From Constellations to Assemblages: Benjamin, Deleuze and the Question of Materialism

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-570
Author(s):  
Tanja Prokić
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Assemblage Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The One

This essay investigates the differences and points of contact between Walter Benjamin's concept of ‘constellation’ (developed in various texts written between 1920 and 1940) and the notion of ‘assemblage’ as theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Both concepts address the entanglement of discourse and matter, bodies and devices, and raise questions regarding the historicity and temporality of different kinds of multiplicity. Presently, the term ‘assemblage’ figures prominently in the context of the new materialism, a theoretical movement which calls for a renewal of materialist ideas, proposing a break with the historical materialism of the past. Against this backdrop, the essay has a twofold purpose: first, by focusing on the notions of constellation and assemblage, it seeks to highlight the differences and analogies between the materialisms of Benjamin, on the one hand, and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other. Second, by examining the new materialism's appropriation of Deleuzian ‘assemblage theory’, it will not only analyse what is ‘new’ about the new materialism, but also underline its conceptual errors and political problems. Eventually, what the essay argues is that our contemporary (‘new materialist’) understanding of assemblages might indeed benefit from a more thorough engagement with the historical materialism of an author like Benjamin.

scholarly journals Kafka and Deleuze/Guattari: Towards a Creative Critical Writing Practice

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 221-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ola Ståhl
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Franz Kafka ◽  
The Other ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
Potential Link ◽  
The One ◽  
Writing Practice

Drawing upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in particular their writing on Franz Kafka, this article stakes out the ground for a creative critical writing practice beyond the confines of literature. Exploring the notion of writing in relation to affect constellations, what causes one to write, and expressions without content, how one begins to write, the argument put forth is that in rethinking the distinction Deleuze and Guattari tend to make between artistic practice and philosophical thought, a space is opened up for transversal lines that may cross between these fields in practices that are creative and critical and involve what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as aesthetic figures as well as conceptual personae. These practices, it is argued, provide a potential link between aesthetics, on the one hand, and ethics and politics, on the other.

scholarly journals Clausewitz and la pensée 681*

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-59
Author(s):  
Éric Alliez ◽  
Maurizio Lazzarato
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
World War ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
The One ◽  
Second World

Abstract In the aftermath of the Second World War, revolutionary movements remained dependent on Leninist theories and practices in their attempts to grasp the new relationship between war and capital. Yet these theories and practices failed to address the global “cold civil war” represented by the events of 1968. This article will show that in the 1970s this task was not undertaken by “professional revolutionaries” or in their Maoist discourse of “protracted war” and its “generalized Clauzewitzian strategy.” Rather, the problem was addressed by Michel Foucault, on the one hand, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, on the other. Each produced a radical break in the conception of war and of its constitutive relationship with capitalism, taking up the confrontation with Clausewitz to reverse the famous formula such that war was not to be understood as the continuation of politics (which determines its ends). Politics was, on the contrary, to be understood as an element and strategic modality of the whole constituted by war. The ambition of la pensée 68, as represented by Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, was not to make this reversal into a simple permutation of the formula's terms, but rather to develop a radical critique of the concepts of “war” and “politics” presupposed by Clausewitz's formula.

scholarly journals O cristal em decomposição em Morte em Veneza de Luchino Visconti

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronica Miranda Damasceno
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fundamental Operation ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Past Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
Death In Venice ◽  
The One ◽  
Luchino Visconti ◽  
Do So

The constitution of the crystal image corresponds to the most fundamental operation of time. In order to do so, it is necessary for time to separate, arise or happen, in two decimetric spurts, of which one of them makes pass the whole present and the other conserves all the past. Time consists precisely in this split, it is the one we see in a crystal. Crystal is the perpetual foundation of time. According to the perspective of the French thinker Gilles Deleuze, in Death in Venice, Luchino Visconti gives us to see the crystalline images according to their own decomposition. This is present throughout his work. In this film, we can see this decomposition, for example, through the plague that devastates Venice or even through the revelation that something arrived too late. When the character of the musician sees the young Tadzio, he has the vision of what lacked in his work: sensual beauty. The too late conditions the work of art and conditions its success, for the sensuous and sensual unity of nature with man is the essence of art par excellence, inasmuch as it is of its nature to occur too late!

scholarly journals KŪNAS IR REIKŠMĖ J. L. NANCY KNYGOJE "CORPUS"

Problemos ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audronė Žukauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The One ◽  
Phenomenological Perception ◽  
Radical Character

