Ежи-садисты и философская гавань: И. Берлин и Ж. Делез о двух формах мышления

Wisdom views in different cultural contexts are closely connected with the corresponding culture’s worldview. Some results are found by comparing the wisdom concepts in Chinese and Western cultures: Firstly, the early wisdom concepts, both in China and the West, contain the elements of intelligence and virtue. Whereas, from the Enlightenment to the Piagetian school, the western concept of wisdom has then shifted to the role of cognition and knowledge; By contrast, the traditional Chinese wisdom concept has been treating wisdom as a virtue. Modern Chinese and western wisdom psychologists are inclined to accept the wisdom meta-theory of “integration of intelligence and virtue”. Secondly, both Chinese and the Western philosophy advocate using wisdom to solve real-life problems. Western thinkers focus on practical problems in the material world, i.e. reconciling conflicts between people and the world through understanding and changing the environment. However, Chinese philosophers focus on internal spiritual problems, i.e. improving the individual realm to solve the contradictions inside oneself. Thirdly, both China and the West highlight the comprehensive application of multiple thinking modes. While comparing with the west, which is excelled in using logical and analytical thinking modes and utilizing rational cognition, China is far better at using dialectical and holistic thinking modes and applying intuitive comprehension.

Reviewed by: Poetic Acts & New Media Tom Rechtin (bio) Poetic Acts & New Media by Tom O’Connor; University Press of America, 2007 As film, television, and now the Internet dominate the media landscape in contemporary American culture, one might question the relevance of such a time-honored form of artistic expression as poetry. After all, aside from a select few people, who writes poetry, much less reads the stuff? However, as Tom O’Connor illustrates in his book Poetic Acts & New Media, poetry not only remains crucially relevant in our contemporary world, but the very conception of “poetry” as a verbal form of artistic expression oftentimes discounts the presence of poetry in other more popular forms of media where poetry, due to the often codified status of meaning, is vastly needed. Indeed, much of O’Connor’s focus lies on exploring poetry not as a verbal form of artistic expression, but in those forms of media that dominate the popular culture’s consciousness and that have historically encouraged a limiting, representational mode of thinking fundamentally antithetical to the nature of “poetry.” Utilizing the writings of Gilles Deleuze, O’Connor identifies “poetry” as a simulated form of expression that generates meaning within the contingent, contextual circumstances of its making. Thus, in “poetry,” no meaning is predetermined, making its worldview fundamentally in opposition to the far more “popular” approach toward meaning that a “representational” view offers. For the latter, meaning has already been codified or preestablished, as the sign and the real are assumed to be equivalent. One is left to simply abide by a logic that denies how meaning had been generated or “simulated” into being. Thus, a representational perspective fundamentally discounts [End Page 196] life as contingent by nature, and in doing so, offers answers or “meanings” that may not apply or may even be harmful to those living by them. It is with this in mind that O’Connor turns toward poetry as not only relevant in contemporary American culture, but vital for its participants. The fact that “poetry” exists beyond its traditional verbal confines in various more popular forms of media illustrates not only how poetry indeed can be “popular,” but also how its presence in more popular forms of media is essential toward counteracting the “dominant” mode of representational thinking that seeks to maintain a stranglehold on meaning. However, before O’Connor embarks on a discussion of “poetry” in various modes of expression other than the verbal, he rightly begins his discussion by applying his definition of “poetry” to the traditional verbal medium of poetry. Specifically, O’Connor highlights how his notion of “poetry” operates within the traditional verbal medium of poetry through an analysis of the work of “media” poet David Trinidad, who, throughout his poetry, “toy[s] with the apparent meanings of many taken-for-granted cultural appearances” (34). At the same time, O’Connor also distinguishes “media poetry” (the neologism for his specific conception of “poetry”) from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, which also wishes to distance itself from a representational mode of thinking. While O’Connor’s “media poetry” conceives of verbal expression as generating Deleuzian Sense-events that are real but not predetermined, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry conceives of verbal language as consisting of a series of arbitrary signs that do not refer to reality but, at best, only themselves. In this way, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry conceives of all meaning as necessarily unfixed and arbitrary in nature, a stance that, while in opposition to a representational mode of thinking, also stands in opposition to O’Connor’s “media poetry,” which conceives of meaning not as arbitrary, but rather as contingent upon context and thereby the very real, lived moment of its creation. Having established the position of “media poetry” within the verbal medium of poetry, O’Connor then shifts his attention to the presence of “media poetry” in the cinema through a discussion of three films: Mulholland Drive, Vanilla Sky, and Being John Malkovich. Here, however, O’Connor’s emphasis rests not solely on the progression or development of each film as a mode of simulation, but...

