Diagrammatic Agency Versus Aesthetic Regime of Contemporary Art: Ernesto Neto's Anti-Leviathan

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Alliez
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Jacques Rancière ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Politics Of The Body ◽  
The Aesthetic

Ernesto Neto's installation at the Panthéon in Paris, Leviathan Toth (2006), brings us into a semiotics of intensities that does not belong to the ‘aesthetic regime’ as described by Jacques Rancière but rather to a Diagrammatic Agency of Contemporary Art. In this case study, the latter is constructed after Deleuze and Guattari – from a politics of the Body without Organs critically and clinically identified to a Body without Image.

The Common as Body Without Organs

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (supplement) ◽  
pp. 46-63
Author(s):  
Vidar Thorsteinsson
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Fundamental Importance ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Conceptual Apparatus ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Social Factory ◽  
The Common

The paper explores the relation of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's work to that of Deleuze and Guattari. The main focus is on Hardt and Negri's concept of ‘the common’ as developed in their most recent book Commonwealth. It is argued that the common can complement what Nicholas Thoburn terms the ‘minor’ characteristics of Deleuze's political thinking while also surpassing certain limitations posed by Hardt and Negri's own previous emphasis on ‘autonomy-in-production’. With reference to Marx's notion of real subsumption and early workerism's social-factory thesis, the discussion circles around showing how a distinction between capital and the common can provide a basis for what Alberto Toscano calls ‘antagonistic separation’ from capital in a more effective way than can the classical capital–labour distinction. To this end, it is demonstrated how the common might benefit from being understood in light of Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual apparatus, with reference primarily to the ‘body without organs’ of Anti-Oedipus. It is argued that the common as body without organs, now understood as constituting its own ‘social production’ separate from the BwO of capital, can provide a new basis for antagonistic separation from capital. Of fundamental importance is how the common potentially invents a novel regime of qualitative valorisation, distinct from capital's limitation to quantity and scarcity.

‘Man Is Ill Because He Is Badly Constructed’: Artaud, Klossowski and Deleuze in Search for the Earth Inside

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Dolphijn
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Performance

Starting with Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, this article analyses the ways in which Artaud's idea of the body without organs links up with various of his writings on the body and bodily theatre and with Deleuze and Guattari's later development of his ideas. Using Klossowski (or Klossowski's Nietzsche) to explain how the dominance of dialogue equals the dominance of God, I go on to examine how the Son (the facialised body), the Father (Language) and the Holy Spirit (Subjectification), need to be warded off in order to revitalize the body, reuniting it with ‘the earth’ it has been separated from. Artaud's writings on Balinese dancing and the Tarahumaran people pave the way for the new body to appear. Reconstructing the body through bodily practices, through religion and above all through art, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we are introduced not only to new ways of thinking theatre and performance art, but to life itself.

scholarly journals SUBJETIVAÇÕES RIZOMÁTICAS E A IDEIA DE CORPO SEM ÓRGÃOS EM A FÚRIA DO CORPO, DE JOÃO GILBERTO NOLL

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-275
Author(s):  
Francisca Gilmara da Silva Almiro ◽  
Roniê Rodrigues da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The Body ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Brazilian Literature ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
The Way

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.

Aesthetic Revolution and Modern Democracy: Rancière’s Historiography

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel Rockhill
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Account ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Jacques Rancière ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter turns to the work of Jacques Rancière, who has, perhaps more than any other prominent living philosopher, extended the historical and historiographical work of Foucault by proposing an archeology of aesthetics, with a particular concern for its relationship to the history of politics. In doing so, however, he has stalwartly refused to provide a genealogical account of the emergence of aesthetics, which appeared at more or less the same time as modern democracy. This chapter thereby sets as its task a critical reassessment of the genealogical limitations of Rancière’s account of the historical relationship between art and politics. It is in this light that it advances an alternative account of historical causality by examining the variable conjuncture of determinants that contributed to the emergence of what Rancière calls the aesthetic regime of art.

The Wrong Side Out With(out) God: An Autopsy of the Body Without Organs

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 507-532
Author(s):  
Matthew G. Whitlock
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Antonin Artaud ◽  
Lacanian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Wrong Side ◽  
Body Without Organs

While the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of ‘body without organs’ (BwO) is developed alongside their critique of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is also developed alongside their critique of Christianity, most poignantly in the sixth plateau of A Thousand Plateaus. Here Deleuze and Guattari quote Antonin Artaud in order to show how ‘the judgment of God weighs upon and is exercised against the BwO’. In order to understand this relationship between judgement of God and the BwO, this essay explores Deleuze's critiques of Christianity in his earlier works and concludes that the BwO, much like Artaud's own poetry, is developed in contrast to an internalised form of Christianity.

