Work Of Deleuze Research Articles

Circe’s Garden: Rewriting Epic and Revolutionary Time

This article focuses on two retellings of the story of Circe, the witch from Homer's Odyssey, exploring Augusta Webster's 1870 dramatic monologue ‘Circe’ and Madeline Miller's 2018 novel of the same name. In both texts Circe's main motivation is to escape from the island, depicted as an idyllic garden, where she has been exiled by the gods. This escape comes to symbolize movement towards revolutionary feminist change; however, there is no possibility of describing what form the escape will take according to existing discourses, suggesting paradoxically that change can only be represented through a failure of all forms of representation. This poses a difficulty in terms of conceptualizing practical social transformation. Michel Foucault's power-knowledge dialectic and Gilles Deleuze's work on virtuality are deployed here to illustrate how ideas of change and newness can be conceptualized from within the system purporting to be changed. Revolution etymologically suggests a recurring back to an idealized state of nature while simultaneously functioning as an invocation of utopian change and the progressively new. Circe's immortality functions as a symbol for this cultural paralysis but the garden represents a way of thinking beyond it. The garden is a space which purports to control or contain temporal and aesthetic movement. However, in fact this space encourages the risk of change in ways which threaten this control, or at least model how containment could be destabilized. For Circe, the garden is thus a platform from which subjective revolutionary possibilities can be modelled in preparation for application to the material world.

Algopopulism and recursive conduct: grappling with fascism and the new populisms vis-à-vis Arendt, Deleuze and Guattari, and Stiegler

The continuing rise of right-wing populisms and fascism across the globe, mobilised by various factors such as the use of social technologies and the weaponisation of nationalism, xenophobia, sexism and racism – to name a few – provokes important questions in terms of resistance. Moreover, given that the lines between the new populisms and fascism are becoming increasingly nebulous, it is imperative that we at least attempt to better understand the conditions – including the more hauntological, which is to say historically and structurally invisibilised – from which algorithmic governmentality and its corollary, recursive conduct, are born. On that account, I unpack two understandings of fascism, first tracing it macropolitically through the work of Hannah Arendt and, thereafter, looking at its more micropolitical and libidinal aspects vis-à-vis the work of Deleuze and Guattari. I do so because it is my contention that there is a historical correlation between Arendt’s theorisation of a generalised espionage and our contemporary surveillance systems, as well as between Deleuze and Guattari’s theorisation of desire and the harnessing of affect through machine learning methods and their deployment via social media platforms, all of which aid the propagation of certain forms of populism – and even fascism. This is what I call algopopulism: algorithmically aided politics that transforms the ‘we’ into the ‘they’ through what can be thought of as recursive conduct or the digital exercise of power and its structuring of the field of possible action and thought. In turn, I link this to Stiegler’s understanding of negative sublimation, a paralysis of the human spirit which occurs due to, among other things, the generalised proletarianisation of knowledge, ultimately provoking the short-circuiting of processes of transindividuation. Finally, I offer some notes on resistance.

Deleuze and Ethology: A Philosophy of Entangled Life

Although the title of Cullen's book is Deleuze and Ethology, the author does not focus on passages in which Gilles Deleuze discusses ethology or animals. Cullen does not even quote Deleuze's valuable definition of ethology as “the study . . . of the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterize each thing.” Instead, Cullen tries to construct a philosophical ethology of his own with reference to Deleuze's works on cinema, which, Cullen argues, allowed the philosopher “to describe his ontology from the point of view of the particular beings that inhabit the world.” It is this emphasis on particular beings rather than species that, according to Cullen, lies “at the heart of philosophical ethology.”Philosophers have often asked if it is possible to understand what animals feel, as for instance in the famous article “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel. In films, the question of what characters see and feel is also important. When filmmakers use a subjective camera, it is almost always paired with an objective one. They might first show the fearful face of a character (objective view) before letting us see the snake she is seeing (subjective view). Most often, a film will then return to the objective view. The shot/countershot is an essential film technique, because the subjective view is not reached by eliminating the observer (in this case, the objective camera) but by oscillating between the observer's and the character's points of view. Moreover, Cullen adds, the distinction between a subjective and an objective shot is not always clear. In one shot we may see, for example, an intoxicated character from the perspective of a third-person camera, but that camera is swinging and blurred in order to suggest the character's subjective state. Deleuze terms this sort of shot “semi-subjective.”Ethologists likewise mingle points of view. They do not put themselves in an animal's shoes—an impossible task, as Nagel has contended. Instead, they learn to pay attention to what the animals they are studying pay attention to. Ethologists blend their perspective with that of animals, semi-subjectively, and the result is a viewpoint neither completely human nor entirely animal. And so, Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue, in A Thousand Plateaus, the ethologists to some extent “become-animal.” Becoming-animal is not an identification with animals at large but a creative process triggered by encounter with one particular animal; the semi-subjective view is a new perspective that did not exist before the encounter. While ethologists change and become-animal, the animals they study also change during their interactions with ethologists, since they too learn to understand what matters to the particular humans with whom they live. Curiously, Cullen introduces the notion of becoming-animal only in the book's conclusion. But by approaching it indirectly, via Deleuze's consideration of cinema rather than his writings about animals, Cullen offers us a refreshing characterization of a concept central to Deleuze.

