Deleuze Research Articles

마주침의 사유, 동물-되기, 문학의 에피파니: 앨리스 먼로의 ｢남자아이와 여자아이｣

This essay examines how the narrator’s witnessing of Mack the horse’s slaughter, alongside her assistance in Flora’s escape from the same fate, reshapes her gender identity as a ‘girl’ in Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of ‘encounters in thought’ and ‘becoming-animal.’ According to Deleuze, thought is not re-cognition in the world of representation, but arises through an encounter that compels us to grasp the intensity of the object through the faculty of sensibility. Sensibility is then elevated to its highest potential (the nth power) through the transcendent exercise triggered by its own limitations, which is then transmitted to other faculties like memory, imagination, and ultimately, thought. Deleuze’s account of encounter offers a philosophical explanation for the nature of experience and thought unique to literature, as characters in literature often experience singular moments (intensity) and learn something significant and previously unknown (Idea) about themselves and the world. Munro’s story first presents ‘dark precursors’ to the narrator’s encounter, such as her intuitive awe toward animals and the molecular affect related to becoming-animal. When the narrator encounters Mack’s slaughter, she is drawn to think non-conceptually of the ‘Idea of life’—something that cannot be thought but must be thought—and is ultimately swept into becoming-animal by unconsciously helping Flora escape. Munro’s deliberate deviation from the conventional epiphanic conclusion highlights her caution against the transcendent or religious implications of epiphany, emphasizing instead a more immanent, transformative experience. The apparnetly bathetic ending subverts the traditional epiphany structure, but the story still captures the character’s growth and learning through the encounter and becoming, aligning with Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence and illustrating a form of immanent thinking unique to literature.

The Intangible Gaze of Surveillance and Material Marks of Oppression in Valentyn Odnoviun’s Photography

Summary The article analyses the series of photographs “Surveillance” (2016–2018) and “Architecture of Evidence” (2021) by the Ukrainian artist Valentyn Odnoviun who lives and works in Lithuania. The analysis is mainly based on the concepts of surveillance and control developed by French philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. With the reference to this theoretical background the article states that Odnoviun exposes the materiality of the gaze of surveillance in various historical periods. This in turn can be interpreted not only as the documentation of the hard evidence of the crimes against humanity, but also as a symbolic resistance against control and oppression.

Poetics in the work of three urban photographers: Love for the chaotic city from the site of urban rooftops

AbstractBy exploring the poetics of three photographers, this article attempts to capture the relationship between urban denizens and the ephemeral, tumultuous city. I understand poetics as arising from their spatial affection for, and sensemaking of, the city, which in turn engenders visual landscapes. I first outline poetics as the art of inhabiting, which generates affection for the city, drawing on the writings of Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Next, I examine how the poetics of photography is crafted in terms of creative sensemaking, where the affected body attunes to percepts and finds resonance with the city's vital forces, thereby enabling poetical landscapes to be captured by the lens.

The Time of a Missing People: Elliptically Uncovering the Workday of the “Extra” in Bruno Varela’s Papeles Secundarios (2004) and Cuerpos Complementarios (2022)

This article examines some work by the Oaxaca-based Mexican experimental filmmaker and video artist Bruno Varela in order to explore the sense of Gilles Deleuze’s view that modern political cinema is characterized by a “missing” people, to which the adequate response is the people-sustaining or people-generating trance. I argue that the element missing from Deleuze’s discussion is how the typical way for a people to go “missing” under capitalism involves the obfuscation of their labor, an idea that sustains the materially grounded trance in Varela’s Papeles Secundarios (2004) and Cuerpos Complementarios (2022), drawn from the filmmaker’s experience as casting director of Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s production of her video installation Tooba (2002) in Oaxaca. The article discusses the “baroque critique” involved in Varela’s elliptically representing the workday of the non-professional Oaxacan actors employed in Neshat’s production, understood here as a critique articulated using the detritus of that production. The result is a paradigm of trans-temporal playfulness on film that also challenges the claims to trans-temporal experience sought in Neshat’s work. Thus, the article also locates these arguments within debates about whether films can “do philosophy”, including a hypothesis about the obfuscations of labor lying behind why making-of documentaries—and their capacities to critique the philosophical pretensions of their original subjects—have not figured more centrally in those debates.

Traces of Georges Bataille in Gilles Deleuze: non-productive expenditure or production of consumption?

