Jonas Oßwald | University of Vienna (original) (raw)

Books by Jonas Oßwald

Campus, 2024

ÜBER DAS BUCH: Gilles Deleuze und Michel Foucault verband eine »philosophische Freundschaft«, so ... more ÜBER DAS BUCH: Gilles Deleuze und Michel Foucault verband eine »philosophische Freundschaft«, so der Tenor. Doch trotz zahlreicher gegenseitiger Bezugnahmen, lobender Rezensionen und füreinander verfasster Vorworte gibt es bisher kaum Arbeiten, die sich mit dem philosophischen Gehalt dieser Beziehung befassen. Jonas Oßwald zeigt erstmals die grundlegende und durchgehende dialogische Verflechtung der Philosophien Deleuze’ und Foucaults, von den frühen transzendentalphilosophischen Überlegungen bis hin zur Frage der Macht, in der sich die Konturen von zwei komplex miteinander verwobenen Machtphilosophien abzeichnen, die sich trotz aller Differenzen und Spannungen letztlich in einem heterogenen Produktionsbegriff der Macht treffen.

SUMMARY: There is a general consensus that Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault were connected by a “philosophical friendship.” Nevertheless, despite numerous references, laudatory reviews, and forewords written for each other, there are few works that address the philosophical content of this relationship. In this study, Jonas Oßwald presents a comprehensive analysis of the intertwined and continuous dialogical relationship between Deleuze’s and Foucault’s philosophies. From their early transcendental-philosophical explorations to the problem of power, the study illuminates the intricate interweaving of two distinct yet interconnected philosophies, which, despite all their inherent differences and tensions, ultimately converge in a heterogeneous concept of productive power.

Peer-reviewed Articles by Jonas Oßwald

Access: Critical Explorations of Equity in Higher Education, 2024

Tillie Olsen (1978) drew attention to an evident, yet underappreciated fact of writing, which is ... more Tillie Olsen (1978) drew attention to an evident, yet underappreciated fact of writing, which is that it takes time: ‘Where the claims of creation cannot be primary, the results are atrophy; unfinished work; minor effort and accomplishment; silences’ (p. 13). Drawing from our experiences as a precariously employed PhD student and a postdoc in philosophy with
parenting responsibilities, we want to address this type of silencing in a manner that stylistically corresponds to the exhaustion, lack of time, and lack of leisure experienced by many caregivers in academia. For this, we want to record one of the few occasions in our daily routine where there is sufficient time and mental capacity to reflect on our own situation: the conversation at
the kitchen table in the evening when the chores are done. Our contribution consists in a redacted transcription of this conversation for which we propose the term ‘autotheoretical dialogue’ (see Fournier 2021; Young 1997). Our dialogue covers topics such as: care in relation to class and gender (Lightman & Link 2021); teaching in higher education as a form of care work in contrast to the more prestigious work of research (Cardozo 2017); the precarious working conditions in academia and their relation to parenting (Spina et al. 2022); the ignorance and hostility towards parenthood in academia; the effects of this marginalisation like fatigue, self-doubt, and depression, but also the ambivalence that arises from the conflict of the
joy of caring; and the institutional and cultural difficulties of reconciling academic work with parenthood.

Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 2024

Academic philosophy has undergone a homogenization since the Second World War that can be underst... more Academic philosophy has undergone a homogenization since the Second World War that can be understood as a discursive colonization through analytic philosophy. This colonization directly results in the othering of non-analytic discourses as continental philosophy as well as the normalization of the discipline according to the analytic model. While analytic philosophy serves as the model for this continuing normalization, it is also itself the product of a normalization that occurred in the US during McCarthyism, resulting in the adaptation of mainstream analytic philosophy to the ideological needs of the Cold War. As the historical result of this process, mainstream analytic philosophy can be genealogically defined as our current majoritarian philosophy. The principal normalization techniques of contemporary academic philosophy, such as prepublication peer review and quantified research evaluation, can be analyzed as a strategically coherent intensification of disciplinary techniques of power. These techniques primarily aim at reducing intellectual labour costs, controlling intellectual work, increasing quantifiable research performance, and breaking the relative autonomy of academic staff.