Straipsnyje analizuojama Jeano Luco Nancy knygoje Corpus suformuluota kūno samprata, nurodoma jos priklausomybė nuo fenomenologinės Emmanuelio Levino ir Maurice’o Merleau-Ponty tradicijos. Straipsnyje taip pat siekiama atskleisti Nancy kūno sampratos radikalumą, jos artimumą tiek Jacques’o Derrida įteisintoms rašymo, paskirstymo erdvėje temoms, tiek Gilles’o Deleuze’o ir Felixo Guattari sukurtai materialistinei kūno koncepcijai. Nancy kūną siekia išlaisvinti nuo reikšmės ir bet kokio organizavimo principo. Tačiau norėdamas paaiškinti, kaip kūnai egzistuoja, jis priverstas išrasti naujas sąvokas: išstatymas, kūnų paskirstymas erdvėje, areališkumas, technē, kūrimas be kūrėjo. Būtent pastaroji sąvoka leidžia Nancy projektą vadinti „krikščionybės dekonstrukcija“; kita vertus, ši sąvoka savotiškai kompromituoja Nancy teorijos radikalumą, atskleisdama bet kurios kūno filosofijos priklausomybę nuo krikščioniškosios tradicijos. Pagrindiniai žodžiai: fenomenologinis suvokimas, prisilietimas, kūnas, technē, krikščionybės dekonstrukcija.Body and Signification in J.-L. Nancy’s CorpusAudronė Žukauskaitė SummaryThe author explores the notion of the body in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus. On the one hand, she shows how Nancy’s project still depends on the phenomenological tradition of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. On the other hand, she seeks to demonstrate the radical character of this notion and its similarity to Jacques Derrida’s concept of writing and spacing as well as to the materialistic concept of the body elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. This similarity is based on the assumption that the body could be thought of and described as beyond any meaningful principle of organization. In order to explain how such bodies exist, Nancy is forced to invent new concepts such as spacing out, expeausition, areality, technē, creation without creator. It is exactly the latter concept that enables Derrida to describe Nancy’s project as “deconstruction of Christianity”. This concept also indicates a compromise in Nancy’s radical thinking, revealing that any “philosophy of the body” in Western thought still belongs to the tradition of Christianity.Keywords: phenomenological perception, touching, the body, technē, deconstruction of Christianity.;"> 

Introduction: The Problem of a Deleuzian Ethics

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Cheri Lynne Carr
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The United States ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Past ◽  
Imminent Danger

Neo- and proto-fascisms have begun re-emerging in ultranationalist, authoritarian, and extremist consolidations of power across the globe. Even in the United States, where fascism was long dismissed as an historical or exclusively European problem, the popular emergence of rhetoric related to fascist ideology over the past decade has inspired widespread comparison and a new sense of the real, imminent danger that fascism poses. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari point out in Anti-Oedipus, fascism was not just a ‘bad moment’ or an ‘historical error’: fascism has yet to be overcome (AO 29–30). Why this is the case and what we might do about it are the frame for understanding Deleuze’s Kantian Ethos: Critique as a Way of Life. It begins with the argument that an account of the endurance of fascism would be better served by emphasising not how different ‘those people’ who support fascism are from ‘us’, who do not, but rather that at the basis of fascism’s allure for us all is the desire for our own repression. If such desire is constitutive of the productive cycle of desire itself, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, any ethics that hopes to create spaces of freedom must have anti-fascism at its heart.

Entangled Worlds

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Science Studies ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
The One

Historically speaking, theology can be said to operate “materiaphobically.” Protestant Christianity in particular has bestowed upon theology a privilege of the soul over the body and belief over practice, in line with the distinction between a disembodied God and the inanimate world “He” created. Like all other human, social, and natural sciences, religious studies imported these theological dualisms into a purportedly secular modernity, mapping them furthermore onto the distinction between a rational, “enlightened” Europe on the one hand and a variously emotional, “primitive,” and “animist” non-Europe on the other. The “new materialisms” currently coursing through cultural, feminist, political, and queer theories seek to displace human privilege by attending to the agency of matter itself. Far from being passive or inert, they show us that matter acts, creates, destroys, and transforms—and, as such, is more of a process than a thing. Entangled Worlds examines the intersections of religion and new and old materialisms. Calling upon an interdisciplinary throng of scholars in science studies, religious studies, and theology, it assembles a multiplicity of experimental perspectives on materiality: What is matter, how does it materialize, and what sorts of worlds are enacted in its varied entanglements with divinity? While both theology and religious studies have over the past few decades come to prioritize the material contexts and bodily ecologies of more-than-human life, Entangled Worlds sets forth the first multivocal conversation between religious studies, theology, and the body of “the new materialism.” Here disciplines and traditions touch, transgress, and contaminate one another across their several carefully specified contexts. And in the responsiveness of this mutual touching of science, religion, philosophy, and theology, the growing complexity of our entanglements takes on a consistent ethical texture of urgency.

