In the contemporary context of environmental crises and the degradation of resources, certain habitats become unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and species extinction. Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between humans and nonhumans, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the other, as an (...) event that distinguishes human from other organisms. Against this background, this article explores how contemporary art—in particular, the series of works The Absence of Alice by Australian new-media and bioartist Svenja Kratz—challenges the normative and human-exceptionalist concept of death. By employing queerfeminist biophilosophy as a strategy that focuses on relations, processes and transformations instead of ‘essences’, the article examines the ways Kratz’s works deterritorialise the conventional concept of death. In this way, it hopes to attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying, and what follows, to reframe ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living. (shrink)

Have we reached what Alexander Galloway dismissively refers to as ‘peak Deleuze’? In this essay, I argue that the arrival at end times – with the sense of mass extinction and philosophy's exhaustion – is indeed a moment of ‘peak Deleuze’, but that this gesture of exhaustion is already implicit in A Thousand Plateaus. Recognising the limits and seduction of a text is never as easy as it seems; every attempt to break up with Deleuze and Guattari, though necessary, is (...) fraught with a whole series of difficulties that were already visible in A Thousand Plateaus's own relation to its outside. (shrink)

Democracy as an assemblage highlights the complexity, contingency and non-linear becomings of a democratic society which is never static but constantly transforming. This article contends that there is a need for an explicit engagement with power in democratic assemblages. It is argued that power is not an individual possession but a function of assemblages, operating through territorialisation and deterritorialisation. These processes, through the flow of power as discipline, production, and disruption, shape democracy. Analysing liberal democracy as a territorialised democratic (...) assemblage, the article states that it faces deterritorialisation by nature's dynamism and ecological thought. However, rather than collapsing in the face of these lines of flight, democracy carries the potential to reterritorialise as ecological democracy by adapting new configurations of power, nature and governance. (shrink)

Taking a schizoanalytic approach to audio-visual images, this article explores some of the radical potentia for deterritorialisation found within David Fincher's Fight Club (1999). The film's potential for deterritorialisation is initially located in an exploration of the film's form and content, which appear designed to interrogate and transcend a series of false binaries between mind and body, inside and outside, male and female. Paying attention to the construction of photorealistic digital spaces and composited images, we examine the actual (...) (and possible) ways viewers relate to the film, both during and after screenings. Recognising the film as an affective force performing within our world, we also investigate some of the real-world effects the film catalysed. Finally, we propose that schizoanalysis, when applied to a Hollywood film, suggests that Deleuze underestimated the deterritorialising potential of contemporary, special effects-driven cinema. If schizoanalysis has thus been reterritorialised by mainstream products, we argue that new, ‘post-Deleuzian’ lines of flight are required to disrupt this ‘de-re-territorialisation’. (shrink)

In his final writings Guattari designed a four-functor meta-model with which to map subjective resingularisation against the backdrop of what he saw as the late-modern admixture of ecological collapse, social deterioration and subjective decomposition. I examine here Guattari’s fourfold in neo-structuralist terms and then engage in a discussion on the difference between worlding and deterritorialisation, reassessing in this sense Guattari’s concept of machinic indices in conversation with the works of anthropologists. Further, I show that Guattari’s fourfold is reminiscent of (...) Heidegger’s Geviert, which I place at the very core of Heidegger’s project of overcoming the modern Ge-stell. Lastly, from the fact that Guattari’s fourfold opens onto the question of worlding and that Heidegger points to our incapability to tune in and sing back to the earth’s song, I draw the conclusion that they put forward an eco-cosmo-poetics that points beyond the flat ontology of today’s new materialism and the subtractive logic of speculative realism. (shrink)

In 1997 the radical body-artist Stelarc hooked himself up to an external muscle stimulation system that was triggered by changing images from the Internet, producing a host of digital, visual, embodied and discursive performances. What an event! This uncanny performance, entitled ParaSite, did not merely represent something but was also simultaneously performative in that the unfolding of the performance itself produced new diffractions in the moment, doing something to and with the performer’s body in a flow of active human and (...) nonhuman participation. Differing from rendering an event, the performative mode does what it says rather than shows something already captured and ‘reflected’ in a representational mode. Here, Stelarc does not act ‘as if’ he were hooked up to the Internet in a meeting of fleshly and digital realities in order to represent issues of entanglement – he actually does it. Furthermore, the performance produces new, unanticipated diffractive iterations as it unfolds in the moment. Although the scene is set, as it were, no one, not even its creator can predict how the show will progress or what diffractions will emerge and become vital parts of the performance. (shrink)