I saiah Berlin is remembered for his positive/negative liberty distinction and his value pluralism, but he was also an active participant in the debate over the nature of political inquiry. This essay argues that his neglected contribution to this debate is central to his thought and a valuable resource in today's debate over political science's methods and ends. I first show how Berlin understood the relationship of empirical science to humanistic study. I then demonstrate that his conceptions of political judgment and the “sense of reality” were intended as alternatives to the scientific pursuit of political knowledge. Finally, I argue that his Churchill and Weizmann essays present exemplars of the moral excellence Berlin considered necessary to ennoble liberal society and the political understanding indispensable to comprehensive political inquiry. I conclude by noting how Berlin's critique of scientific political inquiry informs his liberalism and his own methods of political inquiry.

Planes of Immanence:Deleuzian Assemblage as a Mode of Thought in the Theatre of Ricardo Monti Milton Loayza (bio) It may be that to believe in this world, in this life, has become our most difficult task, the task of a mode of existence to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. —Gilles Deleuze1 Introduction: Performance and Immanence Argentine playwright Ricardo Monti belongs to a generation, which includes authors such as Eduardo Pavlovsky and Roberto Sosa, who experienced the revolutionary and utopian impulses of the 1960s and 1970s in Argentina, in conflict with repressive forces that led to the dictatorship of 1976–1983. Since the return of democracy, Monti continues to write a politically and historically engaged theatre; he is considered a major reference for new generations of playwrights. Various scholarly studies of Monti’s theatre (by Monteleone, Pellettieri, and Graham-Jones, for example) are in agreement when establishing that theatrical dynamism, symbolic density, intertextuality, and experimentation with alternative structures are present in his work.2 Four main features characterize his work: the use of metatheatrical devices, the presence of various forms of parody, its reference to past history, and the ambiguity of its narrative resolutions. These highlight Monti’s search for alternative expressions of reality through theatre, as well as the eccentricity of his aesthetics. Nevertheless, identifying these characteristics falls short of pinpointing the source of the work’s impact, its unity, and its specific innovations. One reason for this shortcoming, I argue, is the treatment of the plays as representation, leading to hermeneutic impasses that, even as they are related to Argentina’s conflicted history, do not translate into a unified vision. A Deleuzian approach, where an author uses theatre for a project related to performance instead of representation, will be more efficacious in conveying continuity in Monti’s work. Rather than confronting us with aporias and/or indeterminacy, the plays are performances that draw paths of becoming. Monti believes that as an artist engaged in the bourgeois practice of theatre, he must commit to critique its thought immanently from the inside of that [End Page 79] practice.3 The plays, then, exploit theatre as an image of thought in the Deleuzian sense of “giv[ing] itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one’s bearings in thought.”4 The Deleuzian concept of immanence, specifically, as Laura Cull has suggested, allows us to “rethink performance itself as a kind of philosophy.”5 The aesthetics of Monti’s plays, the nature of their theatricality, and their ethical/political sense, come into prominence when his dramatic work is understood as a thought experiment that spans the playwright’s career. Like Gilles Deleuze’s theories, Monti’s work concerns contemporary frustration about our mode of investment in the world, whether it may be understood in personal, political, economic, or historical terms. Deleuze understood this crisis as one of the plane of immanence; that is, our capacity to engage our human desire and potentiality in pure becoming with no transcendental end or reference. For Deleuze, it is not an issue of believing in the world but “in its possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence.”6 The search for planes of immanence is a historical task because it is tied to a critique of global capitalism, and to a recognition of the openings and obstacles for revolutionary transformation that globalization offers. Immanence therefore defines practices that engage the state of things as a being in crisis, yet refuse to seek a transcendent path out of the crisis. Instead, this practice chooses to produce more immanence and freedom from the givens in the status quo. In relation to theatre, Deleuze translates the issue of immanence as a rejection of the fixity of representational theatre, which emphasizes perception, while searching for a theatre that takes root in the instability of becoming. This means that theatre must yield to the productivity of desire and thought. Similarly, the plays of Ricardo Monti insist on the theatrical condition of characters and actors, because theatre, unlike the illusions that inform our situation in the world, gives us a better...

