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Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory
Abstract
We begin with a remark from Chapter 2 of What is Philosophy?, which discusses the plane of immanence. This book, of course, is by Deleuze and Guattari, but the text, in this case, clearly indicates a Deleuzian provenance: Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates. He is therefore the prince of philosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere. 1 Further on, Deleuze writes: Spinoza is the vertigo of immanence from which so many philosophers try in vain to escape. Will we ever be mature 1. What is Philosophy?, 48.
... Using Meillassoux's (2007) discussion of Bergson and Deleuze and the countervailing trajectories of becoming, we are reminded that living is not so much reflective of a process of interested choice but rather the mobilization of disinterest in the real. This disinterest constitutes the basis of perception. ...
... The question then becomes: how does one ward off being dissipated in the experiencing of all things 'at once' in the uninterrupted flood of communication (Terranova, 2004)? This is then a matter of timing, of time not 'all at once', but of breaks and detours, of disattention and disinterest, of looking here and not there, of orienting a body to a sense of 'here and there' that requires a 'passing away' from an incessant passing through (Meillassoux, 2007). ...
Across many cities of the so-called Global South, the primary responsibility for constructing spaces of inhabitation has fallen largely to residents themselves. Although these cities have been largely remade through the intensive segregations precipitated by property markets, many substantial traces of the continuous incremental renovations and readjustment of everyday life remain vital. It was not just a matter of households building their own homes. Affordability meant density. Densification was not just of bodies of techniques necessary to provide an array of affordances. This meant the intermixing of measures, angles, calculations, impulses, screens, surfaces, soundscapes, exposures, folds, circuitries, and layers, as instruments for associating things, bringing things into association, where things get their ‘bearings’ by having a ‘bearing’ on each other. But these associations required their own rhythm and time. Focusing on different heterogeneous districts in inner city Jakarta, the paper explores these mixtures of temporality and how they are materialized in local built and economic environments.
... Meillassoux first notes, in reference to Gilles Deleuze's and Félix Guattari's What is Philosophy?, that "to think is twice victorious to cross the Acheron: it is to visit the dead, or rather death, and above all, to succeed in returning." 70 The intrusion of thought is therefore only concluded by "recount[ing] to the living the discoveries of such a journey." 71 Here we should immediately add that this apparent re-Homerization of the Dantean Ulysses does not really contradict our reading, just as Ulysses' fate does not interfere with his urge to disclose the details of his voyage. ...
The paper focuses on the repeated and systematic references to the figure of Ulysses in the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Eugene Thacker, and Reza Negarestani. These are not random occurrences; Ulysses represents a key figure in the mutually interconnected visions and reflections related to the idea of a "world without people" that binds the named authors implicitly and explicitly to the originally Dantean imagery. Through a detailed exposition of the Ulyssean positions of the philosophers in question, the essay demonstrates twofold: first, that the "nihilistic branch" of speculative realism can be read as a specific inversion of the Dantean agenda, and second, that in light of the arguments of "transcendental nihilism" and the logical radicali-zation of the Ulyssean figure, Dante's Divine Comedy can be read as an ana chronistic speculative project.
... This flow can result in two types of deaths: a reactive death by diminution, or a death by vanishing-a body folded in upon itself that shrinks more and more until it is annihilated. This reactive power towards death is by way of narcosis and exhaustion, an ever-increasing in|difference to the world as if enclosed in a social monadological bubble (Meillassoux, 2007). Deleuze refers to this reactive becoming as stupidity or bêtise (see Deleuze, 1994, p. 150). ...
Life can be theorised actively (liveliness) or passively, or as entangled. What does this mean for pedagogy within the Anthropocene? This essay speculatively develops the concept immanent pedagogy of in|difference to explore such a question. This involves an engagement with various expressions of new materialisms, presenting a case as to how the passivity of an indifferent life needs to be recognised to mitigate the excessive claims of life from personalist modernist instrumentalism to neo-Darwinian accounts.
... 16 Few philosophers have argued anything so heretical as we find in Bergson's approach to metaphysics, that is, a radical reversal of what we think metaphysics (and philosophy) to be and how we think it operates (in an "anti-Kantian" metaphysics of immanence, as Quentin Meillassoux describes Bergson's method). 17 More than this, it leads us to a redirection of where thinking is supposed to take place: thinking changes source and direction, passing from things to concepts, and not from concepts to things. Bergson's idea is not that we merely change the direction of our thought about things (whatever that might mean), but that metaphysical thinking somehow starts with the object too, at least as an orientation, posture, or attitude. ...
