Michelangelo, Leibniz and the Serpentine Figure

Abstract In his lectures from 1987, Deleuze draws an analogy between Michelangelo‟s figures and Leibnizian substances by claiming that neither are essences but rather sources of modifications or manners of being. The best way to explore this analogy, I argue, is by focusing on Michelangelo‟s preference for serpentine shapes. By putting key passages from The Logic of Sensation, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque and What is Philosophy? in resonance with the Leibnizian accounts of corporeal aggregates and possible worlds on the one hand and art history on the other, I will try to develop a Deleuzian concept for the typically mannerist ideal of the serpentine figure. Although Deleuze usually prefers to speak in musical terms of refrains and counterpoints by which various blocs of sensation resonate with each other, in the visual arts it is the serpentine figure that renders visible sensory becoming as a rhythmic counter-positioning of possible worlds within a single body without organs

Deleuze, Freud and the Three Syntheses

The aim of this paper is to provide a close reading of Deleuze's complex account of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Difference and Repetition. The first part provides a reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle itself, showing why Freud feels the need to develop a transcendental account of repetition. In the second, I show the limitations of Freud's account, drawing on the work of Weismann to argue that Freud's transcendental model mischaracterises repetition. In the third part, I show how Freud's account of the death drive is shadowed by Deleuze's own non-representational transcendental account

In the Shadow of Akimbo Corporatism: Arched Athleticism and the 'Becoming-Human' of a People.

The importance of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s development of ‘encounter’ is brought into sharp relief as key to the notion of ‘athleticism’. Here, both are developed as indispensable to each other, forming an a-radical/ana-material groundless ground to power, politics, literary sensibility, indeed sense itself – though all played in a minor key. It is a nuanced encounter which, at one and the same time, if working as encounter, produces an acephaletic knowledge, a body-knowledge, without the Ego-I. This, in itself would have been enough. But in an age of massifying systems, drone warfare and horrific migrations, where corporate tentacles bend the rules akimbo, one finds that this turn to a Deleuzean athleticism offers a different kind of political analysis, a radical difference, which, despite (or because of) the odds, enables a politics of hope and indeed, of a ‘becoming-human’

Tracking the triple form of difference: Deleuze's Bergsonism and the Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible

This paper will explore the notions of intensity, the virtual/actual and different/ciation in Gilles Deleuze's work. It will focus in particular on excavating the Bergsonian dimension of these terms in Deleuze's philosophy and their relations to one another. While much has been written on the role of Bergson in shaping Deleuze's virtual/actual philosophy, far less attention has been paid to the way in which Deleuze's thoughts on intensity and the movements of different/ciation are also developed out of his reading of Bergson. To address this I will explicate the 'triple form of difference' that Deleuze locates in Bergson, which includes renditions of intensity and the process of differentiation, after which I will map the movements from this early Bergsonian work to Deleuze's mature position on the matter, as it is found in the final chapter of Difference and Repetition

A Imanência: uma vida...

A Imanência: uma vida..