Straipsnyje svarstoma galimybė, ar ritmo konceptas, funcionuojantis Gillesio Deleuze’o ir Félixo Guattari tekstuose, negalėtų padėti atsekti minties judėjimo linijų nuo filosofijos link skirtingų meno formų ir atgal. Pradedant nuo dinaminės problemų ir sąvokų kartografijos, kurią kaip tinkamą tokiems minties eksperimentams įžvelgė Anne Sauvagnargues, Jamesas M. Buchananas, Ronaldas Bogue, Stephenas Zepke, šiame tyrime siūloma sąvoka ritmas yra tinkama kaip siejamoji galimų filosofijos ir įvairių menų sankabos jungtis. Ritmas Deleuze’o ir Guattari tekstuose tampa filosofine sąvoka ir įgauna ontologinį statusą, transcenduojantį siauras filosofijos (...) ir meno apibrėžtis. Ji funkcionuoja tarpinėje teritorijoje: tarp minties, garso, žodžio ir vaizdo, meno kūrinio, filosofijos, gyvenimo. Būtent žvelgiant iš tokios ontologinės perspektyvos, ši sąvoka įgauna galią atverti ne horizontaliuosius, o vertikaliuosius, genealoginius meno kaip tapsmo aspektus. (shrink)

Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between philosophy, science, and the arts - seeing each as a means of confronting chaos - and challenge the common view that philosophy is an extension of logic. The authors also discuss the similarities and distinctions between creative and philosophical writing. Fresh anecdotes from the history of philosophy illuminate this book, along with engaging discussions of composers, painters, writers, and architects.

The writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have had an immense impact on architectural discourse during the last two decades, particularly in the realm of digital design and fabrication. Well-known concepts such as the rhizomatics, striated and smooth space, and folding have become part of architectural jargon. While Deleuze and Guattari do not devote much text directly to permanent forms of architecture, they are intrigued by structures like tents, shantytowns, and burrows. This 3 volume set of writings on architecture (...) and urbanism presents a range of previously published pieces by Deleuze and Guattari and by many architectural and cultural theorists that explore the implications of their theories on the built environment. This critical collection will be useful to anyone looking into the impact of these great thinkers as it gathers together in one place the best sources for easy access. (shrink)

A critical examination of the figure of Oedipus in psychoanalysis and Western culture as it relates to the history of society and capitalism.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari redefine the relation between the state and its war machine. Far from being a part of the state, warriers are nomads who always come from the outside and keep threatening the authority of the state. In this daring essay inspired by Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari redefine the relation between the state and its war machine. Far from being a part of the state, warriers are nomads who always come from the outside and keep (...) threatening the authority of the state. In the same vein, nomadic science keeps infiltrating royal science, undermining its axioms and principles. Nomadology is a speedy, pocket-sized treatise that refuses to be pinned down. Theorizing a dynamic relationship between sedentary power and "schizophrenic lines of flight," this volume is meant to be read in transit, smuggled into urban nightclubs, offices, and subways. Deleuze and Guattari propose a creative and resistant ethics of becoming-imperceptible, strategizing a continuous invention of weapons on the run. An anarchic bricolage of ideas uprooted from anthropology, aesthetics, history, and military strategy, Nomadology carries out Deleuze's desire to "leave philosophy, but to leave it as a philosopher.". (shrink)

In this classic of critical thought, Deleuze and Guattari challenge conventional interpretations of Kafka's work. Instead of exploring preexisting categories or literary genres, they propose a concept of 'minor literature' the use of major language that subverts it from within. They contend, that Kafka, writing as a Jew in Prague, made German 'take flight on a line of escape; and joyfully became a stranger within it. His work therefore serves as a model for understanding all critical language that must operate (...) within the confines of the dominant language and culture. - from back cover. (shrink)

First delivered in French by Deleuze at the "Schizo-Culture" conference organized by Semiotext at Columbia University in 1975, "Rhizome" introduced a new kind of thinking in philosophy, both non-dialectical and non-hierarchical. The two didn't expect this neo-anarchical blue-print would eventually offer an early template for the understanding of the internet. "Rhizome" substitutes pragmatic, "couch grass," free-floating logic to the binary, oppositional, and exclusive model of the tree. In "Politics," superceding the Marxist concept of class, Deleuze envisages the social macrocosm as (...) a series of lines, and reinvent politics as a process of flux whose outcome will always be unpredictable. It is, he emphasizes, the end of the idea of revolution, but not of the "becoming revolutionary.". (shrink)

This article discusses Kracauer’s analysis of mass ornament in light of Deleuze’s concept of ritournelle. Kracauer was interested in the spectacle of Tiller Girls and found the principle of the capitalist production process in its ornamental formations. Capitalism destroys any natural organisms for its means and excludes any resistance from its effective procedure. This operation necessarily comes along with calculation and mechanisation. All individuals have scaled up statistics charts and scrambled with machines completely. People have turned into masses who (...) are no longer different in form but simple technical objects that can be equally employed at any point of the globe. Kracauer understood mass ornament as the surface-level expression of global capitalism, which revealed its unconscious. He emphasised the ambivalence of mass ornament and a possible line of escape from capitalist rationality through the emptiness of its formal excess. Deleuze’s concept of ritournelle may shed light on a similar question of mass ornament and push its scope beyond Kracauer’s analysis. The two philosophers seem to share the frame of formalism when they deploy their arguments concerning form and depth; however, Deleuze put forward the issue of temporality in his discussion of ritournelle, a crucial question that Kracauer omits. (shrink)

