Taking as the focus of enquiry the engagements of Félix Guattari with Marcel Duchamp, namely, those rare passages in Schizoanalytic Cartographies and Chaosmosis, the question of the encounter is posed in the field of the sign, but of a sign ‘destructured’ (as Duchamp du signe), in the sense also that Guattari started by destructuring Lacan (from Psychoanalysis and Transversality to Anti-Oedipus). Introduced by the relationships between Guattari and Foucault to better play in between the early and the late Guattari, Guattari’s (...) key insight into the Bottle Rack readymade as an existential function is critically discussed from a reopening to enunciation through the ‘Duchamp effect’. If the latter seems to privilege language contrary to Guattari’s own semiotics, it is to derail it as a machinic unconscious. Duchamp’s writings on his readymades and other machinations are analysed, with the role of Raymond Roussel for Duchamp (and Deleuze-Guattari via Foucault), as well as the implications of a trans-Duchamp, his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy, as an opening to a machinic alterity undoing and queering gender binarity and phallic centricity, recovering the singularity of the bachelor machine and its rupture of subjectivation. The article shows how it could be transversally returned to the very middle of the Guattarian trajectory. (shrink)

Offers a history of the philosophy of time and a comparison of the ways of conceiving the temporal, concentrating on European philosophy and its impact the connection between time and money in Western civilization.

Critical reception of Marcel Duchamp since the 1970s has tended to elevate him into the very figure of the Artist he sought to attack. One aspect of this domestication has involved neglecting Duchamp’s fin de siècle ‘eroticism’ with its sexual innuendos and double-entendres. Yet this very readymade vulgarity allows us to recover a Duchamp still capable of disrupting the genres of Art and the gendered Artist, by revealing a theory embedded in his work which continually reverses and displaces phallocentrism in (...) a game consisting of the confusion of genders and genres. We argue that Duchamp’s disruption of the discursive typologies of the genre of art can be profitably read through this apparently trivial sexualized wordplay, particularly in the transgender passage into Rrose Sélavy. Reading this aspect of Duchamp after, i.e. within and against, Lacan demonstrates how Duchamp’s singular regime of signs governed by equivocity and indetermination subverts the ‘phallic function’ of the signifier. (shrink)

Within the continuation of the controversy provoked by Alain Badiou’s Deleuze , the article proposes a reading of Saint Paul. The foundation of universalism which follows engages in exploring the political basement of the conflict between the two paradigms of the multiple developed respectively in the philosophies of Deleuze and Badiou. Saint Paul - or the universalism of grace against the materialism of life.

In this article, the diagram is used to chart the movement from Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and engagement with structuralism in the 1960s to Deleuze and Guattari's ethico-aesthetic constructivism of the 1970s and 1980s. This is shown to culminate in a biopolitical critique and decoding of philosophy, which is part of the unfolding of a transdisciplinary research programme where art is seen to come ontologically ahead of philosophy.

If we begin to sense that Deleuze will have been the first to recognize Gabriel Tarde as a kind of «precursor » which he explored in his most untimely actuality, the constitutive character of Tarde’s inspiration for Deleuze has not been closely studied. It seems, however, as if Deleuze’s critique and overcoming of structuralist thought depends upon this reactualisation of Tarde’s work. This will allow us to better understand the extended »forgetting » of’ Tarde, buried for so long under the (...) Durkheimian structural model which has dominated the social and human sciences. (shrink)

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.

English-language translation of a major work by French philosopher Eric Alliez, in which he offers a new perspective on critical problems in modern aesthetics.

Contemporary art was born out of the radicalization of a crisis begun by modern art , concerning the twofold sensible identity of art, which involves both its image-form and its aesthetic-form. This crisis led Matisse and Duchamp to « undo the image » inasmuch as it is defined by Form, in a kind of phenomenology of the visible and the invisible . Matisse responds to this with a vitalist energeticism which brings about an expansive constructivism of color-forces which replaces aesthetics (...) with an aesthesis. Duchamp enacts a constructivism of the signifier, in which nominalism and bachelor machinism abolish all effects of being of the sign-image and thus all aesthetic sign-making of the world. (shrink)

At the Barnes Foundation in 1931, Matisse undertook the painting of a large decorative panel entitled La Danse. Its stakes are considerable: the disqualification of the painting-form and the drawing-genre, in favor of an environmental art infused with a decorative vitalism that redefines the architectural function itself at the deepest level, beyond any question of site-specificity.

Masoch emerging from the Text for a Life-Experiment: what Deleuze delivers to us is a political program, because « there is no other danger but the father’s return. ».