In the previous chapter I attempted to make a case for working with concepts of intra-action, deterritorialisation and diffraction as a theoretical apparatus by which to imagine pedagogical possibilities (specifically employing the example of management learning to do this), not least via the incorporation of the potentials lying within PaR modalities. This chapter goes on now to describe and discuss an experiment that marked the beginnings of imagining such a pedagogy in practice. The course Critical Issues in Law & (...) Management (henceforth, CILM) was originally set up at Warwick University more than fifteen years ago for undergraduate students of business and law studies, undergoing several incarnations until appearing in the form I was given the opportunity to work with in the 2013/14 academic session. What follows is (a) a detailed discussion of the inheritance – the “ghosts” – that haunted the course; (b) an in-depth report of some of the new test approaches to its reimagining in practice, and (c) diffractive possibilities for further iterations. Working with the conceptual framework provided by Barad et al., this chapter aims to show how I developed inter- and transdisciplinary approaches (including PaR) to re-imagine management learning at undergraduate level. (shrink)

Modern feminist movements run the risk of being appropriated by capitalist agenda and commodified for mass appeal, thus stripping them of their revolutionary potential. I would propose that in order for feminism to challenge this, movements may want to consider the subversion of subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari's notions of becoming-animal and becoming-woman emphasise a subjectivity not confined by rigid identity, such as man/woman. However, feminists have challenged this theory, suggesting it is difficult to both fight for and dispel the very (...) same notion, that is, woman. I argue that in first considering the feminine subject via the Lacanian understanding of ‘Woman’, it can be argued that feminine subjects can engage with becoming-animal to destabilise the notion of ‘Woman’. Riot Grrls, FEMEN and Pussy Riot all demonstrate tactics which could be said to utilise becoming-animal and have had varying success in avoiding commodification. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore how the differences between Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze delineate two different interpretations of the politics of found footage cinema. To do so, the notion of cinematic interval is crucial. While Debord's practice of détournement presupposes a Hegelian-inspired notion of interval that allows for self-awareness to be achieved, Deleuze puts forth a Bergsonian concept of interval that functions as a condition of possibility for creating an ‘image of movement in itself’. To explore (...) these two interpretations, this article uses Guy Debord's 1973 film The Society of the Spectacle as a case study. By focusing on this specific object, the two interpretations of the cinematic interval make it possible to compare two alternative ways of dealing with the representability – or unrepresentability – of capital, and hence to sketch two alternative views on the politics of found footage film practices. (shrink)

A feminist-inspired, Deleuzo-Guattarian conception of love can be a model of designing virtual reality experiences that pursue their liberating rather than enslaving trajectories.

This paper examines the interplay between affectivity, individuality and territory through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the image. To such end, this article employs a philosophical and conceptual analysis grounded in Gilles Deleuze’s cinema theory. The method is qualitative and interpretive, focusing on conceptual elaboration, theoretical synthesis and philosophical critique, rather than empirical research. The article finds that the close-up suspends individuation and expresses the pure affect by deterritorialising the subject. However, in contemporary media, this potential is reterritorialised (...) through political messaging that uses close-up imagery to fix affect within ideological frameworks. Instead of expressing affect, political figures represent and capture it, neutralising its disruptive force. (shrink)

This chapter marks the theoretical pivot of this work. Building on Deleuze & Guattari’s flow theory, and revisiting Land, Fisher, and later /Acc formulations, it identifies the paradox of immediate modernity: movement is constant, yet transformation absent. Capital’s flows no longer functionally deterritorialise: they loop endlessly. Investigatory Accelerationism (i/Acc) is introduced as an alternative approach, using the logic of speed as a diagnostic tool rather than a weapon of rupture. i/Acc reads immediacy as data, repetition as code, and stagnation as (...) revelation, turning the mechanisms of acceleration inward to expose their operations. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore the appropriation of Deleuzian literary theory in the Chinese context and its potential for mapping a new global poetics. The purpose of this treatment is thus twofold: first, it will redefine the East–West literary relationship, and second, it will seek a new ethics of life, as endorsed by Deleuze's philosophy of immanence. One finds an affinity between literature and life in Deleuze's philosophy: in short, literature appears as the passage of life and an enterprise of (...) health and thus seeks new possibilities of life, which consists in the invention of a new language and a new people. But what kind of health may such a view provide for a non-Western individual, people, literature and culture? This investigation further appeals to the medium of translation. This paper argues that the act of translation functions as a means of deterritorialisation that displays continuing variations of a language, and through translation, Deleuze's clinical and critical aspects of literature promote a transversal poetics that transcends the binary, oppositional conception of East–West and an immanent ethics of life that overcomes the sentiment of ressentiment. (shrink)

