Colonization has traditionally been studied as a monological and definitive period. This article seeks to problematize its analysis by means of the so-called ‘philosophy of desire’ and ‘rhizomatic thinking’, enriching them, in methodological terms, by the Actor-Network-Theory. In this vein, an alternative explanation of the colonial regime is offered by emphasizing how it assembled several worlds—Indigenous and Europeans—guided by a desiring-production that put originary accumulation before anything else; a standpoint that also enables a discussion about the network of colonial (...) education deployed in the Audiencia de Quito, which can be evidenced by a revision of some actions of the Augustinian order during the sixteenth century. In conclusion, education was deeply related to colonial assemblage that was continuously deterritorializing the ‘New World’ and the indigenous cultures that inhabited it. (shrink)

For decades, nursing as a discipline has tried to establish itself within the socio‐professional and the socio‐political arenas. To date, several theorists have attempted to thoroughly define the essence (ontology) of nursing while others have proposed means (syntax) to achieve this ‘collective’ objective. Considering that this preoccupation, rooted in essentialism, is pervasive in the nursing literature, our claim is that these quests should be criticized because they impede innovative and transdisciplinary approaches to nursing theory. Our criticism includes the perspective supported (...) by the so‐called ‘postmodern nursing theorists’. We argue that the oeuvre of some nursing postmodern scholars is as prescriptive and linear as the ones they critique. Like it was done before, the discourse of these thinkers perpetuates the status quo by excluding alternative forms of knowledge that cross the boundaries of the discipline of nursing. Using the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this paper proposes an alternative way to conceive the development of nursing knowledge, which, we think, could represent an alternative way to explore the discipline of nursing. (shrink)

Exploring long-term educational change, we investigate our re/construction of research methodology as we moved from a positivist framework to working with ideas drawn from Deleuze and Guattari. We reveal our becoming rhizomatic in data analysis in the metamodelling of the richness flowing horizontally through our practices. We tell of our struggles to escape hierarchical thinking and relations researching between the smooth and striated. A space of interactions, conversations and writings created relations between polyphonic voices, leading us to an emergent (...) methodology. Our struggle against hierarchies in data analysis yielded rich educational possibilities for becoming that Deleuzo-Guattarian thinking offers us. (shrink)

Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections is the first book length collection of essays exploring the relations between the work of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson. With contributions by established international scholars from cultural studies, philosophy and theology, Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson examines the articulation between their concepts, methods and modes of doing philosophy and how their thought relates to different disciplines. Organized thematically, each essay examines the section themes in the context of the contrasts, differences and conjunctions--the (...) rhizomatic connections--between their shared concepts. Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson will make a significant impact upon and contribution to the scholarship on these philosophers, challenging many of the preconceptions, the "images of thought," through which they are all too often read and interpreted. (shrink)

Recent work in the theoretical humanities has given increasing importance to what has been termed posthumanism and hypertextuality. For many within the humanities, posthumanism and hypertextuality have become accessible as a result of studies which have interdisciplinarily explored concerns that have evident implications for the humanities interest in aesthetics, ethics, politics, mind, cognition, identity, subjectivity and language. The work of Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Elaine Graham, George P. Landow and others has been at the forefront of these initiatives. What (...) perhaps needs to be looked at now is the extent to which the interdisciplinary work that has been built up in this new field (which has been called new cultural theory) is a developing episteme, and how it might affect future ways of writing and thinking in the humanities. The paper proposed attempts to explore how new cultural theory, and especially the digitalist strain in the theoretical humanities, might profitably explore ways of integrating certain key concepts and practices in posthumanism and hypertextuality. Familiarity with the literature of both discourses reveals that while the two have obvious affinities, these have not always been approached in ways which would allow the conceptuality of one field to productively merge with those of the other. What seems to be particularly pressing is some speculation on how thought itself is reshaped through interaction with the new modalities of writing and language, and through attunedness to the potentialities of new posthuman ways of being. For this reason, some reflections will be offered on the implications of present and futuristic practices involving Internet culture and cyborg studies. (shrink)

This paper offers a rhizomatic reading of Foucault scholarship in anglophone educational research. It delineates unique parameters of an educational field, the conditions of receptivity for Foucault's work, and identifies three temporary plateau-formations that have erupted in educational research. Indebted to (non-formulaic) principles of connectivity and heterogeneity, multiplicity, and asignifying ruptures the analysis brings to notice the recombinatorial attributes of the discipline of education through attention to what is encamped and what seeps in debates over his work.

