The Sewn-Together Humanities

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is a straightforward one: to step back from the increasing use of assemblage in recent debates and to attempt to take stock of what assemblage thinking offers to humanities. I relate the answer to this question to the title concept of “sewn-together” humanities, which has a tentative and ad hoc character. The starting point is the analysis of the video installation realized by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato, entitled Assemblages, which relies upon the concept of assemblages proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Assuming that research practices and theories combine assemblages of ideas of both abstract and practical nature, I analyse examples of the application of assemblage thinking and action at the levels of a method, methodology, and onto-epistemology, tracing the goals that humanities achieve by means of this approach to research.