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.

Deleuze, Whitehead, and the 'Beautiful Soul' (2019)

Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 2019

This paper explores one means of connection between Whitehead and Deleuze through an investigation into the figure of the ‘beautiful soul’. I first examine Deleuze’s claim that a philosophy of difference risks a ‘new’ version of the beautiful soul, situating this figure in its historical context in Hegel. I then consider why Whitehead may initially appear to fall into the trap of the beautiful soul before arguing that this is not the case. Seeing how brings Whitehead and Deleuze closer together by showing that their respective insistences on the risks, dangers, and adventures integral to speculative thinking highlight the importance of the intersection between the existential and the metaphysical.

Deleuze and the Event(s)

Journal for Cultural Research, 2016

As one of the most prominent and controversial philosophers of the twentieth century, Gilles Deleuze reshaped philosophical thinking and, consequently, approaches to interpreting global events. While not engaging with ‘globalization’ per se, Deleuze’s thinking has a pro- found impact on the globalising world, as well as the alter-globalisation movement. As borders shift, nations fall and a state of perpetual war begins to take hold of both the devel- oped and developing areas of the world, Deleuze’s spatial approach to philosophy and cultural interpretation becomes increasingly important as a means to understand and ‘read’ events around the world. From the continual advancement of the self-described Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) to the democratic protests in Hong Kong, Deleuze’s philosophy elucidates the volatility of space, the means to contest space and the implications of living in such spaces. In short, through Deleuze’s philosophy we can better understand events currently reshaping our cultures, attitudes, relationships and world. The opportunity to open new lines of inquiry not just around Deleuze’s thought, but also towards world events, could be instrumental in apprehending the cultural and ontological significance of late term capitalism, challenged statist ideologies and an all together new world (dis)order.

A Genesis of Speculative Empiricisms: Whitehead and Deleuze read Hume (2019)

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 57, Issue 4 , 2019

Deleuze's "transcendental empiricism" and the "empirical side" of Whitehead's metaphysics are paradoxical unless placed in the context of their unorthodox readings of empiricism. I explore this context focusing on their engagements with Hume. Both subvert presumptions of a categorical gap between external nature and internal human experience and open possibilities for a speculative empiricism that is non-reductive while still affirming experience as source for philosophical thinking. Deleuze and Whitehead follow Hume in beginning with events of sensation as primary but do not presume the logic of (human) subjects and objects (of nature) as necessary structuring polarities for their interpretation. This challenges a basic distinction (between inner and outer or between self and world) that seems inherent in the ordinary concept of experience, thus earning the moniker speculative. The speculative empiricist studies how these abstractions arise from events of experience prior to their consolidation in representation. This includes a critical component: to what extent do unexamined assumptions about conceptual abstraction hinder, block, or prefigure experiential attention? This critical component has existential implications for how we attend to the affective, intuitive, and preconceptual. Russell J. Duvernoy Seattle University Deleuze's "transcendental empiricism" and the "empirical side" of Whitehead's metaphysics are paradoxical unless placed in the context of their unorthodox readings of the empiricist heritage. 1 In this paper, I examine their respective engagements with Hume to explore this context. Charting their convergences and divergences brings into view the extent to which both subvert presumptions of a categorical gap between external nature and internal human experience and open possibilities for a speculative empiricism that is non-reductive while still affirming experience as source for philosophical thinking. 2 Though the term speculative empiricism has acquired some familiarity in the literature on Deleuze and Whitehead, it may appear oxymoronic to a wider audience. 3 Isn't empiricism often 1 See DR, 56-7 and PR, 3. 2