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 182-207, Autumn 2021.

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 182-207, Autumn 2021.

Adopting Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's formulations of the rhizome, this article will examine a dynamic that lies between the film Japón's (Carlos Reygadas, 2002) vernacular specificities, European modernist aesthetics and cosmopolitan spectatorship. The article aims to reveal that Japón, along with other contemporary slow films from around the world, has the potential to reify a deterritorialising and reterritorialising encounter that rethinks a Eurocentric genealogical reading of world cinema and challenges a capitalist code of filmmaking.

This paper analyses and examines Deleuze’s Foucault as a means of investigating intellectual resources for a new sociology – one that, in Foucault’s name, is neither foundationalist nor rep...

I appropriate Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the refrain for a feminist analysis of the girl because it offers more insight into the ways girls construct themselves as performative networks than the death-by-culture or at-risk model preferred by such feminists as Jean Kilbourne, Carol Gilligan, and even Susan Bordo. I proffer that it costs women everything to practise a politics of difference that is by definition reactionary, a reaction to the cultural refusal of leaky gendered bodies that must be overcome. (...) Girl is mapped through such alternations as powerful aggregates of the tremulous, roaming emissions of monstrous particles most desired and desirous. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 217-219.

The past four decades and more have been dominated by the rise of neoliberalism, globalization of economic activities, financialization and the pursuit of profits. There have been major waves of pr...

Viewed from some postcolonial/postmodern perspectives by employing mostly the micropolitics of Homi Bhabha’s and Gilles Deleuze (and other theorists who hold similar conceptions), whose major common interest lies in dismantling the myth of establishing an imagined community by retrieving a shared national history/culture and assuming ethnic purity, this paper seeks to explore the paradoxical aspects of Taiwan’s quest in her decolonizing progress for a “collective” national/cultural identity. Besides, this paper compares mostly Taiwan’s decolonization process with South Korea’s because of their (...) similarity in territorial division due to some civil wars and the intervention of external powers (e.g., the former Soviet Union and U.S.A.). By so doing, this paper aims to propose some solution to Taiwanese’s dilemma in constructing a “collective” national /cultural identity. (shrink)

Currently, global society is delicately poised on a civilisational threshold similar to that of the feudal era. This is a time when outmoded institutions, values, and systems of thought and their associated dogmas are ripe for transcendence by more relevant systems of organization and knowledge (Davidson, 2000). The foundations of the modern era (including modern educational institutions) are under sharp scrutiny; the fragmentation of nature, society and self is evidence of the cracks in the foundations. In times of crises old (...) questions often come to the fore. For example, as environmental problems reach unprecedented levels the perennial existential question of how we should live is emerging once more. So too are educational questions such as what and how we should learn. But, times of crises also present new opportunities, create fresh imaginings and alternative meanings, metaphors and languages.In this paper I wish to appraise sustainability (and its epithets such as development) as a new discourse that emerged in the late 20th century in response to the psycho-socio-environmental crises of the time. I shall also examine the (in)capacity of disciplinary knowledge and traditional scholarship to respond to the complex and pressing problems of contemporary society. Finally, I will critically discuss the role that new modes of knowledge production, an expanded view of scholarship and alternative metaphors might play in (re)imagining the university's role in sustainability education. (shrink)