The mass popular dissent which has marked the early twenty-first century, from al-Qaeda to the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement, can be read as expressions of collective, subjective, existential mutation. This reading is inspired by Félix Guattari, who described the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Polish Solidarity movement and the 1989 Chinese student demonstrations as demands for subjective singularisation. In each of these examples of social discontent, past and present, demands vary widely even within the same movement, spanning economics, lifestyle, (...) religion and politics, and ranging from cries for liberation to conservative returns to ancient tradition. In order to perform a schizoanalysis of such amorphous movements, Guattari developed a four-part ecosophic object, composed of existential Territories, Universes of value, material-energetic Flows and machinic Phyla. Assemblages can be dynamically mapped along these four dimensions. Of crucial importance in the age of extreme deterritorialisation is the existential Territory, which could potentially take the form of a homeland based on poetry or music rather than on ethnicity or even place. Such portable homelands would characterise the dissensual processual post-media era for which Guattari longed. (shrink)

This paper points to significant similarities between the political orientations of Deleuze and Derrida. Derrida's appeal to a pure form of existing concepts (absolute hospitality, pure forgiveness, and so on) parallels Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between relative and absolute 'deterritorialisation'. In each case, the absolute form of the concept is a condition of the possibility of change.

This essay employs Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the capitalist social machine to explore Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964). More specifically, it addresses the psychological struggles of the film's female protagonist, Giuliana, with respect to duelling forces of capitalist deterritorialisation and Oedipal reterritorialisation. The essay also brings together Deleuze's cinema works with his and Guattari's schizoanalysis to show how Antonioni's use of the time-image itself functions as a deterritorialising force, particularly with respect to the film's pivotal island fantasy scene, (...) where, if only momentarily, Giuliana engages in the Deleuzean act of becoming. (shrink)

This paper is an ethnographic endeavour in mapping the Deleuzian concept of Becoming-Animal in a sport called Jallikattu, which involves humans and bulls. Initially, I map the legal and social discourses surrounding this sport to argue the necessity to understand the immanent patterns of molecular forces, activating the human–bull relationships, embedded in this sport. Ethnographic data collected from the domain of Jallikattu bull selection and grooming and from the players of this sport are analysed to materially ground the dynamic ontology (...) of becoming-animal, specifically the conceptions of the pack and the anomalous. I explain how the formation of the Jallikattu assemblage, comprising both the humans and the bulls, compels us to grasp the specific encounters of selectors, groomers and players with the bull in establishing an affective relationship. The act of hugging the bull in this sport and the local conception of action-characteristics help in tracing the nodes of deterritorialisation and rhizomatic connections in the apparatus of Jallikattu. I argue that the richness of becomings embedded in this sport needs to be taken into account, amidst the quantitative surge in legal and social discourses. (shrink)

‘Creative Involution’ posits something of a philosophical genealogy, a line of flight that has neither need for nor interest in the periodisation of Modernism, a line of which Beckett (even reluctantly) is part. Murphy, among others, is deterritorialised as much as Beckett's landscapes are, and so he/they become a ‘complexification’ of being that manifests itself in Beckett not as represented, representative or a representation, since so much of Beckett deals with that which cannot be uttered, known or represented, but whose (...) image the works (and its figures) have become, a thinking through of negativity, becoming, and multiplicity through non-Newtonian motion, of being as becoming, where every movement brings something new into the world, but in something of a reverse Darwinism that moves from complex to simple organism, from Murphy to Worm, or Watt to Pim, or among the nameless figures in the short prose, a ‘becoming-animal’, in something not so much of a creative devolution but rather a ‘neoevolution’, or to adopt another term from Deleuze and Guattari, an ‘involution’, which ‘is in no way confused with regression’ (1987: 238), becomings creating nothing less than new worlds. Writing casually to his post-war confidant Georges Duthuit on 26 July 1951, Beckett noted in the midst of gardening chores, ‘Never seen so many butterflies in such worm-state, this little central cylinder, the only flesh, is the worm’ (2011: 271). The observation comes after the writing but before the premiere performance of Waiting for Godot in which Gogo tells Didi, ‘You and your landscapes! Tell me about the worms!’ (1954: 67). Such ‘becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short a multiplicity’ (1987: 239), Deleuze and Guattari tell us. For Beckett it defines creativity as well, only possible through such un-tethered selves or beings, amid the generation of varieties and differences, accessible through moments of deterritorialisation, characterised by, ‘A fearsome involution calling us toward unheard-of becomings’ (240). (shrink)

