In this paper, I map a sheltered Algebra I classroom—designed for newly arrived multilingual students in a public high school in a southeastern U.S. state—as an assemblage in constant formation and transformation on a one‐world ontology, the plane of immanence. On this flattened surface, the heterogeneous multiplicities within the classroom assemblage are always becoming together through the movements of affecting and being affected, simultaneously containing both the virtual and the actual. Yet I argue that the binary labels and categories imposed on these newly arrived multilingual students stratify and normalize the assemblage, physically separating labeled bodies from those without labels. Therefore, I call for putting these binaries under erasure and redescribing pure differences using different words, recognizing that we are all both monolingual and multilingual—only with varying intensities and speeds.

Abstract In his insistence (with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Martin Heidegger) that human experience is defined by a “plane of immanence” and an unsurpassable horizon of finitude, Emmanuel Falque has elaborated a theological and philosophical concept of transformation as the experience proper to the finitude of immanence. His proposed notion of “extra‐phenomenon” develops a Deleuzean concept of transformation and problematizes the usual paths to transcendence as an “opening” to alterity, as receptivity, and as incompletion. Rather, he challenges thought to remain anchored within the forces of transformation at work in human finitude. Transformation, envisaged radically as an irreversible, ontological change, encapsulates an immanent logic of a surpassing, or a “trans‐” function known both in the impossibility of anticipating the path of transformation and of return. This essay constructs the path of Falque's proposals in relation to Deleuze, and argues that the phenomenology of “Transformation Itself,” without a preemptive anticipation of transcendence, provides a hermeneutic of human experience for a discourse of transcendence. If there is no longer an easy pathway to transcendence by any account of exit, the immanent experience of forces of transformation ultimately provide a hermeneutic for a possible transcendence, where God would be “Transformation Itself.”

Having become from norm-complying flight attendant to bariatric patient and laparoscopic posthuman to the exclusive canvas of the artist who lives as it, the body matter of London-based Alison Dollery is a “plane of immanence” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000). It is considered insightful here in that it enables us to realise the excesses in which bodies exist to society’s handlings of them. Dollery gets in touch with her body matter directly, by touching it and letting acrylic and oil paint touch it. Grabbing without gripping, she initiates deformings, queering such dualisms as body and mind, matter and method, being and becoming, touching and being touched, the artist and the object. As we consider Dollery’s hands (lat. manus) as possessing a vitalist force of zoe (Braidotti, 2008) in her oeuvre, that makes her body fold (Deleuze, 2014), in this interview, we conceptualize her body/art-matters as actively moving from manufactured to manifolding bodies.

ABSTRACT In this paper, we introduce the <Sunghaksipdo VR> project, which is based on Sunghaksipdo (聖學十圖). Known as the Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning, Sunghaksipdo was a heritage created by Toegye, the Korean Confucian scholar of the Joseon Dynasty. While conveying philosophical concepts such as Li (理) and Gyung (敬) and their spiritual values of mindfulness from the heritage to VR, we have focused on reconnecting the original visual diagrams and texts into perceivable VR experiences. We approached this task through the following: (1) by constructing conceptual and philosophical VR space and environments based on the original diagrams, (2) by creating conceptual objects inside VR, and (3) by designing diverse user interactions with such virtual conceptual objects. Particularly the interactions allow the user’s embodied experience and performative engagement, which become a way of understanding the meaning of the philosophical message. While explaining these with diverse exemplary cases, we hope to show how new media and interactive VR technologies can be used to realize philosophical concepts and spiritual value. Through this, we hope to discuss how VR could be imagined as a tangible philosophy discovering the plane of immanence.

This article critically examines the transition from Marx to Spinoza within Antonio Negri’s postoperaist thought and explores a potential alternative rooted in Mario Tronti’s concept of the ‘autonomy of the political’. In Negri’s postoperaismo, the embrace of Spinoza reevaluates Marx’s critique of political economy through an optimistic lens, suggesting a tendency beyond capitalism. However, Negri’s embrace of a Spinozian plane of immanence entails a problematic affirmation of what exists. The article argues that Negri’s worldview, despite its beginnings, ends up resembling deterministic historical materialism. While critical theory exposes flaws in Negri’s theory, it falls short in providing a practical alternative. Returning to Negri’s interpretation of Spinoza’s Political Treatise uncovers earlier arguments, rooted in paradoxes inherent to practical politics. However, reliance on the concept of the multitude highlights deeper issues in Negri’s approach. Rather than adhering to postoperaismo or critical theory, the article suggests an alternative in Tronti’s journey from operaismo, particularly in the concept of the ‘autonomy of the political’. Notwithstanding critiques, this attempted liberation from Marxist determinism allows for a clearer confrontation with politics. The article concludes that Hardt and Negri’s recent critical engagement with this concept advances their arguments but does not entirely overcome inherent limitations in their approach.