ABSTRACT Georges Bataille is remarkably absent from Gilles Deleuze’s oeuvre, even though early commentators like Michel Foucault, in his ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, recognised an obvious affinity between the two thinkers. Direct references to Bataille in Deleuze’s published works are few and far between, and most of them are barely more than offhand remarks. In these few comments, Deleuze’s treatment of Bataille seems to oscillate between contempt and admiration. In an astonishing footnote within the Anti-Oedipus, Bataille’s concept of ‘sumptuary, non-productive expenditure’ is equated with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of the ‘production of consumption’. Taking this passing remark seriously would mean finding Bataille at the very heart of Deleuze’s thought. This paper, therefore, seeks to investigate the traces of Bataille in Deleuze’s work, in order to evaluate the footnote in question. I will show that the equivocation of ‘sumptuary, non-productive expenditure’ and ‘production of consumption’ is indeed warranted and that Deleuze’s thought is far closer to Bataille’s than Deleuze ever cared to admit. Bataille emerges as a great precursor to the thought of immanence, difference, and the event.

Lines of Flight and Nomadic Trajectories: Visualising Rhizomatic Learning with Cartography

Aim. This article presents the research on using cartography as a research method based on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (2004) insights. The aim of the study – to unfold and visualise students' learning experiences in non-formal and informal learning contexts beyond the classroom. Methods. Cartography and rhizoanalysis. Cartography is a method of mapping (Wilmott, 2020). In order to create rhizomatic maps we used Deleuze and Guattari (2004) theoretical insights. The rhizoanalysis (Masny, 2015) was carried out according to Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004) rhizome principles: connectivity and heterogeneity multiplicity and rupture, cartography and decalcomania. The rhizoanalysis simultaneously reveals Alecia Youngblood Jackson and Lisa Mazzei's (2012) process of "thinking with theory". Thirty-eight students from upper-grade classes participated in this research. Each student’s learning path was depicted as their rhizomatic journeys, using various concepts such as nomads, lines of flight, becoming. Results. The rhizoanalysis makes it possible to reveal students’ rhizomatic learning experiences, areas of interest and learning styles. Such a map challenges an existing hierarchical framework and conveys how students’ freely make connections through lines of flight and create their own learning paths. Conclusions. This study demonstrates cartography as a useful methodology for visualising students’ learning experiences. Also, this study is unique and distinctive because it reveals the nomadic trajectories of individual learners and offers a thorough investigation of their activity destinations. The researchers of this study advise that students' non-formal and informal learning experiences be included into their formal education by using nomadic pedagogy.

Becoming-woman: Deconstructing Adolescent Stereotypes through McManus’ Bildungsroman One of Us Is Lying

Karen M. McManus’ novel One of Us is Lying is a carefully crafted teenage Bildungsroman that brings together a group of stereotyped adolescents and blenders them with intense triggers such as murder, homosexuality, budding romance, relationship gaslighting, and second-generation immigration. These experiences catalyze their painful yet inevitable breaking free from the stereotypes. This essay examines how McManus’ novel resonates with French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “becoming-woman.” The concept refers to a dynamic process of transformation and deterritorialization, where individuals move away from fixed identities and categories. It involves breaking down rigid structures and embracing fluidity and change. Although the term explicitly refers to gender, its implications extend beyond gender, challenging fixed identities and hierarchical structures related to race, class, sexuality, and more. The concept fosters a more fluid and open-ended approach to understanding identity and subjectivity among adolescents.

Aberrant Shakespeare: Ron Athey’s Excesses, Bataille’s Solar Anus, Becomings-Macbeth

l In this article we argue that Ron Athey’s performance Solar Anus is an aberrant adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in which the parodic world of abundant excess that the witches catalyze is redemptively captured and transformed through the playful, androgynous, and excessive performance of Athey, who fulfills the witches’ prophecy and continues to live on sovereignly as both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Athey is a Los Angeles-based performance artist who practices what is sometimes called “extreme performance,” exploring the limits of aesthetics and the capabilities of the human body to express both beauty and pain. His work Solar Anus draws on the works of Georges Bataille, especially his short essay-poem, Solar Anus, as well as Paul Molinier, a queer French painter and visual artist who worked on the fringes of the surrealist movement. We work through the combined sociopolitical theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology of transversal poetics and engage especially with the theories and explorations of aesthetics and sovereignty by Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in order to explore the ways in which Athey is capable of realizing the witches’ prophecy of sovereignty without being destroyed by the parodic world that they create and inhabit. Alongside the concepts of sovereignty, we examine how Bataille’s ideas of parody, sacrifice, and excess offer new ways of understanding the world of Macbeth and how excess and sovereignty both function within its porous borders.

‘Be a man!’

