary power developed by Foucault. In this paper I aim to outline how Deleuze’s critique of Foucault – in particular the shift he emphasizes between social relations locked into a ‘logic of enclosure’ towards those rooted in the ‘network’ - has begun to alter the perspectives of criminologists on a range of issues from punishment, regulation, crime and technology and so on. I aim particularly to examine how Deleuze’s notion of a ‘society of control’ can serve to illustrate current trends in criminal justice systems more effectively than the more familiar paradigm of the ‘surveillance society’. In so doing I hope to refine and disambiguate Deleuze’s notion of control itself.

[1] With Guattari.
[2] Jim Fleming and Sylvère Lotringer (Ed.) Forget Baudrillard, An Interview with Baudrillard. New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents series, 1987, p.123
[3] The problem of ‘imposed’ philosophical readings on Deleuzian project can be found in Alain Badiou’s Deleuze: The Clamour of Being where he argues and raises the question of philosophy itself as a “reading machine.”

RETURN TO MAIN PAGE

2006-06-06T05:04:00.000-07:00

The aim of this volume is to provide, through a series of close textual engagements, critical readings of Gilles Deleuze's The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. As interest in the Deleuzean corpus grows, more detailed expositions of his work become necessary. The Fold is a notoriously intricate text that presents a unique reading both of Leibniz and of the Baroque by bringing them together under an operative concept that is also integral to Deleuze's own work. Since its appearance, the readership of the book has grown incessantly, inspiring creative work across the fields of philosophy, aesthetics and cultural theory. However, surprisingly little sustained critical work has been undertaken with regard to it. This volume opens up a number of the key areas of difficulty and complexity within the text in order to provide a readership across different fields with a number of critical perspectives on this work.

Table of Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction; N.McDonnell & S.van Tuinen
Four Things Deleuze Learned from Leibniz; M.Lærke
The Free and Indeterminate Accord of 'The New Harmony': The Significance of Benjamin's Study of the Baroque for Deleuze; T.Flanagan
Leibniz's Combinatorial Art of Synthesis and the Temporal Interval of the Fold; N.McDonnell
Leibniz, Mathematics and the Monad; S.Duffy
Perception, Justification and Transcendental Philosophy; G.Banham
Genesis and Difference: Deleuze, MaImon, and the Post-Kantian Reading of Leibniz; D.W.Smith
A Transcendental Philosophy of the Event: Deleuze's Non-Phenomenological Reading of Leibniz; S.van Tuinen
Towards a Political Ontology of the Fold: Deleuze, Heidegger, Whitehead and the 'Fourfold' Event; K.Robinson
Two Floors of Thinking; or, Deleuze's Aesthetics of Folds; B.M.Kaiser
Capacity or Plasticity: So just what is a Body? M.Hammond
Index

Authors

SJOERD VAN TUINEN is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Belgium. He is author of Peter Sloterdijk. Ein Profil (2006).

NIAMH MCDONNELL is a graduate from Goldsmiths University of London, UK. She was the organizer of the conference 'A Leibniz Affair–Readings of Leibniz from Kant to Deleuze' in 2005. Currently researching the intersection between performative writing in philosophy and moving image art forms, she lives and works in London.

2006-05-04T03:26:00.000-07:00

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

A one day conference on Salomon Maimon and the Essay on Transcendental Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, on Thursday 19 August, 2010

We are pleased to announce the first UK conference on the philosophy of Salomon Maimon (1753-1800). With the recent publication of the first English translation of Maimon’s principal work, the Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, Maimon’s thought has become accessible to the
English speaking world for the first time. The conference celebrates this event and aims to stimulate scholarly interest in the thought of this brilliant but neglected philosopher. As well as exploring Maimon’s philosophy, it will look at his influence on successors, including Deleuze
and the post-Kantian tradition in general.

The Essay on Transcendental Philosophy (1790) is Maimon’s response to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Here he recognizes that the Critique marks a revolution in philosophical method, and wholeheartedly endorses Kant’s turn to ‘transcendental’ philosophy. However, he argues that Kant’s solution to the fundamental problem of transcendental philosophy, viz. how
are concepts applied to intuitions, fails. He offers an alternative solution, a transcendental philosophy based on different foundations or, to be more precise, based on a foundation of difference.

Maimon’s published philosophical works cover a wide spectrum ranging from philosophy of science and mathematics to logic, morals and aesthetics. We welcome papers on any aspect of his thought and of its relation to that of other philosophers, as well as papers on the Essay itself.

Confirmed Speakers:
Paul Franks (Toronto)
Gideon Freudenthal (Tel Aviv)
Beth Lord (Dundee)

Conference Registration will open in June 2010.

We invite submissions for the two remaining slots in the conference programme. Submissions from postgraduate students are very welcome. Papers should be 4,000 - 6,000 words in length and be presentable in 30 - 40 minutes. Papers should include an abstract (no longer than 150 words) and a word count. They should be in RTF or MSWord format.

Submission deadline: 30 June 2010; successful authors will be informed by 19 July.
For further details, to register your interest or to submit papers please e-mail Nick Midgley and Henry Somers-Hall at this address: maimonconference@googlemail.com

Text for 19th February Workshop on 'The Essays of Gilles Deleuze'

2006-02-07T09:27:00.000-08:00

The Actual and the Virtual [1] (from Gilles Deleuze & Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, Continuum, London, 2002, pp. 112-5. N.B this piece does not appear in the first edition of Dialogues)

Nick has provided the following highly useful corrections to translations of some passages:

Part 1 End of 4th sentence of para 1: italicise "run"

6th sentence para 1: italicise "brevity"

Last sentence of para 1: "These are memories of different orders, they are called virtual images because their speed or brevity here keeps them under a principle of unconsciousness." ["orders" not "sorts"]

2nd sentence para 2: italicise "a spatium"

3rd sentence para 2: "The more or less deep layers of the actual object correspond to these,,," [italics and "deep" not "dense"]

Towards end of para 2: "But all the planes merge into one folllowing the path which leads to the virtual" ["virtual" not "actual"!]

Part 2

3rd sentence para 1: "You get to an inner circuit which links only to the actual object and its virtual object..." [italicise "its"]

Last sentence para 1: "There is no longer unassignability of the actual and the virtual, but indiscernibility between the two terms which interchange." [N.B. this sentence is almost repeated in the last sentence of next para.]