This article addresses two explanatory gaps in Althusser’s late work. One has to do with the relation between nominalism and materialism; the other engages the relation between Althusser’s later materialism and a broadly materialist approach to history. In the first part of the article, I develop a response to the problem of nominalism that makes use of Hobbes’s nominalism and Deleuze’s concept of the plane of immanence. In the second part, I address the problem of history by explaining the concept of an aleatory causal chain, and showing how such chains could be at work in human history. I also make use of Hobbes’s materialist account of causation, applying it to social relations, social collectivities, and historical events.

This paper aims to propose some suggestions on what role semiotic analysis of the visual can take in the postmediality environment. Taking a case study from the field of scientific research on biodiversity, that is, the INaturalist platform, what we wish to highlight is how, with the development of digital technologies and the proliferation of new practices of use related to visuality, the landscape of media has changed to such an extent that the need to revise certain semiotic categories developed from the principle of textual closure has become evident. Algorithms, datasets and computer vision technologies include images within complex and heterogeneous configurations in the realm of enunciation, which call for different planes of immanence beyond textuality that become particularly clear from the perspective of a material turn. Considered within the materiality of its substrate, a text becomes an object, and as an object it is included in a network of possible practices of use: scientific research represents in this sense a very accurate context for observing how digital visual texts, even in their apparent immateriality, display the process through which we do things with images.

This paper proposes a new interpretation of Gadamer’s problematic appropriation of Platonic metaphysics. It argues that Gadamer, attempting to respond to the challenge posed by Heidegger’s interpretation of Platonic metaphysics and of its role in the history of Being (Seinsgeschichte), downplayed the transcendence of Platonic Forms. Gadamer achieves a reconfiguration of this transcendence and its transposition into what I call here a plane of immanence through two hermeneutic gestures: 1) interpreting Forms in light of Greek mathematics and especially in light of the structure of the sum-number; 2) introducing temporality and historicity in the Medieval doctrine of transcendentals by giving priority to the Beautiful over the Good. I contend that, Platonically speaking, this amounts to the rejection of νοήσις in favor of διάνοια, and that this raises issues concerning the problem of finitude and the potential limits of linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit).

The article reconstructs and analyzes in detail the concepts of immanence of J. Deleuze and F. Laruelle, as well as their actual and imagined dialogues and mutual critiques from Deleuzian remarks in «What is Philosophy?», referring to Laruelle's non-philosophical strategy of thought as one way of thinking immanence, to the implicit counter-theses of Laruelle, who claims immanence no less than Deleuze, and their open responses to each other. Thus, whereas Deleuze outlines the plan of immanence as something that needs to be created, outlined, grasped (to concept) and which is nevertheless the basic implication of any thought (both philosophical and non-philosophical, where the latter is the non-conceptualizable), Laruelle sees such a demarche as assigning radical immanence to the domain of philosophical thought alone, which thinks of itself as self-sufficient and thus claims conceptual totalization. Laruelle's radical immanence is not the Spinozian One: according to Laruelle, such immanence is something absolutely irreducible, something to which even the predicate of being cannot be added. It is a kind of «givenness-without-givenness» Real. Thus, radical immanence is non-philosophical because it is a generic (générique) experience that people share directly, and does not need an ontology or philosophy of being to be. Whereas the plane of immanence is non-philosophical because it is a pre-philosophical and pre-conceptual level that nevertheless constitutes the heart of philosophy as the inseparability and reciprocity of the External and the Internal.

