From the early 1960s until his death, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote many influential works on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. One of Deleuze's main philosophical projects was a systematic inversion of the traditional relationship between identity and difference. This Deleuzian philosophy of difference is the subject of Jeffrey A. Bell's Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos. Bell argues that Deleuze's efforts to develop a philosophy of difference are best understood by exploring both Deleuze's claim to be a Spinozist, (...) and Nietzsche's claim to have found in Spinoza an important precursor. Beginning with an analysis of these claims, Bell shows how Deleuze extends and transforms concepts at work in Spinoza and Nietzsche to produce a philosophy of difference that promotes and, in fact, exemplifies the notions of dynamic systems and complexity theory. With these concepts at work, Deleuze constructs a philosophical approach that avoids many of the difficulties that linger in other attempts to think about difference. Bell uses close readings of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Whitehead to illustrate how Deleuze's philosophy is successful in this regard and to demonstrate the importance of the historical tradition for Deleuze. Far from being a philosopher who turns his back on what is taken to be a mistaken metaphysical tradition, Bell argues that Deleuze is best understood as a thinker who endeavoured to continue the work of traditional metaphysics and philosophy. (shrink)

Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse explores the roles of stories, figures, dreams, theories, facts, delusions, advertising, institutions, economic arrangements, publishing practices, scientific advances, and politics in twentieth- century technoscience. The book's title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author figure, FemaleMan, encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory rodent, OncoMouse. (...) Haraway sees the world of contemporary technoscience as a drama. Information sciences and life sciences are at the center of the dramatic action. Scenes are set in landscapes where maps of human genetic differences are stored in databases, racialized bodies are reconfigured by morphing for photographs in popular magazines, and transgenic mice important to breast cancer research are patented intellectual property. The actors are many, and not all are human. Beginning with the Modest Witness, the key figure in the Science Revolution, Haraway shows us the trouble lurking in race and gender- marked practices for attesting to matters of fact. In later scenes, Haraway explores the kinship relations among the many cyborg creatures produced in the late twentieth-century--in nuclear research, genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, computer-mediated representational practices, and mutations in biological approaches to "race.". (shrink)

The final work by the author before his death in 1992, Chaosmosis is a radical and challenging work concerned with the reinvention and resingularization of subjectivity. It attempts to embody affective change, the short-circuiting of signification and the proliferation of sense necessary to engage with non-discursive, artistic, poetic and pathic intensities. It includes critical reflections on Lacanian psychoanalysis, structuralism, information theory, postmodernism, and the thought of Heidegger, Bakhtin, Barthes, and others.

Ethics and Representationprovides a critique and overview of contemporary post-structuralist theory. Exploring the Kantian and phenomenological background of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and Irigaray, this book raises some key questions and issues in critical theory. These questions are looked at from a number of angles including the notion of point of view and perspective, the critique of anthropologism from Kant to Deleuze, and the relation between representation and modernity. This is an original contribution to ethical and critical theory which situates poststructuralism (...) in its philosophical background, and in the sustained problematic of the enlightenment. (shrink)

A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a playful and emphatically practical elaboration of the major collaborative work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. When read along with its rigorous textual notes, the book also becomes the richest scholarly treatment of Deleuze's entire philosophical oeuvre available in any language. Finally, the dozens of explicit examples that Brian Massumi furnishes from contemporary artistic, scientific, and popular urban culture make the book an important, perhaps even central text within (...) current debates on postmodern culture and politics.Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the general title for two books published a decade apart. The first, Anti-Oedipus, was a reaction to the events of May/June 1968; it is a critique of "state-happy" Marxism and "school-building" strains of psychoanalysis. The second, A Thousand Plateaus, is an attempt at a positive statement of the sort of nomad philosophy Deleuze and Guattari propose as an alternative to state philosophy.Brian Massumi is Professor of Comparative Literature at McGill University. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s iconic Ecce Homo: maps out the answer by taking the reader on a kind of magical mystery tour ruminating between the paradox. With chapter headings such as ‘Why I am so Wise’ or ‘Why I Write such Good Books’ or ‘Why I am Destiny’, one begins to breathe in the method, the madness, the sheer intelligence of it all. Whatever else may be being said in that text and his others, one thing is certain: a sustained, crucial, well-directed attack (...) on metaphysics – as idealism, dialectical logic, universalism, identity politics, morality and a whole host of other paradigmatic strictures – is necessarily, urgently, launched. Scroll forward more than 100 years since, and, coupled with the profound advances in socio-cultural norms from civil rights to feminism to gender equality, and beyond, as well as the profound advances in physics, from quantum to Higgs Boson; in mathematics from recursive algorithm to fractal imaginaries; in technology and new media from the photography to the digital, from the computer to robotics, from the gun to the stealth bomber – it almost beggars belief that at least in the aesthetic-politico-philosophic arena, one finds a steady crawl, and most recently, more of a electrified sprint, back to metaphysics ‘as a whole’, and more worrying still, to the speculative idealism of Hegel and co. For reasons not entirely clear, there has been a massive group hug toward metaphysics: whether at the level of retrieving it via a return to Hegel or retrieving metaphysics via Heidegger or retrieving it via Hegel or retrieving metaphysics via the newest old version: speculative realism. This chapter sets out to examine critically those approaches and to see how they fare once the erotic, the sensual, and indeed, the networked algorithmic age, is brought to bear. May have to dust off copies of Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy along the way. (shrink)