Deleuze's Encounter With Whitehead (original) (raw)
A.N. Whitehead (Deleuze Studies, 2014, issue number 8.4)
Long review of two re-issued books by Whitehead and two important studies of him by Stengers and Debaise. Involves explorations of the philosophy of the event, poetry and mathematics and a comparison between Heidegger and Whitehead.
The Event of the New Thinking Emergent Creativity with Deleuze and Whitehead Hannah Richter
Parrhesia, 2023
Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the event is one of the central, and most vividly discussed, contributions of his philosophy. The event ruptures flows of thought, knowledge and social relations and renders available a creative potentiality from which the world can be remade differently. But conceptualised by Deleuze as ungrounded and non-causal in any established sense, the precise workings of Deleuze’s creative event also constitute a theoretical puzzle. This paper firstly suggests that the existing scholarship on Deleuze’s event mostly resolves this puzzle by retracing evental creativity to an external source. Distinguishing between an ontological, a genealogical-discursive and a new materialist-affective reading, it is suggested that all three ultimately deflect evental creativity to a primary cause, obscuring not only the theoretical purchase of the event but also its radically non-causal nature. Secondly, this paper draws on the philosophy of Whitehead to develop an alternative reading of Deleuze’s event as a moment of immanent emergence. Here, evental creativity cannot be retraced to a specific source because it always emerges from the relational interaction of a material singularity with the nexus of previously established matter-thought relations in sense that enfold the former. Evental creativity is here defined not by its source but by its effects relative to the relational nexus of previously produced sense.
Todd May Gilles Deleuze An Introduction
This book offers a readable and compelling introduction to the work of one of the twentieth century's most important and elusive thinkers. Other books have tried to explain Deleuze in general terms. Todd May organizes his book around a central question at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy: how might one live? The author then goes on to explain how Deleuze offers a view of the cosmos as a living thing that provides ways of conducting our lives that we may not have dreamed of. Through this approach the full range of Deleuze's philosophy is covered. Offering a lucid account of a highly technical philosophy, Todd May's introduction will be widely read among those in philosophy, political science, cultural studies, and French studies.
Encounters with Deleuze An Interview with Constantin V. Boundas and Daniel W. Smith
This interview, conducted over the span of several months, tracks the respective journeys of Constantin V. Boundas and Daniel W. Smith with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Rather than "becoming Deleuzian," which is neither desirable nor possible, these exchanges initial discoveries of Deleuze's writings by Boundas and Smith, inperson meetings between Boundas and Deleuze, and the widecepts produced by both Boundas and Smith. At stake in this discussion are key contributions by Deleuze to continental philosophy, including the distinction between the virtual and the actual and the very nature of a "concept." Also at stake is the formative or pedagogical impact of a philosopher, like Deleuze, on those who engage with his texts, concepts, and project. Cette interview, menée sur plusieurs mois, suit les parcours respectifs de Constantin V. Boundas et Daniel W. Smith avec la philosophie de Gilles Deleuze. Au lieu de « devenir Deleuzien, » ce qui n'est ni vertes des écrits de Deleuze par Boundas et Smith, des rencontres en personne entre Boundas et Deleuze, et du travail philosophique Smith. L'enjeu ici étant les contributions clés de Deleuze à la philosophie continentale, y compris la distinction entre le virtuel et l'actuel, et la nature même d'un « concept. » Mais il y a aussi l'impact formateur ou pédagogique d'un philosophe, comme Deleuze, sur ceux qui trouvent et s'engagent pleinement dans ses textes, ses concepts et ses projets.
The Death of Gilles Deleuze as Composition of a Concept (with Douglas Ord)
Deleuze Studies, 2017
There was a wide range of in memoriam and homages published in the years following Deleuze’s suicide. However, none of them succeeded in grasping ‘the evential’ aspect of his death. This paper identifies a series of errors in the literature on Deleuze’s death. It also suggests a way to overcome them by considering a singular encounter between Alice’s passage through the looking glass and Deleuze’s defenestration, which both took place on 4 November. We will show how a new conception of death as event comes out of this unseen connection.
The work of the classical American pragmatists is characterized by its organic naturalism and its tendency to focus the transformative power of empirical experience in the service of social benefit. For John Dewey (1981, 63, 178), “every existence is an event” that springs from a “problematic situation”, and individual experience is never “some person’s, it is nature’s, localized in a body as that body happened to exist in nature”. In the Continental tradition, Gilles Deleuze (2009, 182) similarly develops a process account of the “event” as “eternal truth” and as “flesh”, which is always already involved in creative transformations. Both philosophers are interested in an experimental style of critical thought that opens paths for innovation. For Dewey, the communication of “events” should be conceptualized pragmatically, in such a way that interaction may be guided actively and progressively towards the beneficial consequences he sees as being characterized by radical democracies. However, in Deleuze’s work, it is not clear how the Stoic concepts that he relies upon can be mobilized in the service of a directive and constructive agency; and it is not obvious how an individual’s efforts to become worthy of the events that befall her may be evaluated in social terms. Indeed, Deleuze’s attitude toward democracy is notably ambivalent. He has been rebuked for failing to provide a normative account of political governance and for his tendency to devalue democratic principles such as majority opinion consensus and rights. However, as Paul Patton (2010, 161-184) points out, Deleuze’s apparent rejection of actually existing democracies holds out the prospect that other actualizations of the concept of democracy might be possible. In this chapter, I seek to expand understanding about democracy’s potentiality by bringing Deleuze into relation with the pragmatist thought of Dewey. I begin by discussing the individuating and transforming roles of “the event” in Deleuzian Deleuze’s “structuralism”. Subsequent sections position Deleuze’s this account of individuation in relation to Dewey’s pragmatic concept of experimental existence as simultaneously precarious and stable, and consequently in alignment with Dewey’s associated theory of democracy. I argue for a constructed alliance between Dewey and Deleuze that can shed light on the pragmatic implications of Deleuze’s thought, particularly in consideration of the democratic social values and activist programs that are of explicit interest to Dewey, but which remain implicit in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical works (despite their commitments to various political movements). Dewey and Deleuze share a starting point in their understandings of “existence” conceptualized as relational affective in complex ways; as non-foundational, continuous and, creative and organic. Significant resonances in their approaches to philosophical method spring from this shared starting point. An appreciation of these points of convergences in the works of Dewey and Deleuze enables improved understanding about how the ways in which Deleuze ’s concepts and philosophical concerns lead to encourages a mode of critical and constructive thinking that correlates with democratic principles and advances the idea of “democracy as a way of life”.