Spring Greetings to all our readers and viewers in these stirring times, and a warm welcome to new and regular users of the CORE Deleuze Studies network. If you would like to join the network, then send us a brief bio and details of your work and/or interest in Deleuze studies, so we can display your details to everyone and produce more Deleuzian connections. As usual, the editorial board invites your submission of both relevant and congruent video-recorded scholarly papers and of Deleuzian-inflected artworks to showcase on future issues of A/V. Please contact me to discuss your ideas and suggestions for material you would like us to consider.
There have been, and will be, plenty of inspiring Deleuzian events happening, both locally and internationally. Some of the recent events in Manchester, such as talks by Dan Smith from Purdue University, are featured here. We would like to thank the Human Sciences seminar at MMU for past and present support for our work.
If you are organising an event of direct interest to our readers, please send us details in plenty of time so we can tell as many people about them as possible. Please also forward info on new publications in the field so we can advertise them to our readers. We are currently seeking reviewers to read and respond to monographs and essay collections. See the reviews section of the website and contact me if you are interested in submitting an audio-visual review of any of these books.
We are delighted to bring you the latest issue of A/V, Number 12 and extend our warm thanks to all contributors, editors and reviewers. This special issue has been capably web-mastered by Helen Darby. Particular thanks to Helen’s dedication, hard work and expertise. Ben Wissett has given freely of his professional skill and time in editing and shooting some of the material you’ll see and hearing. I would also like to give co-editorial credit to Henry Somers-Hall (Philosophy) and Felicity Colman (Art and Design) at MMU, who have organised, produced, shot and edited some of the current material.
As well as a seminar paper by Dan Smith on the nature of concepts, becoming and temporality in What is Philosophy? we are opening up this issue’s remit to feature other material with congruence to Deleuze Studies, either in its theoretical approach or its Nietzschean remit. In a recent Klossowski seminar, Dan Smith focuses on impulses, intensities and simulacra in Klossowski’s reading of Nietzsche. Jill Marsden (Bolton) considers intensive and affective states in relation to the Eternal Return and Ian James (Cambridge) explores unity and multiplicity in Klossowski’s le Baphomet. The issue includes pieces shaped by Deleuzian theory and art practice: an interview with the filmmakers of Facs of Life, Sylvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, and a short video by Zafer Aracagok on his work with music and images. The latter pieces are both of considerable interest in their own right and research footage for my video work in progress.
I look forward to meeting old and new friends both actually and virtually at Deleuze and Guattari-inspired events and publication in the year ahead.
Enjoy the season
Anna Powell
a.po...@mmu.ac.uk
In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy, famously, as an activity that consists in forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts. But this definition of philosophy implies a somewhat singular analytic of the concept, to borrow Kant’s phrase, and Deleuze’s concept of the concept, as it were, differs significantly from previous conceptions of the concept. One of the
problems it poses is the fact that concepts, from a Deleuzian perspective, have no identity but only a becoming. There is a becoming of concepts not only within Deleuze’s corpus, but also in each book and in each concept, which is extended to and draws from the entire history of philosophy. This paper examines the nature of this becoming of concepts, which is the result of introduction temporality into the form of the true.
Dan Smith, Purdue University
In his groundbreaking study of Nietzsche, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Pierre Klossowski makes use of various concepts—such as intensities, phantasms, simulacra and stereotypes, resemblance and dissemblance, gregariousness and singularity—that have no place in Nietzsche’s own oeuvre. These concepts are Klossowski’s own creations, his own contributions to philosophical thought. Reading Klossowski as a conceptual innovator, has the advantage of allowing us to chart a consistent trajectory through Klossowski’s difficult and often labyrinthine text, without denying its other dimensions (affective, perceptive, literary, and so on). This paper examines three of Klossowski’s most characteristic and important concepts—impulses and their intensities, phantasms, and simulacra and their stereotypes—as well as the precise interrelations he establishes among them. Taken together, these three concepts describe what Klossowski terms the tripartite economy of soul, which constitutes the implicit model through which he interprets Nietzsche’s thought.