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

This introduction presents the rationale for the special issue and outlines the main motives discussed in the following essays. The special issue redefines the concept of ornamentation based on Gilles Deleuze's philosophy. It presents ornaments as potent instruments for forming social bonds through repetition and a ruminative mental mindset. Essays by various authors explore the connection between ornaments, social bonds and affective integration, drawing on Deleuze's concepts of repetition and folds. This reinterpretation offers new insights into the aesthetic and social (...) attributes of ornamentation, shedding light on their role in shaping individual and communal becomings. (shrink)

Both accessible and definitive, Deleuze and Guattari provides a critical examination of the writing of two notoriously difficult thinkers. This important introduction is divided into three sections--knowledge, power, and desire--and provides a systematic account of the intellectual context as well as an exhaustive analysis of the key themes informing Deleuze and Guattari's work. Providing a framework for reading the important and influential study Capitalism and Schizophrenia, this volume is attentive to the needs of the student by providing a lexicon of (...) the difficult ideas used in Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of philosophy, art, and politics. Deleuze and Guattari is an important addition to the critical literature on some of the most challenging work in recent social theory. It will be the standard introduction to Deleuze and Guattari for students of philosophy and social theory. (shrink)

"Mille Plateaux (Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1980) est le second des deux volumes ayant pour sous-titre Capitalisme et schizophrénie issu de la collaboration entre le philosophe Gilles Deleuze et le philosophe et psychanalyste Félix Guattari. Cet ouvrage continue à explorer par des voies inédites - en s'attaquant notamment à une série d'erreurs afférentes selon les auteurs à l'arborescence, à l'État, au langage... - la question déjà avancée dans L'Anti-Œdipe (premier volume) d'une ontologie révolutionnaire des devenirs ("presque imperceptibles") qui ne cessent (...) de défaire l'histoire des identités ("primauté des lignes de fuite") et de produire des "coups" imprévisibles au sociologue et au militant. Sans doute le livre politique de Deleuze et Guattari le plus important, grâce à sa conception originale du pluralisme (l'individu n'y est pas conçu comme fondement de l'organisation sociale : les subjectivités sociales sont toujours au-dessus ou en dessous du niveau de l'individu, composant et décomposant des collectivités de toutes sortes)"--Wikipedia = Mille Plateaux (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980) is the second of two volumes which comes in the series of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a result of collaboration between the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, philosopher and psychoanalyst. This book continues to explore new paths - including addressing a series of errors by the authors related to the tree, the state, the language... - that are already dealt with in Anti-Oedipus (first volume) of an ontology of revolutionary futures; the latter continues to unravel the history of identities ("primacy of lines of flight") and produce "coups" unforeseeable to the sociologist and activist. No doubt the political book of Deleuze and Guattari's is the most important, with its original conception of pluralism (the individual is not conceived as the foundation of social organization: social subjectivities are always above or below of the individual level, composing and decomposing communities of all kinds).". (shrink)

This article focuses on the distinction between psychosocial types and conceptual personae advanced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What is Philosophy? The conceptual persona is the tool that a philosopher invents in order to create new concepts with which to bring forth new events. Although they present it as one of the three elements of philosophy, its nature and function and, above all, its conjunctions with psychosocial types have been overlooked by scholars. What is Philosophy? contains a list (...) of character traits of which each conceptual persona is composed. The central argument of this article is that this list can well be regarded as a table of categories that enable the exercise and experience of philosophy’s creative thinking. Since the character traits of a conceptual persona match the characteristics of the given psychosocial types, it is necessary to keep inventing new conceptual personae always starting from the historical presuppositions. The philosopher requires the conceptual persona to transfer his or her movements of thought to philosophy’s plane of immanence and thereby transform them in such a manner that philosophy can unfold as a creative power. It emerges as the subject of creative thinking at the same time as the concepts that subject creates, with which it coincides in the moment of creation. With the conceptual persona in What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari determine the one element of philosophy that makes the transcendental empiricism a method of creation that appears as a precise operation with all its convincing and transparent results. (shrink)

I propose in this text a rhythmic theory of signs drawn from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I name this theory a semiorhythmology. I suggest that the theory of rhythm developed in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) can be understood, in part, as the culmination of the diverse set of inquiries into signs that both Deleuze and Guattari undertook, individually and together, beginning in the 1960s. I first outline Deleuze’s theory of signs as a theory of encounter as (...) developed in Proust and Signs (1964) and Difference and Repetition (1968), following which I sketch Guattari’s engagements with signs and semiotics throughout the 1960s and 1970s, particularly through his notion of “a-signifying semiotics” and the concept of the “diagram” he adapts from the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. I close by showing how these heterogeneous theories of the sign are drawn together in A Thousand Plateaus through the Spinozist reading of the ethology of Jakob von Uexküll and the theorisation of rhythm in the form of the refrain. (shrink)