The films and live cinema of Vincent Moon are considered in this chapter as ‘psychedelic’: a form of filmmaking and film performances that can open the doors of perception to invisible realms of percepts, affects and durations that are beyond or below ordinary human perception. According to Paul Schrader, films can evoke such spiritual dimensions, in particular through what he called the transcendental style of film, and what Gilles Deleuze termed the time-image. As an audio-visual ethnographer of world religions who is distinctly influenced by shamanic and animistic traditions, Moon brings the transcendental style back to its plane of immanence. His live cinema performances have a ritualistic and ecstatic aspect that recalls the esoteric history of haunted media. Moon's enthralling film performances induce altered states of mind, tap into spiritual realities and immerse the audience in magic.

The research focuses on the problem of freedom from that point of view which puts captiveness by being and openness to being in the middle of non-dialectical examination. This perspective clarifies not only the major course of Bergson’s thought, but also the subsequent incorrect shift to the pole of openness in the hermeneutical interpretation of facticity, implemented by Heidegger. The work is conventionally divided into two parts. The first one inquires about specifics of the method used by Bergson. It is emphasized the proximity in between Bergson's orientation to the common sense and phenomenological research, despite all differences in these approaches. Also it’s gives a general analysis of Bergson’s concepts used in “Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness” and in “Matter and Memory” in order to adequately questioning about the freedom of a person, acting on the basis of specific practical conditions of his existence. Bergson draws the roads of freedom through the adaptability of the intelligible to the prose of life, establishing the plane of immanence with its unbreakable boundaries. The second part analyzes aesthetic consequences of Bergson’s theory of perception and memory, thus opening access to descending pathways in sensory data processing. The theory of duration and the emphasis it places on retrospection in clarifying what accompanies the act of perception, argues for the connection of creativity with the process of actualization of the virtual. With reference to Deleuze, it is criticized the irrational attempt to assert the beginning of creativity both in nothingness and in the realization of the possible by its limiting. Thus, the appeal to Bergson’s ontological intuitions allows to refuse both the aesthetics of the origin and the logic of the readiness-to-hand-being as primarily encountered in the world. In conclusion, it is considered Bergson's polemic with Einstein, in the resolution of which the logic of differentiation seems preferable to the logic of dialectical sublation.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provoke new understandings of the roles and uses of research. Specifically, I argue for the productive and creative potential of ignorance in educational research. Design/Approach/Methods This conceptual paper undertakes a playful experiment, beginning with conclusions and working backward to create a paper within a paper based on these conclusions. The paper then offers philosophical critiques on the generation and use of research. Findings It is a thinkable discourse that educational research begins with conclusions and works backward to justify those prefigured conclusions. It would make sense, therefore, to suggest a re-centering of inquiry. Yet, this approach to research remains grounded in stable understandings of knowledge. Rather than the transcendent approach to research, which moves from ignorance toward knowledge, this paper finds that ignorance resides in a plane of immanence, situated within and pursuing new questions. It calls for ignorance not as a means of research but as an ends. Originality/Value The paper contributes new understandings of how research can be conducted and used, welcoming new playful understandings of research, attending to shifting roles, and blurring the lines drawn between the researcher and research subjects or academic research and creative projects.

Using the listening guide method for short story construction: Redefining researcher and participant through immanence

This article considers Spenserian allegory in light of the ontology and epistemology of the post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Drawing on Deleuze’s interpretation of Baruch Spinoza, I compare the characters of Spenser’s poem to Deleuzean affects, differential intensities that come into being through their varying relations on a “plane of immanence.” Where influential recent arguments have characterized allegorical materiality in The Faerie Queene in terms of deadness and aesthetic emptiness, I will instead emphasize the immanent vitality and generativity of matter in Spenser’s poem. Entering into Deleuzean Becomings as they encounter other bodies in the differential field Spenser calls “Faerie land,” the denizens of Spenser’s Faerie, I will argue, produce affective significance in excess of the delimiting violence of allegorical abstraction. This excess, finally, opens the possibility for our own divergent encounters with the poem—for readings that bring Spenser into differential relation with thinkers of our own historical era.

On That &lt;em&gt;Toy-Being&lt;/em&gt; of Generative Art Toys

The paper analyzes the concept of digital corporeality and identity and their representation in virtual images of digital fashion. Digital fashion is a new field of fashion that develops in the interdisciplinary space made of information technology, gaming industry and digital art. The article assumes that the digital fashion body depends neither on the human nor the human body. The digital body is non-human and it explicitly represents a posthumanist corporeality as a cyborg formation (D. Haraway). It assembles through machinery and becomes randomly fixed assemblages (G. Deleuze, F. Guattari; M. Delande). The author draws on concepts of new materialism, including the concept of the plane of immanence by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari’s, J. Bennett’s vibrant matter and K. Barad’s agential realism. New materialism shows radical change of the digital corporeality discourse. The author analyzes digital fashion projects posted on digital fashion retail platforms, such as The Fabricant, Dematerialised, DressX, Artisant, and works of digital designers who have gained fame through participation in digital shows.