This autoethnographic article adopts Rosemarie Anderson’s (2001) notion of embodied writing to ruminate on the bodily violence done to the effeminate body by hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity and femophobia. Specifically, this text seeks to underscore how the socio-culture discourse to “be a man” bears negative consequences for the effeminate body from childhood to adulthood and from the schoolyard to the opera stage. Masculinity and queer theories, alongside the theories of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Audre Lorde, are interwoven with the auto-narratives and serve as theoretical lenses through which the author widens his narratives beyond the self, situating his experiences within historical and theoretical contexts to contribute to the scholarship around masculinity and opera. At the end of this text, the author suggests that by creating Lordeian connections, new expressions of masculinity might be sought, which could pave the way for new futures within opera.

Repetition, persistence and generality: problematising the endurance of medieval urbanity

ABSTRACT It is proposed that an approach to difference through repetition, inspired by the writing of Gilles Deleuze, provides a conceptual approach to understand the endurance of urban life in medieval England. Perceptions of urban decline in later medieval England are contradicted by the persistence of urban places and communities. A tension, whereby persistence implies repetition yet decline implies discontinuity and difference, is evident. By developing a framework for understanding medieval urbanity as a series of repetitive processes of differentiation, this paper outlines how we might shift our approach to understanding past urban lives, with implications for how we engage with critical issues in urban studies, including the multiplicity, resilience and sustainability of urban lives.

The brutality of fact: Violence, disappearance and the promise of oblivion in the art of Francis Bacon

This essay addresses the violence of disappearance and oblivion in the artwork of Francis Bacon. Drawing upon the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and wider thinking on the aesthetics of violence, the paper argues that the real violence in Bacon is to attend to the violence of the void. Having explained the theoretical basis for this, the essay proceeds to provide a critique of the violence of disappearance in a technological age, noting how the lines between spectacle and absence are not always strategically opposed. The essay ends with a mediation on delirium and the desire to author ones own disappearance through the seduction of the nihilism of the technological gaze.

Exploring collective agency: a methodological approach to becoming differently1

ABSTRACT Our main objective here is to show the methodological usefulness of philosophical ideas. Concretely, drawing on theoretical analyses related to the concept of social structuring processes (Elder-Vass) and becoming differently (Gilles Deleuze), we argue that the social struggles of Afro-Latin American women can be interrogated in their role of transforming normative identities and fostering innovative communitarian dynamics that enable adaptation and transformation. The central thesis is that embracing a social construction perspective characterised by fluidity, adaptability, and solidarity can offer an alternative philosophically grounded methodological framework capable of addressing the complexities of race, gender, and social justice in Latin America. In the context of the recent necessity to rethink mobilisation and social movements, our findings highlight the significance of structuring processes over identity differentiation and the importance of networked activities in facing systemic challenges. Ultimately, this study contributes to the possibility of moving towards more complex accounts of the plurality communitarian arrangements becoming active in the middle of reality changes and mutual efforts to deal with them.

Can the Structuralist Subject Dance? Trisha Brown, Gilles Deleuze, and the Performative Structure-Object

This article argues that a series of dances made by choreographer and dancer Trisha Brown between 1971 and 1975 using accumulation can be understood as performative structure-objects. This is a form of art that paved the way for two current tendencies in art and dance: the generalization of dance into art and the development of the role of the dancer as artist. The concept of the performative structure-object unfolds in the article through a close analysis of Brown’s dances in dialogue with the concept of structure found in Gilles Deleuze’s essay “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” (1967). His article emphasizes a concept of structure understood as both subject and object, as well as a site of practice. While research has been undertaken in dance studies on Brown and the importance of structures in her work, this article expands this research by reconstructing a philosophical concept of structure in her work that has not yet been explored.

Compositional Rheology: Drafting Musical Flux through Fluid Mechanics and Drawing

Abstract This article explores the fluctuating relationship between the concepts of the “smooth” and “striated” musical space and time introduced by French composer Pierre Boulez and further developed by philosopher Gilles Deleuze, as well as its connection to rheology. The study focuses on how the understanding of the Reynolds number (Re), a parameter that characterizes the way a fluid flows in a duct, might provide a new approach to investigating the aforementioned musical concepts and visualizing them through drawing. This article also introduces a way of studying and visualizing musical compositions by establishing analogies between compositional parameters and the molecular and inertial forces that exist within the stream of a fluid.

Adapting the rhizome concept to an extended definition of viral quasispecies and the implications for molecular evolution

The rhizome concept proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offers a novel perspective on the organization and interdependence of complex constellations of heterogeneous entities, their mapping and their ruptures. The emphasis of the present study is placed on the dynamics of contacts and communication among such entities that arise from experimentation, without any favored hierarchy or origin. When applied to biological evolution, the rhizome concept integrates all types of heterogeneity resulting from “symbiotic” relationships among living beings (or their genomic material), horizontal genetic transfer, recombination and mutation, and breaks away from the approach that gives rise to the phylogenetic tree of life. It has already been applied to describe the dynamics and evolution of RNA viruses. Thus, here we introduce a novel framework for the interpretation the viral quasispecies concept, which explains the evolution of RNA virus populations as the result of dynamic interconnections and multifaceted interdependence between highly heterogeneous viral sequences and its inherently heterogeneous host cells. The rhizome network perspective underlines even further the medical implications of the broad mutant spectra of viruses that are in constant flow, given the multiple pathways they have available for fitness loss and gain.

