Search Results (111)

In his lectures from November 1980 to March 1981, Deleuze describes the immanent and compositional nature of Spinoza’s philosophy expressed in the content, the method, and the form of his writings. Spinoza himself uses in the Ethics and the TP the images of the climatologist studying the weather and the geometric drawing of lines and surfaces for his technical, artisanal, and neutral approach to the affects and political life. His ontology is characterized by the absence of hierarchical order and by nature as the principle and source of diversity. This approach is reminiscent of art, which also orders the chaos of human existence and makes it productive in a free and immeasurable way. Deleuze conceives of Spinoza’s ontology as a practical philosophy, leading him to the examples and the analysis of paintings (and, vice versa, from the art of painting to Spinoza’s philosophy), to which he dedicates his subsequent lectures from March to June 1981. In this article I reflect on the link between Deleuze’s lectures on Spinoza and on painting, and therefore also between Spinoza’s compositional thought itself and painting. Full article

Rapid urbanisation in contemporary China has intensified pressures on private living environments, prompting domestic practices to increasingly unfold within third places, specifically privately owned commercial interiors. A representative example is the Starbucks coffeehouse, which explicitly positions itself as a “third place” through its “home away from home” model. This study examines how activities traditionally associated with the private home are enacted within the interiors of Starbucks China. Adopting a qualitative single-case design with two embedded subcases, a campus store and a community store, this research draws on ethnographic observations and interviews. Guided by Baudrillard’s hyperreality and Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage framework, it analyses the deployment and reception of commercial assemblages with spatial configurations, interaction routines, and expressive means that are conceived as substitutes for the social and emotional functions of the home. Findings show that Starbucks’ standardised design and service elements establish homelike conditions that effectively dissipate the intrinsic public/private contradiction of these spaces; yet they concurrently foster relevant everyday counter-practices that transcend such contradictions. These contestational practices offer compensatory comfort, caregiving, and social encounter for those lacking adequate private space. The study argues that such third places reveal critical shifts in the use of public space, offering insights into the changing nature, lived experience, and governance implications of public space in contemporary cities. Full article

Digital tectonics is often discussed through design–production integration, computational form generation, and digital fabrication, yet frameworks that systematically explain how architectural knowledge is constituted in process remain limited. This study addresses that gap by approaching digital tectonics not as an instrumental or formal design approach, but as a knowledge regime. Methodologically, it combines a conceptual–genealogical approach with an onto-methodological reading strategy grounded in Deleuze’s ontology of becoming and De Landa’s assemblage methodology and develops a core reading matrix. The study shows that knowledge in digital tectonics intensifies across potential setup, the productive threshold, behavioral stability, and feedback. Within this model, architectural making knowledge is understood not as a fixed content represented in advance, but as an operative process that concentrates decision-making within production and is reorganized through feedback. The article concludes by proposing an analytical reading model that redefines digital tectonics not merely as a technical or formal category, but as an onto-methodological problem field in which architectural knowledge is constituted in process. Full article

This article addresses an apparent tension in Deleuze’s philosophy: while his own work consistently valorizes the encounter and the role of signs in the genesis of thought, his interpretation of Spinoza seems to offer a radical critique of signs as sources of imagination, superstition, and servitude. The article argues that this tension is only apparent provided that Deleuze’s reconstruction of a Spinozist empiricist semiology is carefully examined. By analyzing Spinoza’s definition of the sign, its classification into scalar and vectorial types, and its grounding in an ethology of the body and affects, the article shows that Deleuze sharply distinguishes between signs that constitute vague experience and certain privileged signs—joyful passions and the “good encounter”—that make the formation of reason possible. The critique of the sign thus targets a specific regime of imaginative thought, while the valorization of the encounter concerns the empirical conditions for engendering thinking. This reconstruction ultimately reveals an isomorphism between Spinoza’s rationalism and Deleuze’s project of transcendental empiricism. Full article

This essay attempts to bring together the philosophies of Spinoza, Wittgenstein, and Deleuze by developing an ethics of learning that is implicit, and at times explicit, in each of their works. How this comes to be manifest in their works is that for Spinoza, Wittgenstein, and Deleuze, what is most important about this ethics of learning is that it is irreducible to rigid moral laws and to an understanding of reality that is reducible to forms of representational thinking. Most importantly, this essay shows that Spinoza’s understanding of absolutely infinite substance allows Spinoza to develop the ethical project of his Ethics—namely, his ethics of learning—and it is also what helps us to understand what Wittgenstein believed must be passed over in silence. Although the influence of Spinoza on Deleuze is well known, the focus placed here on learning will highlight, and in large part explain, why Spinoza remains a constant thread throughout Deleuze’s work while the importance of other philosophers, such as Nietzsche, slip to the background. Full article

