Deleuze's Political Ethics: A Fascism of the New?

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-99
Author(s):  
Fred Evans
Keyword(s):  
Political Context ◽  
Political Ethics ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Political Virtues ◽  
Ethics And Politics

The cosmology of Deleuze and Guattari emphasises the new. I raise the question of whether this emphasis cancels out two other political virtues, solidarity and heterogeneity, and thereby amounts to a fascism of the new. I reply that what Deleuze and Guattari say about cosmological unity and difference suggests that they can avoid this negative designation. I support this conclusion by considering their statements on ethics and politics and by translating their cosmological philosophy into the more immediate ethico-political context of the alloplastic stratum. The latter effort is abetted by elaborating the two thinkers’ use of the term ‘voice’, for example, in Deleuze's statement that Being is the ‘single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple … a single clamour of Being for all beings’ or in the two authors’ notion of a ‘constellation of voices’ that makes up the ‘molecular’ or ‘unconscious’ collective assemblage of enunciation. This elaboration is pertinent because political ethics is essentially which voices are heard, and which not, or at least their relative levels of audibility in the alloplastic regime. I further clarify this treatment of Deleuze and Guattari's political ethics by linking it to the idea of parrhesia, courageous speech and hearing.

scholarly journals Deleuze and Kieślowski: On the Cinema of Exhaustion

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-59
Author(s):  
Eddy Troy
Keyword(s):  
Political Context ◽  
Affective Dimension ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
Affirmative Response ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
The City ◽  
Time Image ◽  
Ethics And Politics

This article revisits Krzysztof Kieślowski's films in light of Gilles Deleuze's writings on cinema. Its central argument is that, while Kieślowski's films register what Deleuze calls exhausted life, or la vie épuisée, they also offer an affirmative response to exhaustion. Deleuze's articulation of exhaustion in the context of film emerges first in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, where the term is posited as the denial of life's capacity to transform itself. In the context of Kieślowski's films and the communist milieux from which they emerge, exhaustion as a film-philosophical concept acquires a socio-political specificity otherwise lacking in Deleuze. Kieślowski's films thus provide the basis for reading exhaustion as an affective correlate of what Deleuze famously calls the “crisis of the action-image”. Stressing Kieślowski's resistance to the hegemony of exhaustion – and what the director calls a “world without representation” – this article emphasizes films such as From the City of Łódź (Z miasta Łodzi, 1969), The Scar (Blizna, 1978), Camera Buff (Amator, 1979), Three Colors: Red (Trois Couleurs: Rouge, 1994). Reading Kieślowski and communist Poland's repressive socio-political context in light of the Deleuzian sense of exhaustion vivifies the affective dimension of the director's oeuvre. Surveying the director's earlier documentary work, his decision to transition to fiction, and his reflections on ethics and politics, this article concludes by arguing for the generative, life-affirming character of Kieślowski's cinema of exhaustion.

Pentecostal Clergy and Politics in Zambia: A Case of Pastor Nevers Mumba, President of the Movement for Multiparty Democracy

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Austin M Cheyeka
Keyword(s):  
Christian Faith ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Political Ethics ◽  
Ethics And Politics

There is no contesting the fact that Pentecostal clergy involvement in partisan politics is a relatively new phenomenon in Africa. In Zambia, Pastor Nevers Mumba has not been given some serious attention by academic observers. In this article I cite his postulation for leaving televangelism to join politics, which has translated into his becoming the fourth president of the Movement for Multiparty Democracy. I expose the inherent contradiction in practice between Mumba’s “political ethics” and “politics” as it is played out in real Zambian life. As a “political pastor” who vilifies corruption, Mumba would be expected to galvanise tremendous support from citizens, the majority of whom claim to be Christian. This, not having been the case, I construct an argument that: Mumba seems to have compromised his Christian faith for the rewards of politics of the belly and for a future that has led him into the morass of political duplicity. 

scholarly journals GILLES’IO DELEUZE’O IR FELIXO GUATTARI MIKROPOLITIKA ŠIUOLAIKINĖS FILOSOFIJOS KONTEKSTE

Problemos ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 34-43
Author(s):  
Audronė Žukauskaitė
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Individual ◽  
A Minor

