‘Transversality’ is a key term in the work of Félix Guattari. As a conceptual and pragmatic motor for the generation of heterogeneity, it extends throughout all of his work, including the writing he undertook with Deleuze. It promotes the rupture and redistribution of hierarchical structures, the mobilisation of operations of deterritorialisation across the social and cultural field, and it gains a ‘chaosmic’ dimension in the later writings. Its ‘origins’, however, are to be found in Guattari's early work at the Clinique de la Borde and in militant Marxist movements in the 1950s and early 1960s. This is an initial and necessarily provisional effort to embed the concept in a social and therapeutic pragmatics and thus counter a debateable tendency towards a dilution or diffusion of transversality in theoretical abstraction, where it risks becoming a synonym for a generalised sense of creative differentiation.
In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari attribute to Leibniz and Raymond Ruyer a vitalism of ` a force that is but does not act'. This is a judicious characterisation of Leibniz's vitalism, but not Ruyer's. In The Fold, Deleuze presents Ruyer as a disciple of Leibniz, but if Leibniz's monads have no doors or windows, Ruyer's are nothing but doors and windows, nothing but liaisons actively forming themselves. For Ruyer, there is only one force, a consciousness-force, matter-form in sustained, non-localisable self-formation. In Deleuze's reading of Leibniz's concept of the vinculum substantiale, Deleuze comes close to presenting a notion of force like that of Ruyer's, in that the vinculum inextricably interfolds monads and bodies, but ultimately the separation of the forces of monads from those of bodies prevails in a fashion incompatible with Ruyer's conception of force. Deleuze and Guattari make use of Ruyer's understanding of consciousness and the brain as the auto-overflight of an absolute surface in their concluding remarks on philosophy and the arts in What Is Philosophy?, but they depart from Ruyer in their characterisation of the relation of force to those two domains, ultimately because they reject Ruyer's advocacy of a universal, goal-directed finalism.
If the development of assemblage theory does not need to be anchored in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as increasingly seems to be the case in the social sciences, then cannot one say that the future of assemblage theory is an illusion? It is an illusion in the sense that it continues to act as though the concept was invented by Deleuze and Guattari, but because it does not feel obligated to draw on their work in its actual operation or development, it cannot lay claim to being authentic. That this does not trouble certain scholars in the social sciences is troubling to me. So in this paper I offer first of all critique of this illusory synthetic version of the assemblage and accompany that with a short case study showing what can be gained by returning to Deleuze and Guattari.
While typically unapologetic in expressing admiration, notably Gilles Deleuze admits his concern one time, in passing, that Gilbert Simondon's thought might hide a pernicious kind of 'disguised moralism', in which the form of the transcendent ('God', 'Man', 'Ideas') lurks, the enemy of the philosophy of immanence. Might there in fact be an ulterior motive in Deleuze's concern? But might this potential critique invite its own reversal? That is, might Deleuze's accusation be in fact a strategy for teasing out what, perhaps, is unrecognisable as such, but structurally essential for how Simondon constructs his onto-epistemological goals? Moreover, might this Simondonian response, unmasked, not only deflect but anticipate a 'critique' like Deleuze's? Extending this question further reveals I believe the implications for Simondon's 'ethics without morality', bringing him closer to Deleuze's interpretation of Spinoza. As a result, Deleuze's 'critique' invites the question: 'What exactly is Spinozan in Simondon's ethics?' Such a question compels our reevaluation of humanism, its underlying prerogatives, if now in light of its consequences, the re-evaluation of poststructuralism: first, because it is predicated on the critique of the humanistic subject and, second, because 'poststructuralism' has come to designate how Simondon's relatedness is determined to Deleuze.
From the point of view of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, Raymond Ruyer's work appears to bear out two distinct tendencies of unequal appeal. On the one hand, Ruyer appears to be an anti-Aristotelian thinker of formation, rejecting any hylomorphic account of the production of reality. However, and notably despite his serious commitment to the work of the sciences of his day, he remains wedded to the ultimately conservative Leibnizian principle of closure. Nowhere is this dichotomy more striking than in his account of human society. The aim of this paper is to show how his positive account of form(ation) finds a significant and convincing extension in Deleuze and Guattari's notion of social surface or socius in Anti-Oedipus.
This article aims to clarify the question of speed and intensity in the thoughts of Simondon and Deleuze, in order to shed light on the recent debates regarding accelerationism and its politics. Instead of starting with speed, we propose to look into the notion of intensity and how it serves as a new ontological ground in Simondon's and Deleuze's philosophy and politics. Simondon mobilises the concept of intensity to criticise hylomorphism and substantialism; Deleuze, taking up Simondon's conceptual framework, repurposes it for his ontology of difference, elevating intensity to the rank of generic concept of being, thus bypassing notions of negativity and individuals as base, in favour of the productive and universal character of difference. In Deleuze, the correlation between intensity and speed is fraught with ambiguities, with each term threatening to subsume the other; this rampant tension becomes explicitly antagonistic when taken up by the diverse strands of contemporary accelerationism, resulting in two extreme cases in the posthuman discourse: either a pure becoming, achieved through destruction, or through abstraction that does away with intensity altogether; or an intensity without movement or speed, that remains a pure jouissance. Both cases appear to stumble over the problem of individuation, if not disindividuation. Hence, we wish to raise the following question: in what way can one think of an accelerationist politics with intensity, or an intensive politics without the fetishisation of speed? We consider this question central to the interrogation of the limits of acceleration and posthuman discourse, thus requiring a new philosophical thought on intensity and speed.
The aim of this paper is to provide a close reading of Deleuze's complex account of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Difference and Repetition. The first part provides a reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle itself, showing why Freud feels the need to develop a transcendental account of repetition. In the second, I show the limitations of Freud's account, drawing on the work of Weismann to argue that Freud's transcendental model mischaracterises repetition. In the third part, I show how Freud's account of the death drive is shadowed by Deleuze's own non-representational transcendental account.
The mathematical model of smooth and striated spaces in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus essentially rests on Riemann's manifold theory and Lautman's account of Riemannian spaces. In this paper I provide a detailed analysis of Lautman's account, arguing, however, that to discern its intricacies, and particularly what I shall call the connectivity problem, it is crucial to consider the fundamental work of Elie Cartan. This allows to address three key problems of Deleuze and Guattari's model: (1) the heterogeneity and homogeneity of spaces, and the local/global duality; (2) the connectivity of spaces and the intrinsic/extrinsic duality; and (3) the translatability of spaces and their concrete mixes. As a result, Lautman's and Cartan's philosophical-mathematical questioning proves decisive to Deleuze and Guattari's appropriation of Riemann's theory, and thus the mathematical model of smooth and striated spaces.
For all their differences, the transcendental philosophies of Kant and Deleuze converge on the need for a principle of the determination of what is given to sensation. This principle, the point of contact between the determined and undetermined, would be a ground of sensation and therefore of all outer experience. For both Kant and Deleuze, this ground can be localised in intensity as the degree of force of the real. But it is Deleuze's unique combination to show that depth, the matrix of intensity, serves as a ground only insofar as it is also an ungrounding.
This paper uses Lawrence Venuti's writings on foreignising translation as a point of departure to examine the relevance of Deleuze's work to the discipline of translation studies. It begins by using Deleuze's earlier work to define translation as a problem of difference, drawing on concepts such as the simulacrum, the Virtual and the Actual, before using ideas from his collaborative works with Guattari, such as the minor and the nomad, to consider more practical aspects in terms of language. It concludes by introducing the concept of the texture of prose as a means to apply these ideas to literary texts.