This essay enacts a philosophy of science education inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's figurations of rhizomatic and nomadic thought. It imagines rhizomes shaking the tree of modern Western science and science education by destabilising arborescent conceptions of knowledge as hierarchically articulated branches of a central stem or trunk rooted in firm foundations, and explores how becoming nomadic might liberate science educators from the sedentary judgmental positions that serve as the nodal points of Western academic science education theorising. (...) This is demonstrated by commencing two rhizomatic textual assemblages that generate questions, provocations and challenges to dominant discourses and assumptions of contemporary science education. The first of these addresses cultural representations of Sir Isaac Newton and the second makes multiple, hybrid connections among the parasites, mosquitoes, humans, technologies and socio‐technical relations signified by malaria. (shrink)

Critical posthumanism as a philosophical, antifascist nonhierarchical imagination for nursing offers a liberatory passageway forward amidst environmental collapse, an epic pandemic, global authoritarianism, extreme health and wealth disparities, over‐reliance on technology and empirics, and unjust societal systems based in whiteness. Drawing upon philosophical and theoretical works from Black and Indigenous scholars, Haraway's idea of the Chthulucene, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thought, and Kaba's abolitionist organizing among others, we as activist nurse scholars continue the speculative discussion outlined in prior papers. (...) Here we further imagine how we can engage a radical philosophical mission of care for all beings human and non, walking and working alongside the people and communities nurses accompany, connected as we are on this dystopian celestial orb. Discussion is centred on critical analyses of traditional justice framing in nursing, and on the praxis possibilities found within rhizomatic thought, making kin, and just episteme while knitting filaments of nursing theory and history, humming song lyrics from collective memory, and critically dismantling received wisdoms to stumble toward a more emancipatory present future. (shrink)

This paper takes Deleuze's idea ‘to green’ as a qualitative predicate which becomes a rhizomatic event where Jesper Hoffmeyer's ‘plant being’ contemplates through waves and rhythms, hence affects and percepts. The article then brings forward an intertwined group of Chinese ideograms which are designed with plant-radicals, making up an ecosystem towards the establishment of a new Chinese ecocriticism under the banner of biosemiotics. Such an effort will, hopefully, widen the scope and dimension of the new field of environmental humanities, (...) with an emphasis on the scenario of affective attuning to the agency of vegetal life. The main purpose is to put Deleuze and Guattari's form-event assemblage within the stratification of regimes of signs in A Thousand Plateaus, in order to establish a ‘natureculture’ continuity not only between science and art, but also between a Western rethinking of language/culture and a Chinese ecosystem/ecocriticism. (shrink)

The screen is not a pre established object: it becomes a screen—and that screen—when it interacts with a group of elements and relates to a set of practices that produce it as a screen. In this process of becoming screen, a crucial step is played by the space in which the screen is located and where spectators gather. The confluence of screen and space changes our perception of both: the screen displays the situatedness of its action, and the space its (...) nature of medium. The landscape becomes a screenscape, in which individuals access images through which they negotiate with reality and others. Eventually, the insistence on becoming screen highlights the role of contingency and conjuncture in the process of mediation: screenscapes emerge according opportunities, conflicts, and potentialities. Hence a media archeology that, far from being linear and teleological, follows unpredicted paths and creates surprising links—a rhizomatic media archeology. (shrink)

