Search Results (32)

This essay seeks to stress the importance of the American poet Walt Whitman to Gilles Deleuze, using how love is variously explored to think about their methods in relationality. I firstly consider how many classic responses to Whitman express division regarding his work. This is indicated by how D.H. Lawrence stresses the satisfactions and exhilarations of reading Whitman but also refers to the sense of embarrassment and shame which readers might experience on doing so, not least because of Whitman’s own apparent shamelessness. For Lawrence, this is exemplified by Whitman’s proclamation that he “aches with amorous love”, as if he were a Deleuzian desiring machine existing only to ache and nothing but. Yet there is no such embarrassment detectable in Deleuze’s responses to Whitman’s work, and his responses are characterized by their insistence that Whitman always insists upon a dimension to experience beyond such conventional desires. He is more than a poet of the body with organs, which in turn enables an understanding of his work as an anticipation of Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs as it was first expounded in Anti-Oedipus. To explore this further, direct and indirect correspondences between Deleuze and Whitman are explored, with particular attention to a range of poems from the 1855 Leaves of Grass. These readings show that if there is a conceptual relationship in their work, their style and syntax are also a way in which they relate thought and action. To triangulate the consideration of the varieties of love that are manifest in Deleuze and Whitman, I use Hannah Stark’s essay on Deleuze and love, showing how different aspects of Deleuze’s writing and thought either consciously or unconsciously relate to the American poet. I reflect upon Deleuze’s claim in his essay on the poet that Whitman’s sustained advocacy of “comradely love” represents a practice of radical relationality, and that this also offers a sense of social and political transformability that is key to both. To provide a final shape to this discussion, I refer to Fredric Jameson’s posthumously published seminars on Deleuze, in which he gives particular attention to the philosopher’s particular interest in American literature. Ultimately, the essay finds that Whitman is given a unique status in Deleuze, one which even threatens to jeopardize his own philosophical system, and that the reason for this may well be love. Full article

The architectural design studio, with its dynamic and expanding scope, challenges traditional academic boundaries and bridges academia and practice by providing an integrated structure. A pedagogy based on experimentation transforms the studio into a laboratory where research and design merge, exploiting the unpredictable benefits of hands-on experience. Accordingly, this study explores experimental pedagogical fictions and tools aimed at integrating material experimentation into studio education, expanding its scope to encompass various craft mediums. It adopts a descriptive and exploratory qualitative methodology, combining theoretical and practice-based methods. It takes atelierz, a vertical architectural design studio, as a case study. Firstly, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of creative experimentation, a philosophical interpretation of the pedagogical fiction of the studio is made on contexts, tools, and actors. Secondly, focusing on the experimental possibilities offered by tools of installations and prototypes, and analyzing their pedagogical use in the architectural studio, the thematic frames of materials, methods and tools, interdisciplinary connections, engagement modalities, and field of discovery are used to evaluate material experimentation. Based on two semesters of atelierz’s visual and physical outputs and process documentation, the findings demonstrate the impact of installations and prototypes on understanding, designing, and applying materials, developing technical skills, transforming non-disciplinary knowledge, mediating exploration, and structuring specialized field of inquiry. This research highlights the pedagogical value of material experimentation and contributes to architectural education by providing knowledge and experience of the studio fictions developed, the pedagogical tools employed within these fictions, and their use for material experimentation. Full article

This article examines some work by the Oaxaca-based Mexican experimental filmmaker and video artist Bruno Varela in order to explore the sense of Gilles Deleuze’s view that modern political cinema is characterized by a “missing” people, to which the adequate response is the people-sustaining or people-generating trance. I argue that the element missing from Deleuze’s discussion is how the typical way for a people to go “missing” under capitalism involves the obfuscation of their labor, an idea that sustains the materially grounded trance in Varela’s Papeles Secundarios (2004) and Cuerpos Complementarios (2022), drawn from the filmmaker’s experience as casting director of Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s production of her video installation Tooba (2002) in Oaxaca. The article discusses the “baroque critique” involved in Varela’s elliptically representing the workday of the non-professional Oaxacan actors employed in Neshat’s production, understood here as a critique articulated using the detritus of that production. The result is a paradigm of trans-temporal playfulness on film that also challenges the claims to trans-temporal experience sought in Neshat’s work. Thus, the article also locates these arguments within debates about whether films can “do philosophy”, including a hypothesis about the obfuscations of labor lying behind why making-of documentaries—and their capacities to critique the philosophical pretensions of their original subjects—have not figured more centrally in those debates. Full article

