Jung and Deleuze: Enchanted Openings to the Other: A Philosophical Contribution

This paper draws from resources in the work of Deleuze to critically examine the notion of organicism and holistic relations that appear in historical forerunners that Jung identifies in his work on synchronicity. I interpret evidence in Jung's comments on synchronicity that resonate with Deleuze's interpretation of repetition and time and which challenge any straightforward foundationalist critique of Jung's thought. A contention of the paper is that Jung and Deleuze envisage enchanted openings onto relations which are not constrained by the presupposition of a bounded whole, whether at the level of the macrocosm or the microcosm. Openings to these relations entail the potential for experimental transformation beyond sedentary habits of thought which are blocked by a disenchanting ‘image of thought’ that stands in need of critique. Other examples of enchanted openings in Jung's work are signposted in an effort to counter their marginalisation in some post-Jungian critiques and to signal their potential value from a Deleuzian perspective

Who are our nomads today?: Deleuze's political ontology and the revolutionary problematic

This paper will address the question of the revolution in Gilles Deleuze's political ontology. More specifically, it will explore what kind of person Deleuze believes is capable of bringing about genuine and practical transformation. Contrary to the belief that a Deleuzian program for change centres on the facilitation of 'absolute deterritorialisation' and pure 'lines of flight', I will demonstrate how Deleuze in fact advocates a more cautious and incremental if not conservative practice that promotes the ethic of prudence. This will be achieved in part through a critical analysis of the dualistic premises upon which much Deleuzian political philosophy is based, alongside the topological triads that can also be found in his work. In light of this critique, Deleuze's thoughts on what it is to be and become a revolutionary will be brought into relief, giving rise to the question of who really is Deleuze's nomad, his true revolutionary or figure of transformation

Cinematic and aesthetic cartographies of subjective mutation

This article exmaines the use of cinema as a mapping of subjective mutation in the work of Deleuze, Gauttari and Berardi. Drawing on Deleuze's distinciton between the reduction of the art-work to the symptom and the idea of art as symptomatology, the article focuses on Berardi's use of cinematic examples, posing the quesiton in each case of to what extent they function as symptomatologies or mere symptoms of cultural and subjective mutations in examples ranging from Bergman's Persona to Van Sant's Elephant to finish on speculations about Fincher's The Social Network as a cirtical engagement with subjective mutation in the 21st Century

A utilitarian antagonist: the zombie in popular video games

This article takes as its starting point the prevalence of the zombie in video games. I argue that, although the zombie games often superficially resemble filmic texts in their use of aesthetic and narrative, they must be understood, less as a set of conventions and thematic metaphors in the way that the zombie text has been read in film and television scholarship, and more as a utilisation of the zombie as a utilitarian antagonist that facilitates and permits the pleasures of violence and fantasy in video game play. Beginning with the Resident Evil and Left 4 Dead series of games I examine the way that games necessarily update the notion zombie as mass antagonist via the need to vary gameplay activity through different styles of adversary for players. At the same time I will demonstrate that, far from simply being the province of the survival horror genre, the zombie appears across an array of game forms, game cultures and game productions. The zombie highlights the participatory nature of game culture in the array of zombie 'mods' that users create to transform existing games into zombie based games, in particular in relation to titles such as the Call of Duty series. At the other end of the production spectrum the zombie features heavily in the little studied area of online flash games where the zombie can be found in a variety of game genres and forms. The zombie here often operates as a pastiche of popular zombie narratives in survival games (The Last Stand), parodic engagements with zombie conventions (Jetpacks and Zombies) or play with the notion of zombie pandemics (the Infectionator games). Here I situate the zombie game as a aesthetic genre that works to provide an easily understandable context for such interactive genres as survival horror, text adventures, shooting games, physics games and driving games, with the popularity of these enough to drive numerous dedicated hosting and link sites such as zombiegames.net. The pastiche element of these games extends into gamers social engagement with games. Online debates over the the appropriate actions or preparation for a zombie holocaust are commonplace on the internet in such spaces as Zombieresearch.net. Whilst many of these sites feature decidedly tongue in cheek engagement with the notion of the zombie apocalypse, the users of fora for games like Left 4 Dead and Dead Island tend to debate this directly in the terms of the games themselves, discussing their relative merits or realism. Some of these games also highlight the specific pleasures of identifying the zombie as protagonist of sorts. In discussing this I will return to online gaming and the Left 4 Dead games in which players may compete online as part of the zombie horde. Such games raise major questions for the issues of identification and immersion that are said to be at the centre of the game experience. I will also explore the parodic pleasures of many flash games that situate the player in the role of spreading zombie infections. Throughout this article I aim to demonstrate that the zombie in game culture is less a cultural metaphor than a combination of utilitarian antagonist and a persistent aesthetic; a means of providing style or pleasure to many games that relies on the intertextual and flexible nature of the zombie as popular cultural phenomenon

The racist bodily imaginary: the image of the body-in-pieces in (post)apartheid culture

This paper outlines a reoccurring motif within the racist imaginary of (post)apartheid culture: the black body-in-pieces. This disturbing visual idiom is approached from three conceptual perspectives. By linking ideas prevalent in Frantz Fanon’s description of colonial racism with psychoanalytic concepts such as Lacan’s notion of the corps morcelé, the paper offers, firstly, an account of the black body-in-pieces as fantasmatic preoccupation of the (post)apartheid imaginary. The role of such images is approached, secondly, through the lens of affect theory which eschews a representational ‘reading’ of such images in favour of attention to their asignifying intensities and the role they play in effectively constituting such bodies. Lastly, Judith Butler’s discussion of war photography and the conditions of grievability introduces an ethical dimension to the discussion and helps draw attention to the unsavory relations of enjoyment occasioned by such images

Le roman d'entreprise: breaking the silence

This article looks at three recent French novels novels in order to explore key themes in what has become known as the roman d’entreprise: Pierre Mari’s Résolution (2005), Nathalie Kuperman’s Nous étions des êtres vivants (2010) and Thierry Beinstingel’s Retour aux mots sauvages (2010). The figure of the entreprise functions both as a fictional representation of the post-Fordist workplace environment in companies such as France Télécom, and also as a means of tackling wider issues of work and social organisation in an era of neoliberal managerialism. The concepts of capitalist realism, organisational miasma and virtuality are used to analyse the ways in which the three novels convey the distinctive affective landscape of the contemporary entreprise. Fiction is used to consider the prolix and self-referential nature of the managerialist entreprise, which enables it to exert a significant influence on the individual and collective subjectivities of employees. The three novels focus on the capacity of the entreprise to capture language and impose an affect of silence on employees

Time Out of Joint: Hamlet and the Pure Form of Time

The aim of this paper is to explore why Deleuze takes up Hamlet’s claim that ‘time is out of joint’. In the first part of this paper, I explore this claim by looking at how Deleuze relates it to Plato’s Timaeus and its conception of the relationship between movement and time. Once we have seen how time functions when it is ‘in joint’, I explore what it would mean for time to no longer be understood in terms of an underlying rational structure. The claim can be understood as about a relationship between time and action. In the second part of this paper, I want to relate this new understanding of time to Hamlet itself, in order to see how temporality operates within the play. I will conclude by relating these two different conceptions of time out of joint to one another through Nietzsche’s Eternal Return