Deleuze Research Articles

The Multiplicity of Immanence: Gilles Deleuze’s Understanding and Application of Chinese Thought

Gilles Deleuze spends his whole life exploring the question of what philosophy is by unconventional approaches to establish the ontology of Becoming and he collaborates with Félix Guattari, integrating Chinese thought into his philosophical discourse directly to support the Becoming theory. Different from the tendency to associate Deleuze’s references to Tao with the philosophy of arts or body aesthetics, this paper argues Tao is introduced because of the consistency with the multiplicity of immanence raised by Deleuze who has updated the connotation of Western philosophical concepts with the help of Tao. Therefore, Tao is no longer defined as the ultimate Being claimed by some French sinologists and philosophers, but as an internal field or the Plane. Accordingly, it can be concluded that the immanence without any certainty (the multiplicity of immanence) itself is a kind of nomadic life, which is also the real meaning of Tao. In this way, Chinese philosophy’s function has far more significant than footnotes and evidence in the construction of Deleuze’s theory.

The Decline of Exegesis: on the teaching performance of Gilles Deleuze

RESUMO Recuperando algumas discussões sobre a performance docente de Gilles Deleuze, presentes em certa literatura francófona recente, esse ensaio apresenta algumas correlações dessa performatividade docente deleuziana com elementos da filosofia do autor. Para tanto, apresenta-se um breve panorama da discussão presente em uma leva de comentadores, articulando-as com discussões conceituais presentes no corpus deleuziano e deleuzo-guattariano. Como hipótese norteadora, defende-se haver em Deleuze uma preocupação em filosofar a partir de um lastro sensível mais do que racional, sendo impossível compreender sua prática docente sem levar em consideração seu apelo por uma sensibilidade filosófica.

Intermediality and the Politics of (Un)Making in Agnès Varda's Visages Villages

Abstract: Agnès Varda and JR's 2017 documentary "Visages Villages" is an extended gesture toward a creative politics that privileges decentralized, communal, and constantly shifting authorial positions. The co-directors not only explore the French countryside in their creative endeavor, but also expand upon preconceived notions of what constitutes a creator and a creation. Using the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a theoretical framework, Varda and JR's interactions with space and place offer a radical and subversive transformation that necessarily multiples everything it touches. This multiplicity is enacted not only through a Deleuzean-Guattarian brand of corporeal movement, but through the consistent regeneration and recycling of individual texts and images, all of which coalesce into an endlessly transformative body of work that resists totalization even as it suggests that textual possibility.

Uzak, or the unbearable lightness of the ordinary

The text explores the notion of urban atmosphere, its ordinary rhythm, and the debilitating effects that it might have on the bodies that breathe through it, by looking at Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s third movie, and first international success, Uzak [2002]. In the first two sections, the theoretical background is laid out, both presenting a ‘tensional’ concept of atmosphere and proposing the employment of the notion of ‘ordinary’ as a way to explore how atmospheres unfold in everyday life. How can we attune to the fleeting consistency of the ordinary, however? The third section makes an argument for the capacity of cinema to do so, mainly drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Lauren Berlant. In the subsequent sections, Uzak is explored by showing how these themes are brought forward through the slow-paced aesthetics of the film.

Towards a ‘study at home’ education in the Arab Gulf region: Reterritorializing the ‘study abroad’ model

Drawing on the works of Deleuze and Guattari, which describe the constituent behaviour of cultural assemblages, this article argues that deterritorialization marks the twentieth-century Gulf educational landscape, which problematized Arab Gulf identity. What followed is characterized by what Gilles Deleuze describes as reterritorialization, specifically the proliferation of American and western institutions in the Arab Gulf countries. This article proposes Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization as lenses through which to observe and respond to the resulting Arab Gulf epistemic and identity crises that arose in part from the ‘study abroad’ model dominating twentieth-century higher education in the Gulf states. In contrast, the ‘study at home’ model becomes an example of reterritorialization, which serves as a local epistemic response to the hegemonic internationalization of education. Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of deterritorialization and reterritorialization provide helpful conceptual tools to examine the western impact on higher education and identity formation in the Arab Gulf region. These two conceptual paradigms characterize two directions in which higher education has progressed during the second half of the twentieth century and well into the beginning of the twenty-first, especially in their intellectual and identity-related aspects. How can Deleuze’s concepts help us characterize an epistemic uqdah that places Arab Gulf education between two antithetical realities: the push towards international education and a sense of adherence to tradition and culture? How does the move for the internationalization of education within the recent history of the Arab Gulf inform identity formation? This conceptual study explores the impact of internationalized education on the Gulf Arab identity from cultural and epistemological perspectives.