Foucault Studies, 2021

Recent commentaries on the relation between Deleuze and Foucault often operate with an implicit i... more Recent commentaries on the relation between Deleuze and Foucault often operate with an implicit idea of compatibility or consistency that postulates systematic harmony as the decisive criterion for the affinity between them. Accordingly, the predominant question is whether Deleuze and Foucault are "true" friends philosophically and politically. Although the assessments differ, they share a likewise implicit notion of the friend as familiar that excludes any form of ambivalence in amicable relations and consequently cannot fully account for the dynamics and variability of the relation between Deleuze and Foucault. This article tries to address this problem by suspending the notion of the friend-as-familiar, effectively posing the question of what concept of friendship we would have if the ambivalent relation between Deleuze and Foucault would be the model. For this, the reconstruction begins with the early encounters and follows their relationship until the supposed split in the context of the desirepleasure-debate. What becomes apparent is the dialogical structure of the philosophical friendship between Deleuze and Foucault that entails convergences as well as divergences, which will eventually be related to their own and fundamentally different concepts of friendship. Deleuze and Foucault, as will be argued, are neither "vrais amis" nor "faux amis" but simply amis that practised a form of philosophical friendship, lasting for more than 15 years.

Book Chapters by Jonas Oßwald

Nietzsche and the Politics of Difference. Ed. by A. Rehberg and A. Woodward. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2022

As Deleuze says in his essay "Nomadic Thought", it is Nietzsche's movement of uncoding which anno... more As Deleuze says in his essay "Nomadic Thought", it is Nietzsche's movement of uncoding which announces a "new politics". Nietzsche marks the beginning of a counter-culture in the effort "to get something through which is not encodable". In this way, Nietzsche establishes a different kind of philosophical discourse, a "counter-philosophy", inasmuch as its utterances are directed against philosophy conceived as the bureaucracy of pure reason. This chapter attempts to establish an untimely echo of Deleuze's essay, which aims at an actualised understanding of this rather enigmatically announced "new politics". It first illustrates how a recent strain of political thought, postfoundationalism, repeats the recoding of society. It then shows that these efforts of recoding are obsessive expressions of a figure which resembles the Nietzschean priest. Finally, it concludes with an outline of Nietzsche's "new politics".

Essays, Texts by Jonas Oßwald

lointain - Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 2018

Die Rampe - Hefte für Literatur, 2018

Talks by Jonas Oßwald

Usages de Foucault - Gebrauchsweisen von Foucault, Berlin, DE, 2024

Perspektiven auf zeitgenössische akademische Philosophie, Vienna, AT, 2024

Die akademische Philosophie hat seit 1945 eine Homogenisierung erfahren, die als eine diskursive ... more Die akademische Philosophie hat seit 1945 eine Homogenisierung erfahren, die als eine diskursive Kolonisierung durch die analytische Philosophie verstanden werden kann. Diese Kolonisierung führt zum othering nicht-analytischer Diskurse als kontinentale Philosophie wie auch zur Normalisierung der Disziplin nach analytischem Vorbild. Während die analytische Philosophie als Modell für diese anhaltende Normalisierung dient, ist sie auch selbst das Produkt einer Normalisierung, die in den USA während des McCarthyismus stattfand und zur Anpassung des analytischen Mainstreams an die ideologischen Erfordernisse des Kalten Krieges führte. Als historisches Ergebnis dieses Prozesses kann der analytische Mainstream genealogisch als majoritäre Philosophie der Gegenwart definiert werden. Die wichtigsten Normalisierungstechniken der akademischen Philosophie, wie prepublication peer review und quantifizierende Forschungsevaluierung, erweisen sich machttheoretisch als eine strategisch kohärente Intensivierung disziplinärer Machttechniken. Diese Techniken zielen in erster Linie darauf ab, die Kosten intellektueller Arbeit zu senken, Forschung zu kontrollieren, den quantifizierbaren Forschungsoutput zu steigern und die relative Autonomie der Forschenden zu brechen.