Robots equipped with artificial intelligence pose a huge challenge to traditional ontological differentiations between the spheres of the human and the non-human. Drawing mainly from neo-animistic and perspectivist approaches in anthropology and science and technology studies, the paper explores the potential of new forms of interconnectedness and rhizomatic entanglements between humans and a world transcending the boundaries between species and material spheres. We argue that intelligent robots meet virtually all criteria Western biology came up with to define ‘life’ and (...) that it ultimately makes sense to recognize them as a new species that is part of our social universe. Contrasting dualistic concepts of man and nature with a monistic approach, we show that traditional properties of life (agency, self-replication, etc.) may apply to artefacts and that, once we accept the idea that social relationships are ultimately open connections to matter of any kind, the seemingly strict boundaries between species and material spheres can no longer be sustained. Instead, we propose to include ‘matter’ and ideas into the sphere of the social as agents in their own right to form a _relational ontology of multi-species assemblages_ (ROMA). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism ed. by Janae Sholtz and Cheri CarrJami Weinstein (bio)Janae Sholtz and Cheri Carr, eds., Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc., 2019, 304 pp., ISBN 978-1-3500-8042-3Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism is a timely, ambitious, and wonderfully diverse collection of essays that aims to forge a new feminist methodology. Described as a “delirium” with the potential to “unleash new (...) ideas, new desires, and new imaginings” (Sholtz and Carr, 1), the editors adopt Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis as the basis for this methodology. They argue that this juxtaposition of feminist theory and schizoanalysis might synthesize and advance research on notions like becoming-woman, rhizomatics, deterritorialization, assemblage, immanence, and material vitalism (2) that have propelled feminist work on Deleuze and Guattari over the last several decades. Moreover, in the volume’s critical reevaluation of schizoanalysis, it strives to reimagine “the philosophical, ethical, aesthetic, and political” (1) by incorporating the evolution of feminist thought since Deleuze and Guattari’s time. The volume is, indeed, important reading for feminist continental philosophers in search of fruitful applications of Deleuzo-Guattarian thought to a wide, intersectional diversity of feminist theory.Citing Buchanan and Colebrook’s Deleuze and Feminist Theory (2000) as the origin of a productive and less skeptical feminist engagement with their work, the volume aims to advance a new generation of feminist Deleuzo-Guattarian thought that departs from a radically heterogeneous, schizoanalytic foundation [End Page 192] asking, “what can philosophical concepts do?” (2). The editors also mention the recent uptake of schizoanalysis as a methodology by reference to the Schizoanalytic Applications series in which the volume is published. There, its application “to contemporary issues and uses in critically oriented and socially engaged philosophical approaches” (4) is explored in a variety of otherwise targeted collections. They suggest that the relevance of schizoanalytic methodology “to feminist theory can be similarly situated in providing a new lens for critical and social engagement,” which the volume explores under the guise of discovering what this “new encounter” between feminism and schizoanalysis “might yield” (4). Thus, the collection is a dual-pronged, dynamic investigation, where one trajectory investigates the potentials for forging a feminist schizoanalytic framework and the other considers the ways that feminism might nuance or reshape the contours of schizoanalysis that were established across Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative works (1).Furthermore, the editors cite the publication of Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies (2013) as additional inspiration. And it is, indeed, in part from Guattari’s visionary work that the joint project with Deleuze—including the articulations of schizoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus, Kafka, and A Thousand Plateaus— came into being (see: Guattari 2006). As Stephane Nadaud explains, their collaboration was designed to “counter... despotic, solitary enunciation—with their own collective one,” which transcends the Cartesian “unity of our ego—the famous I that thinks, and therefore... the cogito” (Guattari 2006, 19). It is, thus, curious that the volume’s title omits Guattari’s name (though other books in the series include it) and that contributors make scarce reference to his individual work. For, it is the very process of their collaboration, which entails their essential duality and the schizoanalytic becoming-imperceptible of their respective individualities, that becomes an archetype for schizoanalytic praxis.The aforementioned delirium, which is at the heart of schizoanalysis, originates from the split or break implied by the “schizo,” meaning that schizoanalysis seeks to locate then mobilize these breaks toward the creation of delirious, impersonal subjectivities. Merging desire and delirium, which he considers “in a deep sense” indistinguishable, Deleuze emphasizes that “desire-delirium is by its nature a libidinal investment of an entire historical milieu, of an entire social environment” (2004, 275). The schizoanalysis process, according to the editors, thus aspires to be a liberatory short-circuit of the rigidly enclosed “Oedipal constraints on the unconscious,” which, in turn, decouples “the unconscious libidinal investment[s]... from the preconscious investments of class and interest” (Shultz and Carr, 4). This echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s well-known invocation: “Destroy, destroy. The task of schizoanalysis goes by way of destruction— a whole scouring of the unconscious, a... (shrink)

