Deleuze and the Social is the first book to focus on the implications of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's thinking on the social sciences and organisation. This book is concerned with the most basic notions of 'the social'. It seeks both to comprehend the 'multiplicity' of the social--in Deleuzian terms, the 'becoming' of the social itself; and it seeks to develop a new social analytical practice. Each of the newly commissioned chapters aims to show the strength of as well as practice the radicalism of a Deleuzian and Guattarian approach to social science and organisation studies. Deleuze and the Social is a book about order, subjectivity, art, capitalism and the construction of a social ontology. It avoids scholasticism by foregrounding its authors' shared concern for practical issues. How is social order constituted? How is resistance possible between the rush of capitalism and the overcoding of the State? How are thinking and living possible?
In May 1968, Gilles Deleuze was an established philosopher teaching at the innovative Vincennes University, just outside of Paris. Felix Guattari was a political militant and director of an unusual psychiatric clinic at La Borde. Their meeting was unlikely, and the two were introduced in an arranged encounter of epic consequence. From that moment on, Deleuze and Guattari engaged in a surprising, productive partnership, collaborating on several groundbreaking works, including Anti-Oedipus, What Is Philosophy? and A Thousand Plateaus. Francois Dosse, a prominent French intellectual, examines the prolific, if improbable, relationship between two men of distinct and differing sensibilities. Drawing on unpublished archives and hundreds of personal interviews, Dosse elucidates a collaboration that lasted more than two decades, underscoring the role that family and history--particularly the turbulence of May 1968--played in their monumental work. He also takes the measure of Deleuze and Guattari's posthumous fortunes and weighs the impact of their thought within intellectual, academic, and professional circles.
'Deleuze and the Social' is concerned with the most basic notions of 'the social'. It seeks both to comprehend the 'multiplicity' of the social - in Deleuzian terms, the 'becoming' of the social itself, and it seeks to develop a new social analytical practice.
In recent years the humanities, social sciences and neuroscience have witnessed an 'affective turn, ' especially in discourses around post-Fordist labor, economic and ecological crises, populism and identity politics, mental health, and political struggle. This new awareness would be unthinkable without the pioneering work of Gilles Deleuze, who replaced judgment with affect as the very material movement of thought: every concept is an affective experience, a becoming. Besides entirely active affects, the highest practice of thought, there is no thought without passive affects or passions. Instead of a calm and rational philosophy of passions, Deleuzian thought is therefore inseparable from "isolated and passionate cries" that deny what everybody knows and what nobody can deny: "every true thought is an aggression." This inseparability of reason and passion is by no means an anti-intellectualist or irrationalist stance. Rather, it is critical, since it protects reason from its self-imposed stupidity (bêtise) by relating it to the unthought forces that condition it. And it is clinical, because thought becomes possessed by a power of selection. The purely active, i.e. free-floating, unrecorded desire, is never enough to produce a consistent relation to the future, which is why we need the passions to give us an initial orientation, to force and enable us to think. Passions are the beliefs, perceptions, representations, and opinions that attach us to the world; they make up the very material of which our lives and thoughts are composed. Instead of truth as the ultimate criterion of judgment, the only principle according to which affective becomings can be selected and evaluated is the extent to which they proliferate joy. Spinoza and Marx show how the recruitment of desire traditionally takes place through the tyrants and priests who inspire sad passions in us. Similarly, the work of Deleuze and Guattari on capitalism and schizophrenia can be read as an encyclopedia of the passions that constitute the affective infrastructure of the socius of contemporary capitalism. If it takes a lot of inventiveness or imagination to be able to diagnose our present becomings, this is because becomings are always composites of joyful and sad passions. Capitalism could not exist if it did not also inspire happiness, love, courage, and perhaps even beatitude. That is why, today, we witness "the spectacle of the happily dominated" (Frédéric Lordon) of the self-entrepreneur, the managerial class, the flex worker, the citizen-consumer, the bean-roasting hipster, and the self-managed team. It is within this field of contradictory and heterogeneous passions that the authors of this volume pursue the diagnosis of our past and present becomings. Their contributions add up to a systematic taxonomy of the passions and indicate their importance for a thinking that reaches beyond itself. TABLE OF CONTENTS // IntroductionCeciel Meiborg & Sjoerd van Tuinen "Everywhere There Are Sad Passions" Gilles Deleuze and the Unhappy ConsciousnessMoritz Gansen To Have Done with the Judgment of 'Reason': Deleuze's Aesthetic OntologySamantha Bankston Closed Vessels and Signs: Jealousy as a Passion for RealityArjen Kleinherenbrink The Drama of Ressentiment: the Philosopher versus the PriestSjoerd van Tuinen The Affective Economy: Producing and Consuming Affects in Deleuze and GuattariJason Read Deleuze's Transformation of the Ideology-Critique Project: Noology CritiqueBenoît Dillet Passion, Cinema and the Old MaterialismLouis-Georges Schwartz Death of Deleuze, Birth of PassionDavid U.B. Liu
2008 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine In recent years, the recognition of Gilles Deleuze as one of the major philosophers of the twentieth century has heightened attention to his brilliant and complex writings on film. What is the place of Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 in the corpus of his philosophy? How and why does Deleuze consider cinema as a singular object of philosophical attention, a specific mode of thought? How does his philosophy of film combine and further his approaches to time, movement, and perception, and how does it produce an escape from subjectivity and a plunge into the immanence of images? How does it recode and utilize Henri Bergson's thought and André Bazin's film theory? What does it tell us about perceiving a world in images—indeed about our relation to the world? These are the central questions addressed in Paola Marrati's powerful and clear elucidation of Deleuze's philosophy of film. Humanities, film studies, and social science scholars will find this book a valuable contribution to the philosophical literature on cinema and its pertinence in contemporary life.