Towards an an-archic ethos

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze has never stated his intention to write or create a work of ethics or moral philosophy, at least not in the traditional sense of the term used to describe a ?genre? of the discipline of philosophy. However, this paper argues that a close attention to Deleuze?s philosophical thought manifests an ethos which calls us to ponder the possibility of creating a way of being that is profoundly anarchic (without an ???? [arch?]), in a sense that it opposes any form of dogmatism and/or hierarchies. In other words, it opposes a notion of ?a ground? or origin - an ???? [arch?]. The examination of this an-archic ethos is manifested through Deleuze?s distinction between ethics and morality and his reading of the works of two of his main philosophical predecessors, Friedrich Nietzsche and Baruch Spinoza.

O CONCEITO DE CURRÍCULO PÓS-CRÍTICO NA EDUCAÇÃO FÍSICA: UMA ANÁLISE GEOFILOSÓFICA

ABSTRACT: This study aims to problematize the concept of post-criticality in curricular uses in the field of school Physical Education. To this end, we used theorizations from both the philosophical and educational fields, as well as their effects on the epistemological discussions of the aforementioned component. As a working method, we took as inspiration the concept of geophilosophy from the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Deleuze; Guattari, 2010). At first, based on its territorialization in the curricular field and its reterritorialization in Physical Education, we highlight the conditions of immanence and the potential of the concept in question and then de-territorialize it, pointing out the risks that accompany classificatory thinking. As a final reflection, we propose a radicalization of the differential process in curricular production, positioning all propositional minority creations in the field of Physical Education as important for a fairer and less violent society, requiring the continuity of work that avoids reductionism and sectarianism.

A Postscript to the “Postscript on the Societies of Control”

Abstract: This article offers a revision of Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” Departing from recent shifts empowered by the digital transformation and AI, we argue that Deleuze’s “dividual” has been replaced by the “user” (reducing the human being to predictable behavior), putting in crisis those institutions that were paramount for the now traditional societies of control in the age of globalization and the end of history (Fukuyama): We witness a crisis of democracies, the legal system, the epistemological system, the civic society, even capitalism itself.

얀 마텔의 『파이 이야기』와 『베아트리스와 버질』

Yann Martel’s two novels, Life of Pi and Beatrice and Virgil, deal with entirely different subject matters, but have something in common. Both are about outrageously hard and absurd lives, the shipwrecked life and the Holocaust, and both employ the vehicle of the animals in their representation. The survival narrative and the representation of Holocaust make the most significant use of the relation between human beings and animals. Animals are an allegory for humans in those absurdly and extremely hard situations and at the same time it is almost impossible for humans not to be animals in those situations. The tiger with his life force in Life Of Pi is no other than Pi in absolute hunger and extreme fear, since the power of animalistic sensation hits the human character’s sense organs. In Beatrice and Virgil animals are the vehicle for the tenor of the Jews in the Holocaust, but the relation between the signifier and the signified is so obscure and confused that it is almost unclear whether the novel is about animals or Holocaust. The confusion creates a certain common zone. In both novels, one becomes the other, a man becomes an animal, and vice versa. For Gilles Deleuze via Baruch Spinoza, figurative languages are not a mere vehicle for the the hidden, already fixed meaning. What matters is not the interpretation involving the signified but the intensity of the signifier itself. The latter immediately touches the reader’s or viewer’s senses before their cognitive faculties begin to work, thus one being is metamorphosized into another. It is not that humans are like animals, but that they are animals themselves.