5th sentence etc. para 2 "But on its side the virtual appears in a time that is smaller than that which measures the minimum of movement in a single direction. That is why the virtual is "ephemeral". But it is also in the virtual that the past is conserved, since this ephemera does not cease to continue in the following "smallest time", which refers to a change of direction. The time smaller than the minimum of thinkable continuous time in one direction is also the longest time, longer than the maximum of continuous time thinkable in all directions." [the translation phrase "making minute adjustments in response to changes of direction" bears very little relation to the French]

1st sentence para 3: "...sometimes the actual refers to the virtual as its own virtual..." [italicise "its own" ]

Last sentence para 3: "Actuals imply already constituted individuals, and determinations by ordinary points, whereas the relation of the actual to the virtual forms an ongoing individuation or a singularisation by remarkable points to be determined in each case." [translation misses out the reference of singular and ordinary to points which is important]
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Translated by Eliot Ross Albert [2]

I
Philosophy is the theory of multiplicities, each of which is composed of actual and virtual elements. Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images. This cloud is composed of a series of more or less extensive coexisting circuits, along which the virtual images are distributed, and around which they run. [3] These virtuals vary in kind as well as in their degree of proximity from the actual particles by which they are both emitted and absorbed. They are called virtual in so tar as their emission and absorption, creation and destruction, occur in a period of time shorter than the shortest continuous period imaginable; it is this very brevity, that keeps them subject to a principle of uncertainty or indetermination. The virtuals, encircling the actual, perpetually renew themselves by emitting yet others, with which they are in turn surrounded and which go on in turn to react upon the actual; 'in the heart of the cloud of the virtual there is a virtual of a yet higher order . . . every virtual particle surrounds itself with a virtual cosmos and each in its turn does likewise indefinitely.' [4] It is the dramatic identity of their dynamics that makes a perception resemble a particle: an actual perception surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images, distributed on increasingly remote, increasingly large, moving circuits, which both make and unmake each other. These are memories of different sorts, but they are still called virtual images in that their speed or brevity subjects them too to a principle of the unconsciousness.

It is by virtue of their mutual inextricability that virtual images are able to react upon actual objects. From this perspective, the virtual continuum, whether one takes all of the circles together or each individually, is a spatium determined in each case by the maximum of time imaginable. The varyingly dense layers of the actual object correspond to these, more or less extensive, circles of virtual images. These layers, whilst themselves virtual, and upon which the actual object becomes itself virtual, constitute the total impetus of the object. [5] The plane of immanence, upon which the dissolution of the actual object occurs, is itself constituted when both obect and image are virtual. But the process of actualization undergone by the actual is one which has as great an effect on the image as it does on the obect. The continuum of virtual images is fragmented and the spatium cut up according to whether the temporal decompositions are regular or irregular. The total impetus of the virtual object splits into forces corresponding to the partial continuum, and the speeds traversing the cut-up spatium. [6] The virtual is never independent of the singularities which cut it up and divide it out on the plane of immanence. As Leibniz has shown, force is as much a virtual in the process of being actualized as the space through which it travels. The plane is therefore divided into a multiplicity of planes according to the cuts in the continuum, and to the divisions of force which mark the actualization of the virtual. But all the planes merge into one following the path which leads to the actual. The plane of immanence includes both the virtual and its actualization simultaneously, without there being any assignable limit between the two. The actual is the complement or the product, the object of actualization, which has nothing but the virtual as its subect. Actualization belongs to the virtual. The actualization of the virtual is singularity whereas the actual itself is individuality constituted. The actual falls from the plane like a fruit, whilst the actualization relates it back to the plane as if to that which turns the object back into a subject.

II
Thus far we have considered those cases in which the actual is surrounded by increasingly extensive, remote and diverse virtualities: a particle creates ephemera, a perception evokes memories. But the inverse movement also occurs: in which, as the circles contract, the virtual draws closer to the actual, both become less and less distinct. You get to an inner circuit which links only the actual object and its virtual image: an actual particle has its virtual double, which barely diverges from it at all; an actual perception has its own memory as a sort of immediate, consecutive or even simultaneous double. [7] For, as Bergson shows, memory is not an actual image which forms after the object has been perceived, but a virtual image coexisting with the actual perception of the object. Memory is a virtual image contemporary with the actual object, its double, its 'mirror image' [8] as in The Lady from Shanghai, in which the mirror takes control of a character, engulfs him and leaves him as just a virtuality; hence, there is coalescence and division, or rather oscillation, a perpetual exchange between the actual object and its virtual image: the virtual image never stops becoming actual. The virtual image absorbs all of a character's actuality, at the same time as the actual character is no more than a virtuality. This perpetual exchange between the virtual and the actual is what defines a crystal; and it is on the plane of immanence that crystals appear. The actual and the virtual coexist, and enter into a tight circuit which we are continually retracing from one to the other. This is no longer a singularization, but an individuation as process, the actual and its virtual: no longer an actualization but a crystallization. Pure virtuality no longer has to actualize itself, since it is a strict correlative of the actual with which it forms the tightest circuit. It is not so much that one cannot assign the terms 'actual' and 'virtual' to distinct objects, but rather that the two are indistinguishable.

