Immanence, transindividuality and the free multitude

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (8) ◽  
pp. 865-887
Author(s):  
Daniela Voss
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Real ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

Since the late 1960s there has been a resurgence of interest in Spinozism in France: Gilles Deleuze was among the first who gave life to a ‘new Spinoza’ with his seminal book Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968). While Deleuze was primarily interested in Spinoza’s ontology and ethics, the contemporary French philosopher Étienne Balibar focuses on the political writings. Despite their common fascination for Spinoza’s relational definition of the individual, both thinkers have drawn very different consequences from the Spinozist inspiration regarding the relevance of his philosophy for a contemporary ethical and political thought. Deleuze draws from Spinoza an ethics of the encounter, an ‘ethology’ that is concerned with the composition of bodies on a plane of immanence. Balibar, on the contrary, deals with the modes of communication that we institute between one another and that are always effectuations on two levels at once: the real and the imaginary. Whereas Deleuze emphasizes the conception of a univocal plane of immanence, Balibar insists on a double expression of the real and the imaginary in any transindividual practice. The aim of this paper is to compare and finally assess their respective contributions to a conception of collective political action: the question of constitution of the ‘free multitude’.

scholarly journals Politicizing flight in Edward Albee’s seascape

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-19
Author(s):  
Zied Khamari
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
The Political ◽  
Edward Albee ◽  
Similar Tendency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Contemporary Life ◽  
The Individual

In recent years, scholars and critics have become increasingly interested in the view that art is a means to escape from the existent reality and the difficulties of modern civilization. Many writers emphasized in their literary works the need to be emancipated from the restrictions of modern society and underlined the idea that flight is the ultimate way to avoid the complexities of contemporary life. Edward Albee, for example, addressed the issue of flight in his drama, particularly the sociopolitical and artistic scopes of escape. In his Seascape, Albee presents a multifaceted perception of flight juxtaposing the social with the literary and the political with the artistic. In the postmodern political thought too, there is a similar tendency that valorizes the struggle for the liberation of the individual from all forms of repression and domination exerted by sociopolitical forces. Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (2005), for instance, criticize the constraints and rules that power authorities use to control the individual and call instead for freeing humans from all authoritarian policies. This paper, then, seeks to examine Albee’s staging of flight from the Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective in an attempt to elucidate his complex yet refined dramatization of escape in his play Seascape.

Feminist Interpretations of Action and the Public in Hannah Arendt’s Theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
Noémi Bíró
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Feminism ◽  
Definition Of

"Feminist Interpretations of Action and the Public in Hannah Arendt’s Theory. Arendt’s typology of human activity and her arguments on the precondition of politics allow for a variety in interpretations for contemporary political thought. The feminist reception of Arendt’s work ranges from critical to conciliatory readings that attempt to find the points in which Arendt’s theory might inspire a feminist political project. In this paper I explore the ways in which feminist thought has responded to Arendt’s definition of action, freedom and politics, and whether her theoretical framework can be useful in a feminist rethinking of politics, power and the public realm. Keywords: Hannah Arendt, political action, the Public, the Social, feminism "

scholarly journals Redefining the political moment

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Arvanitakis
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
John Howard ◽  
Conservative Media ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
War Protest

On 16 February 2003, more than half a million people gathered in Sydney, Australia, as part of a global anti-war protest aimed at stopping the impending invasion of Iraq by the then US Administration. It is difficult to estimate how many millions marched on the coordinated protest, but it was by far the largest mobilization of a generation. Walking and chanting on the streets of Sydney that day, it seemed that a political moment was upon us. In a culture that rarely embraces large scale activism, millions around Australian demanded to be heard. The message was clear: if you do not hear us, we would be willing to bring down a government. The invasion went ahead, however, with the then Australian government, under the leadership of John Howard, being one of the loudest and staunchest supporters of the Bush Administrations drive to war. Within 18 months, anti-war activists struggled to have a few hundred participants take part in anti-Iraq war rallies, and the Howard Government was comfortably re-elected for another term. The political moment had come and gone, with both social commentators and many members of the public looking for a reason. While the conservative media was often the focus of analysis, this paper argues that in a time of late capitalism, the political moment is hollowed out by ‘Politics’ itself. That is to say, that formal political processes (or ‘Politics’) undermine the political practices that people participate in everyday (or ‘politics’). Drawing on an ongoing research project focusing on democracy and young people, I discuss how the concept of ’politics‘ has been destabilised and subsequently, the political moment has been displaced. This displacement has led to a re-definition of ‘political action’ and, I argue, the emergence of a different type of everyday politics.

Conclusion—Rousseau’s paradox

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Social Democrat ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter binds the book together, recapitulating its general argument, and offering pointers as to how the study relates to some contemporary questions of political theory. It suggests that a classification that distinguishes between Weber the ‘liberal’, Schmitt the ‘conservative’ and Neumann the ‘social democrat’, cannot provide an adequate understanding of this episode in the history of political thought. Nor indeed can it do so for other periods. In this book, one part of the development of their ideas has focused on the relationship between state and politics. By learning from their examples, people continue their own search for an acceptable balance between the freedom of the individual and the claims of the political community.