The article starts from Gilles Deleuze’s assumption of film being a philosophy in its own right and applies it to the horror genre. It reads Stanley Cavell’s concept of genre, Timothy Jay Walker’s work on the Horror of the Other (1) and Eugene Thacker’s understanding of philosophical horror (2). It researches horror film as philosophically relevant access to nothingness (3) and shifts to the operations of assigning places to nothingness according to its respective place of access (off screen, on screen, behind the screen/behind the camera) (4). It then gives short analyses of Midsommar (5), Hereditary (6), Tarantula (7), and The Conjuring (8). In Tarantula, the screen functions as a shield against the agent of nothingness residing behind it. Once surmounted from behind by nothingness, the screen is finally purged. In Hereditary and Midsommar, nothingness is always already here, in full light, constantly transforming everything into nothing. In The Conjuring, the morphings and vectorial movements have nothingness evaporate from the screen to what lies behind it, namely (digital) picture technology. The screen turns into a membrane between nothingness and its condition, technology. As a consequence, we have to switch from philosophical horror to technological horror as access to nothingness (9). Full article

Affect theory, non-representational theory, and assemblage theory have been among the most impactful developments in the theoretical humanities in the wake of, and in reaction to, poststructuralism. These interlocking bodies of theory and critical practice call into question two concepts foundational for biblical hermeneutics, namely, interpretation and representation. In literary studies, the poststructuralist “death of the author” has been succeeded by a post-poststructuralist “death of the interpreter”. How might biblical exegesis be reimagined on the far side of this double demise? Non-representational theory, meanwhile, in tandem with affect theory, has dismantled traditional understandings of representation; this article argues that traditional biblical scholarship, epitomized by biblical commentary, is driven by a representation compulsion. Assemblage theory, for its part, more than any other body of thought, reveals the immense complexity of the act of reading, not least biblical reading—after which even explicit evocations of contemporary contexts in contextual biblical hermeneutics amount to skeletally thin descriptions. These and other related lines of inquiry impel the rethinking of academic biblical reading attempted in this article. Full article

This article attempts to elucidate the Deleuzian philosophy of the event between The Logic of Sense and A Thousand Plateaus, where it acquires clearly political nuances. With regard to The Logic of Sense, I show that (i) it takes up the definition of the event of Difference and Repetition, identifying it with that redistribution of pre-individual singularities or individuating differences at the level of the univocal being which defines the conditions of problems; (ii) the event is henceforth also the instance that makes possible the “communication” of the heterogeneous series of bodies and propositions from which the production of sense in language follows; and (iii) the counter-effectuation should be understood in this book as an ethics of the event. With regard to A Thousand Plateaus, I emphasize (i) the “return” to The Logic of Sense that the concept of assemblage entails, (ii) the reformulation of the notion of event that takes place in the new theoretical framework, and (iii) that of the counter-effectuation, which must henceforth be understood as a politics of the event. Full article

Participation has become the keyword in museum and gallery education during the past decades. However, the focus on participation might contain neoliberalist tendencies, creating more entertainment and consumerism than art. In this study based on practice-based research, I explore a gallery educational method to mediate contemporary art to primary and high school students inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s process philosophy and new materialist theory–practice. What kind of roles can the method of Concept Play Workshop create for the participating body and how can it challenge neoliberal tendencies in museum and gallery education? In the workshops, children and young people create philosophical concepts with contemporary art, dialogue-based practices and artistic experiments in the exhibition space of Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen, Norway. I argue that the method can create philosophizing, critical, uncomfortable, resting, dictatorial and protesting bodies. Representational logic becomes challenged, and discomfort and resistance become educational potential. The method creates multiple and overlapping roles for the participating body, shifting the focus towards multiplicities instead of the passive/active binary. Humans are not the only participating bodies, but attention is given to agential matter, contesting human-centeredness. The study is a contribution to the field of post-approaches in gallery and museum education. Full article

Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction provides an ideal means of appreciating and interrogating the duality central to both Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and its adaptations. Moreover, because deconstruction exposes binary oppositions as artificial and constrictive, it enables us to advance beyond them toward multiplicity, a term used by Gilles Deleuze for a complex, ever-changing, multipart structure that transcends unity. Roy Ward Baker’s Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) and episodes of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful (2014–2016) offer fresh ways to think about—and beyond—the duality of culture’s most famously divided pair. The binary oppositions that organize each text are innovative, as are the ways in which these oppositions are reversed and conflated. Ultimately, these adaptations employ triangulation to deconstruct themselves, thereby demonstrating the limitations and instability of duality, as well as the possibilities of multiplicity. Full article

In his works on ecological philosophy, Bruno Latour develops an interesting perspective on religion and pluralism. He proposes a new worldview, in which religion is reinterpreted in view of a Gaian philosophy. He extends ‘pluralism’ beyond the anthropocentrism that dominates modern humanism. In his book Facing Gaia Latour includes nonhuman beings in a larger community and works towards a larger concept of eco-humanism. In this paper, I try to reconstruct his position by showing that the philosophical foundation for his interpretation of religion could be called ‘terrarism’ and is to be classified as a form of new materialism. This new interpretation of materialism has postmodernist origins (inspired by Gilles Deleuze), but it is not identical to it, because Latour distances himself from ‘postmodernism’. He wants to positively contribute to a new ontology. My point is that Latour’s ‘terrarist’ grounding of religious pluralism obstructs any foundation of transcendence and, finally, congests a really pluralistic ecumene because he still adheres to the postmodernist idea that we should renounce to a unitary principle of being. His ideas on eco-humanism and pluralistic ecumene could gain momentum if we opened ourselves to a more holistic and spiritual way of thinking, retaking Lovelock’s conception of Gaia. However, Latour’s new-materialistic interpretation of ‘animism’ can be seen as a positive contribution to a new perspective of the world that definitively sets ‘materialism’ aside. Full article

The concept of navigation, introduced by Harun Farocki in his lecture Computer Animation Rules, explains the digital/algorithmic choreography of consumer behaviour through media platforms. This article contends navigational connectivity is a cybernetic operating structure for capital, which mediates the techno-geographic milieu of the capitalocene and is a key factor in the present destabilization of earth systems. There is, therefore, an urgent need to formulate ways of disarticulating navigational processes to fragment global capitalism and re-establish a diversification of local cultures. We undertake this task in tandem with the critical project of cosmotechnics developed by Yuk Hui and examine how an ontological disagreement between Gilles Deleuze and Quentin Meillassoux shapes Hui’s analysis of cybernetics. Contra Meillassoux’s correlationist reading, we argue Deleuze foregrounds machinic becoming through a primal contact with the virtual and claim practices of montage are machines of analysis that dismantle navigational connections and establish alternate patterns of feedback estranged from the capitalist process. To this end, we examine models of montage developed by Jacques Rancière, Farocki and Deleuze, and consider the potential of such models to function as machines of navigational disarticulation and cultural pluralization. This approach reframes user engagement as modulative becoming in a manner that introduces new techno-cultural-geographic conjunctions appropriate to cosmotechnics. Full article

For the last three years I have been making walks with my canine companion as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded fine art practice-based PhD at Nottingham Trent University, UK, which considers walking art as a shared human–canine practice. In this paper I reflect upon the doings of deep canine topography as a practice, with particular attention to the ethical questions raised. In the short meditation on the ethics of human animal artistic collaboration that follows, I will wander through the complex web of human–canine kinship, explored through art practice. Joining us on our walk through this tricky landscape are Rosi Braidotti, Jack Halberstam, Dona Haraway, Ron Broglio, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and a host of other actors whose concepts and theories provide a rich source of ethical discussion, which fellow artists might find helpful. Full article