The actual object and the virtual image, the object become virtual, the image actual, are all figures dealt with in elementary optics.[9] This distinction between the virtual and the actual corresponds to the most fundamental split in time, that is to say, the differentiation of its passage into two great jets: the passing of the present, and the preservation of the past. The present is a variable given measured in continuous time, a supposedly mono-directional movement, in which the present passes up until the exhaustion of that time.10 The actual is defined by this passing of the present. But the virtual's ephemerality appears in a smaller space of time than that which marks the minimum movement in a single direction. This is why the virtual is 'ephemeral', but the virtual also preserves the past, since that ephemeraslity is continually making minute adjustments in response to changes of direction. The period of time which is smaller than the smallest period of continuous time imaginable in one direction is also the longest time, longer than the longest unit of continuous time imaginable in all directions. The passing of the present, the preservation and self-preservation of the ephemeral each occur according to their own scale of measurement. Virtuals communicate directly over the top of the actuals which separate them. The two aspects of time, the actual image of the present which passes and the virtual image of the past which is preserved, are distinguishable during actualization although they have unassignable limits, but exchange during crystallization to the extent that they become indiscernible, each relating to the role of the other. The relationship between the actual and the virtual takes the form of a circuit, but it does so in two ways: sometimes the actual refers to the virtuals as to other things in the vast circuits where the virtual is actualized; sometimes the actual refers to the virtual as its own virtual, in the smallest circuits where the virtual crystallizes with the actual. The plane of immanence contains both actualization as the relationship of the virtual with other terms, and even the actual as a term with which the virtual is exchanged. In any case, the relationship between the actual and the virtual is not the same as that established between two actuals. Actuals imply already constituted individuals, and are ordinarily determined, whereas the relationship of the actual and the virtual forms an acting individuation or a highly specific and remarkable singularization which needs to be determined case by case.

Notes

1* Translator's note: The reader familiar with Deleuze's work cannot help but be struck by something odd, something disquieting, in the French 'L'actuel et la virtuel'. The anomalous nature of the piece is most evident on the stylistic plane, for unlike most of Deleuze's writing, in which a thought of soaring complexity is expressed with an elegant, limpid clarity, 'L'actuel' is composed of a series of jarringly repetitive monophrasal sentences. Sentences which are frequently blunt assertions of the form 'the virtual is x' rather than Deleuze's customary rigorous philosophical argumentation. My personal suspicion, and the only way to satisfactorily account for the oddity of the text, is that, rather than a finished paper, 'L'actuel et la virtuel' is a series of drafts, or aides-memoires for a paper. Neither the French edition nor the Italian translation (the two editions that I have seen of the text) voices any concerns; however, when 1 raised my reservations about the text with Eric Alliez, one of the most perceptive of Deleuze's readers, he replied '. 'quite obvious' that 'L'actuel et la virtuel' is a draft.

2* Translator's note: Both Caroline Warman and Matteo Mandanr made insightful comments on early versions of this translation, comments which no doubt improved it immeasurably and for which I thank them.

3* Translator's note: Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Difference et repetition (Vendom: Universitaires de France, 1968), trans. by Paul Patton as Difference and Repetition (London: Athlone Press, 1994), pp. 270-1/209: 'Every object is double without it being the case that the two halves resemble one another, one being a virtual image and the other an actual image.'

4 Michel Casse, Du vide et de la creation (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob), pp. 72-3. See also Pierre Levy's study, Qu'est ce que la virtuel? (Paris: Edit:. Decouverte).

5 Henri Bergson, Matiere et la memoire (Paris: Editions du centenaire), trans. by N. M.Paul and W. S. Palmer as Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books,1991), p. 250/104; chapters II and III analyse the virtuality of memory and its actualization. [Translator's note: It is worth noting that these chapters also contain the elaboration of the interlinked concepts of the circuits of memory, contraction and expansion, the coexistence of past with the present, that provide the basis for Bergson's utterly non-psychologizing account of memory, as well as the opening, and indeed ever-present, structure of the present article. The concept of the circuit is introduced by Bergson as an explicit challenge to, and attack upon, the then-dominant accounts of memory in the following way: 'There is supposed to be a rectilinear progress, by which the mind goes further and further from the object, never to return to it. We maintain, on the contrary, that reflective perception is a circuit, in which all the elements, including the perceived object itself, hold each other in a state of mutual tension' (p. 250/104).]

6 See Gilles Chatelet, Les Enjeux du mobile (Paris: Editions du Seuil), pp. 54-68 (from 'virtual speeds' to 'virtual cuts').

7* Translator's note: This 'inner circuit' is what Bergson describes as the 'moment when the recollection ... is capable of blending so well with the present perception that we cannot say where memory begins' (Matter and Memory, p. 106).

8 Henri Bergson, L' Entree spirituelle, 'memory ot the present', pp. 917-20. Bergson insists on two movements, that towards larger and larger circles and that towards a narrower and narrower circle. [Translator's note: Mind-Energy, trans. by H. Wildon Carr (London: Macmillan, 1920), pp. 134-7. Bergson writes: 'Memory seems to be to the perception what the image reflected in the mirror is to the object in front of it. The object can be touched as well as seen; it acts on us as well as we on it; is pregnant with possible actions; it is actual' (p. 134).]

9 The discipline of optics takes the actual object and the virtual image as its starting-points and shows in what circumstances that object becomes virtual, that image actual, and then how both object and image become either actual or virtual.

10* Translator's note: Deleuze had referred to this split, inherited from Bergson earlier in his work, perhaps most notably in his exposition of crystal time in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), were he writes of time splitting into ''two dissymmetrical jets, one of which makes all the present pass on, while the other preserves all the past' (p. 81) '. One can go further and suggest that, as Deleuze notes above, much ol the conceptual basis for the present piece is derived from the section on the 'memory of the present' in Bergson's .L'Energie spirituelle, and that a great deal of it had already been extensively developed and deployed in the above-mentioned chapter of Cinema 2. it is worth remembering as a subject for further investigation that Walter Benjamin - whose admiration for Bergson is well known but, as yst, inadequately explored - had, in an important passage in the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), referred to 'the crystal of the total event' (N2, 6)

RETURN TO MAIN PAGE

New Book: Dorthea Olkowski, 'The Universal'

2006-02-07T02:09:00.000-08:00

Published by Edinburgh University Press, January 2007

Book Description:

The Universal proposes a radical new philosophical system that moves from ontology to ethics. Drawing on the work of De Beauvoir, Sartre, and Le Doeuff, among others, and addressing a range of topics from the Asian sex trade to late capitalism, quantum gravity, and Merleau- Ponty's views on cinema, Dorthea Olkowski stretches the mathematical, poltical, epistemological, and aesthetic limits of continental philosophy and introduces a new perspective on political structures.

Straddling a discourse between formalism and conventionalism, Olkowski develops the concept of an ontological unconscious that arise from our "sensible" relation to the world - the information we absorb and emit that affects our encounters with the environment and others. In this "realm of the senses," or field of vulnerability defined by our experience with pleasure and pain, Olkowski is able to rethink the space-time relations put foth by Irigary's notion of the "interval," Bergson's "recollection," Merleau-Ponty's idea of the "flesh," and Deleuze "plane of immanence."