A fascinating anthology of texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. "One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian," Michel Foucault once wrote. This book anthologizes 40 texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who died in 1995. The early texts, from 1953-1966, belong to literary criticism and announce Deleuze's last book, Critique and Clinic. But philosophy clearly predominates in the rest of the book, with sharp appraisals of (...) the thinkers he always felt indebted to: Spinoza, Bergson. More surprising is his acknowledgement of Jean-Paul Sartre as his master. "The new themes, a certain new style, a new aggressive and polemical way of raising questions," he wrote, "come from Sartre." But the figure of Nietzsche remains by far the most seminal, and the presence throughout of his friends and close collaborators, Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault. The book stops shortly after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, and presents a kind of genealogy of Deleuze's thought as well as his attempt to leave philosophy and connect it to the outside—but, he cautions, as a philosopher. (shrink)

Este trabalho agencia a obra de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari à educação em ciências ao jogar luzes sobre o deslocamento que permeia a organização deste componente curricular. O uso destes autores para pensarmos a educação em ciências, possibilita a (re)inserção da diferença e da multiplicidade, extirpadas do estrato científico pelo sonho moderno de totalização da realidade – que persiste no pedagógico – por meio da redução conceitual operada pela lógica da identidade. Assim, evidencia as (des)continuidades das práticas entre um (...) estrato e outro, como resultado da força de uma tradição que passa a ser subvertida pelo corte epistemológico deleuzo-guattariano. (shrink)

This paper elaborates Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘war machine’ in relation to key theses in Hegel’s political philosophy, with the aim of showing how it illuminates the conditions under which politics and political institutions as Hegel understands them both emerge and are compromised. After first introducing the idea of the war machine and its appropriation by discussing it in relation to Carl Schmitt’s theory of partisan warfare, it examines both the war machine and Hegel’s theory of the State by way of (...) a focus on Hegel’s discussions of drive (Trieb) and semblance (Schein). Regarding the first, the paper explores how both Hegel and Deleuze and Guattari conceive of social structure in terms of a structure of drives even while they differ in their understandings of the drives in relation to desire and subjectivity. Regarding the second, the paper explores how moments of semblance identified by Hegel as he develops his system of Right reveal points where the war machine can emerge from within State structures. The paper argues that the war machine concept challenges understandings of politics built on friend/enemy antagonisms and the use of external conflict to secure internal unity, the former being Schmitt’s explicit political project and the second being the place at which Hegel’s project ultimately finds itself when it fails to secure the rational structure of Ethical Life. (shrink)

Translated and with an Introduction by Daniel W. Smith Afterword by Tom Conley Gilles Deleuze had several paintings by Francis Bacon hanging in his Paris apartment, and the painter’s method and style as well as his motifs of seriality, difference, and repetition influenced Deleuze’s work. This first English translation shows us one of the most original and important French philosophers of the twentieth century in intimate confrontation with one of that century’s most original and important painters. In considering Bacon, Deleuze (...) offers implicit and explicit insights into the origins and development of his own philosophical and aesthetic ideas, ideas that represent a turning point in his intellectual trajectory. First published in French in 1981, _Francis Bacon_ has come to be recognized as one of Deleuze’s most significant texts in aesthetics. Anticipating his work on cinema, the baroque, and literary criticism, the book can be read not only as a study of Bacon’s paintings but also as a crucial text within Deleuze’s broader philosophy of art. In it, Deleuze creates a series of philosophical concepts, each of which relates to a particular aspect of Bacon’s paintings but at the same time finds a place in the “general logic of sensation.” Illuminating Bacon’s paintings, the nonrational logic of sensation, and the act of painting itself, this work—presented in lucid and nuanced translation—also points beyond painting toward connections with other arts such as music, cinema, and literature. _Francis Bacon_ is an indispensable entry point into the conceptual proliferation of Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole. Gilles Deleuze was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, Vincennes–St. Denis. He coauthored _Anti-Oedipus_ and _A Thousand Plateaus_ with Félix Guattari. These works, as well as _Cinema 1, Cinema 2, The Fold, Proust and Signs_, and others, are published in English by Minnesota. Daniel W. Smith teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University. (shrink)

Perhaps because of their dismissal of him as living ‘une carrière à l’américaine’, there have been few attempts to explore the relationship between the work of Gregory Bateson and that of Deleuze and Guattari. This paper offers two ways in which we might do this. First, it explores the concepts, such as plateau of intensity and rhizome, which migrate from Bateson into Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This helps focus on this text as an attempt to create and imagine non-schismogenic forms of (...) social relation. Here, the earthliness of this work is a necessary ‘grounding’ for the plateaus that Deleuze and Guattari seek to develop. Second, this paper builds on this by looking at Guattari’s concept of ecosophical subjectivity, arguing that Bateson is crucial for the ‘ethico-political’ dimensions of this work. It concludes with the claim that as a key influence on their work, exploring Bateson in relation to Deleuze and Guattari can open up new understandings of the ‘earthliness’ of their ideas. (shrink)