„Nu se poate privi” sau „vino și vezi”? Exitus și Idzi i Hliadzi. un studiu de caz

What could possibly bring together Adrian Georgescu’s novel Exitus (2017) and Elem Klimov’s film Idzi i Hliadzi (Come and See, U.S.S.R., 1985)? Both texts explore war trauma experienced by underage subjects (Georgescu’s protagonist Milo is an orphan barely surviving in a devastated unnamed land, while Klimov’s hero, Flyora, is a Belarusian adolescent eager to join the Word War II partisans). We rely on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of time-image to investigate the narrative strategies with which the authors aim to represent what, essentially, ”one can’t look at”: children or teenagers as actors-victims of war.

Libertad, historia y el sujeto del inconsciente. Contribuciones teóricas al estudio de la ideología

In this article we address the notions of freedom, history and subjectivity, in order make an original contribution to the studies of ideology. Our methodology will consist in crossing Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis and the theory of interpellation of Louis Althusser. In the introduction, we start by exposing two major critiques of Freudian psychoanalysis, one formulated by Jean-Paul Sartre, and the other by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, thus shedding the light on how the psychoanalysis could represent (despite those critical arguments), a field of freedom rather than determinism, and a domain which is inherently historical, rather than the opposite. In the first section, will look closer at the notions of freedom, memory and history, advancing a preliminary hypothesis according to which within the symbolic space, the past remains open to changes – which will make both ideology and freedom possible. Moreover, we will see what aspects of freedom could be found within the Althusserian theory of interpellation, and how Lacanian psychoanalysis is compatible with it or can lead us beyond its limitations. In the second section, we will see how there can be a subject that precedes subjectivation, and how Lacan’s theory of subject which arises from the traumatic remainder, surpasses the scope of the theory of interpellation. The third section will address the pulse-traumatic core of the subject, such as it is conceived by Freud, not only as a determining dimension of the individual psyche, but as a structural condition of culture. Via these considerations, we will show how psychoanalysis can provide an explanation of the foundations of ideology, by conceiving the pulse-traumatic core of law that resides in the Name-of-Father. In the conclusion, we will see, through a series of examples, how ideology appears in the guise of truth, and why the psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious is necessary for debunking the illusions it produces.

Radical Distinction of the Secular and the Problem of Violence in the Context of Contemporary Culture’s Philosophical Comprehension

The theory of secularization has long been at the forefront of the philosophical discourse of the 20th century. The secular perception of social processes could not help but influence their dynamics, the decisions made by people at different levels of social life. What is allowed for a person in the world where religions no longer form the basis of social behavior and the centuries-old foundations of social life are considered canceled? The author seeks to analyze previous attempts to comprehend the problem of violence in modern culture through philosophical theories, which regard radical secularization as one of the key characteristics of modernity. At the same time, the author refers, among other things, to the study of various approaches to the problem of moral relativism, including the perspectives of theistic and atheistic philosophy: on the one hand, represented by Radical Orthodoxy of John Milbank and Alasdair McIntyre; on the other hand, postmodernism (Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard), post-structuralism (Judith Butler), and Freudo-Marxism (Slavoj Zizek). All the above-mentioned philosophers associate radical secularism with the escalation of violence in society. The study identifies the meeting point of perspectives on the problem of violence in secular society: the absence of collectively shared values rooted in the discursive tradition inevitably generates and maintains moral relativism, the prevalence of which is generally proportional to the growth in the level of violence, including latent violence. The article suggests ways to mitigate the risks of secularization and moral relativism and puts forwards an argument for the importance of tradition and community in shaping moral values. The author also emphasizes the importance of considering the role of religion, particularly Christianity, in addressing this issue.

