Early summer greetings to all our users. For your delight and edification, A/V’s issue 7 brings you its second of three issues featuring a selection of papers from ‘The Deleuzian Event’ conference at MMU. Many thanks to Dave, Rachael, Alan, Vee and Ana for their good work- enjoy!
Our keynote speaker Claire Colebrook, in Mathematics, Vitalism, Genesis examines Deleuze’s critical relation to the vitalist tradition by looking at the ways in which he uses differential calculus as a philosophical rather than mathematical concept. This has direct implications for how we approach art philosophically and the way in which we think about art’s relation to time.
Craig Lundy’s Deleuze’s Untimely locates the expression of Nietzsche’s Untimely within a Deleuzian philosophy of history. Lundy argues that Immanence and the Outside form a relation throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s work that leads to their radical conception of the event, and in particular the historical event.
Richard Rushton’s paper is The filmic event: Deleuze on Bergson’s three theses on movement. For Rushton, cinematic perception enables new possibilities of human perception and consciousness. This capacity forms the foundations for Deleuze’s understanding of the filmic event.
Etienne/Steven Turpin, via Israeli architect and theorist Eyal Weizman’s essay The Art of War’, contend the impossibility of an inherently ‘progressive,’ ‘radical,’ or ‘emancipatory’ philosophy; and, drawing on Deleuze, re-considers the images of thought, resistance and adaptation which condition our collective political imagination and potential for political struggle.
Matt Lee’s To survive da’ath argues that in Nietzsche’s eternal return, in Deleuze’s call to be worthy of the event and Western magical practice of ’crossing the abyss’ an underlying theme of danger, of death, abounds. He asks ‘Is the purity of the event, the cry of affirmation, merely another way to regain what is lost with the death of god?’
Anna Powell
Website Director
This paper studies the expression of Nietzsche’s Untimely within a Deleuzian philosophy of history. Immanence and the Outside form a relation throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s work that leads to their radical conception of the event, and in particular the historical event. As we see in What Is Philosophy?, in conjunction with Foucault’s Actual and Péguy’s Aternal, the Nietzschean Untimely provides a touchstone for Deleuze and Guattari’s explanation of creativity in the historical event: the unhistorical is located as both the force and the site from which the sedimentations of history emerge. But while Deleuze and Guattari share in Nietzsche’s attempt to facilitate creations counter to our historical present, it cannot be said that they explicitly mirror (or indeed remain entirely faithful to) Nietzsche’s analysis of history, its terms, and its effects in society. By tracing the various uses of the Untimely throughout Deleuze’s corpus, a differential ‘becoming/history’ materialises that simultaneously enhances aspects of Nietzsche’s thoughts on the untimely whilst conflating others.
This conflation can be located on both sides of the differential: while the singular attributes that form Nietzsche’s Untimely topology – the ahistorical and the suprahistorical – are transformed into synonyms of ‘becoming’, ‘history’ also undergoes a facile conflation that effectively attaches to it all the forms of historicism that Nietzsche was opposed to. The result of this coalescence is the replacement of Nietzsche’s project of developing a history for the future with a Deleuzian philosophy of the future, and consequently a hostility towards the figure of history. Once the Untimely has been removed from a history for life and amalgamated in a philosophy of becoming, it is little wonder that a Deleuzian ‘philosophy of history’ appears to be an oxymoron. Attention to Deleuze’s particular appropriation of Nietzsche’s Untimely, however, can show us that the creative elements of Nietzsche’s historical project still persists in Deleuze, albeit under the guise of an immanent nomadology that incorporates both the virtual and actual manifestations of an historical event
Craig Lundy
Craig Lundy is studying a PhD in Philosophy (UNSW). His Thesis Topic is Deleuze and History. Through an investigation of Deleuzian concepts such as virtual/actual events, nomadology, deterritorialisation and machinic assemblages, this thesis questions what use Deleuze has for the Philosophy of History. Drawing from his work on Nietzsche and Bergson, Deleuze’s subsequent ideas on time (from aion/chronos to dead time and stratigraphic time) are evaluated with respect to the projects of nomadology and the universal history of capitalism.
This paper examines Deleuze’s critical relation to the vitalist tradition by looking at the ways in which he uses differential calculus as a philosophical rather than mathematical concept. This has direct implications not only for the ways in which we approach art philosophically, but also for the ways in which we think about art’s relation to time.
Claire Colebrook, University of Edinburgh, U.K.
Professor Claire Colebrook teaches English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has published on Deleuze, literary theory and gender theory. Her most recent book is on Milton and Literary History and will be published by Continuum in 2008.