The concepts of territory and ritornello cannot be separated from one another, despite the fact that scholarship tends to restrict the former to discussions of politics and the latter to discussions of art. Deleuze and Guattari deploy the combination of territory and ritornello, along with associated notions such as rhythm, milieu, counterpoint and force, as a method to describe and understand the formation, existence and relations of living beings. They understand ‘life’ to also include a variety of nonorganic entities, such (...) as social formations. Territory and ritornello provide a philosophical alternative to understanding the existence of beings in terms of an immutable, unchanging transcendent structure, such as divine revelation, politico-economic ideology or cultural identity. As such, this conceptual pair is a necessary element in translating Deleuze and Guattari's metaphysical commitment to immanence and univocity into ethical and political theory and practice. (shrink)

Videogames are a unique artistic form, and to analyse and understand them an equally unique language is required. Cremin turns to Deleuze and Guattari's non-representational philosophy to develop a conceptual toolkit for thinking anew about videogames and our relationship to them. Rather than approach videogames through a language suited to other media forms, Cremin invites us to think in terms of a videogame plane and the compositions of developers and players who bring them to life. According to Cremin, we are (...) not simply playing videogames, we are creating them. We exceed our own bodily limitations by assembling forces with the elements they are made up of. The book develops a critical methodology that can explain what every videogame, irrespective of genre or technology, has in common and proceeds on this basis to analyse their differences. Drawing from a wide range of examples spanning the history of the medium, Cremin discerns the qualities inherent to those regarded as classics and what those qualities enable the player to do. Exploring Videogames with Deleuze and Guattari analyses different aspects of the medium, including the social and cultural context in which videogames are played, to develop a nuanced perspective on gendered narratives, caricatures and glorifications of war. It considers the processes and relationships that have given rise to industrial giants, the spiralling costs of making videogames and the pressure this places developers under to produce standard variations of winning formulas. The book invites the reader to embark on a molecular journey through worlds neither 'virtual' nor 'real' exceeding image, analogy and metaphor. With clear explanations and detailed analysis, Cremin demonstrates the value of a Deleuzian approach to the study of videogames, making it an accessible and valuable resource for students, scholars, developers and enthusiasts. (shrink)

When is the future? Is it to come or is it already here? This question serves as the frame for three further questions: why is utopia a bad concept and in what way is fabulation its superior counterpart? If the object of fabulation is the creation of a people to come, how do we get from the present to the future? And what is a people to come? The answers are that the future is both now and to come, now (...) as the becoming-revolutionary of our present and to come as the goal of our becoming; utopia is a bad concept because it posits a pre-formed blueprint of the future, whereas a genuinely creative future has no predetermined shape and fabulation is the means whereby a creative future may be generated; the movement from the revolutionary present toward a people to come proceeds via the protocol, which provides reference points for an experiment which exceeds our capacities to foresee; a people to come is a collectivity that reconfigures group relations in a polity superior to the present, but it is not a utopian collectivity without differences, conflicts and political issues. Science fiction formulates protocols of the politics of a people to come, and Octavia Butler's science fiction is especially valuable in disclosing the relationship between fabulation and the invention of a people to come. (shrink)

Introduction -- Deleuze and Guattari and political theory -- Dramatization as critical method -- Dramatization : the ontological claims -- Language and the method of dramatization -- Cinema and the method of dramatization -- Events and the method of dramatization -- Conclusion.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work has been mined by writers about music and music education such as Ian Buchanan, Marcel Swiboda, Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, and Elizabeth Gould, as they have reflected on how music and music education should be construed. 1 Our present task is to examine critically Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas in our reading of their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, with a view to determining the merits of their ideas as a basis for a philosophy of (...) music education. 2 As such, we ask three principal questions: What are Deleuze and Guattari asking us to believe? What is our assessment of their contributions and detractions? What are the implications of our analysis for.. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to develop a consistent reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of capitalism by taking seriously their use of Kant’s philosophy in formulating it. In Sect. 1, I will set out the two different roots of the term axiomatic in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. The first of these is the axiomatic approach to formalising fields of mathematics, and the second the Kantian account of the indeterminate relationship between the transcendental unity of apperception and the transcendental (...) object. In Sect. 2, we will see how this transcendental aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of axiomatics is expressed in the notion of binding, which Deleuze and Guattari take to be a process that forces us to understand a field of entities in a certain manner, namely as clearly delimited and deployed in a homogeneous space. I will argue that this process of binding operates as a transcendental condition for capitalism for Deleuze and Guattari. Section 3 addresses some of the details of the capitalist axiomatic itself, drawing out why a Kantian reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the axiomatic provides a response to some of the criticisms of it. Section 4 then analyses Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the outside of capitalism, using the double signification of the noumenal to understand the complex relationship between what they call the war machine and its representation within the axiomatic. (shrink)