Displayed in a Kansas City neighborhood with a history of blockbusting, Nick Cave’s 14-channel video installation Hy-Dyve confronted viewers with a visceral sense of entrapment in traumatizing spaces of racism. The immersive environment portrayed deeply moving experiences of confinement and concealment, connecting narratives of the Middle Passage to present fears of racial profiling. Shown at different scales on the dilapidated walls of a deconsecrated church, the video images enabled visitors to sense what it feels like to be exposed to a scrutinizing and categorizing gaze. Building on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of close-up operations, I explore how Cave both showcases and subverts the visual rhetoric of surveillance, inviting viewers to suspend processes of individuation and embrace alterity. I offer a semiotic analysis of the visual motifs in Hy-Dyve and show how their unstable meanings heighten the potential for immersion in conjunction with the projection mapping technique. The entanglement of video images with crumbling architectural features destabilizes perception and fosters reflection on the imbrication of past and present realities of racial discrimination. Placing Hy-Dyve in the broader context of Cave’s body of work, I suggest that it conjoins two different sides of his practice: a post-black approach to issues of identity which is consonant with his Soundsuits and a more radical activist stance which addresses the particularities of black experience and the burdening history of racial abuse. Full article

This article outlines an eco-operational theory of technical mediation that centers on Gilbert Simondon’s notion of technicity. The argument is that technical apparatuses do the work of concepts. However, the eco-operational viewpoint completely alters the status of concepts: what they are, where they are, and what they do. Technicity, as understood here, concerns the efficacious action and operational functioning of a broad range of apparatuses (including living bodies and technical machines), which are conceived as adaptive mediators. The focus on technicity provides a new notion of the virtual, that of the operationally real, which resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s while also marking a new direction. What is more, by approaching mediation in terms of technicity, the eco-operational framework offers a novel understanding of concept or generality that stakes out a middle path between Kantian representational generality and Deleuzian concrete singularity. Full article

This essay “Pirate Assemblage” explores two related questions. The first is how we read and appreciate the literary form of pirate literature such as Alexander Exquemelin’s Buccaneers of America (1678) and Charles Johnson’s two-volume General History of the Pyrates (volume one 1724, volume two 1728). The second is what the answer to that first question suggests for how we regard pirate literature in relation to more canonical eighteenth-century literature and how this relation might revise our reading of that literature. My answer to the first question explores the concept of “assemblage” for reading and appreciating pirate literature, and my answer to the second question that eighteenth-century literature read in relation to this “pirate assemblage” suggests new ways of reading canonical texts such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) that were written soon after the first volume of The General History of Pyrates. In doing so, my essay responds to the large body of scholarly literature on pirates that has focused on the question of identity—race, class, gender, and sexuality—and the question of whether or not such literature was transgressive. In my essay, by closely reading the unique literary form of pirate literature and utilizing Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concepts of “assemblage” and “minor literature,” I argue that pirate literature, rather than representing transgressive identities, instead progressively produces new economic and social connections that deterritorializes the economy, literary form, and language. Full article

This article compares the mysticism of 4th-century Church Father Gregory of Nyssa to the nomadology of 20th century philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. In their book A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari returned to the figure of the nomad in order to free multiplicities from the “despotic unity” of modern Enlightenment thought. Though Deleuze and Guattari compare this nomadology to spiritual journeys, they claim that their nomad, unlike the mystic, resists a center, a homecoming, a destination. Yet Gregory of Nyssa, writing before the Church itself became a hegemonic power that would confine truth to a single reified code, described the Christian as a wandering nomad, for whom the path itself is the goal. Contrary to the static vision that would be developed in the onto-theological tradition that would lead Western metaphysics to interpret mysticism as the private experience of union with the divine, Gregory of Nyssa proposes a communal movement “from beginning to beginning” with no end, and no union in sight. By placing the postmodern secular nomad alongside the premodern Christian nomad, this article will draw on similarities between the two in order to accentuate the contemporary relevance of Gregory of Nyssa’s vision of mysticism. Full article