Clearly in contrast to the sociosymbolic approaches that underlie the positions of Butler or Derrida, this article delves into a materialist and machinic reading of the ontology of Deleuze and Guattari. This ontology is the basis of a posthumanist conception that allows to join political philosophy, technology and biology understood as complex rhizomatic systems. From this point of view, we propose to construct an antagonistic posthumanist politics that is an alternative to the pluriversal ethics defended by Braidotti. We believe (...) that the latter maintains an excessively liberal position that prioritizes inclusion as a new form of consensus in the face of conflict. (shrink)

This article supports the thesis that the rejection of the analytic/Continental distinction is not possible with an analytic point of view, and grounds the possibility of authentic philosophy within the reasons for the existence of contemporary Continental philosophy. After the presentation of the problem, in the first part, the reasons why classical philosophy was experienced as a way of life in ancient Greece is explained and associated with the act of ‘parrhesia’. In the second part, the rise of the analytic/Continental (...) distinction and the dogmas of reductionism and scientism are shed light on with reference to the texts of some pioneering analytic philosophers. Afterwards, the problem of hegemony in the Anglophone world is pointed out and the position of Continental philosophy is reconsidered under the conceptualization major and minor philosophy. Finally, contemporary Continental philosophy is defined as ‘authentic philosophy’ due to the rhizomatic connections it establishes both in itself & at an interdisciplinary level. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Complicating, Considering, and Connecting Music Education by Lauren Kapalka RichermeNasim NiknafsLauren Kapalka Richerme, Complicating, Considering, and Connecting Music Education (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020)Laurern Kapalka Richerme courageously engages with some of the significant concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in a timely bounded volume, Complicating, Considering, and Connecting Music Education. Through this colossal endeavor, though not the first time a music education scholar deeply explores Deleuzian (...) concepts and theoretical analyses, Richerme provides a fresh perspective on his oeuvre within the field and paves the way for more engaged scholarly exploration on the roles and responsibilities of music education.1Considering the vanity in saying what one sees, as “what we see never resides in what we say,”2 any review of works related to Deleuzian concepts is more of an arborescent endeavor than a rhizomatic one. Consequently, the current review of Richerme’s book may also refute and go against Deleuze and Guattari’s most salient arguments. However, I would like to specifically elaborate on Richerme’s treatment of time; a much welcomed and overlooked aspect of education that Richerme has appositely and strongly delivered. “Music education is not a stagnant ‘what’ but a temporal ‘when’... While the question, ‘What is music education?’ solidifies music education into an immobile identity, asking ‘When is music education?’ emphasizes the differing, individually constructed nature of [End Page 202] educational experiences.”3 Not necessarily an original proposition to treat music education as a process rather than a product, a journey rather than a destination, a meandering rather than walking on a straight line, a desired path rather than a pre-constructed road, Richerme’s angle of this conversation takes on an entirely new path. Rather than solving the problem, as the problem is one’s music education, she elegantly modifies the question: “When is music education?”4 Richerme redirects the reader’s attention from the “spatial turn” in which the field has been engrossed to a temporal one, and from a totalizing music education to a totality of music education:5 “My voice cannot be ‘lost’ or ‘found,’ only silenced or embraced—restrained or encouraged to grow. It will always exist in an uncertain middle, differing day after day.”6Written in eight chapters with two bookending chapters with the same title, “Rhizomatic Journeying,” while the middle chapter re-considers considering and the penultimate chapter discusses the when in music education, Richerme demands the reader to attend to not only the book’s content but the poetic delivery of its prose. One could even recite the sentences and feel the elevation. Richerme’s unique voice is laudable for its humility of approach and candid pronouncements of mistakes made along the way of becoming-toward7 music educator. When reading, I felt I was a fellow traveler crossing paths with her while she shared some of her moments with me. She and I were the Nighthawks of Edward Hopper’s painting. Richerme was there to tell her story and I was there to silently listen; “the story is told and untold. Then retold.”8 And it is in this retelling that I would like to situate this review.This volume is first and foremost an ode to music education. Richerme has a command of the music education literature which manifests itself in the myriad examples she explores. She does not claim to portray novel ideas but crossing paths with other scholars in music education concerning not only Deleuzian concepts but ethical matters of education: “deeming something ‘good for’ is not the same as finding it ‘good’ in the ethical sense.”9 She does not disagree with scholars, perhaps following Deleuzian footsteps, but complements them; an exercise in nuance and scholarly practice not always historically prevalent in the field.However, this practical side of the book that attempts to situate Deleuzian concepts within music education are brought forth at the expense of a deeper level of theoretical analysis of and engagement with their comprehensively theorized concepts such as becoming, striated space, immanence, refrain, and deterritorialization. At times, it feels as though these concepts have been magiccarpeted rather than integrated within music education situations. This volume comes across, marvellously... (shrink)

