From Dreaming of Desert Islands to Reterritorialising Philosophy

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoshiyuki Koizumi

In ‘Causes and Reasons of Desert Islands’, Gilles Deleuze presents a mythological and scientific vision in which new islands and new humanity emerge from the opposition between the land and sea in desert islands. However, what Deleuze cannot explain is how such new territory and people are produced and reproduced while rejecting old and conventional generational ways. To break this impasse, which is also present in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze and Guattari intend to retain the absolute movement of deterritorialisation, while acknowledging that deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation always comingle. This theoretical project is found in the critique of Pierre Clastres on counter-state societies, and is taken up by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? In this latter work, by creating concepts and constituting a new plane, Deleuze and Guattari offer some conditions of a third reterritorialisation that, after the second reterritorialisation in the democratic states, presents a new way of forging a political and revolutionary philosophy. In this essay, we criticise the opinions that consider Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy as one version of radical democracy. Their political philosophy should be situated in the post-democratic era to come.

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Baugh

In Bergsonism, Deleuze refers to Bergson's concept of an ‘open society’, which would be a ‘society of creators’ who gain access to the ‘open creative totality’ through acting and creating. Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy is oriented toward the goal of such an open society. This would be a democracy, but not in the sense of the rule of the actually existing people, but the rule of ‘the people to come,’ for in the actually existing situation, such a people is ‘lacking’. When the people becomes a society of creators, the result is a society open to the future, creativity and the new. Their openness and creative freedom is the polar opposite of the conformism and ‘herd mentality’ condemned by Deleuze and Nietzsche, a mentality which is the basis of all narrow nationalisms (of ethnicity, race, religion and creed). It is the freedom of creating and commanding, not the Kantian freedom to obey Reason and the State. This paper uses Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: For a Minor Literature, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? to sketch Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the open society and of a democracy that remains ‘to come’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-249
Author(s):  
Chantelle Gray

When Gilles Deleuze, in his book on Michel Foucault, asks, ‘who would think of looking for life among the archives?’, he uncovers something particular to Foucault's philosophy, but also to his own: a commitment to the question of what it means to think, and think politically. Although Foucault and Deleuze, who first met in 1952, immediately felt fondness for each other, a growing animosity had settled into the friendship by the end of the 1970s – a rift deepened by theoretical differences. Notwithstanding these difficulties, Foucault and Deleuze shared a love for Nietzsche, as well as a curious fascination with Kant. Kant's influence, which was met with more opposition, is precisely the tension I tease out in this article, showing how Foucault critiques Kant's a priori through his own concept of the historical a priori, along with regularity and resistance, while Deleuze and Guattari, if more obliquely, critique Kant's a priori by further developing Foucault's notion of the historical a priori through their own method of pragmatics, particularly in three chapters of A Thousand Plateaus, namely ‘The Geology of Morals’, ‘Postulates of Linguistics’ and ‘On Several Regimes of Signs’. What I am interested in, then, is Deleuze and Guattari's treatment of redundancy, a concept mentioned seventy times in A Thousand Plateaus. Although not one of their main or most developed concepts, redundancy is a thread that can be traced back to Deleuze's first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity. Moreover, their more developed concepts, for example the diagram, the abstract machine, becoming, micro-politics and the ritornello, as well as their political philosophy, are grounded in their understanding of redundancy, which moves their philosophy beyond mapping out the conditions of possibility (Kant) and demonstrating that the historical a priori emerges as a contingent function of its own expression (Foucault) to the genesis of thought.


1995 ◽  
Vol 16 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Mary Anne Perkins

A few months ago I read Peter Nicholson's The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists for the first time. In the index I found more than a hundred references to Hegel and only one to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However, as many of the latter's writings, published for the first time in recent years, become generally accessible there is an increasing sense that he has been unfairly deprived of his due status as a philosopher. This is partly, no doubt, the syndrome of the prophet in his own country and partly the inevitable consequence of much of his later work remaining unpublished until recent years. Coleridge himself, with what some would take to be confirmation of an over-sensitivity to criticism, felt the neglect of his work went deeper and betrayed an anti-philosophical trait in British character. Despite his close reading of the work of many of his German contemporaries it seems that he did not read more than sixtyone pages of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik. His margin notes to this work are, on the whole, negative in their criticism. However, despite significant disagreements, there is much common ground in theme, argument and conclusion between his many drafts of the ‘Logosophia’, his intended magnum opus, and Hegel's system.


Derrida Today ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-270
Author(s):  
Francesco Vitale

The paper aims to present a reading of the question of Testimony rising in Derrida's later works (from Faith and Knowledge to Poetics and Politics of Witnessing): the experience of Testimony as the irreducible condition of the relation to the Other, of every possible link among living human singularities and, thus, of the thinking of a community to come. This thinking is able to divert the community from the economy grounding and structuring it within our political tradition governed by the metaphysics of presence, which demands the sacrifice of the Other in its multiple theoretical and practical forms. We intend to read this proposal and to point out its rich perspectives by bringing it into the articulation of an ethical-political archi-writing. So we suggest going back to Derrida's early analyses of phenomenology and to De la grammatologie in order to present a reading of archi-writing as the irreducible condition of the relation to otherness and, thus, of the experience through which a living human singularity constitutes itself, a singularity different from the one our tradition compels us to think of within the pattern of the absolute presence to the self, free from the relation to the other.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-275
Author(s):  
Francisca Gilmara da Silva Almiro ◽  
Roniê Rodrigues da Silva