The aesthetic sense is shared by all humankind and nonhuman entities in the organic and inorganic world. The sensible universal can be applied to categories of pure and practical reason; experiental binaries of male-female and subject-object; and issues of autonomy, moral laws and the regulation of perception.
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2006-01-01T13:41:00.000-08:00

Deleuze in Context Workshop

University of Dundee

24 September 2010

11 AM - 6 PM, Carnelly Building, Room 2.20

Supported by School of Humanities and Arts and Humanities Research Institute, University of Dundee

Speakers

Jeffrey Bell, Southeastern Louisiana University, 'Between Realism and Anti-Realism: Deleuze and the Spinozist Tradition in Philosophy'

Ian Buchanan, Cardiff University, 'Deleuze and the Question of Revolution'

Craig Lundy, UNSW, 'Historiophilosophy: Absolute Thought and its Historical Milieu'

David Martin-Jones, University of St Andrews, 'The Child Seer in and as History: Putting the Cinema Books into Context'

Dominic Smith, University of Dundee, 'Get Beyond Bad Faith and Bartleby: Some Stakes for Contemporary Thought'

Organiser: Professor James Williams, School of Humanities, University of Dundee

This event is free but places are limited due to the workshop format, so please book ahead as soon as possible by contacting James, j.r.williams[at]dundee.ac.uk

2006-01-01T13:03:00.000-08:00

Thinking Between Deleuze and Kant
A Strange Encounter

Edited by Matt Lee and Edward Willatt

Pub Date: 1 Jun 2009
ISBN: 1847065945
ISBN13: 9781847065940
hardcover
192 Pages
£65.00

Series Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy

Synopsis
An important collection of essays exploring the implicit dispute between Deleuze's 'transcendental empiricism' and Kant's 'transcendental idealism', a key philosophical concern.

Description
In the wake of much previous work on Gilles Deleuze's relations to other thinkers (including Bergson, Spinoza and Leibniz), his relation to Kant is now of great and active interest and a thriving area of research. In the context of the wider debate between 'naturalism' and 'transcendental philosophy', the implicit dispute between Deleuze's 'transcendental empiricism' and Kant's 'transcendental idealism' is of prime philosophical concern. Bringing together the work of international experts from both Deleuze scholarship and Kant scholarship, Thinking Between Deleuze and Kant addresses explicitly the varied and various connections between these two great European philosophers, providing key material for understanding the central philosophical problems in the wider 'naturalism/ transcendental philosophy' debate. The book reflects an area of great current interest in Deleuze Studies and initiates an ongoing interest in Deleuze within Kant scholarship.

The contributors are Mick Bowles, Levi R. Bryant, Patricia Farrell, Christian Kerslake, Matt Lee, Michael J. Olson, Henry Somers-Hall and Edward Willatt.

Table Of Contents

Notes on Contributors
Note on Translations and Abbreviations Used
Editorial Introduction
1. The Philosopher-monkey: Learning and the Discordant Harmony of the Faculties
Patricia Farrell (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
2. Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism: Notes Towards a Transcendental Materialism
Levi R. Bryant (Collin College, Frisco, USA)
3. Levelling the levels
Matt Lee (University of Greenwich, UK)
4. The Genesis of Cognition: Deleuze as a Reader of Kant
Edward Willatt (University of Greenwich, UK)
5. The Nature of Productive Force: Kant, Spinoza and Deleuze
Mick Bowles (University of Greenwich, UK)
6. Deleuze's 'Reconstruction of Reason': From Leibniz and Kant to Difference and Repetition
Christian Kerslake (Middlesex University, UK)
7. Transcendental Illusion and Antinomy in Kant and Deleuze
Henry Somers-Hall (University of Warwick, UK)
8. Transcendental Idealism, Deleuze and Guattari, and the Metaphysics of Objects
Michael J. Olson (Villanova University, USA)
Bibliography
Index

Available at Waterstones.
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2006-01-01T12:41:00.000-08:00

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation

Joe Hughes

ISBN-10: 1847062849
ISBN-13: 978-1847062840

Synopsis

Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation is a systematic study of three of Deleuze’s central works: Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense and, with Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Hughes shows how each of these three works develops the Husserlian problem of genetic constitution. After an innovative reading of Husserl’s late work, Hughes turns to a detailed study of the conceptual structures of Deleuze’s three books. He demonstrates that each book is surprisingly similar in its structure and that all three function as nearly identical accounts of the genesis of representation.

In a highly original and crucial contribution to Deleuze Studies, this book offers a provocative perspective on many of the questions Deleuze’s work has raised: What is the status of representation? Of subjectivity? What is a body without organs? How is the virtual produced, and what exactly is its function within Deleuze’s thought as a whole? By contextualizing Deleuze’s thought within the radicalization of phenomenology, Hughes is able to suggest solutions to these questions that will be as controversial as they are compelling.

Table Of Contents

Part I: Husserl and Deleuze
1. Husserl, Reduction and Constitution
2. The Logic of Sense

Part II: Anti-Oedipus
3. The Material Reduction
4. Desiring-Production
5. Social Production

Part III: Difference and Repetition

Introduction
6. Static Genesis: Ideas and Intensity
7. Dynamic Genesis: The Production of Time

Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Author

Joe Hughes received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the author of Difference and Repetition: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2009) and is the co-translator of Deleuze's Pericles and Verdi (Columbia University Press, 2002).