Although the style and approach tend to be impersonal, the unity of this thesis itself is a result of its entirely personal basic character and nature. The main focus of this thesis is about cinematic image, time and reality; actually, it is about the trinary relations among images, spectators or perceivers, and reality. All of these elements not only help to define the meaning of cinema but also reveal the knowledge of truth. There are four chapters in this thesis. The main concern in chapter one intends to validate the status of film images in the domain of art form in general. Moreover, it is an indispensable step to set film images free from their original sin or from the shackle of fakery by taking the path from the context of metaphysics. There are three aspects in this chapter: the art form which is constructed by images, the realness of image, and the real images. Each aspect is equally important in reflecting upon the relationship between constructed images and realness in film development. In chapter two, this thesis concentrates on Gilles Deleuze’s cinematic theory in relation to image and movement. The way that Deleuze interpreted and dealt with the movement in images was to set his focal point on subjectivity of images which hinges on a very distinctive effect of becoming, and he denominated this becoming as “movement-image.” There are three sections in this chapter: section one, juxtaposing Bergson’s three theses of movement with Deleuze’s cinematic theories; section two, focusing on the effective results of four trends of montage which are the organic trend of the American school, the dialectic trend of the Soviet school, the quantitative trend of the pre-war French school and the intensive trend of the German Expressionist school; section three, examining three types of movement-images, to wit, perception-image, affection-image and action-image. In chapter three, this thesis looks at Deleuze’s cinematic theory in relation to image and time. In order to have the integrated understanding upon the subjectivity of images, Deleuze realized that there is one other kind of significant image, time-image. This chapter is divided into three divisions. The first division tries to explain the representation of reality that is generated by the association of the virtual power of cinematic images does not mean unadulterated fancy or illusion but a projection of the image of the human mind. The second division points out the fact that cinema not only entertains and moves spectators but it also motivates the spectators to thought; therefore, films should be seen as a significant medium because of its power within which the perception or feeling from viewers’ side intertangles with the corresponsive portrayal of cinematic images on the other side. From the third division on, this thesis starts to turn its focal point away from Deleuze’s cinematic theory and tries to blend the notion of reality into the discussion. The thesis suggests that the category of documentary not only can be seen as nonfictional form of direct time-image, but it also provides three new signs of images in terms of reality: mapping-image, reason-image, and judgement-image. Furthermore, documentary interweaves with the act of attention which comes before viewers’ consciousness, and then, the viewers are able to participate in the viewing process actively and make the judgement that the images of documentary are more trustworthy than the fictional images. In the fourth and also the final chapter, this thesis uses the phenomenological concept of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as the extended foundation in order to seek out the meaning of filmic images from three crucial dimensions: the process of viewing, the essence of objectivity, and the creation of concept. Every separate dimension is equally important and yet interweaves with each other in understanding the ultimate connection between constructed images and the perceptional experience of the spectators. In the first dimension, the thesis dives into the origin of perception, that is, the act of attention which shows that in the searching for the meaning of film images, the answer does not simply rest upon it because, as Merleau-Ponty pointed out, “the result of the act of attention is not to be found in its beginning”. In the second dimension, the thesis focuses on the notion of objective depiction of cinematic images and tries to argue that the essence of objectivity only exists in a conceptual assumption. In the third dimension, the thesis tends to point out that the film images are able to create new concepts just as providing information or knowledge of truth.