The earth is the archetypal image of the origin of humanity, but throughout the history of Western culture it has given way to other, more heavenly allegories. Enlightenment as a paradigm of knowledge consolidated itself in Western philosophical thought in a very convincing way as a production of meanings. Through this rereading of the first Greek metaphysics, thought gradually distanced itself from its materiality, from its humanity, from the possibility of admiring the concrete world, getting closer and closer to the need to create abstract objects, which, as ethical limits, political, aesthetic and epistemological, we end up meeting again in our lives. Visibility seems to be the basis of a Western mental habitus: recognition, officiality, legitimacy and certainty become visible signs with which we compare and validate our own experiences. The earth, as a less transparent element, with greater ability to hide, occult, encrypt represents, however, an image that is better suited to the discussion plan proposed in this text. The relationship with reality, in terms of visibility and invisibility, requires a new perception of the world: the underlying structure no longer assumes a transcendent level, but is understood as a plane of immanence, in which meaning is interior, produced by compositions; an amalgam of networks that intertwine in an imperceptible, invisible underground plane. What we propose here is not a vertical perspective, but a horizontal one like the ground. It is from this earthly thought that we want to reflect on what happens in philosophy and childhood; in philosophy with childhood and in the childhood of philosophy. In the present attempt of an ecophilosophy of education, the discussion plan requires a deviation from the guiding images with which we learn to do research. The intention of the following investigation is to look for another type of map: a kind of subterranean cartography, which pays attention not to what we can see, which has well-defined names and categories, but to what is hidden and inhabits a plane that is muddy, earthly, indistinguishable and absolutely alive. According to the Lipmanian model of Philosophy for Children, the subterranean and rhizomatic processes of the research community will be examined, comparing them to other collective movements that characterize the vegetable communities of plants that inhabit the natural world. Finally, three concepts considered relevant to escape the limits found in some contemporary pedagogical postures will be illustrated, suggesting other paths in the relationship between philosophy, childhood and education: reciprocity, passivity and invisibility.

Unriddling S. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms is important for interpretation of his philosophical views. That is why the issue of his pseudonyms remains one of the most important problems for historians of philosophy and commentators on Kierkegaard’s works. This paper analyses various points of view on the reasons for Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms in his philosophical works. Among the opinions of various philosophers presented in the article, key hypotheses can be distinguished viewing pseudonyms as the following: literary characters; Kierkegaard’s experiment; a search for self-identification; understanding the past; an alternative to Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit; alternative forms of human existence; roles played by S. Kierkegaard, who is also the author of these plays; demonstration of representative figures showing the boundaries of forms of human existence; a way to overcome loneliness; means of indirect communication; dissociation of Kierkegaard’s personality. The author believes that the concept of conceptual persona (or character) used by Deleuze and F. Guattari allows us to reveal the “secret” of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, since this concept demonstrates the complexity and multidimensionality of pseudonyms. Applying the concept of conceptual persona is relevant since pseudonyms have the same properties as conceptual personae: 1) like conceptual personae, pseudonyms are autonomous from their creator and express their own worldview; 2) dialogism, intrinsic to them, allows them to reveal through dialogue the idea embodied in a pseudonym; 3) among the pseudonyms there are no sympathetic pseudonyms expressing the author’s point of view or antipathetic pseudonyms opposing the author; 4) like conceptual personae, pseudonyms form a plane of immanence; 5) pseudonyms are not identical to a social role or the concept of literary character.