In front of deterritorialisation / reterritorialisation process one which characterize the globalization, we try to dread the elements of continuance and break which connect among them the Forums of Porto Alegre and Genoa; these two big mobilizations of citizens of world constitute, indeed, the most relevant repository in a debate on the city. By tempting these comparisons, we build an approach of the new cycle of internationalist fights which puts production and constitution of urbanterritories as main stakes in the (...) future developments of the movement. (shrink)

This paper pursues two goals. The first concerns clarifying the relationship between Deleuze and the Russian linguist and culturologist, Mikhail Bakhtin. Not only does Deleuze refer to Bakhtin as a primary source for his emphasis on voice and indirect discourse, both thinkers valorise heterogeneity and creativity. I argue Deleuze's notions of ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘reterritorialisation’ parallel Bakhtin's idea of ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘monoglossia’. Clarifying the relationship between Deleuze and Bakhtin leads directly to the second of my two other goals. I will (...) argue that an important difference in their characterisation of voice reveals a strong point in Deleuze's philosophy, one related to the political sphere. At the same time, however, Deleuze's particular way of articulating this point conceals a weakness, one related to the idea of the subject. I will conclude my paper by suggesting a way to address this weakness. (shrink)

Process philosophies tend to emphasise the value of continuous creation as the core of their discourse. For Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others the real is ultimately a creative becoming. Critics have argued that there is an irreducible element of (almost religious) belief in this re-evaluation of immanent creation. While I don’t think belief is necessarily a sign of philosophical and existential weakness, in this paper I will examine the possibility for the concept of universal creation to be a political and (...) ethical axiom, the result of a global social contract rather than of a new spirituality. I argue here that a coherent way to fight against potentially totalitarian absolutes is to replace them with a virtual absolute that cannot territorialise without deterritorialising at the same time: the Creal principle. (shrink)

Based on Deleuze’s understanding of creative productivity as an expression of one’s mental desiring-machine, the paper proposes an innovative insight into the ambiguous – constructive and destructive – human need to repeat. To philosophically grasp the aesthetic and material results of such repetitive activity, I propose to complete the Deleuzian concept of assemblage with the concept of ornament, defined as a material result of a repetitive mindset generating arrangements of regularly returning acts and items. I argue that Deleuze’s immanent repetition (...) generates two kinds of ornament: the individual one, such as a personal collection or an artistic style, and the social one, such as an avant-garde movement or subculture fashion. Both ornaments are explained through Deleuze’s concepts of negative and relational deterritorialisation and are further defined by a new reading of Deleuze’s revision of repetition in Freud and Nietzsche. Both kinds of immanent repetition produce ornamental compositions which are threatened by the danger of ornamental decomposition. (shrink)

Dialogue, as a concept, is often seen as both central to and a prerequisite for philosophical understanding, especially across cultural divides. I wish to reposition dialogue from being a force for unity and transcendence, to being a force for distinction and immanence. This creative tension is possible only when one takes a place-based approach to philosophy, that is, when one recognises that concepts have their own provenance, a provenance which was defined and developed as questions were raised in an environment (...) of productive inter-traditional tension. Philosophical traditions are constructed as they (to use Deleuze and Guattari's terms) deterritorialise and reterritorialise thought, that is, as they transform concepts into usable markers of philosophical life. I will resist the impulse to move to the meta-level of ‘conversation’, which serves only to obscure the productive tension between traditions. Attending to the place of philosophy, on the other hand, makes possible both a more thorough self-critical attitude, and the possibility of a productive encounter with philosophy- in-place. African philosophy, I will argue, provides a useful and instructive space in which to rethink dialogue. If we focus on the differences between traditions (what I will term ‘thought-lives’), we will make dialogue productive, rather than regarding it as just a prior condition to reason or as a liberal ideal. (shrink)

Rejecting critiques of the final line of Greta Gerwig's Barbie as a bioessentialist classification of gender, we engage with the Deleuzian concept of becoming to argue that this final line is not only gender inclusive but gender expansive, particularly within the current political moment. Challenging settled, hegemonic gender identities through the unsettled and dynamic possibilities of becoming, we explore how this dialogue can be interpreted as messaging to promote bodily autonomy for all by focusing on the essential role of reproductive (...) and sexual health as necessary for liberation. Despite Barbie exemplifying white feminism and commodifying liberatory messages into a product, the audience and their connections with the film's messages generate the possibilities of liberating white feminism from its self-imposed limitations through becoming and deterritorialisation. (shrink)