This paper seeks to examine the relationship between Gilles Deleuze's idea of immanence and the notion of Buddha-nature in Daisaku Ikeda's philosophy. Although much has been written about Deleuze's idea of immanence, relatively little has been focused on the relationship between this idea and the concept of Buddha-nature in Ikeda's philosophy. This paper aims to argue that there is a structural similarity between these two ideas. Namely, that both affirm immanence in opposition to transcendence. In the first section, we will examine how Deleuze constructed an immanent ontology by drawing from conceptual resources provided by philosophers such as Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche. In the second section, we will examine how Ikeda's idea of Buddha-nature is informed by a line of thinking that is centred around Nichiren, Saichō and Zhiyi's idea of Buddha-nature in Mahāyāna Buddhism. Towards this aim, we will refer to a number of passages in Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and Ikeda's philosophical writings.

This dissertation aims to explicate the genesis of the world in terms of Spinoza’s, Hegel’s and Kant’s ontologies respectively, as Spinoza’s ontology termed as the plane of immanence and Hegel’s ontology known as the immanent dialectic can be the ontological antithesis to Kant’s ontology of transcendence. In terms of the ontology of immanence, the two ontological systems constituted in Spinoza’s Ethics and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit are conditioned by their different presuppositions that the totality of the Spinozan being is Substance and alternatively the totality of the Hegelian being is Subject. The Spinozan ontological pattern that the absolute as Substance- logic of expression- modes explains how the essence of being comes into existence and the process of individuation. Spinoza regards the totality of being as God, Substance or Nature and the infinitely absolute possesses infinite attributes. Yet because of the inadequate idea, human beings can only recognize two attributes of the mind and the body, namely, the temporal mode of thinking and the spatial mode of extension. Critiquing the Cartesian mind-body dualism, Spinoza’s immanence appeals to mind-body monism and mind-body parallelism. As the mind-body parallelism explains how the body as three-dimensional spatial, external extension corresponds to the mind as temporal dimension of internalized consciousness, the mind-body monism and parallelism explain the four-dimensional space-time continuum in Einstein’s general relativity. Breaking with the Euclidian a priori space in geometry, Spinoza’s mode theory concerning the composition of infinite particles within and body encounters without explicates how the constant changes of speed ratio caused by the differentiation of speed/change of speed ratio/the infinitesimal determines the logic of expression as varied degrees of power or power series. Yet, synthesizing Plato’s dialectic, Aristotle’s teleology and organism, Spinoza’s monist vision of immanence and Kant’ subject in German idealism, Hegel’s ontological pattern demonstrated as the absolute as Subject-logic of dialectic- stages of mind in Phenomenology of Spirit, also known as the Science of the Experience of Consciousness, explicates how the subject, initiating the knowing experience from the empirical sense-certainty, perception, force and understanding, consciousness differentiating into self-consciousness to its final stage of absolute Spirit, fulfills its maximal identity in ontology and infinite knowing in epistemology of German idealism as Hegel’s correspondence to Kant’s epistemic principle of “synthetic a priori” of intuition and concept, sensibility and understanding, imagination and judgment within the ontological framework of a priori time and space (while Kant also integrates Newton’s a priori/absolute time and a priori/absolute space and Leibniz’s subject of apperception). Yet rejecting Kant’s a priori time, Hegel’s ongoing formation of consciousness of mind evolves with the temporal dimension of history as the realm of collective human consciousness a posteriori, not Spinoza’s world of Nature. However, for Deleuze, while Hegel’s absolute Spirit as the infinitely large in theology still constitutes a vertical, hierarchical ontology, Spinoza’s notions of conatus, mass-energy conservation and conversion, motion and rest, etc. lead to the infinitely small in ethology and constitutes the spatial, horizontal plane of immanence known as the “pure” immanence. Therefore, the dichotomy of Hegelian History and Spinozan Nature, Hegelian Subject and Spinozan Substance, Hegelian vertical dialectic and Spinozan horizontal plane of immanence presents two ontological differences between the Hegelian Subject-logic of dialectic- stages of mind and the Spinozan Substance- logic of expression- modes, and Kant’s transcendental philosophy as the ontology of transcendence presents its ontological difference from Spinoza’s ontology of the plane of immanence and Hegel’s ontology of negative dialectic. As Kantian noumena somehow corresponds to Hegelian nonbeing and designates itself as the un-representable, higher-dimensional reality, it also anticipates the notion of nonbeing in quantum physics, higher-dimensional reality in string theory in the category of the philosophy of science, as Spinoza’s notion of mind-body mode and the indivisibility of one Substance also anticipates Einstein’s mass-energy conversion/conservation and four-dimensional space-time continuum. In general, this dissertation is divided into five chapters: Chapter One accounts for ontology and its convention since Parmenides and Aristotle concerning the totality of being, substance, categories, time, space and causality, etc. Chapter Two analyzes Hegel’s ontology in Phenomenology of Spirit concerning the dialectic subject, immanent dialectic, the triad of being-nonbeing-becoming as primal quality-quantum-second quality in Science of Logic, etc. Chapter Three demonstrates Kant’s ontology and transcendental subject of synthetic a priori in Critique of Pure Reason concerning his connection with Leibniz’s apperception, Hume’s causality of induction, Newton’s absolute time and space, etc. Chapter Four explicates Spinoza’s ontology demonstrated as the triad of substance, attribute and mode in his Ethics, and how Spinoza’s notion of indivisible substance and mode anticipates Einstein’s general relativity and space-time continuum, etc. In Chapter Five Conclusion, I attempt to synthesize Spinoza’s, Kant’s and Hegel’s ontology concerning time, space and causality respectively and briefly accounts for how their ontological systems anticipate modern scientific theories, such as quantum mechanics and neuroscience in the category of the philosophy of science.