TARP DVIEJŲ KOLONŲ: XVIII A. PABAIGOS – XIX A. PRADŽIOS VILNIAUS MASONŲ KASDIENYBĖ SIMBOLIKOJE

2018 ◽  
pp. 144-163
Author(s):  
Daiva Milinkevičiūtė
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Daily Routine ◽  
The Past ◽  
Secular World ◽  
National Characteristics ◽  
Conservative Christian ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Craft Guilds

The Age of Enlightenment is defined as the period when the universal ideas of progress, deism, humanism, naturalism and others were materialized and became a golden age for freemasons. It is wrong to assume that old and conservative Christian ideas were rejected. Conversely, freemasons put them into new general shapes and expressed them with the help of symbols in their daily routine. Symbols of freemasons had close ties with the past and gave them, on the one hand, a visible instrument, such as rituals and ideas to sense the transcendental, and on the other, intense gnostic aspirations. Freemasons put in a great amount of effort to improve themselves and to create their identity with the help of myths and symbols. It traces its origins to the biblical builders of King Solomon’s Temple, the posterity of the Templar Knights, and associations of the medieval craft guilds, which were also symbolical and became their link not only to each other but also to the secular world. In this work we analysed codified masonic symbols used in their rituals. The subject of our research is the universal Masonic idea and its aspects through the symbols in the daily life of the freemasons in Vilnius. Thanks to freemasons’ signets, we could find continuity, reception, and transformation of universal masonic ideas in the Lithuanian freemasonry and national characteristics of lodges. Taking everything into account, our article shows how the universal idea of freemasonry spread among Lithuanian freemasonry, and which forms and meanings it incorporated in its symbols. The objective of this research is to find a universal Masonic idea throughout their visual and oral symbols and see its impact on the daily life of the masons in Vilnius. Keywords: Freemasonry, Bible, lodge, symbols, rituals, freemasons’ signets.

“Ambiguist” Statesmanship

Worldview ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
pp. 7-8
Author(s):  
Will Herberg
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Fixed Points ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Actual Situation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Rational Mind ◽  
The One

John Courtney Murray's writing cannot fail to be profound and instructive, and I have profited greatly from it in the course of the past decade. But I must confess that his article, "Morality and Foreign Policy" (Worldview, May), leaves me in a strange confusion of mixed feelings. On the one hand, I can sympathize with what I might call the historical intention of the natural law philosophy he espouses, which I take to be the effort to establish enduring structures of meaning and value to serve as fixed points of moral decision in the complexities of the actual situation. On the other hand, I am rather put off by the calm assurance he exhibits when he deals with these matters, as though everything were at bottom unequivocally rational and unequivocally accessible to the rational mind. And I am really distressed at what seems to 3ie to be his woefully inadequate appreciation of the position of the "ambiguists," among whom I cannot deny I count myself.

Benson and Miller in Perspective

1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 242-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Applied Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Stock Of Knowledge

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.

The Origins of Domestic Sheep and Goats: a Reconsideration in the Light of the Fossil Evidence

1969 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 368-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Payne
Keyword(s):  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Present Situation ◽  
Wild Relatives ◽  
The Other ◽  
Domestic Sheep ◽  
Sheep And Goats ◽  
Animal Domestication ◽  
The Past ◽  
The One ◽  
And Control

In recent discussions of the origins and process of animal domestication (Reed, 1961, Zeuner, 1963), both authors rely on two kinds of evidence: on the one hand, the present distributions and characteristics of the different breeds of whatever animal is being discussed, together with its feral and wild relatives, and, on the other hand, the past record, given by literary and pictorial sources and the bones from archaeological and geological sites. Increased recognition of the limitations of the past record, whether in the accuracy of the information it appears to give (as in the case of pictorial sources), or in the certainty of the deductions we are at present capable of drawing from it (this applies especially to the osteological record), has led these authors to argue mainly from the present situation, using the past record to confirm or amplify the existing picture.Arguing from the present, many hypotheses about the origins and process of domestication are available. The only test we have, when attempting to choose between these, lies in the direct evidence of the past record. The past record, it is freely admitted, is very fragmentary: the information provided by the present situation is more exact, ranges over a much wider field, and is more open to test and control. Nevertheless, the past record, however imperfect it is, is the only direct evidence we have about the process of domestication.

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