Journey to Union: Exploring Ibn Arabi’s Nomadic Philosophy and Imaginal Spaces in Sufism

This paper sheds light on Ibn Arabi’s philosophy of journey, which takes place in an empty space where mystical characters, noble saints, Prophets and Messengers of God are given a chance to communicate and interact peacefully. Considering the hermeneutics’ approach to Sufi discourse and Gilles Deleuze’s concept of nomad thought, we aim to showcase that Ibn Arabi regards the Sufi wayfarers as “nomadic subjects” as long as they can journey to the inward and outward realms. The intersection of these two antagonistic realms— the realm of Seen (al-hiss) and Unseen (al-ghayb)— liberates the Sufi practitioners from spatio-temporal stagnation and transfers them to endless states and multiple becomings that later evolve into spiritual stations (maqāmāt) of stability and certainty. Contribution: This article highlights the breadth of Ibn Arabi’s nomadic style of thought in shaping the spiritual journey, arguing that the need to unite with God is expressed through a new style of spiritual movement that occurs in an imaginal space where the Sufi is enabled to communicate via his/her heart with other absentees, including noble saints, Messengers of God and Prophets

Cosmic Hunt, Copper Electroplating, Chaosmic Transduction: Chaosmotechnics of Molecular Collaboration in Matthew Barney’s Redoubt Project (2016–21)

The article considers Matthew Barney’s artistic project Redoubt (2016–21) from the point of view of Gilbert Simondon’s transductive philosophy of individuation. Informed by Simondon—read here with Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze and Yuk Hui—the article performs a case study of Barney’s long-term, expansive and multi-layered project. Redoubt comprises a feature-length film, metal reliefs, and large-scale sculptures, as well as an intermedial performance. The article focuses on the mythological theme of the Cosmic Hunt deployed in Barney’s eponymous feature film as well as on his experimental artistic process entailing cast metals. The goal of the article is to provide a diagram of the functioning of Barney’s complex conception of metamorphosis, which plays itself out on many—heterogenous, yet ultimately entangled—orders of magnitude. Consideration will also be given to the political and decolonial implications of Barney’s artistic proposal, which liberate the notion of the hunt from its takeover by colonial extractivism in order to reveal it as an intensive capture of forces.

Monsters in Mirrors: Duality, Triangulation, and Multiplicity in Two Adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde

Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction provides an ideal means of appreciating and interrogating the duality central to both Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and its adaptations. Moreover, because deconstruction exposes binary oppositions as artificial and constrictive, it enables us to advance beyond them toward multiplicity, a term used by Gilles Deleuze for a complex, ever-changing, multipart structure that transcends unity. Roy Ward Baker’s Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) and episodes of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful (2014–2016) offer fresh ways to think about—and beyond—the duality of culture’s most famously divided pair. The binary oppositions that organize each text are innovative, as are the ways in which these oppositions are reversed and conflated. Ultimately, these adaptations employ triangulation to deconstruct themselves, thereby demonstrating the limitations and instability of duality, as well as the possibilities of multiplicity.

Not by Words Alone: Early Holocaust Graphic Narratives as a “Minor Art”

Abstract Immediately after the Holocaust, scores of Jewish survivors created graphic narratives, in word and image, about their individual and collective wartime experiences under Nazi oppression. This essay will make a case for these early postwar works as a “minor art.” “Minor” captures the material characteristics of this low-capital, low-circulation printed matter: slight in weight, small in size, modest in price, and ephemeral in quality. It also describes their “poor” images that pull, in form and structure, from popular culture (comics, cartoons, illustrated books) on the margins of modernist concerns (composite image-texts relying on narrative storytelling). Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “minor literature” as a deterritorialized, political, collective utterance, I argue that disciplinary notions of “art” and “testimony” have prevented us from seeing this “minor art” and recognizing how its vernacular, amateur art practices allowed survivors to reconstruct the past, remember communities and identities erased, and reclaim their own narratives of persecution. Created by a minority (a decimated Jewish community) working on the peripheries of the art world, they tell a Jewish story using Jewish frames of reference to create a community outside of majoritarian culture. What is at stake in them is not only a poetics of recollection but a politics of representation: of seeing with Jews as a critical act by dominated persons against the dominant, antifascist master narrative of WWII and the primary media of its dissemination, photography and film. Ultimately, this “minor art” can have major implications for both how we understand the crucial first decade of survivor initiatives and how we write our histories of Jewish art.