Class Matters, Vienna, AT, 2022

UPSalon #4: Last Come, Last Served, Vienna, AT, 2022

12th Braga Meetings on Ethics and Political Philosophy, Braga, PT, 2022

Foucault’s general praise of Deleuze & Guattari in the foreword to the English translation of 197... more Foucault’s general praise of Deleuze & Guattari in the foreword to the English translation of 1977 is remarkable not only for its characterisation of Anti-Oedipus as an aesthetico-ethical practice (“Ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politico” (Foucault 1977, 13)), but also for the more mundane fact of its publication date. In 1977, Deleuze engaged in a critique of Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge, published as Désir et plaisir in 1994, in which he distances himself clearly from Foucault’s analytics of power and notion of dispositif in favor of the conception of agencement that will play a crucial role in A Thousand Plateaus. After Désir et plaisir, the once amicable relation between Deleuze and Foucault cooled down significantly and basically came to a halt. Given these circumstances, Foucault’s praising foreword seems at least surprising. So what is it that Foucault finds in Anti-Oedipus and that seems to transcend even their profound conceptual differences around 1977?

Generally speaking, Foucault’s interest concerns the theory and analytics of power in Anti- Oedipus and less the critique of so called Freudo-Marxisms or Deleuze’s & Guattari’s Nietzscheo-Spinozist philosophy of desire, as the identification of Anti-Oedipus’s major enemy with the “fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us” (Foucault 1977, 13) indicates.1 The inquiry of the conditions and processes of the subject’s complicity with power and the general excessiveness of power in the 20th century as indicated by fascism and stalinism (see Foucault 1994b, 400–401), is something that Foucault seems to understand as a common ground with Deleuze & Guattari that subsists even beyond their split regarding the respective conceptualizations of power.

I would like to follow this Foucauldian trace in my contribution by understanding the often neglected notion of anti-production primarily as a thesis of the autonomy of power. Anti- production, as will be argued, is Deleuze’s & Guattari’s general term of a domain that determines the allocation of society’s flows of matter and energy independent of and irreducible to production. Anti-production means not the consumption or destruction of production, but rather its necessary counterpart that guarantees the constant re- territorialization of de-territorialized flows of matter and energy. Societies in general are systems consisting of production, anti-production, and reproduction; capitalism and despotism in the schematics of the so called “universal history” (Deleuze & Guattari 1977, 139) develop a form of anti-production that can be called power proper, that means in the sense of potestas, so called primitive societies instead realize anti-production by a rigid code that is effective without a central authority of enforcement. The revolutionary question in Deleuze’s & Guattari’s sense would then be, how a potential forth societal form could realize anti-production without appealing to power.

13th Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference, Prague, CZ, 2021

Ever since Proust and Signs there is a critique of the notion of the friend in Deleuze that is ca... more Ever since Proust and Signs there is a critique of the notion of the friend in Deleuze that is carried forward in Difference and Repetition, where philía as the good-willed affinity or filitation – “or perhaps it should be called a philiation” (142) – of thought with truth is opposed with a sort of anti-philía characterised by a bad-willed discord that would be the condition of genuine thought. Thought presupposes a violent encounter with an outside rather than friendship and benevolence. In What is Philosophy? on the other hand, there is the acknowledgement of a socio-political notion of the friend as the condition for philosophy itself which is specified in Deleuze’s correspondence with Dionys Mascolo as an internal condition of thought or as one with whom one is “going through trials […] necessary for any thinking” (329).
In my paper I want to address this tension of thinking with the friend against the friend with recourse to the actual form of (philosophical) friendship Deleuze cultivated with Michel Foucault. The ambivalence of this relationship seems not only to express the precarious processuality of “going-through-trials”, it also allows for an understanding of the anti-philía in Difference and Repetition as a reconceptualisation of the notion of the friend if we understand the friend as a possible encounter (rather than a good-willed familiar). The friend would be a self-expressing insistence, an incarnated problem, so to speak, and thus a figure that accounts for the social dimension of thinking and the necessity of migrating concepts.