In early modern theories of ‘proper’ style, ambiguously, difficulty could convey a sense of excellence on one hand (of national belonging, imperial ambition or manly ‘virility’) while also being deployed to denigrate unseemly (too feminine or foreign) speech. Difficulty erupts precisely in the points of friction: when boundaries around ablebodymindedness are drawn or when the available forms of expression are insufficient. Instead of eradicating difficulty altogether, I sift through early modern French, English and Italian writing on rhetoric to make a (...) case for paying closer attention to difficulty, lingering with it, and seeing what these friction points ultimately reveal. The contemporary concept of ‘disability gain’ posits disability not as a defect to be remedied, erased or cured, but rather as a mode of being in the world that allows for innovation, creativity and even added affects, resources or alternative epistemologies. Instead of considering, in the pedagogical domain, how to construct conceptual ‘on-ramps’ for simplifying difficulty, what would we gain by leaning into the unclear, uncertain and potentially joyful ‘other’ forms of communication itself, such as dysfluency, stuttering or Remi Yergeau’s concept of the rhizomatic neuroqueer? (shrink)

This essay explores the narratives of Claudio Magris and Amin Maalouf as a literature of identity, memory and testimony that seeks to foster social justice, dialogue and inclusivity in twenty-first-century Europe and the Mediterranean. In On Identity (Les Identités meurtrières, 1998) Maalouf investigates individual and collective identities, their elusive and treacherous dynamics, through a reflection that encompasses the Levant, the north-south Mediterranean divide and its endless permutations. Similarly, Magris’s fictional characters occupy liminal worlds in which identities contaminate, overlap, and often (...) dissolve, while exclusivist belonging reveals itself as a deceptive chimera. In Blindly (Alla cieca, 2006), Magris explores the legacy of twentieth-century destructive identitarian myths and presents an alternative history that derives from inhabiting alterity, in a process that makes his characters privileged interpreters of the past, often brothers and sisters of the subversive castaways of history. Maalouf’s Balthasar’s Odyssey (Le Périple de Baldassare, 2000) spans the Middle East and Europe and scrutinizes their respective fault lines and connective tissues that solicit transcultural and composite approaches to identity. Balthasar records his permanent alterity by unceasingly questioning and adapting his own perception of the self in an ever-changing world, at a time of impending catastrophe. From the vantage point of Mitteleuropa, Mediterranean Europe, and the Levant, considered not as independent geopolitical entities, but as interconnected, rhizomatic geopolitical networks, the works of Maalouf and Magris emphasize the need to give voice to “other” accounts of history, to question our identitarian assumptions and to nurture the European project, a fragile, but irreplaceable possibility for a shared future. (shrink)

This book explores the current forms of social science theorization starting from some federative themes: Agency, Anthropocene, Coloniality, Intersectionality, Othering, Singularization, Technoscience and Uncertainty. The book proposes a reconstruction of contemporary social theory starting from some thematic issues rather than starting from authors or schools of thought. It emphasizes the usefulness of a rhizomatic way of thinking that recognizes the importance of interconnections, heterogeneity and multiplicity in understanding the complexity of global societies. Focusing on federative themes, it highlights some (...) heuristic and conceptual tools that intersect and intertwine in different themes, returning a complex toolbox for the social sciences, adaptable to different contexts and situations, enriched by voices and theoretical perspectives deriving from reflections on the social that the modern and Eurocentric perspective has tended to marginalize. The book is intended for an academic audience interested in social theory. It is also intended for students from a wide range of disciplines undertaking social science studies. (shrink)

