In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze evokes dramatization when he suggests that intensities must dramatize the Ideas to condition their actualization. This allusion to an artistic category, in the midst of his metaphysical inquiry, has remained obscure. It is not clear, despite its cruciality, why he employs dramatization to explain any actualization and not solely artistic actualization. This essay elucidates this ambiguity, while foregrounding a zone of torsional continuity, wherein intensity encounters the Idea and expresses it through dramatization. This process is at play in the actualization of the organic field, social field, and aesthetic field, where an intensive larval subject—embryo, free individual, artist—encounters the biological, social, or artistic Idea. While unraveling the structure of artistic experience, it is shown how dramatization is indispensable to actualize every Idea. Finally, through Tarkovsky and Blanchot, the notion of poeticization is formulated that, while complementing dramatization, unveils some of its tacit nuances.

We argue that relational ontology reconfigures agency as consciousness of and responsibility for the worlds people bring forth collectively; virtue as primarily a property of collectives; and politics as ontological multi-scalar transformation. The relational self is both more and less responsible than the atomized self: less responsible (as individuals, and to a lesser extent as collectives) for the worlds we currently inhabit, yet more responsible (as collectives, and to a lesser extent as individuals) for the worlds we bring forth. We frame the movement for prison abolition as an actually existing example of how relational ontologies refigure agency, ethics, and politics.

This article argues that Luce Irigaray’s ontology of sexuate difference must be understood as a relational ontology, while situating this interpretation within a broader context of debates about social constructionism, essentialism, and identity. I explore how Irigaray’s inheritance of Heideggerian thought and her development of a relational ontology allows her to circumvent some of the problems created by the frequent tendency in feminist theory to focus on defining what women “are.” By proposing that Being gives itself to us as relation—simultaneously announcing difference while calling upon us to develop a more ethical relationship between subjects—I argue that Irigaray goes beyond both Heideggerian thinking and more positivistic nature/culture debates that rely on Cartesian dualism for their framing. I also further develop my own concept of “relational limit” to illustrate how a relational ontology of difference can help us to respond to modern challenges raised by identity politics.

In Sitting Pretty, Rebekah Taussig explains that “ableism thunders in the background of every conversation, every story, every building. It’s the atmosphere we breathe.” This description echoes many accounts of ableism within Disability Studies although few scholars have fully explored the feeling-thinking of ableism ontologically. This paper draws on Arturo Escobar’s definition of relational ontology as “a dense network of interrelation” to interrogate the lived experiences of disabled people, developing a synontology of ableism as an atmosphere. Further, it uses François Raffoul’s concept of event and Edward Casey’s and Christina Sharpe’s conceptions of atmosphere to highlight the affective, temporal, and relational character of experiences with ableism, illuminating how ableism happens and providing theoretical backing for ongoing anti-ableist work.

In this essay I explore the considerable variety of edges that help to shape the places where we live and between which we move. Descriptions are given of inner vs. outer edges; edges that include and those that exclude; edges that give structure to things, people, and other occupants of the lived world; and edges that underlie and support growth as well as those that signal dismantling and destruction. I designate as “synontology” the enterprise of which encountering and cultivating edges form an integral part. The primary effort is to reconsider the life-world as a world composed of edges rather than as a collection of substances. This is to restore to edges a much more prominent place in the phenomenology of the life-world than has yet been attempted. Edges of several sorts both complicate and complete the places where one lives and between which one moves.