Reviews

'Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation is a superb analysis of the concept of genesis as developed by Deleuze in his three central works - Difference and Repetition, Logic of Sense, and Anti-Oedipus. It also includes one of the best discussions of Deleuze's relation to Husserl in any language. Essential reading for anyone interested in one of the central tenets of Deleuze's philosophy.'
- Daniel W. Smith, Purdue University, USA

2006-01-01T12:31:00.000-08:00

MONU

26-08-08 // NEW ISSUE - EXOTIC URBANISM

A City under the Influence by Vesta Nele Zareh
Cities of Girl by Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix/ Map Office
Thawing Urbanisms in the Arctic by Mason White and Lola Sheppard
Living Facades - Green Urbanism and the Politics of Urban Offsetting by Owen Hatherley
Flying Grass Carpet by Joop de Boer
The 'Great Comeback' of The Chinese to Katendrecht by Els Vervloesem
Urbanism of the permanent Tourist by Deane Simpson
Plastic Wrapped History by Hannah Epstein
Golf Courses and Cultural Conventions of Nature by Jacqueline Schlossman
The Sky is not near enough by Shumon Basar
Defining the Exotic when Identity is Lost by Yasmine El Rashidi
Nondescript Exotism inside the Urban Tissue by Anne Seghers
Pseudo-Democracies and Pseudo-Commissions - Interview with Reinier de Graaf/ OMA
Elite Commune by Lei Liu
Re-fun by Yaowalak Baltisberger
Urbanism in a Minor Key by Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza
The Exotic and the Local - From Superhero to Supercity by Yehuda Greenfield-Gilat

2006-01-01T12:06:00.000-08:00

Deleuze and New Technology

Edited by Mark Poster & David Savat

This volume offers readers a collective and determined effort to explore not only the usefulness of key ideas of Deleuze in thinking about our new digital and biotechnological future but, also aims to take seriously a style of thinking that negotiates between philosophy, science and art.

June 2009
288 pages
Paperback - £21.99
Deleuze Connections series
http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9780748633388

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2006-01-01T11:59:00.000-08:00

Deleuze and Performance

Edited by Laura Cull

Deleuze and Performance is a collection of new essays dedicated to Deleuze's writing on theatre and to the productivity of his philosophy for (re)thinking performance. This book provides rigorous analyses of Deleuze's writings on theatre practitioners such as Artaud, Beckett and Carmelo Bene, as well as offering innovative readings of historical and contemporary performance including performance art, dance, new media performance, theatre and opera, which use Deleuze's concepts in exciting new ways.

May 2009
288 pages
Paperback - £24.99
Deleuze Connections series
http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9780748635047

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2006-01-01T11:32:00.000-08:00

MONU

06-02-09 // NEW ISSUE - HOLY URBANISM

(browse the entire issue #10 on YouTube)

A Mormon Megaproject by Daniel Hadley
Then It Hit Me: Learn to Meditate by Brian A Shabaglian
The Sacred and the Holy: Transient Urban Spaces by Colin Davies
Cross Utilization: Enhanced Religious Experiences by NL Architects
Strata and Sound: The Adhan as an Urban Operating Procedure by Peter Dorsey
The Sensory Experience of Sacred Space: Senso-Ji and Meiji-Jungu, Tokyo by Raymond Lucas
Peace Through Superior Horsepower by Speedism
God is a Nigerian by Emeka Udemba
Emblematic Power - Interview with Kees Christiaanse
Sacred Wire by Elliott Malkin
The Mormon Church’s Infrastructure of Salvation by Jesse LeCavalier
Do not give up Hope! by Maurizio Scarciglia
[uhn-hoh-lee] Alliance: A Domain of Objects by Edward Richardson
Drive-Through Religion by Carolyn Sponza
Urban Rituals by Abha Mahajan
Sacred Beauties by Karen Crequer
Strucked by a Freak Wave by Matilde Cassani

2006-01-01T11:22:00.000-08:00

Deleuze and Queer Theory

Edited By Merl Storr and Chrysanthi Nigianni

Ediburgh University Press
This book is distributed in North America by Columbia University Press

Feb 2009
200 pages
Series: Deleuze Connections

Description

This exciting collection of work introduces a major shift in debates on sexuality: a shift away from discourse, identity and signification, to a radical new conception of bodily materialism. Moving away from the established path known as queer theory, it suggests an alternative to Butler's matter/representation binary. It thus dares to ask how to think sexuality and sex outside the discursive and linguistic context that has come to dominate contemporary research in social sciences and humanities.

Deleuze and Queer Theory is a provocative and often militant collection that explores a diverse range of themes including: the revisiting of the term 'queer'; a rethinking of the sex-gender distinction as being implied in Queer Theory; an exploration of queer temporalities; the non/re-reading of the homosexual body/desire and the becoming-queer of the Deleuze/Guattari philosophy. It will be essential reading for anyone interested not just in Deleuze's and Guattari's philosophy, but also in the fields of sexuality, gender and feminist theory.

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2006-01-01T09:23:00.000-08:00

Schizoanalysis and Visual Culture

Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory

Venue: Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

Dates: June 1st - June 2nd 2010

What is schizoanalysis and how might it be applied to the analysis of contemporary visual culture?

This question is both daunting in its complexity and exciting in terms of the possibility for a whole new way of thinking about visual culture it offers. Answering it seems to require that we experiment with Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas and concepts to produce our own new syntheses adequate to the demands of the present creative, historical and theoretical conjuncture we find ourselves in today. That is the challenge this symposium will take up by bringing together some of the most creative and exacting scholars working in the twin fields of Deleuze studies and film studies today.

Abstracts should be sent to the conference convenor Ian Buchanan buchanani@cardiff.ac.uk by January 31, 2010.

Keynote Speakers

Dr Felicity Colman (Manchester Metropolitan)

Dr Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University)

Dr Richard Rushton (University of Lancaster)

Professor Tom Conley (Harvard University)

Professor David Rodowick (Harvard University)

Professor Mirjam Schaub (The Free University of Berlin)

Professor Paola Marrati (Johns Hopkins University)

Professor Patricia Pisters (University of Amsterdam)
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2006-01-01T09:14:00.000-08:00

RESONANCE(S)
A Deleuze and Guattari Conference on Philosophy, Arts and Politics

Santral Istanbul (provided by Istanbul Bilgi University), April 22-24, 2010.

The function of philosophy is to create concepts ... Creating isn't communicating but resisting ... Creation takes place in choked passages.
G. Deleuze

Resonance as a nomadic concept in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari still throws light and shades to our understanding of the problematical relationship between philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis and arts on the one hand, and the spectacle or the specular on the other. What kind of a concept is resonance? Can it be theorised or should it simply be left untheorised? What are its implications for the concept of a concept? What are the conditions of its distribution in the work of Deleuze and Guattari? If philosophy can deviate the thought from the rule of the specular, as was attempted by the Situationists, "resonance" - as it appears basically in The Logic of Sense - is perhaps already offering a non-relational relationship between various pairs or binaries which, especially in recent history and in the history of philosophy have fettered thought to a sedentary regression. If the spectacle cannot be maintained as such unless under certain philosophical, historical, cultural and geographical conditions, what would be the role of resonance in opening up new paths towards deterritorialisations particularly under the light of an elusive concept of "resonance" on a plane of continuous flight?