States of Affection: Gilles Deleuze and the In-Between-Ness of Becoming Cinema

States of Affection: Gilles Deleuze and the In-Between-Ness of Becoming Cinema

Segmentarity in W.H. Auden's The Unknown Citizen

Wystan Hugh Auden, an Anglo-American poet, was regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His diverse and influential body of work spans various genres and themes, reflecting the complexities and nuances of modern life. Among his notable contributions is the satirical poem The Unknown Citizen, which poignantly critiques the reduction of individuals to mere numbers and data under the pervasive surveillance of authorities. This poem serves as a profound commentary on the dehumanizing effects of bureaucratic systems and the loss of individual identity in the face of societal conformity. In this essay, we will delve deeper into the themes presented in Audens The Unknown Citizen by employing the theoretical frameworks of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, particularly their conceptions of segmentarity, lines of flight, and related ideas as elaborated in their co-authored work A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Through this lens, we aim to explore how individuals are systematically segmented and monitored in modern society. We will analyze the mechanisms through which societal structures impose rigid segmentarity on individuals, effectively stripping them of their unique identities. Furthermore, we will investigate the potential for individuals to break free from these constraints, utilizing lines of flight to escape rigid societal structures and reclaim their self-identities. This interdisciplinary approach will provide a nuanced understanding of the interplay between societal control and personal autonomy in contemporary contexts.

Reading the Creative Industries With Deleuze: How Creative Are the Creative Industries?

This article develops a definition of creativity that is informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze, Dan Harris, Susan Luckman, and others. We explore its application in the context of the creative industries in Australia. Through our empirical interviews conducted as part of an Australian Research Council–funded project called Vital Arts, we delve into the multifaceted nature of creativity, which we argue is not always accounted for in the bureaucratic organization, categorization, and funding of the creative industries. We outline the measurements used by key governmental, nongovernmental, and policymaking bodies in Australia to categorize and fund the creative industries. These metrics reveal blind spots in how the creative industries are institutionally organized and treated when considering the Deleuzian ontology of creativity that actually motors creative work. We argue that many creative jobs and industries exist outside traditional bureaucratic definitions and categories, and through the concepts of affect, becoming, the major and the minor, as well as fabulation, from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, we explore these dynamics further.

Imagining Embodiment in Karate Kata

This paper is an exploration of how a particular moment in time - the 2020 pandemic - created a paradigm shift that both has and has not affected the way martial artists train. I argue rethinking the concept of virtuality beyond the bounds of technology provides a lens through which to better understand certain aspects of embodied existence that both reinforce and go beyond the physical. I discuss the virtual effects on training in terms of a phrase I call embodied imagination via a phenomenological analysis using Gilles Deleuze, Edward Casey, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I focus on karate kata and their bunkai, which serve to exemplify how embodied imagination is always already both virtualized and actualized in senses individual and communal. I end with a description of a combination of techniques that relies on narrow line work, utilizing creative interpretations of limited and liminal spaces.

Curriculum as ‘folding’ democratic practice: Integrating Deleuzian and Deweyan philosophies with the lived experiences of English teachers

AbstractThis article advocates the revision of the English as an Additional Language (EAL) Curriculum in Australia into a “curriculum as ‘folding’ democratic practice”, a concept deeply informed by the lived experiences of sixteen teachers of English from multilingual backgrounds. Using hermeneutic phenomenology and narrative inquiry, this study explores how these educators leverage their personal and professional lived experiences to transcend the limitations of a curriculum dominated by Australian Standard English. These narratives highlight the adaptation of the curriculum through ethical engagements with learners’ diverse needs, embodying democratic and pluralistic approaches. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s (1993) concepts of the “fold” and “molecular possibilities” and John Dewey’s “democratic education” (1916), the research illustrates the potential of a responsive and inclusive curriculum that fosters intercultural capabilities in superdiverse classrooms. This study advocates an EAL curriculum that not only imparts linguistic skills but also prepares learners for meaningful participation in a globally interconnected society, extending the scope of English language education and teacher capabilities in Australia and beyond. The research highlights broader implications for other subject-related curricula, suggesting principles that could foster inclusivity and intercultural understanding.