Saving the infinite. The philosophy of gilles deleuze

El presente artículo pretende, en primer lugar, identificar el papel que juega la noción de infinito en la filosofía de Gilles Deleuze, donde es erigida como horizonte absoluto de la actividad de pensar y como criterio para distinguir, en virtud de las relaciones que se establezcan con ella, la especificidad de las disciplinas filosófica, científica y artística. Una vez definida la misión de la filosofía como tentativa de salvar lo infinito, se tratará de rastrear las particulares elaboraciones teóricas de Leibniz y Spinoza acerca de esta cuestión como inspiradoras fundamentales de la doctrina deleuziana sobre la infinitud.The present article aims first to identify the role that the notion of infinite plays in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, where it is raised as the absolute horizon of thought as well as the criterion for distinguishing, according to the relationships established with it, the specificity of philosophy, science and art. Then, and once defined the mission of philosophy as the attempt to save the infinite, we will try to track the particular theories on this question offered by Leibniz and Spinoza as the fundamental source of inspiration for the deleuzian doctrine on infinity

Neutralización y génesis. Gilles Deleuze o cómo hacerse un pensamiento sin imágenes o un cuerpo sin órganos

A partir del análisis del significado de los sintagmas “pensamiento sin imagen” y “cuerpo sin órganos” pretendemos concluir que la ontología de Deleuze se articula en torno a dos operaciones maestras, neutralización y génesis, que promueven una reformulación particular de la filosofía trascendental en la que el campo de las condiciones queda vaciado hasta identificarse con el desierto. Esta reformulación traslada el problema desde la cuestión de la comunicación entre sustancias preexistentes hasta la determinación de las condiciones de construcción –génesis– del pensamiento y del cuerpo.An analysis of the meaning of the phrases ‘thought without image’ and ‘body without organs’ is the basis upon which we aim to show that Deleuze’s ontology is articulated by two master operations –neutralisation and genesis. These two operations promote a reformulation of transcendental philosophy in which the field of the conditions is emptied and identified to the desert. Consequently, the problem is transferred from the question of communication between pre-existent substances to the determination of the conditions necessary for the genesis of both thought and body

What can we learn from understanding the characteristics, circumstances, and patterns of women killed by men and the men who kill them?

This thesis explores what can be learned from a connected analysis of men’s fatal violence against women, that is, looking at all instances regardless of the relationship between victim and perpetrator, to understand the characteristics, circumstances and patterns of women killed by men and the men who kill them. Sex differences, both between victims and perpetrators, are hidden in official data and policy responses to fatal violence and historically were overlooked in criminology. This thesis seeks to make the case for keeping sex differences at the forefront, rejecting siloed approaches which overplay the distinctions and overlook the commonalities between sexual and domestic violence and abuse, including prostitution, and for reinstating the concept of patriarchy as central to feminist scholarship whilst bringing together the too often separated approaches of feminist activism, service provision and academia. A mixed method approach was used wherein quantitative analysis of data regarding UK women killed by men in between 2012 and 2014 (446 women), with an additional purposive sample of women who had been killed by strangers between 2015 and 2017 (63 women) and women who had been involved in prostitution and killed between 2009 and 2011 and 2015 and 2017 (16 women, of whom ten were also in the purposive sample of women who had been killed by strangers, therefore an additional 6 women), was enhanced by case histories ensuring that women’s realities remained the focal point of the research and adding depth. The research found that ignoring sex in analysis of homicide means ignoring the specificities of femicide. The thesis offers both a new definition of femicide and a new model of men’s violence against women, incorporating individual, situations/relational, institutional, structural, and cultural contributors recognising intersecting inequalities to contextualise men’s violence against women within patriarchal societies

Información y documentación: Revistas

Sin resume

La dialéctica trascendental de la relación entre los sexos en Lacan

On the basis of Eugen Fink’s insistence that the true contribution of Kant’s transcendental dialectic is that its treatment of the problem of totality reveals the concept ‘totum’ to be a masking of the nothing, our aim is to highlight that the theory of sexual relation introduced by Lacan in his Seminar Encore –and in general his turn to the real from the 1960 onwards– presents a group of features that make clear its Kantian affiliation. The particular analysis of the logic of illusion contained in Lacan’s formulas of sexuation entail the exposure of three nothings: the impossibility of the sexual relation, the non-existence of The woman, and the absence of the Other of the Other.Basándonos en la lectura de Eugen Fink según la cual el tratamiento del problema de la totalidad en Kant deja al descubierto que el concepto de totum no es sino un enmascaramiento de la nada, y que en ello consiste la verdadera contribución de su crítica en tanto que dialéctica trascendental, pretendemos mostrar que la teoría de la relación sexual contenida en el Seminario Aún de Lacan –y en general el giro a lo real de su doctrina a partir de los años sesenta– presenta una serie de características que ponen de manifiesto su filiación kantiana. El particular análisis de la lógica de la ilusión de Lacan condensado en sus fórmulas de la sexuación tendría como consecuencia el desenmascaramiento de tres nadas: la imposibilidad de la relación sexual, la inexistencia de La mujer y la ausencia del Otro del Otro