From domestication to imperial patronage: Deconstructing the biomedicalisation of occupational therapy.

Occupational therapy knowledge emerged in the 19th century as reformist movements responded to the industrialisation of society and capitalist expansion. In the Global North, it was institutionalised by State apparatuses during the First and Second World Wars. Although biomedicine contributed to the rapid expansion and establishment of occupational therapy as a health discipline, its domestication by the biomedical model led to an overly regulated profession that betrays its reformist ideals. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, our aim in this article is to deconstruct the biomedicalisation of occupational therapy and demonstrate how resistance to this process is critical for the future of this discipline. The use of arts and crafts in occupational therapy may be conceptualised as a 'nomad science' aesthetically resisting the domination of industrialism and medical reductionism. Through the war efforts, a coalition of progressive nurses, social workers, teachers, artisans and activists metamorphosed into occupational therapists. As it did with nursing, biomedicine proceeded to domesticate occupational therapy through a form of 'imperial' patronage subsequently embodied in the evidence-based movement. 'Occupational' jargon is widely used today and may be viewed as the product of a profession trying to establish itself as an autonomous discipline that imposes its own regime of truth. Given the symbolic violence underlying this patronage, the future of occupational therapy should not mean behaving according to biomedicine's terms. As a discipline, occupational therapy must resist the appropriation of its 'war machine' and craft its own terms through the release of new creative energy.

Joyce in the Fold, the Fold in Joyce

Joyce in the Fold, the Fold in Joyce

Critical antagonisms: cycling and territory

ABSTRACT Slower speed limits and regulated passing distances between motor vehicles and bicycles are now taken-for-granted in policies aimed at increasing cycling participation rates by addressing safety concerns in societies dominated by cars. Rather than understanding distance as a measurement between two points, this paper addresses the sensibilities of proximity. This paper draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and the related concepts of assemblage, territory and critical distance, to better understand how subjectivities emerge through sensations of proximity-in-motion while riding a bike. Attention turns to how experiences of risk underpin an encroachment on personal space that transforms the affective capacities of cycling bodies to ride specific routes along roads, footpaths and cycleways. The article engages with the situated cycling experiences of 28 individuals who ride for leisure and/or transport, who consented to participate in a cycling sensory ethnography in the small city of Wollongong, Australia. Greater appreciation of how sensations of antagonism triggered by proximity-in-cycling-motion, work to reinforce or challenge subjectivities may offer insights to improve actual and perceived safety for cyclists beyond fixed distance policy concepts.

Decoding and deterritorialization. Capitalism and state in the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

This text aims to present the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the context of the relationship between the state, capitalism, and machines. Due to the multiplicity and rhizomatics that characterize the works of both French philosophers, the author also outlines the basic concepts important from the point of view of the discussed problem, such as abstract machines, devices, segmentation, deterritorialization, coding, axiomatics, rhizoma, micropolitics, and macropolitics. The perspective proposed in the works of Deleuze and Guattari escapes the well-known patterns of analysis in social sciences, which makes them an interesting look at the relationship between the state and capitalism.