This text is the result of bibliographical research, of a philosophical nature, supported by the records of the philosophy of difference and/or multiplicity developed by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Our intention is to situate how philosophy, as well as art and science, are defined by the creative power, or by the demand to create a new thought, as opposed to representational thinking and recognition. We will highlight the specificity of philosophical activity and its primary task as the (...) creation of concepts and we will point out elements of a pedagogy of the concept. Through it and territorialization and deterritorialization movements, we carried out a thought exercise addressing issues related to the contemporary university, opposing two images of knowledge, namely, the arboreal and the rhizomatic; we also propose the concept of a smaller university as a bulwark of resistance. (shrink)

In order to understand how Deleuze's method of dramatization is ‘not privileging mankind in any way’, this article turns to the figure of the marionette as it is discreetly, but consistently, developed thorough Deleuze's books. Inspired by Kleist's On the Marionette Theatre, this marionette figure claims for a rhizomatic approach to the subject, defined by the lines it draws into space and exercising its freedom in the present of Aion through spatio-temporal dynamisms similar to those of Leibniz's monads. The (...) strange freedom developed by marionettes also leads to an examination of Nietzsche's ‘eternal return’, which is at the core of Deleuze's elaboration of the method of dramatization. Combining Nietzsche's eternal return with the characteristics of Deleuzian marionettes then requires us to revisit the famous concept of ‘becoming’: becomings are selective, both methodologically and ontologically. (shrink)

This essay enacts a philosophy of science education inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's figurations of rhizomatic and nomadic thought. It imagines rhizomes shaking the tree of modern Western science and science education by destabilising arborescent conceptions of knowledge as hierarchically articulated branches of a central stem or trunk rooted in firm foundations, and explores how becoming nomadic might liberate science educators from the sedentary judgmental positions that serve as the nodal points of Western academic science education theorising. (...) This is demonstrated by commencing two rhizomatic textual assemblages that generate questions, provocations and challenges to dominant discourses and assumptions of contemporary science education. The first of these addresses cultural representations of Sir Isaac Newton and the second makes multiple, hybrid connections among the parasites, mosquitoes, humans, technologies and socio‐technical relations signified by malaria. (shrink)

Contemporary capitalism is in effect, if not in intent, Deleuzian. As a network of networks, it is rhizomatic, flexible, chaosmotic, evolving, expanding. In the negativist spirit that characterizes the work of the Frankfurt School, this article shows via an analysis of the goverment of the self, the commodification of culture and the modification of nature, how contemporary capitalism does colonize not only the life-world but also life itself.

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

Introduction. The article examines the role of youth culture (in particular, counterculture and subculture) in reformatting the modern sociocultural space. As long ago asin the 1970s. the researchers pointed out that young people, showing their active position, change the realities of the socio-cultural space in which their parents lived. The research is based on the materials of the graffiti and street art subculture, as an informal artistic practice. The graffiti subculture emerged among African American teenagers in the 1970s in New (...) York City. The first label that this subculture has been endowed with by society and city authorities is vandalism. However, in the late 1970s early 1980s graffiti is involved in the sphere of the art world institutions activities (private galleries) and becomes in demand among collectors. Street art emerges under its influence. The aim of the study is to reveal due to what characteristics of the socio-cultural space the transition from deviation (vandal practice) to the asserting norm became possible. Methods. The methodological basis of the research is the theory of generations by K. Mannheim and his concept of «fresh contact», which indicates the rethinking of the previously assimilated sociocultural experience by the subjects of culture. Another methodological basis is the concept of rhizome, introduced into scientific circulation by the philosophers J. Deleuze and F. Guattari. Scientific novelty of the research. It is shown how the rhizomatic principle of organizing culture is realized during the transition of youth practice from the space of deviant, in accordance with social norms, actions into the institutionalized space of the art world. Results. Using the example of the metamorphosis that the youth subculture of graffiti underwent in the late 20th — early 21st centuries, the author shows how the boundaries between norm and deviation are shifting in modern society. Conclusions. The rhizom principle, clearly manifested in the organization of the space of postmodern culture, allows graffiti and street art to make the above transition. The fall of the great narrative in the art world leads to the loosening of hierarchies and creates an opportunity for the integration of once marginal phenomena into the space of official art. K. Mannheim’s concept of «fresh contact» is effective in the study of postmodern culture. (shrink)