This paper critiques the discursive knowledge productions in V. S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers by challenging the authority of its purported firsthand observations of practising Muslims across four Muslim-majority societies. It argues the book’s discursive knowledge production is not grounded in empirical ethnography but is instead manufactured through specific narrative and rhetorical strategies. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (deterritorialization), Homi Bhabha (mimicry and ambivalence), and Paul de Man (prosopopoeia), the study demonstrates how Naipaul constructs a civilizational hierarchy by positioning himself against anthropological knowledge, trivializing or appropriating peripheral writers, selectively manipulating canonical and non-canonical texts, and orchestrating encounters with interlocutors. The analysis examines how these techniques create a narrative backdrop for critiquing Islamic institutions and practices, including Sharīʿah, religious pedagogy, and educational systems such as the pesantren. Through Orientalist framing, selective historicism, and rhetorical ventriloquism, Naipaul consistently represents the Islamic world as a site of civilizational deficiency in contrast to his ideal of a Western ‘universal civilization’. The paper further engages the writings of key intellectuals—Geertz, Illich, Foucault, Iqbal, and Maududi—to counter Naipaul’s civilizational diagnosis and to foreground alternative internal critiques of modernity, politics, and education. It concludes that Naipaul’s treatment of Islam participates in a longer discursive tradition shaped by Enlightenment-derived narratives of cultural hierarchy rather than neutral ethnographic inquiry. Full article

In his seminars, Deleuze claims that Spinoza is ‘an absolute geometrist’. This article contextualizes, explains and substantiates this aspect of Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza. I position Deleuze’s reading within both the long-running scholarly debate on Spinoza’s relationship to mathematics and within the evolution of Deleuze’s own relation to Spinoza. Deleuze’s idea that Spinoza is a geometrist is shown to consist of three elements. First, according to Spinoza, geometry is more fundamental than arithmetic. Second, Spinoza frees geometry from the realm of fiction and abstract and develops, as Deleuze says, a ‘mathematics of the real’. Third, Spinoza finds in geometry a language of univocity, by which he can avoid the equivocity and hierarchy of the Aristotelian worldview. Full article

Spinoza’s theory of language seems to risk the paradox that no expression of true ideas is possible in linguistic terms. One particular term in the Ethics has stood out as addressing its potential contradictions: quatenus, ‘insofar as’ or ‘to the extent that,’ occurring hundreds of times in the text but still an element of mystery. This article offers an interpretation of this notion inspired by Deleuze’s reading and especially the theme in his seminars, that Spinoza’s project is a ‘general semiology.’ This suggests another way to affirm the coherence of the Ethics, by making a virtuous circle of its ontological and practical registers. Key to this is the notion of ‘sense’ in its genetic role and the overlooked distinction between infinite attributes and the two powers. The senses of words, propositions or demonstrations in the Ethics are not independent of a ‘noncausal correspondence’ between powers of thinking and acting from which they arise, and which quatenus consistently marks. Full article

The distinction between signs and expressions is essential to unlock Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza. However, during a lecture delivered on 13 January 1981, Deleuze makes a passing remark that complicates this distinction. For Spinoza, Christ’s religion, like political society, is a systems of signs pertaining to the collective imagination that nevertheless is meant to facilitate the transition towards the domain of expressions, that is, to the domain of reason and philosophy. The aim of this paper is to shed light on this ambiguity between signs and expressions in Deleuze’s work on Spinoza. First, I discuss the scattered passages in Spinoza’s oeuvre dealing with the figure of Christ. I then go on to reconstruct Deleuze’s Spinozistic taxonomy of signs. Third, I reconstruct Deleuze’s comparison between Spinoza and Hobbes regarding the emergence of political society from the state of nature. I then propose a close reading of chapter 7 of the Theological-Political Treatise to argue that Christ’s religion, according to Spinoza, should be seen as fulfilling the function of political society in times of crisis. I end with an extensive analysis of Spinoza’s formula “the Spirit of Christ, that is, the idea of God” in light of Deleuze’s reading of the first half of Ethics V. To conclude, I suggest we look at Christ as the conceptual persona of Spinozism. Full article

At the end of Deleuze’s lectures on Spinoza of 1980–1981, he asks his students to “imagine a Spinozist gambler.” Yet he ends the course offering few clues about how to picture this figure. Here we provide an interpretation of the Spinozist gambler based on both its Spinozist conceptual context and its place in Deleuze’s broader philosophy of gambling play. Accordingly, we examine Spinozist gambling in terms of Deleuze’s account of Spinoza’s three types of knowledge, and we compare the Spinozist gambler to Deleuze’s more prominent figure of the Nietzschean dice-thrower. We thereby offer a tripartite characterization of the Spinozist gambler following its place in Spinoza’s epistemology, which we further refine by examining Deleuze’s comments on indeterminism in Spinoza and Nietzsche. We argue that, according to Deleuze, the Spinozist gambler controls chance through rational organization, whereas the Nietzschean gambler affirms and embraces chance itself. And by means of this analysis, we advance our knowledge of both Deleuze’s Spinozism and his philosophy of play. Full article