November/December 2006 Historically Speaking 15 knowledge or foresight play in making policy. They require, in short, a kind of empathy with policy makers that the academic world, increasingly detached from the world of practice, does not prize. Half a century ago that empathy often derived from some experience of the rough world outside—be it as soldier, journalist, practitioner, or simply a close and engaged observer—that earlier generations had and valued, but which diis one seems to lack. To be sure, one might claim that the logic of international relations is so powerful that individual choices and peculiarities do not matter—but if that is the case, the cocktail party chatter and lunchtime conversation of the academic world should reflect the fact. Trachtenberg is an outstanding example of a scholar who, by controlling his own political beliefs and passions, enables otiiers to understand the perplexing choices made by fallible, partly informed, and pressured governmental officials. But without claiming to understand him better than he does himself, it seems to me that his success in so doing stems from his great stock of good sense, his admirable intellectual detachment, his awareness of the vagaries of human nature, and his ability to analyze the large forces that undoubtedly do operate in the political world. Perhaps he has much to learn from the international relations theorists , but I doubt it. Rather, they—and we—have much more to learn from him. Copyright © Eliot A. Cohen EliotA. Cohen is the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies atJohns Hopkins University's School of AdvancedInternationalStudies. His most recent book, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (Free Press, 2002), won thefirstHuntington Pri%e, administered by theJohn M. OUn Institutefor Strategic Studies at Harvard University. ' Isaiah Berlin, "PoliticalJudgment," in The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History, ed. Henry Hardy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 47. Response to Trachtenberg Donald Kagan Marc Trachtenberg's essay is a model of the wisdom and good sense that characterize all his work. His suggestion that historians need to examine the theoretical underpinnings of their interpretations is surely right, as is his advice to theorists that they need to go beyond cherry-picking convenient facts and interpretations and get the true feeling for how things work in the real world by the careful study of history . Theory has the function of suggesting what questions may or must be asked to achieve understanding. From earliest times at least up to the 1 8th century, men have included die role of the divine in their efforts to understand war, peace, and human events in general. Theories that excluded the role of the gods were rare. Clearly, some theories stubbornly persist, although to many they seem to have been discredited by events. Marxism is another example of this phenomenon. In spite of all the evidence that appears to have disproved the several versions of economic determinism emanating from Marxist theories, they still underlie, in more or less obvious ways, many current interpretations. These examples remind us that the theories dominating the scene at any time and the questions they suggest are not the only ones possible. In our time the dominant theory has been one form or another of "realism," which puts the competition among nations for power at the center of the matter. "Realists" believe that all states and nations seek as much power as they can get. The desire for power is almost like original sin: unattractive, Clearly, some theories stubbornly persist. . . . In spite of all the evidence that appears to have disproved the several versions of economic determinism emanating from Marxist theories, they still underlie, in more or less obvious ways, many current interpretations. deplorable, and regrettable, but inescapable. "Neorealists " understand die behavior of states in their international relations in a tamer and less reprehensible form as the search, not for power itself, not for domination, but for security, which, in turn, requires power. The realist view is a gloomy one, for it envisages no way to stop the unlimited search for power and the conflict it must engender except the conquest of all by one power, or the maintenance of an uneasy peace by...