Although Gilles Deleuze never explicitly developed what might be considered a ‘philosophy of technology’, this article nonetheless attempts to outline the rudiments of a Deleuzian approach to technology by proposing a series of interrelated concepts: (1) prosthesis (technological artefacts are externalised organs); (2) proto-technicity, or originary technicity (but this technicity already exists in Nature, all the way down, and precedes any ‘theory’); (3) exodarwinism (the fact that evolutionary time has bifurcated, and technology evolves in a faster and accelerating time scale); (...) (4) de-specialisation or de-differentiation (what conditions the externalisation of organs is their deterritorialisation); (5) motricity (the link between the brain and the hand/mouth is primarily one of movement); (6) inscription, or graphism (the link between mouth and hand takes place through phonetic writing, when the hand reproduces speech in graphic inscriptions); (7) maker's knowledge (we know the organisations of matter found in nature through the organisations of matter that we ourselves have created); and finally, (8) totipotence (like a stem cell, the body is capable of externalising an almost unlimited number of forms and functions; it is itself an abstract and the source of abstractions). (shrink)

William S. Burroughs's concept of control acts as a key influence on Gilles Deleuze's control society, a contemporary power arrangement in which conduct is manipulated through direct, non-localised modulations. Deleuze says resisting control society requires finding new weapons against it. This task of armament is epitomised in the artistry of non-binary musician, occultist and multimedia artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Also influenced by Burroughs, and having personal ties to the author, P-Orridge devoted h/er 50-plus years of creative output to projects aimed (...) at control's short-circuiting. Among P-Orridge's most prominent projects was Psychic TV (PTV), a sonic outfit that incorporated performance art, improvisation and ecstatic rituals across an eclectic range of music genres to attack sites of control. PTV also inspired and networked with P-Orridge's political art collective and magick organisation ‘Thee Temple ov Psychic Youth’ (TOPY). PTV's principal weapon for undermining control was the musical sigil, aural vacuoles of non-communication created from ritualised desire designed to be deployed into the world as affective agents. Working through the Deleuzian philosophical framework of concept creation, this article draws inspiration from the weaponised artistry of PTV to formulate two novel concepts of the musical sigil: the ‘virus sigil’ and the ‘key sigil’. Two corresponding tracks serve as focal points for illustrating each concept's short-circuit tactics. Virus sigils, exemplified by the track ‘Roman P.’ as used in a television advertisement, act a contaminating agents that short-circuit control directly. They infiltrate control-serving media to disrupt its transmissions of socially conditioning information from within. Key sigils, exemplified by ‘Message From The Temple’, act as a recruitment agent that short-circuit control indirectly. Functioning themselves like an advertisement for TOPY, this type of sigil disseminates counter-information that proliferates TOPY as a nomadic war machine, opening passages therethrough to becomings of an alternative space-time deterritorialised from control's manipulations. (shrink)

Affirmative ethics, as a collective and radically democratic praxis, must be constructed by subjects who collectively defy unity and actualise a virtual heterogeneous assemblage, while retaining ethical accountability. The composition of an ethically active subjectivity is achieved by transcending the force of the negative and by acknowledging and reworking reactive emotions such as pain, anger, greed and fear. It entails working through negative instances to attain a more profound understanding of their sources – both affective and cognitive – and striving (...) to transform them into affirmation. Ethics demands rigorous effort: it encompasses not only critical intelligence but also the force of affectivity in relational and epistemological operations. Affirmative ethics functions as a critique of power by exposing the despotic instances of contemporary power formations and the undercurrents of molecular molarities or micro-fascisms. It breaks free from the toxic bonds and the acquiescent application of established norm and values. It deterritorialises them by introducing ethical flows that unfold and enhance relational interdependence. Affirmative ethical subjects are not enamoured of power. An affirmative life, therefore, epitomises ‘the anti-fascist life’. (shrink)

The paper’s purpose consists in pointing out the importance of the notion of “territory”, in its different accepted meanings, for the development of a theory and a practice of subjectivity both in deleuzean and canettian thought. Even though they start from very different perspectives and epistemic levels, they indeed produce similar philosophical effects, which strengthen their “common” view and the model of subjectivity they try to shape. More precisely, the paper focuses on the deleuzean triad of territorialisation, deterritorialisation, reterritorialisation, (...) with regard to the role it plays in the forming of the subject and in connection with the fundamental deleuzean notion of difference; it furthermore concentrates on the characterization of the notion of territory in Canetti’s work, also in the light of the mentioned deleuzean categories and with reference to the crucial canettian concept of transformation. Finally, the paper analyses both the political consequences of the “nomadic subjectivity” Deleuze and Canetti deal with and the critical and problematic aspects it involves. (shrink)