Deleuze’s film-philosophy makes much of the notion of virtual images in Bergson’s Matter and Memory, but in doing so he transforms a psycho-meta-physical thesis into a (very) unBergsonian ontological one. In this essay, we will offer a corrective by exploring Bergson’s own explanation of the image as an “attitude of the body”—something that projects an actual, corporeal, and postural approach, not only to cinema, but also to philosophy. Indeed, just as Renoir famously said that “a director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again,” so Bergson wrote that each philosopher only makes one “single point” throughout his or her whole career. And this one point, he then declares, is like a “vanishing image,” only one best understood as an attitude of the body. It is embodied image that underlies an alternative Bergsonian cinema of the actual and the body—one that we will examine through what Bergson’s has to say about “attitude” as well as “gesture” and “mime.” We will also look at it through a gestural concept enacted by a film, to be precise, the five remakes that comprise Lars von Trier’s and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions (2003). This will bring us back to the idea of what it is that is being remade, both by directors and philosophers, in Renoir’s “one film” and Bergson’s singular “vanishing image” respectively. Is the “one” being remade an image understood as a representation, or is it a gesture, understood as a bodily movement? It is the latter stance that provides a wholly new and alternative view of Bergson’s philosophy of cinema.
... Then he brings in his trump card from Cantor's transfinite set-theory (see Johnston 2011) as well as Deleuze and Bergson's theory of matter (Meillassoux 2007) to correlate the logical necessity of contingency with radical contingency scientifically observed in matter. ...
In this article, Meillassoux and Laruelle were brought into conversation with Derrida concerning contingency, temporality, non-philosophy and God. The conversation between Derrida and Meillassoux focused on their respective views on trace and radical contingency, which opened towards reflections on God as either divinology (Meillassoux) or the endless desertification of language (Derrida), thus saving the name 'God' and keeping the name safe. One cannot think this desertification of language, 'God', without a reflection on khōra. This opened a conversational space with Laruelle's non-philosophy. One of the major criticisms against Laruelle is that his non-philosophy has no worth in terms of the extra-philosophical (ethical, political or juridical) and the same could be said with regards to khōra and, specifically, Derrida's interpretation of khōra. Therefore Derrida's interpretation of khōra with its 'unilateral' relation to logos, the giving and receiving of khōra without giving and receiving anything and thus remaining indifferent, were brought into conversation with Laruelle's unilateral duality. This unilateral duality, although indifferent to philosophy, makes all the difference to logos and thus to philosophy. The question is: what place is given to khōra and/or non-philosophy within academia? Derrida's God can be interpreted as a kind of autodeconstructive divine violence or holy folly. What place is given to divine violence or holy folly within academia? What is the relation of non-philosophy to philosophy? Is it the non-foundational foundation that remains totally indifferent to philosophy as it does not engage in a dialectical relationship with philosophy and yet it is the theory or science of philosophy? Can academia afford to 'give place' to this holy folly, this non-philosophy, this khōratic theo-logic, but on the other hand, can it afford not to 'give place' to the queen and/or jester of academia?
For too long, the Earth has been used to ground thought instead of bending it; such grounding leaves the planet as nothing but a stage for phenomenology, deconstruction, or other forms of anthropocentric philosophy. In far too much continental philosophy, the Earth is a cold, dead place enlivened only by human thought—either as a thing to be exploited, or as an object of nostalgia. Geophilosophy seeks instead to question the ground of thinking itself, the relation of the inorganic to the capacities and limits of thought. This book constructs an eclectic variant of geophilosophy through engagements with digging machines, nuclear waste, cyclones and volcanoes, giant worms, secret vessels, decay, subterranean cities, hell, demon souls, black suns, and xenoarcheaology, via continental theory (Nietzsche, Schelling, Deleuze, et alia) and various cultural objects such as horror films, videogames, and weird Lovecraftian fictions, with special attention to Speculative Realism and the work of Reza Negarestani. In a time where the earth as a whole is threatened by ecological collapse, On an Ungrounded Earth generates a perversely realist account of the earth as a dynamic engine materially invading and upsetting our attempts to reduce it to merely the ground beneath our feet.