En voz alta. Los cursos de Gilles Deleuze en Vincennes

Sin resume

Salvar lo infinito : la filosofía de Gilles Deleuze

El presente artículo pretende, en primer lugar, identificar el papel que juega la noción de infinito en la filosofía de Gilles Deleuze, donde es erigida como horizonte absoluto de la actividad de pensar y como criterio para distinguir, en virtud de las relaciones que se establezcan con ella, la especificidad de las disciplinas filosófica, científica y artística. Una vez definida la misión de la filosofía como tentativa de salvar lo infinito, se tratará de rastrear las particulares elaboraciones teóricas de Leibniz y Spinoza acerca de esta cuestión como inspiradoras fundamentales de la doctrina deleuziana sobre la infinitud.The present article aims first to identify the role that the notion of infinite plays in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy, where it is raised as the absolute horizon of thought as well as the criterion for distinguishing, according to the relationships established with it, the specificity of philosophy, science and art. Then, and once defined the mission of philosophy as the attempt to save the infinite, we will try to track the particular theories on this question offered by Leibniz and Spinoza as the fundamental source of inspiration for the deleuzian doctrine on infinity

Approximating Geometric Knapsack via L-packings

We study the two-dimensional geometric knapsack problem (2DK) in which we are given a set of n axis-aligned rectangular items, each one with an associated profit, and an axis-aligned square knapsack. The goal is to find a (non-overlapping) packing of a maximum profit subset of items inside the knapsack (without rotating items). The best-known polynomial-time approximation factor for this problem (even just in the cardinality case) is (2 + \epsilon) [Jansen and Zhang, SODA 2004]. In this paper, we break the 2 approximation barrier, achieving a polynomial-time (17/9 + \epsilon) < 1.89 approximation, which improves to (558/325 + \epsilon) < 1.72 in the cardinality case. Essentially all prior work on 2DK approximation packs items inside a constant number of rectangular containers, where items inside each container are packed using a simple greedy strategy. We deviate for the first time from this setting: we show that there exists a large profit solution where items are packed inside a constant number of containers plus one L-shaped region at the boundary of the knapsack which contains items that are high and narrow and items that are wide and thin. As a second major and the main algorithmic contribution of this paper, we present a PTAS for this case. We believe that this will turn out to be useful in future work in geometric packing problems. We also consider the variant of the problem with rotations (2DKR), where items can be rotated by 90 degrees. Also, in this case, the best-known polynomial-time approximation factor (even for the cardinality case) is (2 + \epsilon) [Jansen and Zhang, SODA 2004]. Exploiting part of the machinery developed for 2DK plus a few additional ideas, we obtain a polynomial-time (3/2 + \epsilon)-approximation for 2DKR, which improves to (4/3 + \epsilon) in the cardinality case.Comment: 64pages, full version of FOCS 2017 pape

Improved Pseudo-Polynomial-Time Approximation for Strip Packing

We study the strip packing problem, a classical packing problem which generalizes both bin packing and makespan minimization. Here we are given a set of axis-parallel rectangles in the two-dimensional plane and the goal is to pack them in a vertical strip of fixed width such that the height of the obtained packing is minimized. The packing must be non-overlapping and the rectangles cannot be rotated. A reduction from the partition problem shows that no approximation better than 3/2 is possible for strip packing in polynomial time (assuming P!=NP). Nadiradze and Wiese [SODA16] overcame this barrier by presenting a (7/5+epsilon)-approximation algorithm in pseudo-polynomial-time (PPT). As the problem is strongly NP-hard, it does not admit an exact PPT algorithm (though a PPT approximation scheme might exist). In this paper we make further progress on the PPT approximability of strip packing, by presenting a (4/3+epsilon)-approximation algorithm. Our result is based on a non-trivial repacking of some rectangles in the "empty space" left by the construction by Nadiradze and Wiese, and in some sense pushes their approach to its limit. Our PPT algorithm can be adapted to the case where we are allowed to rotate the rectangles by 90 degrees, achieving the same approximation factor and breaking the polynomial-time approximation barrier of 3/2 for the case with rotations as well