The interplay between urban and rural lifestyles in the modern era, influenced by globalisation, technological advancements and societal shifts, underscores a complex fusion of cultures and behaviours. This convergence reshapes communal dynamics and territorial perceptions. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical framework, particularly concepts of territory, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, this study explores the emergence of urban subcultures resembling rural communities. Through ornamental behaviour and the repetition of cultural events, urban spaces undergo a transformative process akin to ritornello, establishing distinct (...) territories marked by creative expressions. The territories are justified and consolidated by a repeated performance of the social ornament which is a set of rules, practices and material products. All these phenomena, infused with the event (Deleuze) and moments of awe (Leddy), intertwine aesthetics and ethics, promoting community unity and well-being. This inquiry not only clarifies social phenomena but also indicates pathways for a more fulfilling societal existence. (shrink)

_Abstract_ This article proposes the concept of the _ecumenical machine possessed_ to account for how contemporary humanitarian capitalism integrates marginality and reproduces totalitarian coherence through the figure of the _victim_. Building on Žižek’s reformulation of Hegelian totality as _“the whole plus its symptoms,”_ I argue that post‑war liberal universalism—materialised in the twin formations of _dialogical recognition_ and _empathetic trauma_—does not expel the _sinthome_ but _magnetises it into the symbolic edifice_. Reading Wagner’s _Parsifal_ (through Syberberg), Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Deleuze/Guattari, I show (...) how _Amfortas’s wound_ functions as the real kernel that supports the coherence of the post‑1945 order; how _genealogy_ is _recoded_ into a validating niche for humanitarian governance; and how the _fetish_ is _updated_ via the annexation of human and _eco‑victims_ to an expanded capitalist _recording surface_. A Deleuzian _retrospective problematisation_ reframes totalitarianism as a transcendental–immanent _problem_ that is never abolished by its solutions—democratic, humanitarian, or otherwise. In this horizon, the dispositif of _human dignity_ separates capital from its own unintelligible flood, while the deterritorialised voice of NGOs and human‑rights discourse takes the form of a _maternal superego_. The result is a _victimist fetishism_ in which commodities emanate halos of wound and care, and philosophy’s attempt to articulate contradiction is rendered _unintelligible_. The penultimate section reads the _identitarian state_ through _House of Cards_, Chernobyl as real‑unrepresentable object, and the hermaphroditic Parsifal; the conclusion advances a _Christological_ thesis: _subjective destitution_ as an antifilosophical practice that cancels the sociosymbolic Other and articulates a _triple formula_ of the _sense of the earth_. (shrink)

This chapter outlines the theoretical foundations for a new sexual politics for men beyond manhood, masculinity and gender that addresses the limitations of theories reviewed in previous chapters. Drawing upon new materialism, posthumanism and the ontology of Deleuze and Guattari, and feminist engagements with these ideas, it discusses the political implications of destabilising men, masculinity and gender. Deleuze and Guattari’s (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Bloomsbury Academic, 1983/2013; A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Bloomsbury Academic, (...) 1987/2020) concepts of assemblages, territorialisation, deterritorialisation, schizoanalysis, microfascism, desire and molar and molecular practices are used to provide insights into ways of understanding and responding to men’s patriarchal subjectivities and practices. (shrink)

Félix Guattari spent his entire working life at La Borde psychiatric clinic where a radicalised form of psychoanalysis, ‘schizoanalysis’, was applied, based on the theory that emerged in Anti-Oedipus and was elaborated in A Thousand Plateaus. In the medium of this non-Oedipalised therapeutic plane lies the ‘body without organs (BwO), a body not fully organised but open to every form of expression and metamorphosis. The ideas and practice involved in schizoanalysis, which have now been in effect for fifty years in (...) every social and cultural field, have produced a new hybrid of Lacanian analysis and schizoanalysis, with the recent queering psychoanalysis expanding further the revolutionary character of the latter. The general logic and the determinate ideas of A Thousand Plateaus were applied as a reciprocal presupposition between content and form: free expression, interconnectedness, becoming-woman and -imperceptible, a deterritorialisation of models, roles and relations. (shrink)