Leviathan-Toth, Ernesto Neto’s anti/counter-installation which could be seen hanging from the vaults of the Panthéon in autumn 2006 does not seek to exploit this national memorial as a space in which to stand as an exhibition. It responds to all of its surrounding factors – physical, aesthetic, political, and metaphysical, to attack the representative art whose constitutive-constitutional role in the republic, according to Hobbes, can be seen in Leviathan’s frontispiece. Setting up a sort of Critique et Clinique of Representation in (...) all senses of the term beginning with the short-circuit between politics and aesthetics, Neto’s operation sets its sights on the expansive dis-organisation of the multitude living under the « democratic » regime of contractual representation of which the Panthéon is the temple. It provides a body for the rhizomatic-bioenergetic perversion of the Image of the State-Machine, of the Form-State, by projecting a new infra and supra-organic type of reality which draws its « energy » from the forces of the multitudo dissoluta whose radical and vital recomposition it advocates. This work or non-work, derived from a Brazilian political-aesthetic constructivism which is undergoing redefinition, can now only take place in the context of a practice of displacement which incorporates and is constituted of the spectator-participant. (shrink)

El Cuerpo sin Órganos tiene que herir. Lo cual significa, para el filósofo, que el CsO desorgan- izará su identidad filosófica. Como tal, el CsO estalla en medio de la obra de Gilles Deleuze y es la marca de una ruptura entre una Lógica del sentido y una Lógica de la sensación, entre una biofilosofía y una biopolítica, contemporánea de los acontecimientos de mayo del 68 y del comienzo de la colaboración de Deleuze con Félix Guattari. Mientras que antes de (...) la ruptura existe una superficie de singularidades móviles que expresa una deleuziana maquinaria estructuralista del sentido, después de dicha ruptura el pensamiento logra su auténtica materialidad en conceptos llenos de vida, conceptos que han sido construidos maquínicamente y que expresan acontecimientos. El pensamiento no es ya inmanente a la vida, sino que se trata de la dimensión vital de la vida que se arroja a lo impensado gracias a la ruptura producida por el CsO. Este arrojarse da lugar a la sensación, entendida como la dimensión tanto estética como política del CsO, que crea nuevas posibilidades para la vida. A la postre, la biopolítica resulta coextensiva tanto del arte como de la filosofía, haciendo válida como a ninguna otra la pregunta de Deleuze y de Guattari: «¿cómo hacerse un cuerpo sin órganos?». (shrink)

In this article, we begin from the assertion that global war does not affirm itself as an imperial ordering power without `opacifying' every regulative idea of peace, which is thereby reduced to the status of a deceptive illusion. `Postmodern' peace, which is absolutely contemporaneous with war, is deduced from war in the guise of the `post-democratic' institution of a permanent state of exception, of a continuation of war by other means, and of a reduction of sovereignty to the imbalance of (...) terror, in accordance with the principle of distinction that opposes friend and enemy. Once war, peace and barbarism interact with no rule other than the common sense of the unworldly squalor, only Combat against War can destroy the sensorial evidence of a false social peace and open on to the construction of a World that is once again possible for the singularities that we are in common. Whence derives the character of social threat that marks out contemporary art when it focuses on the mediatic world-image by putting to work a new transversalist aesthetic paradigm, exposing itself to the tearing asunder of the sensible in the over-exposition of peace to war. This could be art's new address, tracing its difference in a creative machination of affects that can no longer find support in any remembrance of the being of peace. (shrink)

A cross between a Do It Yourself and a primer of political anatomy, ErwinWurm’s « politically incorrect » drawings present, one by one, the sculptures of a present dreamed up by a post-post-minimalist Buster Keaton. Wurm sculpts bodies that are both outlandish and Austrian; there is nothing to prevent us from thinking of both Austria and the outlandish when we look at these drawings produced for Multitudes, together with the photographs that accompany them.

Isabelle Stengers anchors the major stake in Whiteheadian philosophy in the notion of constructivism. In doing so, the relation of this philosophy of becoming — the first anti-substantialist principle of which is stated as `principle of process' — to the ideas of vitalist intuition as the self-expression of the world is announced as eminently problematic. This problematizing opening to Whitehead obliges us to think about the constructivist nature of his concepts because of their irreducibility to the expression of facts of (...) experience since they must necessarily function as a machinic articulation of how things become implied in the `ontological principle' of reason; by the same token, it poses at the heart of the analysis the question of the pragmatic-speculative alterity in Whiteheadian constructivism. (shrink)