Israeli architect and theorist Eyal Weizman’s essay “The Art of War” outlines the emergent danger of the Israel Defence Forces’ (IDF) adaptation of contemporary philosophical theory as a basis for a dangerous new practice of warfare. Despite the extensive discussion provoked by Weizman’s article, the significance of his analysis remains somewhat obscure. In this paper I explain, following Weizman, how theoretical frameworks (primarily those of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, Baudrillard and Deleuze) have been taken up within the traditionally hierarchical organization of the IDF. That is, by adopting a temporary structure of collective behaviour and itinerant deployment, the IDF has managed to create a space for its own radical mutation and thus creating a deadly new method of counter-insurgency. Expanding on Weizman’s analysis, my aim is to consider the IDF’s military operational theory as provoking two additional considerations which carry important political consequences:
(1) the impossibility of an inherently ‘progressive,’ ‘radical,’ or ‘emancipatory’ philosophy; and,
(2) the adaptation and integration of non-hierarchical models of organisation by dominant powers (primarily the State and corporate firms) as means of furthering their powers of control.
The former concern highlights the importance of embracing a pragmatic opportunism as a practice of resistance in order to further develop strategic potentials for intervention within a specific context; the latter concern provokes a discussion of philosophy, the event, and its unfolding in relation to militarism and occupation. Both concerns return us to Deleuze and Guattari’s cautious remarks at the end of A Thousand Plateaus – “Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us” (500) – and beckon us to re-consider the images of thought, resistance and adaptation which condition our collective political imagination and the potentials for political struggle.
Etienne/Stephen Turpin, University of East London, U.K.
In forming his conception of the filmic event Deleuze formulated three theses on movement which were derived from Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory. The theses are: 1- Movement is distinct from the space covered; 2 – Movement is made up of instants quelconques; and 3 – Movement consists of a change of duration. This paper closely examines these theses in order to arrive at an understanding of cinematic perception as Deleuze conceives of it. The overriding logic of the filmic event is, for Deleuze, one in which an apparatus of perception is put into play, an apparatus of ‘cinematographic perception’ which is in many ways superior to ‘human’ perception. The perceptions that the film camera-projector provides for us have the capacity to be more accomplished than our own, human capacities for perception. Thus, cinematic perception provides the possibility for a consciousness that introduces new possibilities of perception to the human. It is this capacity for new possibilities and new modes of perception that form the foundations for Deleuze’s understanding of the filmic event.
Richard Rushton , Lancaster University, U.K.
I am currently working on a book on Realism and Reality in the Cinema which features a chapter on Deleuze.
In the ‘Western Kabbalah’ – that version of the Judaic tradition which underlies large portions of the work of Western Hermetic magicians – one of the central concepts is that of ‘da’ath’, a non-existent ‘sephiroth’ encountered in the experience known as ‘Crossing the Abyss’. This experience constitutes one of the central initiatory experiences of the various traditions of Western Hermetic magic. It can be understood as the point at which the practitioner succeeds in their aim but in doing so find themselves caught within a paranoiac machine. The ‘abyss’ is the point at which everything in the universe is to be understood as directly speaking to the individual – it is an exercise in constituting a paranoiac machine of intense and immense over-determination.
The core practice of magic, as a ‘body-spirituality’, involves a continual process of learning, the aim of which is ‘knowledge’. The particular understanding of knowledge, however, is transformed from a possessive content or object (a ‘know-that’) into a transformative apprenticeship – but an apprenticeship to what? It is, I will argue, an apprenticeship to the event and the experience of the ‘abyss’ is a salutary lesson or warning in the power and anger involved in such an apprenticeship. Deleuze warns that the task with regard the event is to be worthy of it, to be able to sustain it or bear it, a theme that directly relates to the encounter with the demon of the eternal return in Nietzsche’s most important presentation of that concept.
In Nietzsche’s eternal return, Deleuze’s call to be worthy of the event and Western magical practice of ‘crossing the abyss’ this underlying theme of danger, of death, abounds. Is the event, then, always an event of death, rebirth, loss? Is this the central aspect of what it means to encounter the event – to lose something, to lose our selves, to die in some way or another? Does this suggest that perhaps the event is a hidden encoding of the transcendent? Is the purity of the event, the cry of affirmation, merely another way to regain what is lost with the death of god.
Matt Lee , Greenwich University, U.K.
My first encounter with Deleuze, through What is Philosophy?, brought to life a form of philosophy I had been struggling to find, a philosophy that was directed at life, which was unafraid of leaving the confines of the academy and which spoke as though the force of thought was a living impulse within it.
My research focuses on developing a materialism that isn’t reductive or naïve and I concentrate currently on transcendental arguments and structures, in particular trying to understand and articulate the concept of a ‘transcendental empiricism’. I currently work as a lecturer at Greenwich University as well as being an independent film-maker. I also experiment with modern day shamanic and magical practices and am working on an account of such practices from the standpoint of a ‘practical metaphysics’ derived from Deleuze’s account of ‘becoming’
A/V is proud to showcase Steven Eastwood’s Of Camera, which puts Deleuzian affects, percepts and concepts into play in this film based on the abortive attempts of two people to be together in the same space. Their disagreement is fuelled by technical difference: the woman exists on videotape and the man on celluloid. The story corrupts as the two realise they are incompatible and that they are being filmed and watched.
Steven Eastwood