24th International Conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, Newcastle, UK, 2018

If we follow Deleuze in his speech “Nomadic Thought” from 1972, it is Nietzsche‘s movement of unc... more If we follow Deleuze in his speech “Nomadic Thought” from 1972, it is Nietzsche‘s movement of uncoding which announces a “new politics” (259): in contrast to the two bureaucracies – marxism and psychoanalysis – that constitute our modernity by way of public resp. private recoding (this state is the problem, but a differing state is the solution; this family made you ill, but through a differing family you will cure), Nietzsche marks the beginning of a counter-culture through the effort “to get something through which is not encodable” (254) and which allows for (social) relations that are “neither legal, nor contractual, nor institutional” (255), hence precisely not capturable through recoding. These uncoded relations are, as Deleuze writes, perhaps best conceived as “being in the same boat” (ibid.): we are stuck in a lifeboat and share something beyond any law, contract or institution – we are pulling the oars together. In this way, Deleuze concludes, Nietzsche establishes a different kind of philosophical discourse, a “counter-philosophy” (259) inasmuch its utterances are directed against philosophy conceived as the bureaucracy of pure reason.

In my contribution, I want to make the attempt to sketch out this still rather enigmatic new Nietzschean politics in a first step as a critique of political reason. Starting from the thesis that political theory, even in its postfoundationalist form, tends to conceive the political as something which primarily has to be thought, i.e. conceptually determined and thus perpetuating the authoritarian gesture of a master-thinker who has, de jure, a privileged access to the political, the suggestion will be developed that a new politics in the said sense requires the extension of the movement of uncoding in the realm of the political to the extent that it is no longer encodable (in any concept whatsoever). In the ultimate consequence this means that the idea of the political as a distinct realm is an illusion and its conceptual determination a recoding of the bureaucrats of political reason.
This critical aspect of the new Nietzschean politics allows to shift the problem: if we suspend the traditional image of political thought, we can perceive the minor politics already occuring in virtually every living context (e.g. thought, modes of existence, social relations like friendship, arts etc.). This means that virtually every living context becomes a potential object of (political) intervention as well as invention and thus acquires an insistence or vividness crucial to combat a pathological indifference and complicity typical for control societies. The subsequent question is then how to establish a coherence without unity of these minor politics or how to pull the oars of our lifeboat together without getting stuck in a control situation as Burroughs (1978) described it. In a second step I want to conceive the announced new politics eventually not as a solution, but as an equivalent to the problem of how to share a cause without sharing a telos. In this way Deleuze‘s notion of a new Nietzschean politics can be understood as a radicalization of postfoundationalist thought avant la lettre.

The Inhuman Gaze and Perceiving Otherwise, Paris, FR, 2018

Merleau-Ponty‘s inhuman gaze is unbearable, as he says, because it withdraws the possibility to c... more Merleau-Ponty‘s inhuman gaze is unbearable, as he says, because it withdraws the possibility to communicate, it passivates and quiesces the object of the gaze; the object is ashamed of being animalized by the remoteness of an observation, which goes hand in hand with the de-animalization of the gazing subject. The gaze of a dog, as Merleau- Ponty continues, has no such effect, the dog being already quiesced, already unable to communicate in the eyes of the gazed at object: one does not feel shame when faced with a dog‘s gaze (though perhaps when faced with a cat‘s gaze).

While Merleau-Ponty‘s shame emerges out of a specific way of being perceived, there is a notion of shame in Deleuze and Guattari, which arises with a specific way of perceiving. It is what they call with Primo Levi „the shame of being human“ (Deleuze & Guattari. What is Philosophy? [1994], 107) or the shame when faced with „the possibilities of life that we are offered“ (idem, 108); a shame, which is „one of philosophy‘s most powerful motifs“ (ibid.).

If we say that Merleau-Ponty‘s inhuman gaze is unbearable because the object is ashamed for itself being animalized, then we find the precise inversion of that in Deleuze and Guattari: one is ashamed before the intolerable, the quiescence and complicity associated with it. A shame before the possible modes of existence to which there is „no way to escape [...] but to play the part of the animal (to growl, burrow, snigger, distort ourselves)“ (ibid.). The inhuman gaze animalizes the object, while the shame of being human animalizes the subject.