This conference is therefore an invitation to philosophers, theorists and artists to reconsider the concept of resonance in the work of Deleuze and Guattari and also to see its implications for a renewal of various theories on sex, gender, identity, politics, history, literature, science, topology, religion, visual arts, music, sound, media and performance. Under what conditions does thought become specular and can thought be forced to a maddening resonance so as to drive the critique of specular towards, say, a "somnambulist" phase where the undecidable is what lies between one's eyelids.

Such a reconsideration of "resonance" requires without doubt deterritorialisations of not only Deleuze and Guattari's, but also thought's relation to the philosophies of Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Tarde, Bergson and Freud. A scrutinisation of such relationships will not only reformulate the present theories but hopefully will put forward new ones.

E-mail: team.resonative@gmail.com

Conference website: http://www.resonative.net/ (website will be continuously updated, please check regularly)

Convener: Zafer Aracagök
Dept of Graphic Design
Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture
Bilkent University
06800 Bilkent, Ankara - Turkey
Tel: +90 312 290 32 50

Committee:
Tugba Ayas, Firat Berksun, Irem Cagil, Emre Koyuncu, P. Burcu Yalim

Confirmed plenaries:
Arkady Plotnitsky, Claire Colebrook, Gary Genosko, Mahmut Mutman.

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2006-01-01T09:04:00.000-08:00

Collapse Volume V, entitled The Copernican Imperative, will be published on 15 December 2008. The volume will be available to order in advance from http://www.urbanomic.com/ from mid-November. As usual, the volume will be printed in a limited numbered edition of 1000.

The volume will include contributions from: Julian Barbour, Nick Bostrom, Gabriel Catren, Milan Cirkovic, Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, Nigel Cooke, Alberto Gualandi, Iain Hamilton Grant, Paul Humphreys, Immanuel Kant, James Ladyman, Thomas Metzinger, Carlo Rovelli, Martin Schönfeld, Conrad Shawcross, Keith Tyson and Damian Veal.

Copernicanism tore asunder the fit between the world and man's organs: the congruence between reality and visibility.
- Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World

In his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo proclaimed, through his mouthpiece Salviati, that he could 'never sufficiently admire the outstanding acumen' of those early advocates of Copernicanism who, 'through sheer force of intellect' - that is, without even the benefit of a telescope to confirm the theory observationally - 'had done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over that which sensible experience plainly showed them to the contrary'.

Since Galileo published his work in 1632, recognition of the deeply counterintuitive nature of scientific findings has become virtually commonplace, and the 'explanatory gap' between the 'manifest' and 'scientific' images of reality has long been a central concern for philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists alike. In this volume of Collapse, we bring together samples of the most intellectually challenging contemporary work devoted to exploring the philosophical implications of 'Copernicanism' from a variety of overlapping and complementary standpoints.

As in previous volumes, the involvement in Collapse V of several major contemporary artists alongside groundbreaking philosophers and prominent scientists is designed to open up new perspectives and new directions for thinking outside disciplinary constraints. From multiple philosophical and artistic perspectives, and from scientific fields as diverse as theoretical physics and cosmology, biology, mathematics, cognitive neuroscience, and astrobiology, the volume addresses the issues of the 'deanthropomorphisation' of reality initiated by the Copernican Revolution, the relation between scientific and philosophical (Kantian) 'Copernicanism', and the enduring gulf between the spontaneous image of the world bequeathed to us by evolution and that revealed by the physical sciences in the wake of Copernicus.

With several of the contributions in interview form, Collapse V: The Copernican Imperative will be an accessible and thought-provoking volume exemplifying that characteristic blend of speculative audacity and scientifically informed insight which has always been the hallmark of 'Copernicanism'.

Contents of Volume V will be as follows (some details subject to alteration):

In 'Anaximander's Legacy', theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli (co-founder of Loop Quantum Gravity and author of Quantum Gravity) charts the historical dynamics of science's ever more radical overturning of the commonsense image of the world from Anaximander through Copernicus to the 'unfinished revolution' of twentieth-century physics - a revolution which, suggests Rovelli, challenges us to find a way of understanding the world in the absence of the familiar stage of space and time.

Rovelli's question 'Can we think the world without time?' is one which has preoccupied renegade theoretical physicist and historian of science Julian Barbour (author of Absolute or Relative Motion? and The End of Time) for the best part of five decades. In our interview 'The View From Nowhen' we discuss the nature of his radical rethinking of the foundations of physics, his arguments for the non-existence of time and change, and the influence his ideas have exerted on contemporary quantum gravity research from outside the halls of academe.

In his contribution to the volume, Turner Prize winning artist Keith Tyson - well known for his intricate and provocative artistic displacements and extrapolations of scientific ideas - presents his own unique take on the enigma of Copernicanism.

In our interview with Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart (authors of dozens of ground-breaking popular science books, including their co-authored works The Collapse of Chaos, Figments of Reality, and What Does A Martian look Like?), we discuss with them the continuing collaboration between mathematician and biologist; the key conceptual innovations of their co-authored works; their trenchant criticisms of what they see as the overly conservative and unimaginative nature of contemporary astrobiology; and their positive programme for a new science of alien life, beyond astrobiology, which they call 'xenoscience'.

In 'Sailing the Archipelago of Habitability', cosmologist and astrobiologist Milan Cirkovic provides a sophisticated defence of anthropic reasoning (understood in terms of 'observation selection effects') against the charges brought against it by the likes of Cohen and Stewart as part of an ambitious project of laying the 'philosophical groundworks' of the nascent science of astrobiology.

In 'Where Are They?', philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom (Director of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, author of Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy) revisits Fermi's Paradox, employing probabilistic 'anthropic' reasoning to motivate the conclusion that, far from being a cause for celebration, the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would in fact augur very badly for the future of the human race.

