Watsuji and Deleuze and Guattari in the Climate of Culture

Abstract

Seth Jacobowitz, in his paper "Watsuji and Deleuze and Guattari in the Climate of Culture," analyzes theories of cultural properties in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus alongside Watsuji Tetsuro's prewar Climate and Culture. At stake in these investigations is the status of the West as a universalizing particular ratified by these authors in the instance of its own critique. We are confronted on the one hand with Deleuze and Guattari's exoticized, Orientalist promise of an alternative economy of meaning derived from the Balinese term for "plateau" and the morphology of the rhizome and, on the other hand, by the "human geography" in Watsuji Tetsuro's Culture and Climate, which explicitly places itself under the sign of racial science. Jacobowitz seeks to disclose how despite their articulation over and against Eurocentrism, these two theories in fact reify the cultural properties of the West and remap them on a global scale.