in the trenches of Sebastopol, when a young officer who was just the age of Wilfred Owen abandoned Stendhal's view of the hero in war and decided that, By virtue of my oath and still more because of my feeling for humanity, I cannot be silent. His advocacy of non-resistance came later, but Isaiah Berlin's conclusion that Tolstoy's sense of reality was . . . too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to construct out of the fragments into which his intellect shivered the world, reads rather strangely only a decade after it was written.

This reissued volume by Isaiah Berlin, originally published in 1996, comprises primarily essays from the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s concerning political themes such as government repress...

The purpose of any social discipline is to understand the society through their theoretical perspectives. Human communication as a social science is also without exception, its purpose is to explain the society by means of inspecting the social information as well as the contents and extensions during the operation of social information system. Social together with its system are complex and comprehensive by nature, which determines human communication existing itself as a comprehensive science with multiple theories, aspects and perspectives. It is reasonable to study with the help of related theories of other subjects in facing concrete research issues and when the existing theories lack enough power to give an explanation. Interpersonal human communication is an important part in human life, the human communication study about is rather few, however. This paper is about to solve this problem, for current human communication cannot explain the barriers occurred in the interpersonal human communication. To deal with such issue that often happens in social life, the author is appeal to information system theories to explain that the trajectory of information changes in the course of human communication could cause barriers.

This research goes beyond the debate over the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of the 2011 Arab Spring, seeking instead to develop a critical framing of one particular episode of those mobilisations, namely of the Tunisian revolution, by taking into account the often-overlooked instances of local struggles, migration and Islamic militancy in the region, in order to reveal the specificity of contemporary political action. The Tunisian revolution raises important questions regarding the articulation of resistance and political subjectivity in the context of global governmentality. By drawing from political theory, philosophy, ethnography and readings of local street art, I attempt to restore the radical significance of the event as an instance of possible collective action by engaging with the concept of ‘political event’ (here drawing critically from Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Alain Badiou) as both rupture and creation of the new. I reflect on different technologies of containment of dissent, aimed at reducing the virtual dimension of collective action. This containment can regard the discursive level and be enacted through hegemonic narratives or it can regard the non-discursive level of affects and be enacted by intensifying and/or speculating on accumulated affects (such as discontent). Yet, alongside these technologies, I theorize the existence of circuits of mediation concerned with the movement of tactical counter-knowledges and practices of resistance across wide (spaces such as the Mediterranean Sea after 2011, for example). I integrate theories around contagion and virality of protest with the concept of resonance (Clover, 2016) based on the commonality of dispossession and the ‘structural similarities’ (Manji and Sokari, 2012) of mobile categories of people produced as surplus population (Clover, 2016). Furthermore, I mobilise Edouard Glissant’s notion of Relation (Glissant, 1997), to engage with the Tunisian example of cross-class alliances, while showing their centrality for the revolutionary transformation.