In his (2006) motion-sculpture Binary Star artist Conrad Shawcross gestured 'Beyond Copernicanism', simulating the experience of life in a solar system where there is 'no such thing as one'. In his contribution to the volume Shawcross investigates the relationship between his work and the philosophical trope of Copernicanism.

In an interview charting the journey 'From Copernicanism to Nemocentrism', Thomas Metzinger (philosopher of neuroscience, author of Being No One) discusses his 'self-model theory of subjectivity', the potential social and cultural ramifications of the findings of contemporary neuroscience, and responds to criticisms of his radical eliminativist position with regard to the existence of 'selves'.

In his 'Thinking Outside the Brain', philosopher Paul Humphreys (author of Extending Ourselves: Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method) proposes that computational science is fast displacing humans from the centre of the epistemological universe, speculates on the possibility of a 'science without humans', and presents his proposals for a radically non-anthropocentric empiricism.

The paintings of Nigel Cooke present a philosophically-informed meditation on the continual displacement of the author-subject in the history of thought and artistic representation. His contribution in the form of a series of drawings, 'Thinker Dejecta', contributes to a thinking-through of the consequences of Copernicanism from this perspective.

In our fourth and final interview, 'Who's Afraid of Scientism?', James Ladyman (philosopher of science, co-author of Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalised) discusses the forlornness of contemporary analytic metaphysics and the prospects for a radically naturalised metaphysics which would fully take on board the most counterintuitive findings of contemporary physics, finally dispensing with the habitual ontology of 'little things and microbangings' which continues to hold sway in contemporary 'pseudo-naturalist philosophy'.

In his 'The Phoenix of Nature' Martin Schönfeld (artist and philosopher of nature, author of The Philosophy of the Young Kant) presents us with a vivid picture of Immanuel Kant profoundly at odds with the recent popular characterisation of him as a conservative, anti-Copernican thinker, via a stimulating exploration of his early cosmology. Here we are presented a radically anti-anthropocentric, anti-Christian, naturalist, speculatively audacious Kant who pushes 'Copernicanism' to its limits; who abolishes the hand of God from, and introduces a history and evolution into, the Newtonian cosmos; and who as early as 1755 strongly anticipates the fundaments of what became the Standard Model of modern cosmology only in the 1930s.

To accompany his piece Schönfeld also contributes a new translation of Immanuel Kant's 'Concerning Creation in the Total Extent of its Infinity in Both Space and Time', an extended excerpt from his 1755 Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens in which this astonishingly prescient cosmology of 'island universes' and the birth and death of 'worlds' is most magnificently and perfervidly portrayed.

Tackling the great philosophical 'Copernican Revolution' head-on, Iain Hamilton Grant (philosopher, author of Philosophies of Nature after Schelling) examines the 'Prospects for Dogmatism after Kant'.

In 'Copernicanism, Correlationism, Critique' Damian Veal (philosopher, editor of the volume) critically re-examines the question of the meaning of 'Copernicanism' for philosophy, providing reasons for rejecting the idea popular amongst recent 'speculative realists' that a proper philosophical assimilation of the findings of the modern sciences demands a thoroughgoing break with the Kantian critical legacy.

In 'A Throw of the Quantum Dice Will Never Overturn the Copernican Revolution' Gabriel Catren (Director of the project 'Savoir et Système' at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris) presents what he calls a 'speculative overcoming' of recent influential quasi-Kantian interpretations of quantum mechanics. Rather than being limited to a mathematical account of the correlations between 'observed' systems and their 'observers', or pointing to the inherent 'transcendental' limits of physical knowledge, Catren argues that quantum mechanics furnishes a complete and realistic description of the intrinsic properties of physical systems, an ontology which exemplifies the Copernican deanthropomorphisation of nature.

In 'Errancies of the Human: French Philosophies of Nature and the Overturning of the Copernican Revolution', Alberto Gualandi (philosopher, author of Deleuze and Le problème de la vérité scientifique dans la philosophie française contemporain) indicates the features common to certain speculative philosophies of nature in 1960s France and problems facing contemporary evolutionary biologists.

Collapse V: The Copernican Imperative
December 2008
Eds D. Veal, R. Mackay
450+pp tbc
Limited Edition 1000 Numbered Copies
ISBN 978-0-9553087-4-1
£9.99

2006-01-01T08:09:00.000-08:00

Deleuze and Activism

The Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory
In cooperation with Culture, Imagination and Practice Research Group, School of Social Sciences

Cardiff University, Wales, UK

12-13 November, 2009

When Deleuze and Guattari wrote Anti-Oedipus they hoped it would be a resource to arms for dissidents and political activists. Rather than set out a program of change, they tried to isolate the political, cultural and economic factors that inhibit change. In so doing they created a work that was instantly recognised as a philosophical watershed. It changed the landscape of political theory in a single sweep. Subsequent works developed this analysis further, creating a formidable armoury of critical tools with which to face a world increasingly indifferent to philosophy. This conference seeks to examine the Deleuzian legacy from the point of view of radical politics. It seeks to analyse both what he and Guattari wrote on the subject and more particularly to see what their writings enable us to say now.

Speakers

Paul Patton (UNSW); Ian Buchanan (Cardiff University); Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London); Nathan Widder (University of London); Brad Evans (University of Leeds); Stephen Shukaitis (University of Essex); Offer Parchev (Haifa University); Dimitris Papadopoulos (Cardiff University); Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (Cardiff University); Simone Bignall (University of South Australia); Keir Milburn (University of Leeds); Christian Kerslake (Middlesex University); Marcelo Svirsky (Cardiff University)

For further information, please contact
Dr. Marcelo Svirsky
Eleni Panayiotou, PhD Candidate
The Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory
Cardiff University
E-mail: deleuze@cf.ac.uk

Website here.

2006-01-01T08:01:00.000-08:00

Deleuze's Philosophical Lineage

Edited by Graham Jones and Jon Roffe

Edinburgh University Press / Columbia University Press

Publication Date: Apr 2009
384 pages

The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is increasingly gaining the prestige that its astonishing inventiveness calls for in the Anglo-American theoretical context. His wide-ranging works on the history of philosophy, cinema, painting, literature and politics are being taken up and put to work across disciplinary divides and in interesting and surprising ways. However, the backbone of Deleuze's philosophy - the many and varied sources from which he draws the material for his conceptual innovation - has until now remained relatively obscure and unexplored.