Straipsnyje analizuojama Gilles’io Deleuze’o ir Felixo Guattari kuriama mikropolitikos samprata, kuri priešpriešinama makropolitikai, veikiančiai pripažintų politinių teorijų ir apibrėžtų tapatybių lygmenyje. Mikropolitikos projektas siejamas su tapsmo mažuma, mažosios literatūros, mažosios politikos sampratomis, kurios nukreiptos ne į tapatybės kūrimą, bet į tapsmo procesą, inovaciją, eksperimentą. Deleuze’as ir Guattari teigia, jog tapsmas mažuma yra universalus procesas, kurio tikslas – kiekvieno individo autonomija. Deleuze‘o ir Guattari universalaus tapsmo koncepcija priešpriešinama Alaino Badiou kuriamai karingojo universalizmo sampratai. Badiou postuluojamas universalizmas iš pirmo žvilgsnio yra panašus į Deleuze’o ir Guattari siūlomos tapsmo teorijos universalumą, tačiau abiejų teorijų turinys radikaliai skiriasi. Deleuze’ui ir Guattari pats tapsmas mažuma yra universalus procesas; Badiou, priešingai, mažumas ir skirtumus pasitelkia tam, kad juos redukuotų į lygybę ir vienodumą. Badiou siekia panaikinti skirtumus dėl universalizmo, kuris pasiekiamas per tiesos įvykį, bendrą visiems ir kiekvienam.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: mikropolitika, mažoji literatūra, tapsmas mažuma, paskirybė, universalizmas.Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Micropolitics in the Context of Contemporary PhilosophyAudronė Žukauskaitė   SummaryThe article discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of micropolitics in relation with the notions of minor literature and becoming-minoritarian. The concept of minor literature appears in Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and is defined by three characteristics: 1) the deterritorialization of language; 2) the connection of the individual to a political immediacy; 3) the collective assemblage of enunciation. The notion of minor literature is closely related with the notion of becoming-minoritarian developed in A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari claim that becoming-minoritarian is the universal figure of consciousness. In this sense, any kind of becoming is a revolutionary act, because it changes the political constellation of power and enables the repressed to reach an autonomous condition. The concept of becoming-minoritarian is introduced to the contemporary political context through the notion of minor politics, discussed by Nicholas Thoburn. Minor politics is seen not as a fetishization of marginal identity but rather as a possibility to legitimize the existence of those who lack any social identity. In this sense, the notions of becoming-minoritarian and minor politics are contrasted with Alain Badiou’s claim to universality: the question is raised as to whether becoming-minoritarian should necessarily end in autonomy, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, or, by contrast, whether it should seek to universalize the minor and in this way raise the claim for universal justice.Keywords: micropolitics, minor literature, becoming-minoritiarian, the particular, universalism.

scholarly journals LYING AND HYPOCRISY IN MORALITY AND POLITICS

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth W. Grant
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Possibilities ◽  
Political Ethics ◽  
Moral Principles ◽  
Political Relationships ◽  
Sense Of Reality ◽  
Political Virtues ◽  
Basic Alternative ◽  
Moral Requirements

Hypocrisy is necessary in politics, especially in democracies, but whilehypocrisy can facilitate democratic cooperation, lying tends to undermine it. Thereare two basic alternative possibilities for how to think about political ethics. Thefirst begins with universal moral principles that are then applied to politics as wellas to other areas of life. In the second approach, instead, each activity or type ofrelationship has its own moral requirements. What is it about politics that makeshypocrisy and lying either morally legitimate or morally illegitimate? For the firstapproach, lying and hypocrisy are vices, whereas for the second, they may beconsidered as virtuous under certain circumstances. Hypocrisy is necessarybecause political relationships are relationships of dependence among peoplewhose interests do not exactly coincide. To secure supporters and coalition partnersrequires a certain amount of pretense. The case of lying, however, is quite differentdue to three additional characteristics of political relationships: cooperation overtime requires trust; accountability requires transparency; and consensus requiresa shared sense of reality. Lying undermines all three. Thus, truthfulness is amongthe political virtues even if exceptions sometimes must be made. Today, “post-truth”politics (“New Lying”), threatens to create a dangerous indifference to the truth anda cynical, wholesale acceptance of political lying.