Introduction: Cartographies in becoming -- The happy depression -- Integrated world capitalism -- Planetary psychopathia -- Postmediatic affect -- User's manual-- Deleuze and the rhizomatic machine -- Why is anti-Oedipus the book of the '68 movement? -- Kafka, hypertext, and assemblages -- The tantric egg -- Chaosmosis -- The provisional eternity of friendship.

This article brings Édouard Glissant's theory of creolization into critical conversation with Luce Irigaray's sexuate difference theory and suggests creolization as a process capable of reconfiguring place and origin. Such a creolized conception, the article suggests, fissures narratives of legitimacy, possession, and lawful order, pseudo-claims utilized to dismiss antiracist protests. The article traces Irigaray's critique of woman as place and origin with her conception of the interval. It examines how Glissant's analysis of the womb-abyss clarifies and strategically obscures racialization as (...) an ongoing lacuna in Western thought. By deploying a rhizomatic network of relayed traces, the essay examines Glissantian notions of chaos, trembling, and detour to articulate sociopolitical movements that reveal and undermine the sexual economy of the neo-Plantation. Both thinkers, the author suggests, bring together place, origin, and movement to construct two radically different but strategically valuable theories that have yet to be put in a sustained, critical conversation. By positioning each theorist within their own framework, discourse, and socio-ethical concerns, the author offers ways that creolization and sexuate difference theory clarify issues contemporary American feminism tends to gesture toward as “intersectional” issues of gender, sex, and race. (shrink)

The earth is the archetypal image of the origin of humanity, but throughout the history of Western culture it has given way to other, more heavenly allegories. Enlightenment as a paradigm of knowledge consolidated itself in Western philosophical thought in a very convincing way as a production of meanings. Through this rereading of the first Greek metaphysics, thought gradually distanced itself from its materiality, from its humanity, from the possibility of admiring the concrete world, getting closer and closer to the (...) need to create abstract objects, which, as ethical limits, political, aesthetic and epistemological, we end up meeting again in our lives. Visibility seems to be the basis of a Western mental habitus: recognition, officiality, legitimacy and certainty become visible signs with which we compare and validate our own experiences. The earth, as a less transparent element, with greater ability to hide, occult, encrypt represents, however, an image that is better suited to the discussion plan proposed in this text. The relationship with reality, in terms of visibility and invisibility, requires a new perception of the world: the underlying structure no longer assumes a transcendent level, but is understood as a plane of immanence, in which meaning is interior, produced by compositions; an amalgam of networks that intertwine in an imperceptible, invisible underground plane. What we propose here is not a vertical perspective, but a horizontal one like the ground. It is from this earthly thought that we want to reflect on what happens in philosophy and childhood; in philosophy with childhood and in the childhood of philosophy. In the present attempt of an ecophilosophy of education, the discussion plan requires a deviation from the guiding images with which we learn to do research. The intention of the following investigation is to look for another type of map: a kind of subterranean cartography, which pays attention not to what we can see, which has well-defined names and categories, but to what is hidden and inhabits a plane that is muddy, earthly, indistinguishable and absolutely alive. According to the Lipmanian model of Philosophy for Children, the subterranean and rhizomatic processes of the research community will be examined, comparing them to other collective movements that characterize the vegetable communities of plants that inhabit the natural world. Finally, three concepts considered relevant to escape the limits found in some contemporary pedagogical postures will be illustrated, suggesting other paths in the relationship between philosophy, childhood and education: reciprocity, passivity and invisibility. (shrink)