This chapter retests Pyrrho and Aenesidemus’ instability thesis and their meteorology against Meillassoux’s rational and materialist take on time. Instead of pitching a radical instability against the fixity of “now-time” and durations, and therefore of the whole cohort of correlationist apperceptions of time (including time as inner-experience), Meillassoux rivets such an absolute instability right at the heart of the Principle of Non-contradiction. With him, the principle is no longer fixed by timeless predicates as in Aristotle, but by a hyper-chaos time that knows no breath. How does Meillassoux articulate this and what would the Pyrrhonians say about it? The argument of this chapter is to say that such a speculation is somewhat troublesome because in order to rethink Aristotle’s principle, Meillassoux has no choice, but to mortgage the autonomy of hyper-chaos to the chronological temporality it superciliously purports to do without. Once more, reasoned human logic wins the trophy of meaning, but fails in providing an adequate “apprehension” of time and reality because once again, it arrives too late.
The dynamism of the modern epoch in many ways requires the same dynamic definition of its role and signif- icance in this rapidly changing world, and it is also necessary to designate the identification code of this period of history. Obviously, the problem of any historical space, any historical period is the definition of identi- ty. Only when the boundaries and contours of identity are found can a person adequately understand his role and place in the flow of history, in social practice. Modern reality, which is being realized in the context of the intensification of the total digitalization process, requires a search for your identification code. Especially on the scale of an actively becoming digital culture. It was this research perspective that determined the con- tent of this article. The authors, relying on socio-philosophical research techniques, analyzed digital identity within the framework of the phenomenon of digital culture. The authors pay special attention to the risks that such an identity carries; the authors also point out the possibility of dissonance in digital and real identities. The authors' scientific interest is related to the objective difference between real identity and the identity that they present in the digital space. As a rule, these types of reality do not coincide and contradict each other. This state can lead to dissociative personality and a feeling of one’s own uncertainty. And in this sense, the task of society is to create a digital situation in which a person would objectively evaluate himself both in real life and in the field of digital space. The state and society bear a certain responsibility for the possible risks and challenges that the active process of digitalization brings, which does not exclude, of course, the personal responsibility of each participant in digital communication.
This final chapter is the second part of my proposal for a pedagogy of in|difference. I start with a second generalization (building on the first generalization in the previous chapter) that addresses the limitation imposed by quantum realism, that is, the impossibility for a complete ontological, epistemological, and rational understanding of the world-for-itself, the cosmic forces of nature. The animism of uncontrollable life requires the acceptance of creative destruction. Posthumanist animacy is addressed in this sense, and I return to anorganic life and its consequences for education. The world-for-itself becomes the ethico-onto-epistemological problematic addressed by Deleuze and Guattari. I review all the nuances of in|difference in complex system and return to some of the issues raised previously regarding quantum theory. Of interest also are both Nietzsche and Schelling on Nature, which are reviewed and related to pedagogy. I distinguish between a ‘virtual Real’ (zoë, Deleuze’s ‘dark precursor,’ A Life) and the ‘radical Real’ of in|difference (pure immanence). The shift is then to problematize non|life and passive vitalism, which lead to further problematization of life|death. I end with a section of destructive creativity subtitled ‘how the earth “thinks.”’ This leads to a paideia of in|difference.
Even though Quentin Meillassoux's philosophy is still in the making, to use Graham Harman's (2015) expression, it has garnered sufficient attention to become the topic of an ever-growing body of specialized literature. Here we wish to make a contribution in that direction. We offer an examination of Meillassoux's definition of philosophy as "the invention of strange forms of argumentation". We compare and contrast this definition to the one that has been offered by Deleuze & Guattari in What is Philosophy? Our examination of Meillassoux's core metaphilosophical ideas will follow the same methodological procedure that he himself outlined in his fictionalization of Deleuze as a pre-Socratic. We contend that his novel interpretative technique, which relies heavily on fictionalization, should be repeatable by other authors. To this end, we evaluate his potential to become a philosophical heir to Alain Badiou. We explain why this may be the case, by positing a fictional situation that we will name "the Continental Expectation", and then we will link that situation to the contents of Meillassoux's philosophy, specifically to his concept of absolute contingency.
In After Finitude as well as in Potentiality and Virtuality, Meillassoux conceives chance in a mathematical way. In The number and the Siren, he argues that Mallarmé had a philosophical conception of chance, specifically a dialectical one. Here we explore Meillassoux’s interpretation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Un Coupe de dés. What we consider to be crucial about that interpretation is the Mallarmean concept of Chance, which we think is the precursor to Meillassoux’s concept of contingency. Additionally, we suggest that Meillassoux recuperates the Mallarmean “Perhaps”, which may called “Maybeing”, as that which replaces Being. We then explain what the concept of “Maybeing” is. Roughly speaking, it is a fusion of two English expressions: “may be” (modal verb) and “maybe” (adverb). Finally, we indicate how the concept of Maybeing can be used in order to solve the problem posed by the correlational circle, as well as some comments on Meillassoux's ideas about meaningless signs.