Deterritorialized Travels: Notes on World, Earth, and Literature in the Work of Deleuze and Guattari

Starting with the works of Edmund Husserl, phenomenological philosophy occupied itself with questions of foundation. The German word Grund’s denotations of both foundation and physical ground give rise to numerous foundational concepts such as Husserl´s Lebenswelt and Heidegger´s Erde. Regarding such concepts, one can trace a path that leads through Heidegger´s Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks to the terminology of Deleuze´s and Guattari´s post-phenomenological thought. This paper argues that the Deleuzian term “deterritorialization” can be seen as an offspring of phenomenology´s attempts to cope with foundational problems. Traveling and deterritorialization become defining features of the authors´ reading of the Anglo-American literary tradition. The paper thus also contends that the deterritorialization of language -- the affinity of literary texts for agrammatical forms -- exemplifies for Deleuze and Guattari the characteristic trait of what can be regarded as a traveling form.

Spiritual homes on the move: narratives of migrations from Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries

ABSTRACT This paper explores the process of the creation of home as a constellation of faith and migration. Building on discussions in geography and anthropology describing home as being in-between mobile and fixed, a hybrid entity-in-construction, the paper challenges the antimonies between place-based or placeless, real or imagined homes common in migration research. Building on the analysis of historical narratives of 18th- and 19th-century migration from Scotland, it highlights the ways in which migrants were involved in the construction and performance of homes through faith and movement. It draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to explore not only the material, imagined and relational nature of spiritual homes, but also attends to performative acts of faith, affective dimensions and openness to the otherworldly being. Using the concepts of multiplicity, affect and the collective, it considers spirituality as a part of the fluidity of homes and an uncertain movement between them. It explores fusion and heterogeneity of spiritual attachments and connections that bring unexpected actors together in more or less intensive states of spiritual co-belonging ‘at home’. The paper concludes with conceptual reflections about spiritual homes as dispossession and exposure in an impossible relation with the foreign and otherworldly in migration.

Reimagining Curriculum Leadership During a Pandemic

This essay details ways in which curriculum leaders can critically engage with contemporary needs to produce a “becoming-curriculum”—with lines of flight breaking free from prescriptive, reductive triangulations—by opening curriculum to present and future (rather than past) realities. Evolutionary theory, the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and culturally responsive leadership can help to reconceptualize curriculum studies and community-based education. As we prepare students for an unknowable future, how can we better care for the actual students and communities in front of us rather than the potential lives of abstract, future adults?

Razones políticas de la distinción deleuziana entre el devenir y la historia

El concepto de devenir ocupa un lugar relevante en la obra de Deleuze. Tras su aparición en Nietzsche y la filosofía, gana protagonismo en Lógica del sentido y pasa a distinguirse de la historia a partir de Diálogos en el marco de un viraje antihistoricista. Según nuestra hipótesis, en la base de esta separación se hallan razones ontológicas y políticas: las primeras remiten a la concepción del acontecimiento, mientras que las segundas se explican por la crisis de la izquierda y la aparición de los nuevos filósofos en el campo intelectual francés de mediados de los años 70. Nuestro objetivo es indagar las razones políticas de esta diferenciación conceptual clave que se mantuvo hasta el final de la producción deleuziana.

Un campo trascendental animado: idea e intensidad en la ontología de Gilles Deleuze

El campo trascendental es presentado en Différence et répétition a partir de los conceptos de Idea e intensidad. Mucho se ha especulado en torno de estos conceptos, pero la relación entre ambos es aún objeto de controversia. En este artículo intentaremos echar luz sobre ese vínculo. Primero, mostraremos que la intensidad es ontológicamente actual, y no virtual o intermediaria como algunas lecturas sugieren. En este punto, la lectura de la obra de 1968 se complementa con Le pli. Leibniz et le Baroque, para mostrar que el carácter actual de la intensidad se mantiene en la obra tardía de Deleuze. En segundo lugar, indagaremos en la relación de lo intensivo con los tres caracteres de la Idea y con la dramatización que comanda la actualización. En tercer lugar, abordaremos la relación entre Idea e intensidad a partir del problema de la expresión. Esto deriva, por último, en una articulación compleja del orden de constitución entre esos dos ámbitos. En este último punto resulta clave la lectura conjunta de Différence et répétition y Logique du sens.