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari critique the relationship between formal logic and philosophy. They argue that since philosophy is the creation of concepts that are intensional, and formal logic reduces concepts to their extension, formal logic then has no special providence to decide philosophical questions. This may strike the logic-inclined philosopher as outdated given that there are now formal intensional logics designed to model meaning rather than reference. However, it will be shown that these logics too fail to (...) express the concept in a way that preserves its philosophical import. Doing so requires contrasting Deleuze and Guattari's account of the concept with Frege's to show how the latter persists even in intensional logics in the form of mathematical functions that are ultimately referential. This then results in support for Deleuze and Guattari's claim that formal logic is a useful tool, but that it is incapable of adjudicating philosophical disputes. (shrink)

In a series of philosophical discussions and artistic case studies, this volume develops a materialist and immanent approach to modern and contemporary art. The argument is made for a return to aesthetics--an aesthetics of affect--and for the theorization of art as an expanded and complex practice. Staging a series of encounters between specific Deleuzian concepts--the virtual, the minor, the fold, etc.--and the work of artists that position their work outside of the gallery or "outside" of representation--Simon O'Sullivan takes Deleuze's thought (...) into other milieus, allowing these "possible worlds" to work back on philosophy. (shrink)

The article looks at how the Internet can be imagined as a kind of psychedelic technology – in the sense of ‘manifesting’ new realities – through the lens of different ideas associated with Deleuze and Guattari. It considers a darker strain of their ideas and their reception, initially looking back to discussions from earlier cybertheory before taking as its case study the production of ‘microfascist’ subjectivities on the notorious website 4chan – arguably the point of origin of both the ‘alt-right’ (...) and ‘QAnon’. To unpack this case study, the article develops the idea of ‘weird mediation’ (in dialogue with Gilbert Simondon), as well as considering some ‘shamanic’ aspects from Deleuze and Guattari’s thought (in dialogue with Carlos Castenada), which together offer insights and warnings about the power of mind manifesting technologies. (shrink)

This is the first volume to mobilize encounters between the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the rich developments in cultural studies of music and sound. The book takes seriously the intellectual and political challenge that the process philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari poses for previous understandings of music as permanent objects and primarily discursive texts. By elaborating on the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari in innovative ways, the chapters of the book demonstrate how musical and sonic practices (...) and expressions can be reconsidered as instances of becoming, actors in assemblages, and actualizations of virtual tendencies. The collection pushes notions of music and sound beyond such long-term paradigms as identity thinking, the privileging of signification, and the centrality of the human subject. The chapters of the volume bring a range of new topics and methodological approaches in contact with Deleuze and Guattari. These span from movement improvisation, jazz and western art music studies, sound and performance art and reality TV talent shows to deaf musicians and indigenous music. The book also highlights such fresh ways of doing analysis and shaping the methodological tools of music and sound studies that are enabled by Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy. Their philosophy, too, gains renewed capacities and potential when responding to ethnographic, cultural, ethnomusicological, participatory, aesthetic, new materialist, feminist and queer perspectives to music and sound. (shrink)

The following paper is an exposition and analysis of Deleuze and Guattari's (hereafter called D&G) vision for philosophy. In sections I and II I discuss two defining features of this vision: respectively, the philosopher as creator and the concept as the philosopher's creation. In the final section I argue that D&G's vision is supported by a normative principle that is itself not intuitively obvious. I conclude that while D&G's vision for philosophy charts out a brave space for philosophy, one may (...) adopt the spirit of their vision without embracing their normative principle. (shrink)

This article is essentially a brief reflection on time in the context of Donna Haraway's recent work When Species Meet (2008), and in particular her rejection of Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'becoming animal' in their A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987). The exception Haraway takes to Deleuze and Guattari's approach to human-animal relations is considered as indicative of wider fissures in contemporary critical theory that have failed to respond to the global crisis of the sixth earth extinction event. (...) Yet there are also points of confluence in their respective positions that provide the potential for a more coherent politics of eco-critique. (shrink)

We need to keep experimenting with writing to meet the challenges of Deleuze and Guattari’s flattened ontology in the humanities. The paper reports on a small, experimental research project at a university in the north-west of England. The findings are written in an experimental mode, inspired by the Deleuze and Guattarian concept, ‘assemblage’. The experiment is theorised and assessed in a non-reductive way that offers future creative possibilities to other researchers. First, the paper presents a context for the subsequent experimental (...) writing. Some current innovative writerly practice and some theoretical and methodological standpoints are reviewed. Next, this paper presents its theorisation of ‘assemblage’ with particular reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the idea, ‘double articulation’. This approach supports and justifies the author’s schematisation of the textual assemblage into four areas: identity, work, territory and dissolving territory. The author explains how these ideas func... (shrink)

The magnum opus of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, is not only the most important work of 20th century French philosophy, but also provides an unprecedented opportunity for philosophers and geographers to collaborate. Although neither were professional geographers A Thousand Plateaus constitutes a “geophilosophy,” a neo-materialism, which, in linking the philosophical materialisms of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud with contemporary science, avoids the traditional bogeys of materialism: determinism and vitalism. By the same token, as a rigorous and consistent (...) materialism, A Thousand Plateaus provides an escape route from the paralyzing post-modernism that has trapped important contemporary schools of geography and philosophy. In addition, Deleuze and Guattari’s politicized stance–their historical-libidinal materialism–provides a relief from the arid scientism and naive realism to which critics of post- modernism have all too often fallen prey. (shrink)