In my paper, I want to follow the effects of this shame before the intolerable, which paradoxically seems to be all too perceptible given a brief look at any newspaper. By drawing also from Nietzsche and Foucault the assumption will be developed that the shame before the intolerable suspends an observational remoteness and establishes a closeness, which allows for perceiving the all too perceptible intolerable by invoking the „sacred ‚No‘“ of Nietzsche‘s lion. Though this animalized „No“ is not sufficient in itself (rather a preparation for the subsequent work of problematization), it is, as will be illustrated, a necessary prerequisite for a thought concerning itself with living problems, in contrast to a thought being quiesced in a complicity through empty abstractions.

10th International Deleuze Studies Conference, Toronto, CA, 2017

In "Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation" Deleuze gives an unusual account of chance, which he s... more In "Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation" Deleuze gives an unusual account of chance, which he strictly differentiates from probability. Drawing from Pius Servien, Deleuze specifies probabilities as objects of science, whereas chance concerns a mode of choice which is neither scientific nor aesthetic. The crucial point is that chance as choice implies a distinct pragmatic dimension insofar it has to be used, or more precisely, insofar it has to be injected in the set of figurative probabilities of the seemingly empty canvas in order to extract the figure. The injected chance thus opens a space of becoming which is operationalized as a modulatory diagram.

In my paper, I try to read this pragmatic account of chance as a methodological treatise. Taking into account the development of Deleuze's concept of chance (and chaos) since "Nietzsche and Philosophy" as well as the reconceptualization of the virtual in "A Thousand Plateaus" as the effect of his engagement with Michel Foucault in the 1970s, I want to show how this methodology of the aleatoric could serve as a guideline for a general logic of intervention.

Such a general logic of intervention bears not only important consequences for a politics of the immanent, insofar as it rejects any attempts of an ultimately inevitable transcendent grounding of the political. It is also – in general – the tacit supplement of a philosophy of immanence and becoming: Whenever there is immanence, there is intervention – a situated action out of the midsts.

Announcements by Jonas Oßwald

The international symposium "Foucault and Marx: Ambivalences, Legacies, and Future Struggles" aim... more The international symposium "Foucault and Marx: Ambivalences, Legacies, and Future Struggles" aims to explore the tense relationship between Foucault and Marx and, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Foucault's death in 2024, to put it into perspective with regard to Foucault's intellectual legacy. Foucault is generally perceived as a harsh critic of Marxism, both in terms of its analytical possibilities and political dangers. This contrasts strongly not only with Foucault's repeated emphasis on the centrality of Marx, but also with clear theoretical parallels. The subject of the symposium is therefore the question of how this ambivalence is to be understood, what it means for possible continuations of the Foucauldian project and to what extent the Foucault-Marx connection can be made fruitful for current and future questions.

The workshop series is based on the assumption that while the theoretical movement of poststructu... more The workshop series is based on the assumption that while the theoretical movement of poststructuralism is being associated with a constant series of representatives, there is no consensus about a thematic standpoint that would be commonly shared by them. The label »poststructuralism« therefore functions pragmatically, despite remaining thematically undetermined. This is currently mirrored in debates on post-truth, in which critics again and again claim the supposed entanglement of poststructuralism, without being able to designate the specific coherence of the term. Based on this situation the lecture series aims at situating poststructuralism in its irreducible plurality both historically and systematically, thereby drawing a sort of review of this theoretical movement and, at the same time, seek out potential actualizations.

If the workshop series therefore asks the (rather polemical) question, what »it will have been« that goes by the name of poststructuralism, the future II, which was coined by Jacques Derrida as a mode of speaking of the event, should invite a historization as well as an opening towards a future poststructuralism.

Sessions:

Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, with contributions by Joshua Bergamin and Tanja Traxler
Thomas Nail, with contributions by Ralf Gisinger and Manu Sharma
Kas Saghafi, with contributions by Flora Löffelmann and Angelika Seppi