The contemporary crises of neoliberal economics have given rise to a series of popular uprisings around the world. These revolts have sparked a type of demand that points to an unusual kind of struggle. The so-called ‘struggles of desire’, often led by feminist, indigenous and ecological movements, call for a change in modes of existence. However, a strange paradox of causes and effects emerges. Faced with the apparent inconceivability of a world beyond the tentacles of the capitalist economic rationality, the assemblage of the myriad minority groups mobilising around the world is becoming one of the primary threats to market stability and a growing danger for liberal democracies. In this context, current far-right social and political movements claim to have been called to stand up for the ‘common good’ against the threats of those who, presumably, persevere in the pursuit of their own interests. This article will address the multifaceted nature of the problem in three parts: first, by examining the so-called prevailing political realism; second, by analysing the question of community and the defence of the common good; and, finally, by exploring the emergence of minority becomings that go beyond the apparent fight for recognition of egalitarian rights brought up by contemporary minority movements.
Gilles Deleuze asserts that he made his ‘move into politics’ influenced by three key figures: Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari and Elias Sanbar. This article focuses on the implications of Guattari and Sanbar in this transition. Its hypothesis posits that Deleuze's shift aligns with an anti-colonial approach. The article will explore three episodes: first, in Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari push the clinic to its limits, identifying the process of racialisation through the extrapolation of metropolitan categories onto the colonies, as well as the consequences of Frantz Fanon's notion of the impediment of the unconscious; second, when they reference Samir Amin in A Thousand Plateaus to analyse the transnationalisation of capitalism, breaking down the interplay between minorisation and majorisation movements and considering the implications of colonisation's substitution; finally, the article will examine What is Philosophy?, where Deleuze and Guattari address the process of Europeanisation. Additionally, it discusses his two books Cinema 1 and 2 and cinema classes, alongside his collaborative work with Sanbar, particularly the expression ‘missing people’, which the article connects to Third World cinema and the Palestinian cause.
Vaslav Nijinsky's infamous 1919 St. Moritz recital and his notebooks, published as The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, often are read as symptoms of the dancer's progressive mental illness. At the same time, however, they perform what Nijinsky calls chuvstvo (feeling), a configuration of affects in the Deleuzian sense of the term. Opting for an affective rather than a symptomatic reading of the 1919 recital and Nijinsky's writings, this article adapts key concepts of schizoanalysis (becoming, desiring-machine, body-without-organs) to deconstruct Nijinsky's performance as becoming-intense, while advocating a molecular approach in studying dances of crises in effect. The preliminary goal of the study is to outline how the dancer and eyewitnesses perceived the forces that drove the performance and the dancer's relationship with the audience. Based on these accounts, the main part of the analysis configures Nijinsky's dancing as a solitary desiring-machine producing a body-without-organs (which he calls God Nijinsky) that radiates chuvstvo. As such, the recital becomes a case for dance theory mapping the rhizomes of kinetic becoming. By looking at Nijinsky's St Moritz dance and his writing via Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the article argues for a nuanced and non-reductionist approach to any dance of crisis; a symptom perhaps but, in any case, an expression of life's dynamism and complexity.
In Foucault’s work, power often appears too totalising and resistance too vacuous. Many cite Foucault’s later turn towards the self’s relation to itself as a more adequate concept of resistance. This reading misses a central Foucaultian concept: force. By following Deleuze’s account of how Foucaultian force grounds the distinction between power and resistance, I argue that both are types of forces, such that resistance is not reactionary to power, but primary to, and hence foundational for, power. Moreover, subjectivity is not principally resistant. Rather, as a capacity of all forces, subjectivity can be implicated in both power and resistance.
This article develops a new interpretation of Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the aesthetic. I argue that Deleuze’s aesthetics should be understood through the becoming autonomous of appearance, which is a conception of aesthetics that is simultaneously non-aesthetic. The becoming autonomous of appearance can be reformulated as the becoming autonomous of aesthetics from experience. This poses a challenge to the idea that Deleuze developed a transcendental empiricism based on the ontological primacy of aesthetic experience. The uncoupling of aesthetics from experience makes the ontological primacy of aesthetic experience impossible. Autonomous appearance is not the aesthetics of a transcendental empiricism, but of the pure connector between virtual and actual. It is the aesthetics of what Deleuze calls the third synthesis of time.
This article examines the philosophical concept of the unthought in Kostas Axelos and Gilles Deleuze. It challenges anthropocentric perspectives by exploring the inherent limitations of thought itself. In this light, the article aims to create a unique perspective for exploring the concept of the unthought. Specifically, this study attempts to strengthen Axelos’s significance in navigating Deleuze’s intellectual influences. It is argued that the connection between Axelos and Deleuze fosters a form of planetary consciousness that escapes any straightforward anthropocentric thinking. Grounded in an open-system framework, it moves beyond the limitations of traditional ways of thinking and paves the way for an ahuman mode of philosophical inquiry. That said, the concept of the open critically examines the boundaries of thought, yet all the while recognises the complex risks involved in thinking beyond traditional modes of philosophical reflection. In this context, Axelos, the philosopher of play par excellence, and Deleuze, the philosopher of difference par excellence, engage in a form of Nietzschean game-play. Through them we can readdress the concept of the unthought and consider the possibility for thinking beyond nihilism.