Deleuzian Encounters brings together sixteen accessible, thought-provoking essays that examine the practical and ethical implications of Deleuze's philosophy for different contemporary social issues. Topics explored include: the environment, terrorism, refugees, indigenous reconciliation, gender, suicide, intellectual disability, injecting drug use, classroom teaching and global activism. Each contribution provides practical examples of how to make use of Deleuze's thought in social research, and offers fresh insights into the creative and innovative potentials Deleuze's philosophy holds for social thought and action.
This accessible book examines critically the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, clarifying the ideas of these two notoriously difficult thinkers without over-simplifying them. Divided into three sections - Knowledge, Power, and Liberation of Desire - the book provides a systematic account of the intellectual context as well as an exhaustive analysis of the key themes informing Deleuze and Guattari′s work. It provides the framework for reading the important and influential study Capitalism and Schizophrenia and, with the needs of students in mind, explains the key concepts in Deleuze and Guattari′s discussion of philosophy, art and politics. Definitive and incisive, the book will be invaluable in situating the philosophy of these two major figures within the perspective of the social and human sciences.
Defining the lives of a majority of the world's population, the question of 'the city' has risen to the fore as one the most urgent issues of our time "e; uniting concerns across the terrain of climate policies, global financing, localised struggles and multi-disciplinary research. Deleuze and the City rests on a conviction that philosophy is crucially important for advancing knowledge on cities, and for allowing us to envisage new forms of urban life toward a more sustainable future. It gathers some of the most original thinkers and accomplished scholars in contemporary urban studies, showing how Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical project is essential for our thinking through the multi-scalar, uneven and contested landscapes that constitute 'the city' today. Case studies range from the 'laboratory urbanism' of an Austrian ski resort and a 'sustainable' Swedish shopping mall to the 'urbicidal' refurbishments of Haifa.
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychiatrist-activist Félix Guattari’s 1980 book A Thousand Plateaus is widely recognized as a masterpiece of twentieth-century Continental philosophy. Until now, however, few scholars have dared to explain the book’s political importance. Deleuze’s Political Vision reconstructs Deleuze’s conception of pluralism, human nature, the social contract, liberalism, democracy, socialism, feminism, and comparative political theory. Unlike scholars who read Deleuze as a Marxist, author Nicholas Tampio argues that Deleuze was a cutting-edge liberal, concerned about protecting difference from what John Stuart Mill called the tyranny of the majority. The book brings Deleuze into conversation with other contemporary political theorists such as Hannah Arendt, William E. Connolly, Jürgen Habermas, Bruno Latour, Charles Mills, Martha Nussbaum, Carole Pateman, Abdolkarim Soroush, Leo Strauss, and Charles Taylor. Deleuze’s Political Vision translates Deleuze’s ideas into popular vernaculars to realize his political vision and reveal his work as essential to modern discussions of political theory and philosophy.
A critical and provocative exploration of the political, conceptual and cultural points of resonance between Deleuze's minor politics and Marx's critique of capitalist dynamics, engaging with Deleuze's missing work, The Grandeur of Marx. This book explores the core categories of communism and capital in conjunction with a wealth of contemporary and historical political concepts and movements - from the lumpenproletariat and anarchism, to Italian autonomia and Antonio Negri, immaterial labour and the refusal of work. This book will serve as an introduction to Deleuze's politics and the contemporary vitality of Marx for students and will challenge scholars in the fields of social and political theory, sociology and cultural studies.