The Face Revisited: Using Deleuze and Guattari to Explore the Politics of Algorithmic Face Recognition

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-91
Author(s):  
Claudio Celis Bueno
Keyword(s):  
Face Recognition ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The Political ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Clear Relation

This article explores the political dimension of algorithmic face recognition through the prism of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of faciality. It argues that algorithmic face recognition is a technology that expresses a key aspect of contemporary capitalism: the problematic position of the individual in light of new forms of algorithmic and statistical regimes of power. While there is a clear relation between modern disciplinary mechanisms of individualization and the face as a sign of individuality, in control societies this relation appears more as a contradiction. The article contends that Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of machinic enslavement and social subjection offer a fruitful perspective from where to identify the power mechanisms behind the problematic position of the individual in the specific case of algorithmic face recognition.

Self as political possibility: subversive neighbor love and transcendental agency amidst collective blindness

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin McCoy Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
The Political ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
The Real ◽  
Political Subject

ABSTRACTThe author investigates a notion of self as political possibility from a multi-displinary perspective that engages the psychoanalytic and philosophical thought of Jung, Žižek, Badiou and Heidegger. The political subject is one who has encountered the real of a particular societal void through the neighbor's unbidden appeal and is thus violently wrenched out of the indifference of banal **existence into a possibility of political action in a world gone mad. To illuminate her theoretical arguments, the author includes her own auto-ethnographic study into the conditions from which an egalitarian-based clinic of care emerged amidst the horror of the AIDS plague when there was no societal support in place. Lastly, the author engages Heidegger's (secondarily Jung and Badiou's) secular reading of the apostle Paul's Christian revolution as a means of elaborating on the transcendental dimension of thought and the conditions for its collective and co-experienced political possibility in today's moment in history.

Personification and the Political Imagination of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

2016 ◽  
pp. 399-418
Author(s):  
Amanda Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Imagination ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Individual

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, consciousness, agency, and embodiment are not always in concert. Legal personification serves as the backdrop of my discussion of Bottom’s metamorphosis, which I see as evocative of developments within common law around the creation of artificial persons. In early modern jurisprudence, disembodiment offered an occasion for incorporation, such that the non-consensual human could be transformed into an artificial entity with agentic capacity. Through the staging of metamorphosis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream elaborates the surreal transformation of the human into the non-human as a theatrical effect with political implications, insofar as personification is an enabling condition of the collective rather than a crisis of the individual. The play’s sensitivity to artificial assemblage puts it in conversation with a strand of contemporary political thought interested in the complexity of the will beyond the human body.

Collusion and convergence in 18th‐century English political action

1966 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Rudé
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Political Action ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
The Political ◽  
Leaders And Followers ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Parliamentary Politics ◽  
The Way

It is now more than thirty-five years since Sir Lewis Namier gave his famous shot in the arm to the study of the parliamentary politics of the 18th century. Under his impact, the great Tory and Whig monoliths have been effectively dethroned and their places taken by ‘connections’ and ‘groups’, by ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ – and among the ‘outs’ the ‘loyal’, or sometimes ‘factious’, opposition. But Namier's preoccupations, and the enthusiasm they inspired, far from stimulating research into the whole field of political action, have rather had the effect of confining its operation to Parliament alone. Hence, the unofficial opposition – that of the ‘political nation’ without-doors – has tended to be neglected. Yet, in this more spontaneous, unofficial opposition from ‘without doors’, it is instructive to see the way in which different actions, starting in different quarters of the community converge for more or less brief periods and exert a common pressure. Anomic and associational movements, social protest and political demands, well-organized and clear-sighted interest groups and ‘directaction’ crowds, leaders and followers come together in a chorus of united opposition, in which, however, the individual parts can still be distinguished and identified.

The Politics of Slavery

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Brace
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Definition Of

This book asks what it means to describe someone as a slave and explores the political dimensions of that question. It argues against the search for a transhistorical and timeless definition of slavery, and offers a critical interrogation of the dominant liberal discourse on slavery from the Enlightenment to the present. It pays particular attention to the meanings of the slavery / freedom binary and to the connections between the past and the present in understanding ‘old’ and ‘new’ slavery. The book is about what it means to think about slavery as a historical process and as a political relation, both in the history of political thought and in present debates about trafficking and incarceration. It argues that we need to bring the concept of slavery back into our understandings of freedom, labour and belonging, and unravel the assumptions behind the meanings we ascribe to personhood, sub-personhood and humanity. From Aristotle and the idea of natural slavery, through Locke’s conception of civil society, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and J.S. Mill’s analogy of slavery and marriage to the discourse of modern abolition and the idea of trafficking as slavery, the book interrogates what it means to think about the idea of freedom as the opposite of slavery, and draws attention to the significance of the tensions, ambiguities and silences that surround that conception.

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