A Breathing Space for Aesthetics and Politics: An Introduction to Jacques Rancière

2014 ◽  
Vol 31 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 5-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikos Papastergiadis
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The Political ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Creative Transformation ◽  
Breathing Space ◽  
Jacques Rancière

Jacques Rancière is one of the central figures in the contemporary debates on aesthetics and politics. This introduction maps the shift of focus in Rancière’s writing from political theory to contemporary art practice and also traces the enduring interest in ideas on equality and creativity. It situates Rancière’s rich body of writing in relation to key theorists such as the philosopher Alain Badiou, art historian Terry Smith and anthropologist George E. Marcus. I argue that Rancière offers a distinctive approach in this broad field by clarifying the specificity of the artist’s task in the production of critical and creative transformation, or what he calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’. In conclusion, I complement Rancière’s invocation to break out of the oppositional paradigm in which the political and aesthetic are usually confined by outlining some further methodological techniques for addressing contemporary art.

scholarly journals An Autoethnography of Fat and Weight Loss: Becoming the Bw0 with Deleuze and Guattari

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie M Sheach Leith
Keyword(s):  
Weight Loss ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Body ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Fat Bodies ◽  
The Biggest Loser ◽  
Political Value

This article experiments with some of the insights provided by the work of Deleuze and Guattari as a move towards deterritorializing fat bodies. This is necessary because in contemporary Western society the fat [female] body is positioned and frequently experienced as lacking in social, cultural and political value and as being in need of surveillance and control, not least by the neo-liberal ‘self’. This article is a response to Deleuze and Guattari's plea to ‘think differently’, in this case about fat and weight loss. The article eschews the paradigmatic form of the traditional academic research paper, adopting a semi autoethnographic approach to present an analysis of my engagement with the Biggest Loser (diet) Club. Thinking through rather than about the body it focuses on embodied experiences of fat and the on-going process of cutting that body down to ‘normal’ size. By utilising two central concepts in Deleuzoguattarian thought – ‘becoming’ and the ‘body – without – organs’ (BwO) - I seek to demonstrate the embodied, theoretical and ethical potential of utilising Deleuze and Guattari's work to explore fat and weight loss and how this might productively serve to deterritorialize contemporary discourses which stigmatise fat bodies.

scholarly journals Philosophy in the Artworld: Some Recent Theories of Contemporary Art

Philosophies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Terry Smith
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Current Regime ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
The World ◽  
Jacques Rancière ◽  
Nestor Garcia Canclini

“The contemporary” is a phrase in frequent use in artworld discourse as a placeholder term for broader, world-picturing concepts such as “the contemporary condition” or “contemporaneity”. Brief references to key texts by philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, and Peter Osborne often tend to suffice as indicating the outer limits of theoretical discussion. In an attempt to add some depth to the discourse, this paper outlines my approach to these questions, then explores in some detail what these three theorists have had to say in recent years about contemporaneity in general and contemporary art in particular, and about the links between both. It also examines key essays by Jean-Luc Nancy, Néstor García Canclini, as well as the artist-theorist Jean-Phillipe Antoine, each of whom have contributed significantly to these debates. The analysis moves from Agamben’s poetic evocation of “contemporariness” as a Nietzschean experience of “untimeliness” in relation to one’s times, through Nancy’s emphasis on art’s constant recursion to its origins, Rancière’s attribution of dissensus to the current regime of art, Osborne’s insistence on contemporary art’s “post-conceptual” character, to Canclini’s preference for a “post-autonomous” art, which captures the world at the point of its coming into being. I conclude by echoing Antoine’s call for artists and others to think historically, to “knit together a specific variety of times”, a task that is especially pressing when presentist immanence strives to encompasses everything.

For Those Who Disagree – Rancière and the Sublime

Sublime Art ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 202-240
Author(s):  
Stephen Zepke
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Philosophy Department ◽  
Jacques Rancière ◽  
The One ◽  
Negative Sense ◽  
The Way

The work of Jacques Rancière is concerned with the sublime, but in a negative sense. He hates it. And as well, he hates the way thinkers such as Deleuze and Lyotard (and in fact them in particular, his colleagues in the Philosophy department at Paris VIII) have constructed both an aesthetics and an ethics from it. And as well, how this sublime aesthetics draws upon a politics (which is also an ontology) of otherness. In fact, he is even going to accuse Derrida of this, although without roilling him up with the problems of the sublime. So Rancière is going to be very useful to us as a critical reflection on those who have gone before, but as well he will because he is the one who speaks most about contemporary art. But his place here is not entirely negative, despite his constant and methodological disagreements. Rancière also offers an aesthetics based upon Kant’s Third Critique, but one that begins from the beautiful rather than the sublime. This will be a useful addition to the aesthetics we have already examined that emerge from Kant’s work, and another possible way to understand its political possibilities.

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