Identifying the limitations in earlier attempts for comparing Euro-American philosophy with Indian, the paper distinguishes its approach and makes a case for an alternative approach. This consists of bending the Euro-American philosophy, without breaking it, for use in India. Following the discussion of major and minor literatures by Deleuze and Guattari in the context of Kafka in Europe, the paper shows the variance between its claims in the context of minor literature and the reality. In this context, it establishes a (...) close relation between modernity and art and literature in Europe, where the latter is sought to reclaim what is rejected by the modern. Modernity rejected the premodern as embodying non-reason. Without abandoning this relation between minor and major, it seeks to show its relevance in India through Indian National Movement and M. K. Gandhi. This paper, thus, discusses an instance where alien is a better ground for growth and relevance than the origin. (shrink)

Deleuze and Guattari’s thought on remainders of childhood has proven its worth for educational theory and philosophy. However, thus far the discussion has not paid much attention to their notion of infantilization, which reveals a new dimension of their understanding of childhood. In this article, I develop both their concept of becoming-child and their concept of infantilization. This allows for thinking the remainders of childhood as inherently risky and ambiguous. I argue that this new understanding does not only paint a (...) more complete picture of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of childhood, but is also better equipped to evade two dangers already identified in the Deleuze and Guattari scholarship: the romanticization of childhood on the one hand and the risky proximity of becoming-child to the acceleration of consumerist capitalism on the other hand. (shrink)

Uncovering the theoretical and creative interconnections between posthumanism and philosophies of immanence, this volume explores the influence of the philosophy of immanence on posthuman theory; the varied reworkings of immanence for the nonhuman turn; and the new pathways for critical thinking created by the combination of these monumental discourses. With the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari serving as a vibrant node of immanence, this volume maps a multiplicity of pathways from Deleuze, Guattari and their theoretical allies - including (...) Spinoza and Nietzsche - to posthuman thought. As positions that insist, respectively, on the equal yet distinct powers of mind and body (immanence) and the urgent need to dismantle human privilege and exceptionality (posthumanism), each chapter reveals concepts for rethinking established notions of being, thought, experience, and life. The authors here take examples from a range of different media, including literature and contemporary cinema, featuring films such as Enthiran/The Robot (India, 2010) and CHAPPiE (USA/Mexico, 2015), and new developments in technology and theory. In doing so, they investigate Deleuzian and Guattarian posthumanism from a variety of political and ethical frameworks and perspectives, from afro-pessimism to feminist thought, disability studies, biopolitics, and social justice. Countering the dualisms of Cartesian philosophy and flattening the hierarchies imposed by Humanism, From Deleuze and Guattari to Posthumanism launches vital interrogations of established knowledge and sparks the critical reflection necessary for life in the posthuman era. (shrink)

A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a playful and emphatically practical elaboration of the major collaborative work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. When read along with its rigorous textual notes, the book also becomes the richest scholarly treatment of Deleuze's entire philosophical oeuvre available in any language. Finally, the dozens of explicit examples that Brian Massumi furnishes from contemporary artistic, scientific, and popular urban culture make the book an important, perhaps even central text within (...) current debates on postmodern culture and politics.Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the general title for two books published a decade apart. The first, Anti-Oedipus, was a reaction to the events of May/June 1968; it is a critique of "state-happy" Marxism and "school-building" strains of psychoanalysis. The second, A Thousand Plateaus, is an attempt at a positive statement of the sort of nomad philosophy Deleuze and Guattari propose as an alternative to state philosophy.Brian Massumi is Professor of Comparative Literature at McGill University. (shrink)

While Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus is quite rightly considered a fully fledged response to May ’68 and as one with the radical politics of the 1970s, their 1980 follow-up, A Thousand Plateaus, has tended to provoke a more perplexed reaction. In this article, I will argue that we can nonetheless extract a definite line of argumentation serving a precise political end if we relate the text back to Foucault's mid-1970s output on power/knowledge. In particular, I will emphasise Deleuze and Guattari's (...) appropriation of the Foucaultian notion of dispositif via their concept of the assemblage, the former being understood as a concrete articulation of lines of power, knowledge and subjectivation, as well as the Foucaultian ‘diagram’, the latter being a more abstract or indeterminate stage of the dispositif whose relative indeterminacy, for Deleuze and Guattari, offers a means of escape. I will show that, making room for the assemblage's opening back onto the relative indeterminacy of its generative stages, the assemblage incorporates into itself a more immanent alternative to the dispositif that is focused on collective desire rather than power, within which resistance becomes a primary and generative dimension rather than a counter-attack. In the first section, I will outline Foucault's approach to power, knowledge and subjectivation, emphasising Deleuze's reading of Foucault though without trying to overdetermine my reading in this way. Next, I will turn to the Foucaultian diagram. In the third section, I will focus on A Thousand Plateaus, demonstrating how the notion of assemblage developed in this text responds to and builds upon Foucault's approach to power/knowledge and subjectivation in order to reconceive resistance. (shrink)