This book takes as its goal the examination of this rich theoretical background. Presenting essays by a range of the world's foremost Deleuze scholars, and a number of up and coming theorists of his work, the book is composed of in-depth analyses of the key figures in Deleuze's lineage whose significance - as a result of either their obscurity or the complexity of their place in the Deleuzean text - has not previously been well understood.

This work will prove indispensable to students and scholars seeking to understand the context from which Deleuze's ideas emerge.

Included are essays on Deleuze's relationship to figures as varied as Marx, Simondon, Lacan, Hegel, Hume, Maimon, Ruyer, Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, Reimann, Leibniz, Bergson and Freud.
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2006-01-01T07:29:00.000-08:00

Deleuze's 'Difference and Repetition' A Reader's Guide

Joe Hughes

Pub Date: 1 Feb 2009

Series Reader's Guides

Description

Gilles Deleuze is without question one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Difference and Repetition is a classic work of contemporary philosophy and a key text in Deleuze's oeuvre, a brilliant exposition of the critique of identity that develops two key concepts: pure difference and complex repetition. Deleuze's 'Difference and Repetition': A Reader's Guide offers a concise and accessible introduction to this hugely important and yet notoriously demanding work. Written specifically to meet the needs of students coming to Deleuze for the first time, the book offers guidance on:
- Philosophical and historical context
- Key themes
- Reading the text
- Reception and influence
- Further reading.

Table Of Contents

1. Context
2. Overview of Themes
3. Reading the Text
4. Reception and Influence
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Authors

Joe Hughes received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the author of Difference and Repetition: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum, 2009) and is the co-translator of Deleuze's Pericles and Verdi (Columbia University Press, 2002).

Reviews

“The first comprehensive study of Deleuze's most important book. Beautifully written, Hughes' book brings an immense amount of clarity to Difference and Repetition … Hughes' book is not only a great introduction to Difference and Repetition, but a great book in its own right.” – Leonard Lawlor, Sparks Professor of Philosophy, Penn State University, USA

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2006-01-01T06:59:00.000-08:00

Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New

Edited by Simon O'Sullivan and Stephen Zepke

Pub Date: 13 Nov 2008

ISBN: 0826499538
ISBN13: 9780826499530

hardcover
256 Pages
£65.00

Series Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy

Description

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have arguably gone further than anyone in contemporary philosophy in affirming a philosophy of creation, one that both establishes and encourages a clear ethical imperative: to create the new.

In this remarkable undertaking, these two thinkers have created a fresh engagement of thought with the world. This important collection of essays attempts to explore and extend the creative rupture that Deleuze and Guattari produce in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project.

The essays in this volume, all by leading thinkers and theorists, extend Deleuze and Guattari's project by offering creative experiments in constructing new communities - of ideas and objects, experiences and collectives - that cohere around the interaction of philosophy, the arts and the political realm. Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New produces new perspectives on Deleuze and Guattari's work by emphasising its relevance to the contemporary intersection of aesthetics and political theory, thereby exploring a pressing contemporary problem: the production of the new.

Table Of Contents

1. Introduction: The Production of the New, Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmith’s College, University of London, UK) and Stephen Zepke (Academy of Fine Arts, Austria)
2. Sci Phi: Gilles Deleuze and the Future of Philosophy, Gregory Flaxman (University of North Carolina, USA)
3. Alterity and Desire, Bifo (Franco Berardi) (Accademia di belle Arti, Milan, Italy)
4. The Readymade: Art as the Refrain of Life, Stephen Zepke (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria)
5. Art Methodologies in Media Ecology, Matthew Fuller (Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK)
6. In Praise of Negativism, Alberto Toscano (Goldsmith's College, University of London, UK)
7. Affective Vectors: Icons, Guattari, and Art, Felicity J. Colman (University of Melbourne, Australia)
8. A Portrait of Deleuze-Foucault for Contemporary Art, John Rajchman (University of Columbia, USA)
9. The Production of the New and the Care of the Self, Simon O'Sullivan (Goldsmith's College, University of London, UK)
10. Thirty-Four (New) Ways of Expressing ‘Becoming-Thinking’ Through the Literary Work of Art and Sexuality, Dorothea Olkowski (University of Colorado, USA)
11. Readymades, Lavender Mist and Mirror Travel: Deleuze, Badiou and the Time of Art Practice, Dave Burrows (University of Central England, UK)
12. Beauty as the Promise of Happiness: Waste and the Present, Claire Colebrook (University of Edinburgh, UK)
13. Contemporary Matisse (Variations in Three, Two, One), Eric Alliez (Middlesex University, UK)
14. Deleuze and the Production of the New, Daniel W. Smith (Purdue University, USA)
15. Sonic and Cultural Noise as Production of the New: The Industrial Music Media Ecology of Throbbing Gristle, Michael Goddard (University of Lodz, Poland)
16. The Aesthetic Paradigm, Maurizio Lazzarato (Philosopher)
17. Painting Time With Light, Darren Ambrose (University of Warwick, UK)
18. Jazz Improvisation: Music of the People to Come, Eugene Holland (Ohio State University, USA)
19. Novelty and Double Causality in Kant, Whitehead and Deleuze, Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University, USA)
20. Resistance and Creation: An Introduction to Guattari’s ‘Consciousness and Subjectivity’, David Reggio (Goldsmith’s College, University of London, UK)
21. Consciousness and Subjectivity, Felix Guattari (Philosopher and psychoanalyst)
Bibliography Index

Authors

Simon O'Sullivan is Senior Lecturer in Art History/ Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. He is the author of Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (Palgrave, 2005).

Stephen Zepke teaches Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Austria. He is the author of Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 2005).
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2006-01-01T06:22:00.000-08:00

University of Greenwich,

Maritime Campus,

Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich
Room QA010 (Queen Anne Court)

Free entry but please register by e-mailing us at volcaniclines@hotmail.com

Lunch and coffee is unfortunately NOT provided but there are many coffee shops, cafes and food shops near to campus.

For directions to the location click here.
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To see the event page on 'facebook' click here.