The Common as Body Without Organs

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (supplement) ◽  
pp. 46-63
Author(s):  
Vidar Thorsteinsson
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Fundamental Importance ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
Conceptual Apparatus ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Social Factory ◽  
The Common

The paper explores the relation of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's work to that of Deleuze and Guattari. The main focus is on Hardt and Negri's concept of ‘the common’ as developed in their most recent book Commonwealth. It is argued that the common can complement what Nicholas Thoburn terms the ‘minor’ characteristics of Deleuze's political thinking while also surpassing certain limitations posed by Hardt and Negri's own previous emphasis on ‘autonomy-in-production’. With reference to Marx's notion of real subsumption and early workerism's social-factory thesis, the discussion circles around showing how a distinction between capital and the common can provide a basis for what Alberto Toscano calls ‘antagonistic separation’ from capital in a more effective way than can the classical capital–labour distinction. To this end, it is demonstrated how the common might benefit from being understood in light of Deleuze and Guattari's conceptual apparatus, with reference primarily to the ‘body without organs’ of Anti-Oedipus. It is argued that the common as body without organs, now understood as constituting its own ‘social production’ separate from the BwO of capital, can provide a new basis for antagonistic separation from capital. Of fundamental importance is how the common potentially invents a novel regime of qualitative valorisation, distinct from capital's limitation to quantity and scarcity.

The Take and the Stutter: Glenn Gould's Time Synthesis

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 558-577
Author(s):  
Mickey Vallee
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Sound Recording ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Concert Hall ◽  
The Third ◽  
Passive Synthesis ◽  
Recording Studios ◽  
Recorded Performance

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Glenn Gould as an illustration of the third principle of the rhizome, that of multiplicity: ‘When Glenn Gould speeds up the performance of a piece, he is not just displaying virtuosity, he is transforming the musical points into lines, he is making the whole piece proliferate’ (1987: 8). In an attempt to make sensible their ostensibly modest statement, I proliferate the relationships between Glenn Gould's philosophy of sound recording, Deleuze's theory of passive synthesis, and Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the stutter. I argue, ultimately, that Glenn Gould's radical recording practice stutters and deterritorialises the temporality of the recorded performance. More generally, the Deleuzian perspective broadens the scope of Gould's aesthetic practices that highlights the importance of aesthetic acts in the redistribution of sensory experience. But the study serves a broader purpose than celebrating a pianist/recordist that Deleuze admired. Rather, while his contemporaries began to use the studio as a compositional element in sound recording, Gould bypassed such a step towards the informational logics of recording studios. Thus, it is inappropriate to think of Gould as having immersed himself in ‘technology’ than the broader concept of a complex, one that redistributed the striated listening space of the concert hall.

From Deleuze and Guattari's Words to a Deleuzian Theory of Reading

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-557
Author(s):  
Daniel Haines
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Transcendental Empiricism ◽  
Theory Of Reading ◽  
Open Question

While Deleuze and Guattari's passion for certain literature is well known, the nature of a ‘Deleuzian’ literary criticism remains an open question. However, most critics appear to agree that Deleuze and Guattari's comments on meaning and interpretation offer an ontological alternative to the textual focus of deconstruction. Through an interrogation of the difficult style of their books in relation to Plato, Nietzsche and Derrida, this paper offers a different reading of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to literary criticism. Despite appearances, transcendental empiricism and the project of ‘overturning Platonism’ provide a Deleuzian theory of reading that attends to textuality.

Becoming Rhizomatic: Researching Flowing in/between Striated and Smooth Space

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-376
Author(s):  
Ester A. Betrián Villas ◽  
Gloria Jové Monclus ◽  
Charly Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Educational Change ◽  
Research Methodology ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Smooth Space

Exploring long-term educational change, we investigate our re/construction of research methodology as we moved from a positivist framework to working with ideas drawn from Deleuze and Guattari. We reveal our becoming rhizomatic in data analysis in the metamodelling of the richness flowing horizontally through our practices. We tell of our struggles to escape hierarchical thinking and relations researching between the smooth and striated. A space of interactions, conversations and writings created relations between polyphonic voices, leading us to an emergent methodology. Our struggle against hierarchies in data analysis yielded rich educational possibilities for becoming that Deleuzo-Guattarian thinking offers us.

‘Man Is Ill Because He Is Badly Constructed’: Artaud, Klossowski and Deleuze in Search for the Earth Inside

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Dolphijn
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Performance

Starting with Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, this article analyses the ways in which Artaud's idea of the body without organs links up with various of his writings on the body and bodily theatre and with Deleuze and Guattari's later development of his ideas. Using Klossowski (or Klossowski's Nietzsche) to explain how the dominance of dialogue equals the dominance of God, I go on to examine how the Son (the facialised body), the Father (Language) and the Holy Spirit (Subjectification), need to be warded off in order to revitalize the body, reuniting it with ‘the earth’ it has been separated from. Artaud's writings on Balinese dancing and the Tarahumaran people pave the way for the new body to appear. Reconstructing the body through bodily practices, through religion and above all through art, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we are introduced not only to new ways of thinking theatre and performance art, but to life itself.

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