This article explores the relationship between Gilles Deleuze's philosophical endeavours and Marxism, with a particular focus on his unfinished work, Grandeur de Marx. Despite the collapse of Soviet socialism, Deleuze acknowledged that his philosophical pursuits were profoundly intertwined with Marxist thought. His insistence on this connection was not a mere expression of regret or an apology for his political leanings. In the 1990s, as neoliberal globalisation spread beyond the United States and Europe, Marxism persisted as a rallying cry for resistance. (...) The ascendancy of global capitalism was not a consequence of Marxism's failure; rather, it was a manifestation of what Marx had presciently predicted in his works. Thus, Deleuze's unfinished project on Marx can be viewed as a response to anti-Marxist reactionism from a distinct vantage point. While several interpretations of Deleuze's unwritten Marx exist, the argument in this essay is that Deleuze attempted to recreate the conditions for Marx's critical analysis by employing communism as an event. (shrink)

This article discusses Kracauer’s analysis of mass ornament in light of Deleuze’s concept of ritournelle. Kracauer was interested in the spectacle of Tiller Girls and found the principle of the capitalist production process in its ornamental formations. Capitalism destroys any natural organisms for its means and excludes any resistance from its effective procedure. This operation necessarily comes along with calculation and mechanisation. All individuals have scaled up statistics charts and scrambled with machines completely. People have turned into masses who are (...) no longer different in form but simple technical objects that can be equally employed at any point of the globe. Kracauer understood mass ornament as the surface-level expression of global capitalism, which revealed its unconscious. He emphasised the ambivalence of mass ornament and a possible line of escape from capitalist rationality through the emptiness of its formal excess. Deleuze’s concept of ritournelle may shed light on a similar question of mass ornament and push its scope beyond Kracauer’s analysis. The two philosophers seem to share the frame of formalism when they deploy their arguments concerning form and depth; however, Deleuze put forward the issue of temporality in his discussion of ritournelle, a crucial question that Kracauer omits. (shrink)

In the South Korean film, The Parasite, the underling family, in an act of desperation, uses deceptive means to infiltrate the rich family. The term parasite refers nominally to the underling family, and their efforts to befriend and inhabit the class territory and social hierarchy of the rich family. How can this be of use for education? To answer this, we ask: what can we learn from Parasite to inform contemporary philosophy of education? Primarily, this experimental piece written from different (...) philosophical viewpoints, suggests that the images, narrative, and social context of the film cannot be read stereotypically. Using a blend of Deleuze and Stiegler ‘cinema-theory’, we present a heuristic perspective on the Parasite from three viewpoints: (1) South Korean society, and how a pedagogy of the parasite helps to understand the dynamics of contemporary philosophy of education in a global context. South Korea is uniquely placed at the cusp and threshold of deterritorializing Western capitalism, given its position next to the only in-tact communist state system; (2) The film shows how theorizing an exceptional notion of time contributes to the overall pedagogy of the parasite. Here, being a parasite is about waiting to attach oneself to a host, yet this waiting is an anxious, perceptive, adherent time, a reciprocal time, and one internally interconnected to that of the host; (3) The ethics of the parasite. The parasite chooses a host from a certain viewpoint before attaching itself and trying to be absorbed into the host. The pedagogy of the parasite suggests a unique ethical treatment of these assimilative processes and allows us to consider cinema as a parasitic means to shake the passive audience out of its stupor when bearing witness to the violence in the film and its own collusion in the trauma and reality of contemporary capitalism. (shrink)

This essay discusses the problem of materialism and its relation to politics through readings of Deleuze’s ontology. It recounts the “hidden tradition” of materialism in an Althusserian sense and brings about the idea of materialist politics by investigating the relationship between Alexius Meinong and Gilles Deleuze.