From Edo to Post-metropolis: The Floating Space of Sakariba (盛り場)

This paper will highlight suggestions and problems associated with representing Tokyo as the archetypical Far-East Asian post-metropolis, starting with the fascination of sci-fi and cyberpunk imagery. The two ideas operate differently within both European and Japanese urban space. This will be emphasized by the work of Deleuze and Guattarì, through their conceptions of tree and rhizome. The research will not limit itself to demonstrating the rhizomatic and fluid nature of Tokyo's urban space, which makes it a fully-fledged post-metropolis. It will also identify some of the rhizome's main nodes or junctions, thus highlighting its conformation in terms of efficient strength. Article received: April 30, 2020; Article accepted: June 23, 2020; Published online: September 15, 2020; Review article

Experimentação e prudência no pensamento rizomático de Deleuze e Guattari

A perspectiva rizomática no pensamento de Deleuze e Guattari consiste numa “ruptura de escala” de análise da realidade, na qual deixamos de percebê-la como pura unidade, seja no sujeito ou no objeto. Com isso, nos fazem notar que o pensamento clássico, filosófico e científico, nunca permitiu que se compreendessem as multiplicidades rizomáticas que eles propõem, onde toda forma de unidade é excluída. A partir da operação rizomática de subtração da unidade como imagem de referência para toda multiplicidade (n-1), vemos emergir um modo de abordar as realidades a partir de três conjuntos de linhas que nos compõem, indivíduos ou grupos, e que se distribuem num plano de imanência em que se relacionam continuamente. As análises das linhas e de suas relações nos aproximam da questão da criação ou da produção da novidade e dos devires na obra de Deleuze e Guattari. A tarefa consiste em abrir os problemas práticos a fim de liberar as linhas, sejam as de uma vida, as de um indivíduo ou as de uma sociedade, mas para isso é necessário convocar experimentações nas quais é preciso proceder com prudência. Neste sentido, esta filosofia prática deve ser compreendida necessariamente como uma ética e o que pretendemos aqui é justamente pensar como se configura este modo dinâmico e imanente de avaliação dos riscos e dos fatores de criação que se apresentam constantemente nos mais diversos planos da realidade.

Biopolitics of migration: An assemblage approach

Critical research on migration, borders and camps has used the notion of biopolitics to interrogate how sovereign power or the state differentiate and govern the life of mobile populations. Yet despite its popularity, biopolitical theory is not without limitations, particularly when used as an analytic lens for empirical research. Many theorists of biopolitics are concerned with grand historical shifts and binary oppositions between life and death, inclusion and exclusion, bare life and political rights. Such binaries have been challenged by recent research that points to complex and nuanced differentiations of belonging and citizenship, to the ambiguity of power relations, and that prioritizes the agency and experience of individuals over structuralist conceptions of oppression. Against this background, I suggest that assemblage thinking and the works of Deleuze and Guattari offer terms and concepts that can be made useful to reconsider biopolitics as an analytic approach. Assemblage thinking challenges traditional oppositions between the individual and the collective, structure and agency, oppression and resistance and may thus be more sensitive to the complexity of power relations that integrate the life of migrants. In particular, I examine how revised conceptions of power, life, difference and population challenge the assumption of a central origin of power and an understanding of biopolitics as spatially or historically confined. By considering biopolitics as multiple and becoming, analysis can become more sensitive to the biopolitical experience of migrants, and to the formation of alternative collectives and subjectivities that challenge the violent biopolitics of contemporary migration regimes.

Inquiry as Divination

The article proposes divination as a speculative method for inquiry, drawing primarily on the work of Deleuze. Divinatory practices would be diagrammatic, ambulant, cryptic, affirmative, and experimental. They would look for strange relations between the one and the many, in the shifting totality of the cosmos, and entertain relations that are always to some extent inhuman. The article offers an example from an ethnographic study of classroom interaction. It suggests that divination has the power to import “catastrophe” into the frameworks and methods of research, in the hope of clearing a space for creativity and unforeseen outcomes.