The final chapter explores ways to foster practices by men beyond the gender binary and beyond gender. It outlines the implications of the theoretical framework advanced earlier for the politics and practices of engaging men in personal transformation and promotion of a more peaceful and socially just world. Such practices will require participation by men in transforming their subjectivities and engaging in collective practices in the public sphere. Deleuze and Guattari’s (A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Bloomsbury (...) Academic, 1987/2020) notions of deterritorialisation, becoming, lines of flight, nomad, molecular practices, rhyzomes and affect are used to explore the micropolitics of unbecoming men. While such practices occur at the micropolitical levels of society, the chapter also explores how such practices can inform collective and public resistance against the macropolitical levels of patriarchy and the gender binary. (shrink)

Adopting Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's formulations of the rhizome, this article will examine a dynamic that lies between the film Japón's (Carlos Reygadas, 2002) vernacular specificities, European modernist aesthetics and cosmopolitan spectatorship. The article aims to reveal that Japón, along with other contemporary slow films from around the world, has the potential to reify a deterritorialising and reterritorialising encounter that rethinks a Eurocentric genealogical reading of world cinema and challenges a capitalist code of filmmaking.

What does theory-fiction bring to theory? What does it add to it (if anything)? This essay attempts to answer these questions and is organised around ten sections, each of which makes a different set of claims, while also identifying some precursors, certain scenes of writing and other key examples of this genre. The ten sections are as follows: (1) Dramatisation and Deterritorialisation. In which I attend to theory-fiction’s dramatisation of concepts, its non-philosophical character (following François Laruelle) and its operation (...) as a kind of ‘minor’ writing (following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari). (2) Cybernetic Theory-Fictions. Here I attend to a key scene of theory-fiction that involves Science Fiction and cybernetics. (3) Hyperstitions and Other Nestings. Following directly on from 2., this section concerns the idea of fictions making themselves real via feedback loops. (4) From Ethnopoetics to Ecopoetics. In this section, I look to other kinds of theoretical writing that also involve fiction as method. (5) Science Fictions and Sympoiesis. Here I address those theory-fictions that present non-human and inter-species perspectives. (6) Outside Perspectives and Critical Fabulations. In which I explore how theory-fiction operates as an optic to an outside or onto historical trauma. (7) Different Registers. Here I look at the way in which theory-fiction also uses other forms of representation. (8) Formal Devices. In which I turn back to writing and explore some of the more formal devices of theory-fiction. (9) Performing Texts. In this section I attend to the idea of texts that perform their content and that also call to be performed. (10) Sites of Production and Modes of Existence. My last section explores the idea that theory-fiction is situated away from the mainstream and thus can express other subject positions and modes of existence. In a coda to this first essay, I briefly lay out my own determining encounter with a certain scene of theory-fiction and attend briefly to the idea that a scene might itself be a theory-fiction too. (shrink)

The score of Piece Four of Sylvano Bussotti's Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor is the most important image in A Thousand Plateaus. It serves as a prefatory image not only to the Rhizome plateau, but also to the work as a whole. It functions as the book's musical score, guiding readers in their performance of the text. Embracing John Cage's graphism and aleatory practices, Bussotti created his own ‘aserial’ new music, one that celebrated passion and Bussotti's open homosexuality. The (...) visual elements of Piece Four include a deterritorialisation of the standard piano score, a diagram of the composition's abstract machine, and a drawing that Bussotti had produced ten years before writing Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor. The drawing itself is a rhizomic artwork, with details that echo visual motifs throughout A Thousand Plateaus. The superimposition of the drawing on the deterritorialised framework of the standard piano score conjoins the visible and the audible, faciality and the refrain, in a single artefact. (shrink)

With the work of authors such as Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Edwidge Danticat, Earl Lovelace, Junot Díaz, Maryse Condé, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, or Dany Laferrière, Caribbean literature looks back on a prolific and influential tradition of ‘hybrid’ aesthetics and transcultural social realism. Simultaneously, contemporary literary and cultural scholarship is increasingly becoming aware of its post-postcolonial and post-postmodernist condition, deferring text-immanent arguments of deterritorialisation, agency, or representation for the sake of a more material criticism which questions the very premises of our (...) modern social systems. The concept of a minor universality reflects this necessity. Against this backdrop, the present paper investigates the potential of critics such as Jacques Rancière, Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu, and Shalini Puri to both (re)read the aforementioned tradition and also approach the present generation of Caribbean writers. (shrink)

In this article, I will try to elucidate the relevance of Deleuze and Guattari’s approaches in the philosophy of education, along the lines of the Deleuzean pedagogy of ‘do with me’ and the absence of pre-established rules for learning or methodological anarchism. To do so, I will consider three important milestones in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought: (i) antihumanism as the matrix of a pedagogy of generosity, (ii) the primacy of functioning over meaning as a vindication of practical learning versus rote (...) learning, (iii) the concepts of ‘deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation’ as the unlearning required by all true learning. (shrink)