Freud’s psychoanalysis of Little Hans is a defining moment in psychoanalytic theory, because it marks the first psychoanalytic attempt ever to analyze childhood as an actuality rather than a set of recollected experiences. This article aims to explain Deleuze and Guattari’s dismissal of Freud’s interpretation as an act of silencing the children that is meant to corroborate his own theories of psychosexual development and particularly the Oedipus complex. Deleuze and Guattari are not against psychoanalytic interpretation in and of itself as (...) a creative intervention into the lived actuality of the analysand, but they think that Freudian psychoanalysis misses the opportunity by tracing every aspect of individual existence back to familial figures and relationships. While Freud considers the case of Little Hans as a verification of his theory of sexuality, Deleuze and Guattari regard the case as a perfect example of how psychoanalytic suggestion often distorts the utterances of the analysand for its own interests, thereby failing altogether to grasp the logic of becoming as an escape from familial determinations. (shrink)

This article investigates the complex object of the political book. Mobilising Deleuze and Guattari's typology of the book, the article assesses the material properties of four specific books (or sets of books): Mao Zedong's ‘Little Red Book’, Russian Futurist books, Antonin Artaud's paper ‘spells’, and Guy Debord and Asger Jorn's ‘anti-book’ Mémoires. Highly critical of the dominant mode of the political book, what they call the ‘root-book’, Deleuze and Guattari draw attention to the troubling religious structures and passions that order (...) its field. Here the book internalises the world as the origin and source of truth and authority – a mode of existence as dear to the avant-garde as it is to religious formations: ‘Wagner, Mallarmé, and Joyce, Marx and Freud: still Bibles.’ But the book also features in Deleuze and Guattari's counter-figure of the ‘rhizome-book’, where they foreground the dynamic materiality of this medium: ‘A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds.’ The rhizome-book is an enticing concept for assessing the political book, yet Deleuze and Guattari pay little attention to the specific, concrete attributes of this medium. In focusing on the properties of particular books this article seeks to address that absence, and so contribute to an understanding of the political book that is fully engaged with its material forms. (shrink)

A posthumous collection of writings by Deleuze, including letters, youthful essays, and an interview, many previously unpublished. Letters and Other Texts is the third and final volume of the posthumous texts of Gilles Deleuze, collected for publication in French on the twentieth anniversary of his death. It contains several letters addressed to his contemporaries (Michel Foucault, Pierre Klossowski, François Châtelet, and Clément Rosset, among others). Of particular importance are the letters addressed to Félix Guattari, which offer an irreplaceable account of (...) their work as a duo from Anti-Oedipus to What is Philosophy? Later letters provide a new perspective on Deleuze's work as he responds to students' questions. his volume also offers a set of unpublished or hard-to-find texts, including some essays from Deleuze's youth, a few unusual drawings, and a long interview from 1973 on Anti-Oedipus with Guattari. (shrink)

Previous chapter As usual, the theory of the State and economics presented in Chapter 13 was strictly correlated with the theory of agency, power and the war machine that had just been introduced in the preceding chapter. It was the exact counterpart, this time seen from the political and economic context, of the rhuthmic approach of politics advocated previously. It suggested a kind of rhuthmic description of the negative as well as positive conditions under which any rhuthmic - Économie classique (...) et marxiste – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Given that Deleuze and Guattari came to prominence after May 1968, many readers attempt to determine the political significance of their work. The difficulty that some encounter finding its political implications contrasts with Deleuze and Guattari's commitment to radical causes. In response, Patton and Thoburn elaborate on the Marxist elements in the pair's oeuvre, a line of analysis I continue. Focusing on A Thousand Plateaus, I discuss their references to the theorisation of the ‘dependency theorists’, a group of Marxist-inspired scholars (...) who became influential during the 1960s. Does their engagement with dependency theory provide the basis for a political project? (shrink)

Research on attachment is widely regarded in sociology and feminist scholarship as politically conservative – oriented by a concern to police families, pathologize mothers and emphasize psychological at the expense of socio-economic factors. These critiques have presented attachment theory as constructing biological imperatives to naturalize contingent, social demands. We propose that a more effective critique of the politically conservative uses of attachment theory is offered by engaging with the ‘attachment system’ at the level of ontology. In developing this argument we (...) draw on Deleuze and Guattari, making use of the common language of ethology which links their ideas to that of attachment theory. The attachment system can and has been reified into an image of the infant returning to their caregiver as an image of familial sufficiency. This has offered ammunition for discourses and institutions which isolate women from health, social and political resources. Yet Deleuze and Guattari can help attachment theory and research to be recognized as a powerful ally for progressive politics, for reflection on the movement of human individuation, and for arguing for the meaningful resourcing of those who care for someone else. (shrink)