Speculative realists have directed a radical critique towards what they call “correlationism,” the stance according to which we only have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other. Both Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier have used Gilles Deleuze’s ontology as a paradigmatic example of correlationism. Instead of defending Deleuze from this accusation, I argue that we need to accept it, but that the correlation is drastically transformed when we take into account Deleuze’s panpsychism. I hence contend that Deleuze is a panpsychist, grounding my argument in (a) his theory of contemplations and (b) his account of the universe as a cinema in itself. This changes everything, since a panpsychist type of correlationism avoids the main problem that leads both Meillassoux and Brassier to try to overcome correlationism, namely, that of the possibility of existence before and after humans.
In this paper, I argue for an alternative reading of Michel Foucault as an anti-correlationist thinker. Specifically, I position him as aligned with what philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls speculative materialism (an offshoot of speculative realism). Given the resurgent and exciting prioritization of speculative ontology over concrete politics among these thinkers, coupled with the need for a revolutionary anti-capitalist political movement, my approach aims to take speculative materialists’ claims regarding access to the in-itself seriously while also devoting attention to their (underdeveloped) political dimension. It is in this latter realm Foucault proves particularly helpful to think alongside. Though Foucault has often and convincingly been portrayed as an anti-universalist, postmodern, and epistemologically-oriented figure, I present him as concerned with the subject’s access to the Outside (the great outdoors, things-in-themselves) as well as the politics of such access. I do so through a study of a wide selection of his works (books, essays, interviews, articles), a comparison between his philosophical position and that of Meillassoux’s, and an expansion upon Foucault’s analysis of Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” in The Order of Things, positing the artwork as a speculative object. I suggest, in short, that Foucault’s concepts of thought, force, and the subject have surprisingly striking similarities to Meillassoux’s absolute contingency and his political subject (the ‘vectoral militant’). We can, then, begin to see a revolutionary politics arising out of what I understand as Foucault’s speculative stance—hopefully providing an opportunity to both (re)consider Foucault and highlight the politics incipient in contemporary explorations into the Outside.
This book examines the psychology involved in handling, and responding to, materials in artistic practice, such as oils, charcoal, brushes, canvas, earth, and sand. Artists often work with intuitive, tactile sensations and rhythms that connect them to these materials. Rhythm connects the brain and body to the world, and the world of abstract art. The book features new readings of artworks by Matisse, Pollock, Dubuffet, Tápies, Benglis, Len Lye, Star Gossage, Shannon Novak, Simon Ingram, Lee Mingwei, L. N. Tallur and many others. Such art challenges centuries of philosophical and aesthetic order that has elevated the substance of mind over the substance of matter. This is a multidisciplinary study of different metastable patterns and rhythms: in art, the body, and the brain. This focus on the propagation of rhythm across domains represents a fresh art historical approach and provides important opportunities for art and science to cooperate.
The philosophies of substance presuppose a subject which then encounters a datum. This subject then reacts to the datum. The process ontology presupposes a datum (firstness) which is met with feelings (secondness), and progressively attains the unity of a subject (thirdness). It is in this sense that our bodily experience is primarily an experience of the dependence of the actual presentational immediacy upon the virtual causal efficacy, and not the other way round. To put it bluntly, the world does not emerge from the subject, but processes of subjectification emerge from the interactions between the body and world. The chapter is meant to provide the basis for the panel that will stage an encounter between cognitive neurosciences and architecture.
Quentin Meillassoux (1967) es un filósofo francés que ha cobrado notoriedad a partir de la publicación de Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence en 2006. Su obra se inscribe en el Realismo Especulativo, movimiento de reciente expansión en el campo filosófico contemporáneo que promueve una ontología realista. Además de reivindicar una filosofía materialista, Meillassoux defiende la inmanencia ya en su tesis doctoral L’inexistence divine y, especialmente, en el artículo “L’immanence: d’outre-monde” (2009), donde afirma que una verdadera filosofía de la inmanencia no puede fundamentarse en un pensamiento de la finitud sino en una ética de la inmortalidad. Meillassoux opone su perspectiva, aparentemente paradójica, de una inmanencia “de otro mundo” a los pensamientos contemporáneos de la inmanencia, esencialmente al de Deleuze, quien hizo de dicho concepto un blasón de su proyecto filosófico. En este artículo queremos ensayar una confrontación entre la idea de Meillassoux de una creencia en el Mundo de la Justicia y la propuesta deleuziana de una creencia en este mundo con vistas a elucidar convergencias y divergencias relevantes en sus abordajes de la inmanencia y sus concepciones del vínculo entre la filosofía y el ateísmo.