Dan Smith, Purdue University
This paper explores Klossowski’s unusual obsession with Nietzsche’s body – his attention to Nietzsche’s intensive, affective states. Klossowski is at pains to establish that the body gains an essential prominence in Nietzsche’s work, that eternal return is ‘une pensée corporante’ (a bodying thought) and that his atrocious health – his migraines, neuralgias, gastric disorders and eye-strain are fundamental material conditions for the production of his philosophy. In the spirit of Klossowski’s approach, I propose to develop his account of Nietzsche’s experience of the thought of eternal return in Sils Maria, asking what is articulated in and by this proper name. These reflections on landscape and headaches will lead from Sils Maria to Turin and into a more general reflection on what takes place at the edge of things.
Jill Marsden, University of Bolton
This paper argues that Klossowski’s novel affirms a principle of multiplicity which exceeds any unitary figures of divine law, individual identity, or moral and aesthetic value. In this context Le Baphomet can be read, not only as an affirmation of a Nietzschean thinking of being as flux and becoming, but it also offers insights into the status of Klossowski’s idionsyncratic literary style. The affirmation of multiplicity in excess of any horizon of unity or totality is, the paper concludes, dependent on a specific practice of writing in which an irreducibly fragmentary excess over all thought is affirmed as such.
Ian James, Cambridge
Facs of Life
Artists and filmmakers Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson are co-founders of Terminal Beach, a cross-media arts platform investigating new configurations of image, sound, text and spectatorship. Together, they have made numerous films and photo-essays, sound and videoinstallations, solo and group exhibitions, performances, radio shows and texts.
Facs of Life, their first feature film, which received its world premiere at FID Marseille 2009, has been shown at numerous international festivals and art spaces including TATE Britain, BAFICI, Jihlava, Il Vento del Cinema, Ludwig Museum, Fundação Clovis Salgado, Serralves Contemporary Art Museum and 16beaver. Around the film and its research, they have also made a series of exhibitions: “Inarchivé – l’explosition d’un film”, a dispersion of filmic elements around Marseille (Les Instants Vidéo in association with FID,), “blown up ! à la recherche des élèves de Gilles Deleuze”, an experiment in exploded cinema and live spatial montage combining multimedia installation, dance, sound art, performance, lectures, screenings and discussions (Mains d’Oeuvres, Paris) and a four-screen installation, “twice torn from time” (UCSB gallery, Santa Barbara).
The duo are currently working on a new feature film, Girl from the Nouvelle Vague. They are also working in collaboration with an international group of artists and theorists on KAKFAMACHINE, which aims to realize Félix Guattari’s ambitious project to make a film by Kafka.
The present video interview was made by Anna Powell in Paris, autumn 2010 as part of her longer film project on Deleuze and moving image practice.
We did this short film together with Hüseyin Mert Erverdi who is a MA student at Film and TV Dept., Bilgi University. After a series of discussions I decided that I should appear as smoking a cigarette through rhizomatic fumes of which I should be saying “re-so-nance” in slow motion. As for my answers to Anna Powell’s questions, Mert invented a flow of paragraphs which resonate well but do not synchronise with the sound track I prepared for the film. The sound track includes some excerpts from KOG, by the.clinamen (Z.Aracagök and Anthony Donovan) released by White Label Music, UK, and my answers.
Zafer Aracagök is an academic/musician who teaches art theory and continental philosophy at Bilgi University, Istanbul TR. He is the author of three books (in Turkish) and a number of articles addressing the issues of image, resonance and noise in continental philosophy and in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari in academic journals such as Revue Chimères, Pli-The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Parallax, Third Text, Rhizomes, Postmodern Culture and Symploke. His book, Desonance: Desonating (with) Deleuze was published by VDM Verlag, Germany (September 2009). His musical work is well received, released and performed both in Turkey and abroad such as, UK, France, Germany and Italy.
ZA organised “Resonances: A Deleuze and Guattari Conference on Philosophy, Arts and Politics” at Bilgi University, santralistanbul in July 2010; and he is editing a special “Resonances: Deleuze and Guattari” issue for Parallax (Routledge, January 2012).