In 1948 Sartre wrote an essay about the absolute space in Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures. This notion of absolute space is also used by Gilles Deleuze, inspired by the art critic and philosopher Henri Maldiney, in his approach of the notion of essence in Spinoza. In the first part of this article, I explain what this absolute space is about, and how it helps us to better understand Spinoza’s theory of the relation between essences and existence of modi in their relationship with—and dependency of—the substance. In a second part, I explain Sartre’s notion of absolute space in order to illustrate his inversion of the relation of essence and existence, and what this inversion means on a metaphysical level. I conclude with the suggestion that Sartre’s early philosophy and his notion of absolute consciousness and freedom can be interpreted as a kind of Spinozism, stripped of its essences. Full article

Awaken, aware, arise, perform, pause, and repeat. The actions of the everyday. Without it, we fall into dysregulation. This paper seeks to examine creative research developed as an experiment during COVID-19, an audiovisualscape in virtual reality (VR). Rhythmanalysis+ is a social, ecological, and sensorial enquiry into materiality, grounded in archipelagic thinking, through the lens of Rhythmanalysis, a form of analysis focusing on the everyday, through the lens of cyclical and linear rhythms. (Lefebvre). The research will also draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome theory, a botanical and philosophical investigation into networks. Networks form the backbone of the research. Lars Bang Larsen also argues that networks offer a distinctive view on how factual, speculative, historical, and non-human elements envelop and intertwine. Glissant’s archipelagic thought promotes transformation, multiplicity, and a sense of unpredictability. For this work, four inhabitants from Sherkin, a small island off the southwest coast of Ireland with a population of 100, became the research focus. Across four weeks, islanders gathered data from their daily sensory rhythms. Flight patterns of birds and bats were recorded, daily tasks noted, pathways cycled. Relational impacts of animal-odour on farming, weather, and tides were processed remotely, and an immersive cartographic score was created as a direct response in a three-dimensional virtual space. Rhythmanalysis+ analyses our newly altered perceptions of time and space as a material within a virtual world. VR, created as a gaming platform, is being pushed by art itself, forcing us to relook at the natural world, which is not static, but relational. Fluid but equally extractive, it is important to look at technology’s impact on all that is human and how it is perceived within the body as it is reframed digitally. Full article

This article aims to reflect on the testamentary dimension of Max Ophüls’ last feature film, Lola Montès, from a research context that seeks to understand the thematic, narrative, and stylistic traits of film directors’ last films. Through a mobilisation of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of crystal image, and a film analysis of the work and comparison with other important Ophüls films, this paper argues that the constant movement of the characters and the filmmaker’s camera throughout his body of work is, in this testament film, transformed into an infernal circularity in which its protagonist is imprisoned. This movement without escape, based on the circularity of the circus arena in which Lola is held captive, is ultimately a way of portraying the decadence and exploitation of mass entertainment culture in its logic of capture, exploitation and commodification of its “human products.” The culmination of circularity and repetition in this capture is associated with the degradation of both the living performative body of Lola and the figure of its director Max Ophüls, given that Lola Montès was not only a very difficult film to direct but also very poorly received at the time of its release. Full article

Bluetongue virus serotype 3 (BTV-3) emerged in northwestern Europe in 2023–2024, raising concerns about its potential reproductive impact on rams, similar to previous outbreaks with BTV-8. This study assessed the effect of natural BTV-3 infection on the semen quality of 49 rams in Belgium using two cross-sectional sampling sessions during the 2024 outbreak. Semen and blood were tested for BTV RNA via RT-qPCR, and a composite semen quality score (SQS) was established based on key sperm parameters. On the first sampling date, 75% of rams were viremic, and 19% presented azoospermia. Rams with BTV RNA detectable in both semen and blood had significantly lower SQS and sperm concentrations than those with viral RNA in blood only or none at all. By the second sampling, 53 days later, semen quality had improved markedly, indicating a transient effect of infection. These findings confirm that BTV-3 can severely but temporarily impair ram fertility, particularly when viral replication occurs in the reproductive tract. Given the seasonal overlap between vector activity and breeding programs, these results underscore the importance of integrating reproductive health monitoring into outbreak response strategies. Full article

The first film signed by Paolo Taviani without his brother Vittorio (who died in 2018) in more than 60 years, Leonora addio (2022) recapitulates and condenses an entire career by recounting the grotesque (real-life) journey of the burial, cremation, exhumation, transfer (from Rome to Sicily) and re-burial of Luigi Pirandello’s corpse over more than ten years, as well as by showing in the last thirty minutes an adaptation for the screen of “The Nail” (“Il chiodo”, the last novella by the renowned Sicilian writer). A quintessential testament film refracting the writer’s death in Vittorio’s (one of the film’s many Pirandello-esque mirror games) and alluding to the intellectual legacies of either, Leonora addio daringly thematizes the exploitation of cultural value as well as its political implications—particularly in the specific Italian context and, implicitly yet unmistakably, in the present day too. My paper will analyse Leonora addio paying particular attention to how this subtext intersects the film’s “testamentary” surface, to Deleuze’s “crystal images” (pervasively informing the structure of Leonora addio), to the film’s many nods to Kaos (a 1984 Pirandello adaptation for the screen by the Taviani, analysed mainly through the lens of Lacanian gaze theory) and to the role of death in both films. Full article