By focusing on the qualities of a posthumanist architectural practice in his chapter 4, Andrej Radman continues the analysis of the genetic power of affective encounters begun by Iris van der Tuin in her opening chapter, and by Jussi Parikka in his geophilosophical analysis of the emergent consequences of constitutive relations for the operation of posthuman systems. Radman argues that the recomposition of what Guattari refers to as ‘architectural enunciation’ profoundly transforms the role of the architect, who becomes its relay by assuming the analytic and pragmatic responsibility for the production not merely of the environment, but of subjectivation itself. Following Deleuze’s Spinozism, and continuing the affective corporeal emphasis subsequently given to this in work by Brian Massumi, Radman suggests that if to think differently one has to feel differently, and if the sole purpose of design is to change us, then architecture is effectively a ‘psychotropic practice’ that modulates and compels routines of experience.
ision traditionally occupies the height of the sensorial hierarchy. The sense of clarity and purity conveyed by vision, allows it to be explicitly associated with truth and knowledge. The law has always relied on vision and representation, from eye-witnesses to photography, to imagery and emblems. The law and its normative gaze can be understood as that which decrees what is permitted to be and become visible and what is not. Indeed, even if law’s perspectival view is bound to be betrayed by the realities of perception, it is nonetheless productive of real effects on the world.
This first title in the interdisciplinary series ‘Law and the Senses’ asks how we can develop new theoretical approaches to law and seeing that go beyond a simple critique of the legal pretension to truth. This volume aims to understand how law might see and unsee, and how in its turn is seen and unseen. It explores devices and practices of visibility, the evolution of iconology and iconography, and the relation between the gaze of the law and the blindness of justice. The contributions, all radically interdisciplinary, are drawn from photography, legal theory, philosophy, and poetry.
How does order emerge out of the multiplicity of bodies, objects, ideas and practices that constitute the urban? This book explores the relation between space, law and control in the contemporary city - and particularly in the context of urban 'mega events' - through a combined geographical and normative analysis. Informed by the recent spatial, affective and material 'turns' in the humanities and social sciences, Andrea Pavoni addresses this question by pursuing an innovative and trans-disciplinary approach, capable of accounting for the emergence of order in urban space both at the conceptual and empirical levels. Two overarching objectives are pursued. First, to account for the increasing convergence of logics, techniques and technologies of law, security and marketing into novel, potentially oppressive spatial configurations. Second, to envisage a consistent ethico-political strategy to counter this evolution, by rethinking originally and in radically spatial terms the notion of justice. Forging a sophisticated and original analysis, this book offers an analysis that will be of considerable interest to those working in critical urban geography, critical legal studies, critical event studies, surveillance and control studies.
De acordo com História e Consciência de Classe de Georg Lukács, o pensamento e a existência são “aspectos reais de um mesmo processo histórico e dialético”. A simultaneidade do pensamento e da existência é obscurecido pela reificação, entendida por Lukács como a lógica das relações capitalistas. Meu argumento é que as implicações de sua grande inovação conceitual para se compreender as relações entre o capitalismo e a representação têm sido eclipsados por comentários recentes sobre o conceito de reificação. Ao me aproximar criticamente dos comentários recentes ( por Axel Honneth e Kevin Floyd), os quais tendem a ver a reificação enquanto um modo de representação e não uma lógica, argumento por um retorno e clarificação do conceito de reificação de Lukács como melhor meio de se orientar na lógica contemporânea da racionalidade capitalista.
The Forbidden City in Beijing is well known for being the emperor’s palace during the period of feudalism as well as a significant monument in Chinese historic studies. In addition because of its spatial formations this group of architecture is special in the fields of Art and Cultural Studies. The Forbidden City can be interpreted according to conventional methods such as historical or archeological analysis, but also thoughts from art and philosophy can provide new ways of understanding this site from the perspective of embodied space.
In this paper I will consider the Forbidden City in terms of Deleuze’s idea. In particular I will focus on his concepts of flesh, imagination and affect and the relationship between these three terms and audience. The investigation will be extended by a discussion of my studio work and artistic practice.
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