How can one try to speak of conclusions when all the work undertaken has attempted to point towards notions of entanglement, diffraction and deterritorialisation that melt such conceptual ‘solidities’ into air? In light of this, perhaps it is the task of this conclusion/beginning, to tie the emergent properties of this book together into a form of ‘map’ that might go on to create new diffractions in the minds and practices of interested teachers, students, pedagogues and educational stakeholders. The idea (...) of a ‘map’ suggested here is perhaps most simply put forth as a kind of apparatus that works to render known and traditional ways of thinking about teaching and learning strange, hybridised and complex through transdisciplinary means, thus opening up possibilities for new and creative lines of flight. These lines of flight are not produced ‘for their own sake’ alone, rather the ‘maps’ put forth throughout this book point towards an experimental intention to enhance teaching and learning, diffracting into new opportunities for criticality. (shrink)

In ‘Causes and Reasons of Desert Islands’, Gilles Deleuze presents a mythological and scientific vision in which new islands and new humanity emerge from the opposition between the land and sea in desert islands. However, what Deleuze cannot explain is how such new territory and people are produced and reproduced while rejecting old and conventional generational ways. To break this impasse, which is also present in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze and Guattari intend to retain the absolute movement of deterritorialisation, (...) while acknowledging that deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation always comingle. This theoretical project is found in the critique of Pierre Clastres on counter-state societies, and is taken up by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? In this latter work, by creating concepts and constituting a new plane, Deleuze and Guattari offer some conditions of a third reterritorialisation that, after the second reterritorialisation in the democratic states, presents a new way of forging a political and revolutionary philosophy. In this essay, we criticise the opinions that consider Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy as one version of radical democracy. Their political philosophy should be situated in the post-democratic era to come. (shrink)

In much the same way that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987: 3) describe the concept of a book, we conceive of Teaching for Change as “lines of flight, movements of deterritorialisation and destratification”. Like Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 4), the lines of flight rupture in all directions with measurable speeds constituting an “assemblage”. We shall now expound on the pedagogic notions espoused through Teaching for Change as assemblages of learning. In order to explain what Teaching for Change comprises, (...) we need to show: first, how it functions; second, with which connection it intensifies; and third, which metamorphosis it undergoes. In this way, we examine Teaching for Change as an assemblage of learning whereby we accentuate some of the pedagogical actions as embedded in Teaching for Change. (shrink)

Depuis le milieu des annees 1960, les etudes spinozistes ont pris un nouvel essor sous l'impulsion du courant marxiste qui a vu dans le programme de liberation des collectivites pense par Spinoza le projet politique le plus apte ä assurer une reponse ä la crise de legitimite du marxisme. Dans la foulee de certaines intuitions de Althusser, et ä la lumiere de la conceptualite spinoziste, plusieurs penseurs (notamment Deleuze, Negri, Macherey, Matheron et Virno) ont ainsi propose un nouveau modele d'organisation (...) de la vie en commun. Ces acteurs de la renaissance spinoziste redigent, en quelque sorte, le chapitre conclusif de la derniere ceuvre de Spinoza (i.e. le Tratte politique reste inacheve) en definissant les nouvelles conditions de la democratic ä l'heure de la deterritorialisation generalisee marquee par l'abolition des frontieres nationales (economie mondiale, reseaux informatiques, etc.). Ce contexte offre l'occasion de repenser la politique en radicalisant les propos de Spinoza et en faisant jouer les notions de "puissance" et de "multitude" non seulement contre les concepts de "pouvoir" et de "peuple" qui en sont venus ä dominer le champ de la reflexion en philosophic politique, mais egalement contre les philosophies de l'histoire fondees sur la dialectique et la teleologie. Apres avoir decrit brievement quelques-uns des principaux enjeux de la politique spinoziste et avoir presente les nouveaux ennemis du spinozisme (neo-liberalisme et marxisme ideologique), nous ferons une genealogie de la refondation neo-spinozienne de Marx (Althusser, Deleuze, Negri) avant de repondre ä la question "Que faire?". II s'agira alors de determiner le role de l'Etat et de situer cette pensee politique par rapport ä l'utopie revolutionnaire. Ce parcours contribuera ä mieux definir les fondements et les implications de la democratic non-representative qui est au cceur des revendications de la renaissance spinoziste. (shrink)