In the two volumes which make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose new concepts of “machine” and “organism.” The problem of the relationship between machines and organisms has a long philosophical history, and this essay treats their work as a contribution to this debate. It is argued that their solution to this problem is found in their difficult concept of the “body without organs,” a concept that is given some much-needed clarification in the essay. The first section details (...) Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the machine, examining the ways in which it differs from the traditional concept as described by Canguilhem: their machines do not have predictable movements, but instead produce events; they do not have a purpose; they are able to reproduce themselves. The second section details their conception of the organism through their account of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: organisms are bodies which normalize and which create hierarchies; they also do not have a purpose; they have a “unity of composition.” The final section argues that their concept of the “body without organs” shows us how to understand the relation between the two transformed concepts, and defines the body without organs as the becoming-machine of the organism. (shrink)

It is in Sein und Zeit that Heidegger decrees the end of the Geisteswissenschaften and their tradition, when, as he is commenting on the Briefwechsel [exchange of letters] between Dilthey and Yorck von Wartenburg, he pays homage to the latter for “his full understanding of the fundamental character of history as virtuality [...] [which he] owes to his knowledge of the character of being of human Dasein itself.” Consequently, Heidegger continues, “the interest of understanding historicality” is confronted with the task (...) of an elaboration of the “generic difference between the ontic and the historical.” But he must part ways with Yorck when the latter, after having clearly established that difference, moves from virtuality to mysticism. If, on the other hand, once separated from the ontic, “the question of historicality shows itself to be an ontological question which inquires into the constitution of being of historical being”, it is once again towards Dilthey that one must turn, in spite of his confused vitalism. Heidegger effects two operations at once. On the one hand, he expels the Geisteswissenschaften from the position they occupied at the heart of metaphysics, as the inheritors of the Enlightenment and the outcome of Hegelianism. On the other hand, he brings to fulfillment the critical labor which had precisely shown its value in Dilthey’s historicism —acritical labor which develops the search for the meaning of historicity and allows one to move from the theory of objectivity to that of expression, from the acknowledgment of historiography in the context of the critique of cognition to its definition at the heart of the transcendental schematism. Historicity is then posited as an ontological dimension and leaves only its ontic residue for historiography. (shrink)

This article explores the political dimension of algorithmic face recognition through the prism of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of faciality. It argues that algorithmic face recognition is a technology that expresses a key aspect of contemporary capitalism: the problematic position of the individual in light of new forms of algorithmic and statistical regimes of power. While there is a clear relation between modern disciplinary mechanisms of individualization and the face as a sign of individuality, in control societies this (...) relation appears more as a contradiction. The article contends that Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of machinic enslavement and social subjection offer a fruitful perspective from where to identify the power mechanisms behind the problematic position of the individual in the specific case of algorithmic face recognition. (shrink)

Philosophy emerged for the first time in ancient Greece and, according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it arose decisively with Plato through a triple transformation. Even today, the thought and creation of philosophy still require a triple transformation, despite the fact that the historical preconditions under which a philosopher pursues his or her task have changed since Greek antiquity. In this article, I introduce the concept of the triple transformation, which ensues from my examination of What is Philosophy?, the (...) last jointly authored book of Deleuze and Guattari. Therein they define philosophy as the activity that consists of creating concepts in order to bring forth new events... (shrink)

Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus includes some useful concepts to understand technologies and their relations to humans as individuals and as a society. This article provides an introduction to their notions of machine and becoming and places them in the context of technological use in general, with a special focus on the cellphone. The concept of machine exceeds the technological context, yet it can be still relevant to technologies, especially digital ones. The concept of becoming assists in better understanding co-shaping (...) processes in which a technology and its users change in tandem. Becoming is analyzed as a set of five characteristics: [1] transduction, a change process in both the user and the technology; [2] rhizome, no starting or end point; [3] molecularity, small movement or change that can create a big difference; [4] partial simulation, creating a non-identical copy; and [5] anti-memory, forgetting the past. Based on this analysis, the concept of becoming-mobile is introduced as a new way of understanding the interrelations between humans and their cellphones. Becoming-mobile can be further developed either with Deleuze and Guattari’s own concepts such as nomadicism or with “external” concepts such as postphenomenology’s embodiment and new mobility studies’ virtual mobility. Machine, becoming, and becoming-mobile address some basic questions in philosophy of technology, thereby enabling us to refer to Deleuze and Guattari as philosophers of technology. (shrink)

The article analyzes a variation in the conditions of production of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical thought based on joint production with Félix Guattari. The article is divided into three parts: firstly, we analyze the influence of structuralism on Deleuze’s work, mainly through the author’s own text on this current of thought and its influence on the construction of the notion of “idea” in Difference and Repetition. In a second movement, we analyze the appearance of the notion of “machines” in Guattari’s work (...) Psychoanalysis and Transversality and its protagonism in the authors’ first joint work, Anti-Oedipus. Finally, we analyze the role that machines play in defining concepts, in the authors’ latest joint work. In addition to methodological aspects, we argue that the variation from structuralism to machinism has epistemological and ontological ramifications, which are decisive for the authors’ reading. (shrink)