Reviewed by: The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos by Vrasidas Karalis Eleftheria Rania Kosmidou (bio) Vrasidas Karalis, The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2021. Pp. x + 207. 24 illustrations. Cloth $135.00. Vrasidas Karalis’s monograph The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos, published by Berghahn in 2021, is an important addition to the scholarly study of Greek film. Firstly, it investigates Theo Angelopoulos’s work in terms of the filmmaker’s biographical context, largely avoiding the established Brechtian methodological framework for discussing his films. Secondly, despite an abundance of journal articles, only a few books exist in the English language that deal with the work of Angelopoulos. Since Andrew Horton’s seminal books The Films of Theo Angelopoulos: A Cinema of Contemplation (1997a) and The Last Modernist: Theo Angelopoulos (1997b), David Bordwell’s Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging (2005), and Irini Stathi’s edited collection Theo Angelopoulos (2000), Karalis’s monograph is the first serious effort to reopen and recreate a space for academic discourse on Theo Angelopoulos’s cinema internationally. Within the field of film studies, much attention has been given to Angelopoulos’s distinct cinematic language, and the wider Greek and international literature is rife with studies analyzing and exploring his Brechtian cinema. In The Cinematic Language of Theo Angelopoulos, however, Karalis discusses the filmmaker’s work differently. Using mainly philosophical but also art-critical discourse analysis and occasionally Freudian terminology, he situates Angelopoulos’s work within biographical and sociopolitical contexts as he explores the ways in which the filmmaker experimented with his work throughout his life, constantly inventing and reinventing himself as a global auteur consciously attempting to create a global cinematic language. Karalis argues that the dominant mode of reading Angelopoulos’s films through a Brechtian lens is misleading and has restricted the study of his films. While acknowledging Brechtian elements in Angelopoulos’s early films, he sees a change toward Aristotelian catharsis and empathy after 1977. Moreover, after Alexander the Great (Megalexandros, 1980), Angelopoulos completely abandoned his epic mode to adapt a “fluid visual lyricism” (42). Karalis attributes these changes to Angelopoulos’s political, existential, and personal meditation, his self-questioning and self-redefining. As Karalis sets out to examine the continual evolution of Angelopoulos’s approach to his films, one of his first tasks is to present the reader with a brief chronological overview of the filmmaker’s life and work—including his collaboration with his longtime friend Vasilis Rafailidis when they co-founded the [End Page 484] journal Contemporary Cinema (Synchronos Kinimatografos) in 1969—together with details of his films’ production and reception. Karalis provides evidence of Angelopoulos’s director of photography (DoP) Giorgos Arvanitis’s contribution to his cinematic universe, crediting Arvanitis for introducing an anti-illusionist style of minimalistic filming. Situating Angelopoulos and Arvanitis’s images within the category of the Deleuzian “planes of immanence,” non-referential images that exist within themselves and in themselves (Deleuze 2001), Karalis contends that their collaboration created an emotional cinema because of the Deleuzian completeness and singularization of their visual images. This is what differentiates Angelopoulos’s earlier films from the later films in which he worked with DoP Andreas Sinanos, a collaboration that resulted in a lyrical and fluid cinema. Karalis also attributes some of the changes he discerns in Angelopoulos’s work to Eleni Karaindrou’s post-1984 musical contribution to Angelopoulos’s cinema: her scores are non-diegetic and her emotional melodies rectify Angelopoulos’s narratives, the distanced performances in his films, and their overall visual style. Karalis recognizes four stages in Angelopoulos’s work, which he eloquently calls a polyptych, borrowing a term from painting and art history. Referring to the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard’s ethical and religious teleological stages of human life (Kierkegaard 1992), he argues that Angelopoulos seems to have gone through these stages in a reverse order: from knowledge and strong political ideology to doubt, from doubt to introspection, from introspection to redemption through aesthetics, eventually (in his last films) reaching nihilism and emotionalism. Abandoning Brecht and the Brechtian acting mode in 1977, Angelopoulos became more interested in poetry in his quest for what Karalis calls “the cinematic sublime” (148). His...

With the invention of the concept of ‘geophilosophy’, Deleuze and Guattari did not intend to invoke a new subfield of philosophy; for them, all philosophy is geophilosophy by virtue of its constitutive relationship with contingency. What is less well understood, however, are the implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophical approach for how we think about subjectivity today. Working against phenomenological forms of ‘earth-thinking’ that tend to reduce the ‘geo-’ to a phenomenological concept of ‘world’, Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize the earth as an immanent plane of forces that both precedes and exceeds the subject. Turning to Deleuze’s earlier essay on the literature of Michel Tournier, this paper offers a reading of geophilosophy in which aesthetic practices help us to grapple with the unthought forces of the earth beyond the phenomenological logic of world, and where art itself becomes a process that radically refigures our sense of what subjectivity can become.