Category: Gilles Deleuze
-
Distilling my dissertation topic—>Etheric Imagination in an Ontology of Organism: Towards a Planetary Philosophy
First, a few orientating quotations from the thinkers I will be boiling together in the alchemical vessel of my dissertation. “…if we had the choice between empiricism and the all-oppressing necessity of thought of a rationalism which had been driven to the highest point, no free spirit would be able to object to deciding in favor of…
-
“Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic” by Whitney Bauman
“From a planetary perspective, truth is seen as the coconstruction of truth regimes. Our understandings of the world and the technologies of those understandings begin to create those worlds that we are persuaded most toward. In other words, one of the reasons modern science became so pervasive is that its truth regime–including the medical, communication,…
-
Transcendental Earth: Thinking Horizontally with Deleuze and Guattari
Some other bloggers (AGENT SWARM and Time’s Flow Stemmed, for example) have been been ruminating over this beautiful string of sentences from Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?: Thinking provokes general indifference. It is a dangerous exercise nevertheless. Indeed, it is only when the dangers become obvious that indifference ceases, but they often remain hidden and…
-
Thinking Through Atheism in a Religious Cosmos (response to professoranton)
Like Professor Anton, I would also want to pose the existential problematic of self-consciousness to those atheists who reject religion outright. If religion arose naturally as a result of humanity’s gradually increasing capacity for self-consciousness, and by implication, for conscience, then what are we secular folks supposed to replace it with? We cannot simply expect…
-
Audio from International Whitehead Conference in Krakow
Here is the audio of my presentation at the IWC last week in the philosophy of religion section: Here is a PDF of the paper I read, titled “Worldly Religion in Whitehead and Deleuze: Steps Toward an Incarnational Philosophy” Related articles 9th Annual International Whitehead Conference in Kracow, Poland (footnotes2plato.com) Also, thanks to Leon over…
-
9th International Whitehead Conference in Kracow, Poland
I’m headed halfway around the world today to present a paper at the IWC in Poland. Roland Faber, Catherine Keller, Herman Greene and others will be giving talks. I’ll do my best to record and/or live blog during their remarks. I’ll be presenting a paper in the religion section on the secularization of God in…
-
Alex Honnold’s free solo of Half Dome in Yosemite – Nobody knows what a body can do.
Deleuze writes of Spinoza’s epochal realization that we do not know what a body can do: Spinoza will engender all the passions, in their details, on the basis of these two fundamental affects: joy as an increase in the power of acting, sadness as a diminution or destruction of the power of acting. This comes…
-
“Deleuze, Guattari, and the ‘Politics of Sorcery’” by Joshua Delpech-Ramey
Find the article in SubStance HERE. “Deleuze and Guattari’s mode of immanent critique is linked to the possibility of founding identities and collectivities which, because inherently relational and constantly in a state of becoming, can not be the subject of straightforward representation, whether in ontological or political discourse. I will argue that sorcery is an important reference…
-
Responding to Levi Bryant on the Question of Religion
I’ve copied my response to Levi below: I’m glad you are not reducing all religion to the sort of literalism we’re both trying to critique (you from a scientific standpoint aimed at religion, me from a spiritual standpoint aimed at scientism). Regardless of what the majority of “believers” may think about the ontological status of…
-
Reflections on nihilism as a belief system
Levi Bryant initiated a string of blog posts on nihilism with his “axioms for a dark ontology.” Attempts at Living followed HERE, and Bill Rose Thorn HERE. Both of them accept Bryant’s ontological purposelessness, but raise the important issue of developing a “post-nihilistic praxis” (see this great post by Michael/Archive Fire from last year on what…
-
Reflections on Deleuze’s Engagement with Natural Science in D&R
In chapter V of Difference and Repetition, “The Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible,” Deleuze engages with the various scientific theories of 19th and 20th century thermodynamics, not by identifying his fictions with scientific facts, but by detonating the philosophical idea of “intensive depth” in range of the qualitative extensity studied in terms of the scientific…
-
Deleuze’s Pedagogy of Problematic Ideas as an Example of Etheric Imagination
Below is another section of my dissertation proposal… ………………. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between a singular pedagogy of the concept and a universal encyclopedia of the concept.155 What does it mean to say that Deleuze’s philosophical method is pedagogical, rather than encyclopedic? It means that philosophical concepts are not catalogued in…
-
John Sallis’ Logic of Imagination as an Example of Etheric Imagination
Below is another section of my dissertation proposal. More to come… ……………………………………. John Sallis begins his Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental (2000) by regretting the Husserlian phenomenological tradition’s tendency to subordinate imagination to pure perception in an effort to “[protect] the bodily presence of the perceived from imaginal contamination.”208 Sallis argues that…
-
Deleuzian Ideas
Deleuze writes: “Ideas no more than Problems do not exist only in our heads but occur here and there in the production of an actual historical world” (Difference and Repetition, p. 190). Ideas are not simply located inside the head. Nor can Ideas be entirely captured inside the grammatical form of a logical syllogism, even…
-
More on Latour and Tarnas – Networks, Technology, and the Transformation of Western Culture
Grant Maxwell has responded to my reflections on Richard Tarnas, Bruno Latour, and the Re-Enchantment Project. Grant wonders what I meant by referring to Tarnas’ archetypal cosmology as a “middle up” approach to transforming culture, and to Latour’s anthropology of the moderns as a “top down” approach to the same. I appreciate Grant’s use of Latour’s own network…
-
Root Images in Philosophies of Difference
-
Notes on Intro and Ch. 1 of “Difference and Repetition” by Gilles Deleuze
As Adam/Knowledge Ecology has mentioned, a few of us are doing a reading group on Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Here are my notes for our first session. Notes for Introduction and Chapter 1 of Difference and Repetition by Deleuze By Matt Segall Preface: Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is an initiatory text that, rather than putting…
-
Jacob Sherman on Joshua Ramey’s “The Hermetic Deleuze” (2012)
Read it HERE. Jake writes: I suspect that Ramey seeks to divine a new shape for philosophy in the hermetic tradition rather than, say, in Hadot’s ancient philosophical schools, because of the degree of creativity that hermeticism not only thematizes but also unleashes. Goethe’s Faust is at his most hermetic when he translates the opening…
-
Reblogged: The Hermetic Deleuze: Anesthetizing Chaos
This from Virgilio A. Rivas The Hermetic Deleuze: Anesthetizing Chaos. My comment to Rivas: Fascinating post. I’ve given some thought to the effects of the Internet, especially blogging/vlogging, on neuro-cognitive evolution. The Global Network of Capitalized Information is fast at work relieving us of our own private subjectivity. Our very selves are being gobbled up…
Footnotes2Plato 