The way we experience space has a direct relationship to the way we perceive it, as evidenced by the ways that space has been represented in painting throughout history. My research is concerned with the representation of space in contemporary painting. Contemporary experiences of space through new media screens offer painters a unique challenge that requires them to think about representing space in new ways. My research focuses on the role of the window in painting, a device that has confirmed painters’ preoccupation with representing space on a two-dimensional plane. I provide an historical overview that establishes the window as an important spatial and metaphorical concern within painting. I draw a connection between the window and Plato’s cave as a frame of representation. In the context of this research, ‘space’ refers to a painterly space which includes both illusory space and actual physical/material space. Whereas Gilles Deleuze defines these different kinds of space as either ‘haptic’ or ‘optic space’, I use the term ‘unstable space’ to describe that which occurs when both ‘haptic’ and ‘optic space’ coexist on a picture plane. In considering Plato’s cave as a window or frame of representation, I recognise the demarcation of key spatial and representational concepts related to the window in painting. As with Plato’s cave, the window demarcates binary opposites that have structured much subsequent thinking about art, such as interiority/exteriority, nature/culture, illusion/reality. Through Plato’s theories, I specifically draw attention to the dualist structure of his belief system that posits tensions between interior and exterior, reality and illusion, nature and culture. I establish the term ‘unstable space’ through examining the theories of Deleuze and Jacques Derrida that deconstruct Plato’s writing. Their theories offer a means by which to construct new meanings within the space of painting, as they emphasise the instability of the binaries afforded by Plato’s philosophy and instead suggest the possibilities of multiplicity. The contemporary ‘windows’ of media screens significantly shift the metaphor of the singular window to the multiplicity of windows within windows. This multiplicity reflects the way we currently experience space and the effect this has on the thinking of space in contemporary painting practice. In this way, painting’s material dimension and illusory space can be explored not in terms of binary oppositions but as complementaries. Having traced the development of the window as an important representational device in painting, I propose that the window can be used as a mechanism to explore the ‘unstable space’ through painting. This space operates between spatial and representational theory. Through the analysis of specific works of art by contemporary artists chosen as exemplars in the field of painting, I argue that the unstable space can be created solely in the medium of paint. My research extends understandings of space as represented within the limits of a two-dimensional surface. The representation of space within my painting practice results from my reimagining of the window as an unstable space, my exploring of the perception and representation of ambiguous space, and my engaging with pictorial illusion through abstraction. Explicitly, the studio research found that the screen or window was able to act as a metaphor for the body and as such effectively articulate the experience of interiority and exteriority, surface and figure, ground and distance.

In Gilles Deleuze's terms, the Baroque is not limitable to a particular historical period of art, but instead manifests more a mode of thinking, an operation of traits. The fold, for him, is its persistent figure, and it is in an attempt to investigate the meanings and proliferations of Deleuze's attention to that form that this article turns to an interpretation of G. G. de Clérambault, an early-twentieth-century psychiatrist for whom drapery possessed especially potent fascinations. Interested in particular in the undulations of display, spectacle, and concealment that the concept of drapery contains, the article brings three broader contexts to its analysis: the pleasures of deception afforded by the cinema; the spirit-world material, or “stuff,” of ectoplasm séances and their often theatrical stagings; and, lastly, in reference to Deleuze's mentioning of an “Islamic Baroque,” the operations of veiling.

This essay explores the correspondence between cinema and money through an investigation of what I call the 'financialization of the image.' Drawing from the tradition of psychoanalytic film criticism and the cinematic ontology of Gilles Deleuze, it argues that the 'camera-eye' and the 'brain-screen' are distinct modes of organizing cinematic perception in capital. Furthermore, it argues that Gilles Deleuze's understanding of the brain-screen is the most adequate mode of thinking of the organization of subjective vision within control societies and the financialization of life itself.