An interdisciplinary and contemporary response to Irigaray’s work.

This essay argues that important critical and political perspective can be gained on Deleuze's famous essay, ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’ by viewing it as an attempt to move beyond the Sartrean framework of ‘bad faith’. The argument comprises four sections. In section one, I contextualise Deleuze's essay in terms of contrasting readings of Bartleby, from a prior account by Georges Perec, to contemporary accounts indebted to Deleuze, from Hardt and Negri's Empire to Gisèle Berkman's recent L'Effet Bartleby. The argument of (...) this section is that a problematically reductive image of Bartleby has emerged in the wake of Deleuze's essay, but that this can be challenged in favour of a more nuanced and politically significant reading by contextualising the essay as an attempt to overcome bad faith. In section two, I develop this by drawing out the nature and relevance of the threat posed by bad faith through a focus on Sartrean, Deleuzian and Badioucan critiques of Bartleby, before arguing, in section three, that attention to the concept of a ‘logic of presuppositions’ developed in Deleuze's essay shows how bad faith can be overcome. These sections all build towards the fourth and longest section, which draws out the wider political significance of what it means to overcome bad faith. To do so, I pay attention to how logics of presupposition function in Bartleby's story, and consider Deleuze's essay in relation to his work on ‘control societies’ and ‘collective assemblages of enunciation’. (shrink)

Twenty years after his death, Deleuze's thought continues to be mobilised in relation to the most timely and critical problems society faces, foremost amongst which is the Anthropocene. What might the significance of Deleuze and Guattari be in relation to the new and urgent set of concerns that the Anthropocene engenders? Deleuze's work presaged much of the concept of the Anthropocene, not only in his sustained challenges to humanism, anthropocentrism and capitalism, but also through his interest in geology and the (...) philosophy of time. Guattari gave his work an ‘ecosophical’ and ‘cartographical’ dimension and spoke of a ‘mechanosphere’ covering the planet. Together, Deleuze and Guattari advocated a ‘geophilosophy’ which called for a ‘new earth’ along with ‘new peoples’. Not only does the work of Deleuze and Guattari offer a range of useful concepts that can be applied to contemporary global problems such as anthropogenic climate change, peak oil and the exploitation of the nonhuman, but it also models the kind of interdisciplinarity that the epoch of the Anthropocene requires. This special issue of Deleuze Studies engages the many philosophical tools provided by Deleuze and Guattari and their interlocutors in order to critically approach our particularly tense moment in terrestrial history. Simultaneously, it asks how this moment could change the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari are further developed. (shrink)

A mythic symbolic type is a binary-structured, gender-oriented cultural mask. Whoever enters it will never exit and will behave according to the mask’s logic. The article focuses on the men of the semi-commune Little Home trapped in the mask. It will examine this cultural structure’s organization of binary-opposition in a unique kind of intensity, I called “masculine waves.” In the final part, a discussion will be presented in the context of Deleuze’s Becoming and Bloch’s utopia.