Birds of the Air and Winged Creatures: An Ironic Critique of Surveillance in Ecclesiastes and an Ellulian Ethic of Language, Love, Fear, and Freedom

First, this article introduces the person and work of Jacques Ellul and highlights important aspects of his writing on surveillance, power, and violence. It shows that Ellul’s critique of surveillance predates the work of other critics of surveillance such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Giorgio Agamben. This provides a conceptual sociological frame for the more philosophical, theological, and ethical work provided in the conclusion. Second, this essay engages Ellul’s reading of Ecclesiastes, as provisionally demonstrated here, to uncover the wisdom of this curious scriptural text that can help individuals and groups to think and live well in surveillant environments.

The animal effect in David Cronenberg

This article proposes and interprets the force of an ‘animal effect’ in the films of David Cronenberg. Starting from the concept of zoonosis, or the mingling of human with non-human beings, I argue that beyond the literal hybridizations of man and animal that transpire at the level of narrative in such films as The Fly (1986), Naked Lunch (1991) and eXistenZ (1999), there is a formal dimension of animality that articulates their textual construction. Drawing on the concept of ‘becoming-animal’ in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I enlist the notion of an animal effect to foreground the importance of form and signification in Cronenberg against the prevailing critical emphasis on ‘the body’ in his work. The article defends these claims through a close reading of Naked Lunch, whose formal strategies imply the presence of non-human perceptual agents shaping the narrative, an aesthetic strategy that requires the viewer to actively make sense of their viewership by grasping the ‘inhuman formalism’ of Cronenberg’s cinema.

Minor Voices in Salim Barakat’s “The Captives of Sinjar”: Deleuzian Perspective

Salim Barakat's The Captives of Sinjar (2016), has been read as historical accounts of the actual events that happened in Sinjar back in 2014. It appears to depict the accounts of Yazidi women who endured victimization at the hands of a collective of male perpetrators – ISIS – the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham fighters. However, in this paper, we unravel the signs and symbols of the text to show the invisible aspects of the incidents which are mediated through the perspective of the male narrator, Sarat. The narrative language employed within the text serves to engage readers at a cognitive level that encourages contemplation and fosters a heightened mental engagement. With the blend of magic reality mode and surrealist scenes, the linguistic approach facilitates the construction of vivid imageries, particularly concerning the portrayal of the mass execution of captives, as portrayed through meticulously selected artistic representations embedded within the novel’s fabric. This study aims to explore alternative dimensions of the novel. Through a close reading, we seek to establish links between the analysis and the theoretical framework of minor literature as examined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Central to our findings is the discernment of an enduring and dynamic struggle between marginalized and oppressed factions, juxtaposed against those in positions of dominance. Moreover, the study examines the intricate interplay between constructed notions of identity and the subjective realities of the characters.

(Dis)utopian Landscapes in Don DeLillo’s Fiction

The concepts of utopia (a good place) and dystopia (a bad place) might be arrived at and developed by one’s contact with the (constructed) reality and comprehension, yet frustration and discontent with it, and one’s pessimism and optimism over a better present and future contingent upon the place and time in which one exists. The former has a long history, whereas the latter is a work in progress. That is, one cannot simply distinguish between the two by asking whether the latter is primarily precautionary and reactive, cautioning us what not to do, whilst the former is proactive, pointing us towards the right direction. Both the former and latter may have similar motives, namely, to demonstrate the dark characteristics of one society by comparing it with another, fictitious culture. Someone’s utopia might alternate dystopia, or many traditional utopias from the past include aspects that modern readers would identify as dystopian. On the other hand, one could argue that dystopia serves as the worst-case scenario, presenting a degraded, collapsing, and/or collapsed society, be it socio-culturally, economically, or technologically, worse than another, yet still hopeful for a drastic change for the better. Utopia could be received as the best-case scenario for people in a society considering its socio-political demise. Shortly, both utopian and dystopian scenarios would fit into an extended framework of contemplations on a catastrophe that would either signal a tremendous shift for the better or result in an apocalyptic nightmare. Drawing on the standpoints of Giles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard and tracing Don DeLillo’s fiction, this paper seeks to explore the notion of dystopia, the future assumptions that dystopian fiction puts forward, and the challenges and issues it highlights, such as digital surveillance, technological control, the disappearance of individualism, uncertainty, and dread.