Given the increased online accessibility of Deleuze’s seminars, notably with the Deleuze Seminars project (Purdue University), this essay examines the start of Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari in 1969 and so-called ‘missing years’ of Deleuze’s teaching, that is, his first semesters teaching at the University of Paris Vincennes campus (1970–1). After consulting Deleuze’s correspondence for details on his activities preceding his appointment at Vincennes as well as initial steps of working with Guattari, I draw from several sources – Deleuze’s remarks in the 1971–2 seminar as well as other pertinent publications – to derive the likely content of the first seminar devoted to Anti-Oedipus (during the 1970–1 academic year). Then, as an additional source, I juxtapose the likely seminar content with the contemporaneous testimony furnished in Guattari’s diary (1970–2), published as The Anti-Oedipus Papers. To develop this juxtaposition, I reconstitute these diary entries in their chronological order (heretofore unavailable in French or English). This analysis – outline of several sessions in the initial Anti-Oedipus seminar and details on Guattari’s concurrent theoretical input – displays Deleuze’s processes for preparing both teaching and collaborative publication as well the importance of Guattari’s contribution to both these outcomes and to the broad project of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
What does Gilles Deleuze mean by his equation of forces and gods in Nietzsche and Philosophy? Are the gods metaphorical figures for the forces central to this text? Are they real divinities to whom one might pray or sacrifice? Or is the ontological status of these gods more ambiguous and paradoxical? This article takes seriously Deleuze's equation, exploring its implications for the Nietzschean–Deleuzian theory of forces. For Deleuze reading Nietzsche, the one that wants in the will is the relationality of gods, and the will to power, embodied in Dionysus, is a will towards relational complexes of divine potencies luring becoming.
This article examines Deleuze's work on cinema as an indirect response to views on the ontology of art expressed in Kierkegaard's Either/Or. The pseudonyms of 'A' and 'B' claim that traditional art forms cannot capture movement and time in a manner adequate for expressing the aesthetic and ethical life-views they respectively represent. Through analysis of Kierkegaard's text as well as of key scenes from Casablanca (1942) and A Hidden Life (2019), I argue that the movement-image and time-image provide a compelling answer to these limitations and fulfil their hidden promise of an art form capable of such expression.
This article examines dramatisation in Deleuze and Kierkegaard, encapsulated in the formulas 'the stuttering of language' and 'the question that silences'. Deleuze's differential approach actualises virtual ideas within a system of heterogenesis through the interplay between actual concepts and intensive dramas. Conversely, Kierkegaard's existential approach, examined in The Concept of Anxiety, establishes an infinite loop between the psychological language of anxiety and the dogmatic language of hereditary sin, leading to a third existential language centred on the moment of appropriation. The article concludes by contrasting Deleuze's focus on expression through internal differences with Kierkegaard's emphasis on making an existential choice.
This article examines Difference and Repetition's oblique engagement with Kierkegaard. After canvassing Kierkegaard's concept of repetition, I reconstruct Deleuze's disagreement with it, arguing that Deleuze resists Kierkegaard's view of subjectivity rather than his faith in a transcendent God. Regarding Deleuze's agreement with Kierkegaard, I contend that he reads Kierkegaard's opposition to Hegel and emphasis on the future into Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. This discussion reveals that Deleuze's encounter with Kierkegaard is subtler, and more productive, than has been appreciated. It also foregrounds Deleuze's original contributions to a concept of repetition while illuminating his principled approach to the history of philosophy.
The article unpacks Deleuze's understanding of the radical potential lying in Kierkegaard's notion of subjectivity. It explains why Kierkegaard's figure of the knight of faith is pertinent for our present age and traces the manner in which Deleuze reconstructs this figure for developing his own concept of becoming and, specifically, of 'becoming nobody'. But why is Deleuze, a self-proclaimed philosopher of difference, attracted to the idea of 'becoming imperceptible'? We answer this question by showing how the Kierkegaardian notion of interiority turns into a key concept within a new Deleuzian understanding of the political.
A reasonable response to the tragedies of the contemporary moment, to what we see and hear daily, is nihilistic numbness. Just as for S & oslash;ren Kierkegaard the Christian belief in the incarnation is absurd, to affirm this world, to believe in it, is absurd. Gilles Deleuze is not lured by the object of Kierkegaard's belief, but to the movements Kierkegaard's belief enacts, its immanent implications. Deleuze calls us to believe in the world by virtue of the absurd, for it is through this absurd belief that we may actually enact a potentiality that a reasonable response would obscure.
In this article I expand upon Deleuze's injunction to 'become capable of loving without memory', reading the thought of S & oslash;ren Kierkegaard and Gilles Deleuze as laying the foundations for a view that I call 'Christian Atheism'. This is founded upon four basic principles: (1) God is love; (2) God-Love is neither a person nor a substance; (3) God-Love is the immanent, not transcendent, cause of all things; (4) God-Love is not a moral judge, but implies an ethical comportment, calling us forth in the love of self and in the love of the other or the love of the neighbour. I look first to Kierkegaard's understanding of God as love, drawing comparisons with Deleuze's notion of Being the sacrificial structural relation between renunciation and return as discussed in Fear and Trembling, before using this to expand upon Deleuze's understanding of love without memory.
Reading S & oslash;ren Kierkegaard through Gilles Deleuze, this article invites readers to engage with the existence-modes (aesthetic, ethical, and so on) as a series. The 'either/or', a site at which conditions for transformation emerge, becomes a prompt for tuning into the erotics of existence, from asexual and queer desires to creative passions. Turning to Audre Lorde's existential account of erotics, the article makes the case for Kierkegaard's import for queer, feminist and affect studies.
This brief essay reflects on the concept of expressionism in Gilles Deleuze's work on Spinoza, and addresses the relationship between forms of content and forms of expression as discussed by Deleuze and Félix Guattari when they introduce a minor literature. We address how modes of expression – expressing, expressed, expresses – can enable liberatory movements of creative resistance, and yet, how expression can be cut short thereby devolving into sad passions. We argue that a re-engagement in expressionism offers ways of collectively and creatively resisting what is most oppressive in this world, suffering as it is amid a polycrisis.