O trabalho apresenta uma leitura da obra A Fúria do corpo, de João Gilberto Noll, a partir dos conceitos de Corpo sem Órgãos e Rizoma propostos pelos filósofos franceses Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. Nesse sentido, objetiva estudar a construção identitária das personagens da referida narrativa, estabelecendo uma associação com essas noções filosóficas, problematizando, sobretudo, a errância das personagens e a linguagem utilizada para a composição da obra. Ao longo da leitura crítica, destacaremos como o texto de Noll nos desafia à construção de sentidos através de uma subjetividade constituída a partir de linhas de fuga, ideia discutida pelos filósofos supracitados. Ao adentrarmos no texto ficcional pelo viés de tais linhas, é possível entender como as personagens percebem e vivem suas experimentações rizomáticas. Desse modo, não se pretende aqui atribuir sentidos fechados à narrativa, mas sugerir que o Corpo sem Órgãos e o Rizoma são características que representam as experiências errantes das personagens encontradas na escrita de Noll. Palavras-chave: Literatura Brasileira Contemporânea. João Gilberto Noll. Identidade. Corpo sem Órgãos. Rizoma. THE RHIZOME AND THE IDEA OF BODY WITHOUT ORGANS IN THE FURY OF THE BODY, BY JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL Abstract: This paper presents a reading of The Fury of the Body, by João Gilberto Noll, based on the concepts of Body without Organs and Rhizome proposed by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It aims to study the characters’ identity construction, establishing an association with these philosophical notions, exploring, especially, the characters’ wandering nature and the language used in the composition of the work. Throughout this critical reading, emphasis will be given on the way Noll’s text challenge us to construct directions through a subjectivity built from escape lines, a concept defined by Deleuze and Guattari. By reading the narrative through these lenses, it is possible to understand how the characters perceive and live their rhizomatic trials. Thus, the intention here is not to attribute closed meanings to the narrative, but to suggest that the Body without Organs and the Rhizome are features that represent the characters’ wandering experiences in The Fury of the Body. Keywords: Contemporary Brazilian Literature. João Gilberto Noll. Identity. Body without Organs. Rhizome.


Dialogue ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. E. Cooper

The author struggles to come to grips here with the philosophical complexities and personal tragedies that disorient us when we reflect on the great and pervasive inequalities in human societies. His egalitarianism is radical in denying the justice of the inequalities that liberals like Rawls would countenance, and in denying that justice and capitalism are compatible. Nielsen displays a masterly knowledge of the literature of social justice, especially that which bears on Rawls's A Theory of Justice and Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia, the celebrated philosophical flagships of liberalism and conservatism respectively; this feature of the book should be useful for advanced students of social and political philosophy who need to acquire a sense for the texture of contemporary argument in the field. The thicket of sturdy arguments in Equality and Liberty should convince Rawlsians to accept many tenets of Nielsen's radical egalitarianism, or else to re-examine their thinking about social justice. And the extended critique of Anarchy, State and Utopia should persuade Nozickians of the need for “a reasonably sophisticated political sociology and a sound critical theory of society” if one is to philosophize adequately about social justice (5). Many will find this critique the most valuable part of the book.


Author(s):  
Gavin Rae

This chapter engages with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s analysis of the war machine, suggesting that it contradicts Arendt’s analysis and offers the most radical critique within the radical-juridical paradigm. Premised on the notion that we must rethink sovereignty from ontological difference rather than unity, Deleuze and Guattari radically undermine the indivisibility that defines the classic-juridical conception. Far from being located in one individual or point, sovereignty is always tied to the State, which is a multiplicity that expresses the constantly moving, fluid, and dynamic field of difference. By thinking the social world in terms of heterogeneity, Deleuze and Guattari undermine the hierarchical conception of sovereignty underpinning the classic-juridical model, but continue to implicitly insist that State sovereignty is tied to the maintenance of juridical order; an order that is always threatened by or in conflict with the war machine that disrupts it. As a consequence, they conclude that sovereign order is always far more unstable and disordered than it appears to be.


Author(s):  
Charles W. Mills

In this essay, Charles W. Mills seeks to catalyze a comparable recognition of Du Bois’s theoretical achievements in political philosophy. Since Du Bois engaged critically with many different forms of political thought, his beliefs do not neatly align with any one political philosophy, challenging scholarly orthodoxies to the point of exclusion by mainstream scholarship. However, recent work in slavery, American capitalism, and global economy has aligned with Du Bois’s theories, and his influence is increasingly acknowledged in shaping discussions of race. Mills argues that Western political philosophy, especially in its modern form, is heavily dependent on racial categorization and subjugation, despite its supposed commitment to free and equal citizenship for all. Du Bois recognized the need to reframe Western philosophical concepts in order to establish black political equality and critiqued this framework, providing a starting point for the black political thinkers to come after him.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-91
Author(s):  
Claudio Celis Bueno

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-318
Author(s):  
Amanda Núñez García

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.


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