Hybridising Knowledge: Some Considerations on the Epistemology of Contamination in the Works of Deleuze and Serres and Its Reception in Bio Art

In this article I investigate the necessarily interdisciplinary nature of our contemporaneity, from the perspective of works by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour and Michel Serres. While we often find that academia, society and governments push us towards interdisciplinarity, it is also true that those same institutions and powers (and therefore the epistemological systems on which they are based), distance us from that purpose. Opposing this aporetic situation we come up against the Deleuzian concept of ‘contamination’, or the well-known ‘science of Venus’ concept of Michel Serres. In doing so, we attempt ‘to put the tracing back on the map’, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, and try to see the epistemological becomings that we find in contemporary culture. The main indicators which we use to study these contaminations and hybridisations are cinema and Bio Art. In both cases we observe that the real creative production is closer to ‘contamination’ than to the ‘purification’ and deletion of metabolic and hybrid processes criticised by Bruno Latour.

Deleuze and the Work of Death: A Study from the Impulse-Images

When formulating the concept of the impulse-image, Deleuze never tires of asserting that these images are saturated with death and obsessed by degradation. They stand at a curious intersection in the taxonomy of images, a constitutively in-between space: they are formally inserted between affection-image and action-image in The Movement-Image, but produce a direct passage to the time-image. However, they do not reach the time-image due to obsession by the negative effects of time. This article introduces the concept of the impulse-image in Deleuze's work on the impulse and death instinct, in his fundamental texts of the 1960s and 1970s, including his collaboration with Félix Guattari. The death instinct in the late 1960s was a transcendental principle that acquired the form of the groundless or crack-up essential for the production of difference. It is at this time that Deleuze publishes Zola and the Crack-up, an embryonic essay for what would later become the impulse-image. In the 1970s, Deleuze, along with Guattari, fought the need to include a groundless force in the mould of the death instinct. Speaking of cinema in the 1980s, which is when he returns to the impulse theme, one finds characteristics of both preceding periods, especially the structure conceived in the 1960s (the incidence of the groundless as a transcendental force of disarticulation), associated with the criticism of the 1970s (a need to overcome the song of death to reach time and desire). However, Deleuze now stands apart, recognising a naturalistic image and admiring a practice of symptomatology, but pointing out that his own understanding of the world does not lie in it. With the impulse-images, Deleuze also plays a relevant role in studies of film naturalism, shaping a powerful concept for studies of contemporary naturalistic symptomatologies that emerge in situations of misery of civilisation.

Visualizing lived experience: mapping the soundscape of an after-school Minecraft club

This article demonstrates the power of employing alternative, interpretative analysis techniques in ethnographic work. The author argues for the role of sensory interpretation as a valid and necessary method of analytical enquiry, particularly to challenge existing dominant, primarily written discourses that often strive for unrealistic empirical objectivity. In order to make this argument, he demonstrates a combined sonic/visual, interpretative approach to analysis, developed to explore the lived experience of a group of children in an after-school club that took place in and around the world-building videogame Minecraft. Here, inspired by research which takes artistic and exploratory approaches towards knowing, the author employs interpretative drawing as an analytical move. Underpinned by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (see A Thousand Plateaus, 1987: 12), the author produces a visual ‘map’ of soundscape data as a means of exploring potentially side-lined aspects of lived experience, through a process of resemiotization. Developing this sonic/visual approach in context – a process that had an impact on both the analyst and the analysis – helped to shed new light on the site under investigation. As such, this article builds on other analyses of sound in children’s social and educational experience by proposing that interpretative, visual responses to soundscape data can add value to otherwise purely written, or purely sonic, accounts.

The Genetic Power of Paradox: From Dark Precursor to Quasi-Causality

In this article, I conduct a selective reading of Difference and Repetition that intertwines with The Logic of Sense, specifically in relation to the concept of paradox, underscoring how Deleuze's work itself is a performance of the necessity of paradoxical thinking and the insistence on an image of thought which incorporates paradox as its central feature. I argue that para-sense anticipates the centrality of paradox in Logic of Sense, just as the obscure, unilluminated element of Ideas anticipates the significance of non-sense for the proliferation of sense therein. Likewise, the dark precursor as that which enables communication between different kinds bears a resemblance to the idea of the quasi-cause that we find in The Logic of Sense. Paradox, the paradoxical instant and para-sense, as figures which help us to cultivate and maintain the discordant relations of passion to thought, the corporeal and incorporeal, and word and thing, unfix our thinking so that we can allow ourselves to be more thoroughly immersed in the multiplicities and intensities that surround us. This is the possibility of a kind of doubling that is not based on the sterility of representation, but rather the genitality of learning and proliferation of (non)sense.