Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze as interpreters of Henri Bergson

In this essay I concentrate on the relation between Deleuze's philosophy and Merleau-Ponty's. I examine the question of whether their philosophical projects are as widely divergent as Deleuze wants the reader to believe. Since explicit references to Merleau-Ponty in the work of Deleuze are rather rare, I take the detour of examining their interpretations of Henri Bergson, a philosopher they both recognized as an important source of inspiration. More specifically, I study the references to Bergson in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze that deal with difference and immanence. I show that Merleau-Ponty merely reads Bergson as a difference thinker, whereas Deleuze stresses Bergson's immanentism. However, these two positions do not exclude one another. First of all, there are many similarities with respect to which Bergsonian concepts both authors focus on and how they interpret them. Secondly, as Deleuze's own philosophy illustrates, a philosophy of difference is not incompatible with immanentism. However, there is one passage in Cinema I. The Movement-Image in which Deleuze states that there is a fundamental difference between the battle against dualism as it is fought by Bergson on the one hand, and phenomenology on the other. Since Deleuze's search for an immanent philosophy relies heavily on concepts introduced by Bergson, this passage can help to indicate to what degree the aforementioned similarities between Deleuze's and Merleau-Ponty's immanentism hold

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

Rights of passage: law and the biopolitics of dying

Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures explores the relation between law and life and the advent of a politics of 'life'. How have recent events focused social, political and cultural attention on the living body and its maintenance and management? The central concept, through which the embodiment of the subject will be examined will be that of 'bio-power'. Articulated by Michel Foucault, but brought to attention more recently in the work of Giorgio Agamben, this concept recognises that the relation between life and law is both historical and necessary: the law must operate on bodies but can only do so by establishing a border between the body of the polity, and the mere life excepted from political concern. The contemporary advent of bio-politics occurs when the polity increasingly and invasively operates on this 'mere' life, and the body or organism – rather than the self – becomes the object of political management. The manner in which the body becomes the focus of contemporary power has led legal theory to explore new questions of the threshold between life and death and has led social theory to question the new extensions of the law and the polity into embodied life. The contributors explore the forensic shift in contemporary social theory and cultural sensibility from a number of perspectives. Description of book from publisher website at: http://www.palgrave.com

Diffusion or War? Foucault as a Reader of Tarde

The objective of this chapter is to clarify the social theory underlying in Foucault’s genealogy of power/knowledge thanks to a comparison with Tarde’s microsociology. Nietzsche is often identified as the direct (and unique) predecessor of this genealogy, and the habitual criticisms are worried about the intricate relations between Foucault and Marx. These perspectives omit to point to another – and more direct – antecedent of Foucault`s microphysics: the microsociology of Gabriel Tarde. Bio-power technologies must be read as Tardian inventions that, by propagation, have reconfigured pre-existing social spaces, building modern societies. We will see how the Tardean source in Foucault’s genealogy sheds new clarity about the micro-socio-logic involved in it, enabling us to identify some of its aporiae and to imagine some solutions in this respect as well

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

Coldness and Cruelty as Performance in Deleuze's Proust

This book is an encounter between Deleuze the philosopher, Proust the novelist, and Beckett the writer creating interdisciplinary and inter-aesthetic bridges between them, covering textual, visual, sonic and performative phenomena, ..

Swimming is never without risk: opening up on learning through activism and research

This article examines my own becoming as Elisabeth and as a researcher. It is about working as a support worker, coaching teams that are trying to realize inclusive education for a child, and my PhD process, which relies on these practices. My intention here is to unfold several aspects, blockages, possibilities, and tensions that can make sense of my messy struggle. The never-ending learning through working with people, listening to their stories, and taking responsibility are important ingredients of my engagement. It is necessary to provide insights and justify my multiple positions to avoid falling into a narcissistic trap. In doing so, I will seek help from Levinas and in concepts of Deleuze and Guattari to (re-)construct my own understanding

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