This book posits that a singular paradigm in social theory can be discovered by reconstructing the conceptual grammar of Gabriel Tarde’s micro-sociology and by understanding the ways in which Gilles Deleuze’s micro-politics and Michel Foucault’s micro-physics have engaged with it. This is articulated in the infinite social multiplicity-invention-imitation-opposition-open system. Guided by infinitist ontology and an epistemology of infinitesimal difference, this paradigm offers a micro-socio-logic capable of producing new ways of understanding social life and its vicissitudes. In the field of social theory, this can be called the infinitesimal revolution.
Explores how the French theory of philosophy, which became popular during the last three decades of the twentieth century, spread to America and examines the critical practices that French theory inspired.
Traditionally, security has been the realm of the state and its uniformed police. However, in the last two decades, many actors and agencies, including schools, clubs, housing corporations, hospitals, shopkeepers, insurers, energy suppliers and even private citizens, have enforced some form of security, effectively changing its delivery, and overall role. In The Securitization of Society, Marc Schuilenburg establishes a new critical perspective for examining the dynamic nature of security and its governance. Rooted in the works of the French philosophers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Gabriel Tarde, this book explores the ongoing structural and cultural changes that have impacted security in Western society from the 19th century to the present. By analyzing the new hybrid of public-private security, this volume provides deep insight into the processes of securitization and modern risk management for the police and judicial authorities as well as other emerging parties. Schuilenburg draws upon four case studies of increased securitization in Europe – monitoring marijuana cultivation, urban intervention teams, road transport crime, and the collective shop ban – in order to raise important questions about citizenship, social order, and the law within this expanding new paradigm. An innovative, interdisciplinary approach to criminological theory that incorporates philosophy, sociology, and political science, The Securitization of Society reveals how security is understood and enacted in urban environments today.
Rehmann’s book investigates how Deleuze and Foucault read Nietzsche and apply a hermeneutics of innocence to his philosophy that erases its elitist, anti-democratic, and anti-socialist dimensions. This also affects their own theory and impairs postmodernism’s claim to develop a radical critique.
A new edition of this introduction to Deleuze's seminal work, Difference and Repetition, with new material on intensity, science and action and new engagements with Bryant, Sauvagnargues, Smith, Somers-Hall and de Beistegui.
For Gilles Deleuze, time is 'out of joint'. For Michel Serres, it is 'a crumpled handkerchief'. In both of these concepts, explicit references are made to the non-linear dynamics of Chaos and Complexity theory, as well as the New Sciences. The groundbreaking work of these key thinkers has the potential to instigate a radical break from traditional existentialist theories of time and history, affording us the opportunity to view history and historical events as a complex, non-linear system of feedback-loops, couplings and interfaces. In this collection, the first to address the comparative historiographies of Deleuze and Serres, twelve leading experts - including William Connolly, Eugene Holland, Claire Colebrook and Elizabeth Grosz - examine these alternative concepts of time and history, exposing critical arguments in this important and emerging field of research.
A collective experiment in the conjunction of law and philosophy. This collection of 11 essays offers insights into Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of law, investigating new forms of politics, economics and society. It explores the features of Deleuze's universal jurisprudence, the mutual becoming of law and philosophy and reveals law as the most progressive and experimental force of the Modern Age.
Space in Theory: Kristeva, Foucault, Deleuze seeks to give a detailed but succinct overview of the role of spatial reflection in three of the most influential French critical thinkers of recent decades. It proposes a step-by-step analysis of the changing place of space in their theories, focussing on the common problematic all three critics address, but highlighting the significant differences between them. It aims to rectify an unaccountable absence of detailed analysis to the significance of space in their work up until now. Space in Theory argues that Kristeva, Foucault and Deleuze address the question: How are meaning and knowledge produced in contemporary society? What makes it possible to speak and think in ways we take for granted? The answer which all three thinkers provide is: space. This space takes various forms: psychic, subjective space in Kristeva, power-knowledge-space in Foucault, and the spaces of life as multiple flows of becoming in Deleuze. This book alternates between analyses of these thinkers’ theoretical texts, and brief digressions into literary texts by Barrico, de Beauvoir, Beckett, Bodrožić or Bonnefoy, via Borges, Forster, Gide, Gilbert, Glissant, Hall, to Kafka, Ondaatje, Perec, Proust, Sartre, Warner and Woolf. These detours through literature aim to render more concrete and accessible the highly complex conceptulization of contemporary spatial theory. This volume is aimed at students, postgraduates and researchers interested in the areas of French poststructuralist theory, spatial reflection, or more generally contemporary cultural theory and cultural studies.
