Anthony Faramelli, Revolutionary Substance:
Schizoanalysis and Multitude
Antonio Negri’s seminal book, Time for Revolution
(1993), brought together Spinoza’s monism, his concept of a singular substance,
with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a “line of flight” to open up the
potential of the multitude, a multiplicity of singularities loosely bound together
by the singular project of revolution. There has been a renewed interest in
this with the publication of #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader. By
emphasising to a certain misunderstanding of Deleuze and Guattari, the essays
included in the reader form a bridge between Nick Land and Antonio Negri in
order to demonstrate how revolution can be enacted through an emphasis on
constant accelerating speeds. What these positions presuppose is an infinitely
smooth substance over which revolutionary lines of flight can travel at ever
accelerating speeds without being reterritorialized. However the monism of
Deleuze and Guattari conceives substance as folded, making the different
heterogeneous points of knowledge (or memories) immanent to each other. Time’s folded
spatial dimension rejects the teleology found in Negri and the other
Accelerationist thinkers.
This paper will correct this foundational error and
demonstrate how schizoanalysis offers a radically different alternative to most
thinkers of multitude. This paper will demonstrate that schizoanalysis’
politics retains the plurality of the multitude, but does not flat out
difference between the singular points that construct it. As such, the
schizoanalytic concept that pluralism equals monism (2002, 20) engenders a
politics of immanence and resistance, rather than revolution, which opens up a
greater capacity for achieving radical change.
Anthony Faramelli recently completed his PhD in the
critical humanities at Kingston University’s London Graduate School and is
currently training to be a group analysis at the Institute of Group Analysis.
His current research is concerned with the relationship between French
Institutional Psychotherapy, schizoanalysis and radical politics.
A_faramelli@hotmail.com
Kostas Filippakis
Αντικείμενο της παρούσας εισήγησης αποτελεί η ερμηνεία της σκέψης του Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) από τον Alain Badiou (1937- ), όπως αυτή εκτέθηκε στο έργο του τελευταίου Ντελέζ. Η βοή του είναι (1997). Πρόκειται για μιαν ετερόδοξη ανάγνωση, η οποία επιχειρεί -εν πολλοίς θέτοντας εντός παρενθέσεως το κοινό του έργο με τον Guattari (1930-1992)- να αποσπάσει τον Deleuze από την εικόνα του συρμού που τον εμφανίζει ως έναν «γκουρού των χίπηδων», ως κάποιον που κηρύσσει την κατάφαση της διαφοράς, της ροής και της απελευθερωτικής δυναμικής της επιθυμίας ενάντια σε κάθε κανονιστική νόρμα. Μέσα από την παρουσίαση του Badiou προκύπτει, αντιθέτως, ένας παραδοσιακός, «αγνώριστος» σχεδόν φιλόσοφος, εκπρόσωπος ενός αριστοκρατικού ασκητισμού, ο οποίος, μακράν του να «ανατρέπει» τον πλατωνισμό, εισηγείται μια μοντέρνα και εκλεπτυσμένη εκδοχή του. Μολονότι έχουμε υπόψη μας την κριτική που της ασκήθηκε (παραδείγματος χάριν, δύο σχετικά πρόσφατα βιβλία των Jon Roffe και Clayton Crockett*), δε θα μας απασχολήσει, παρά μόνο σε ένα δεύτερο επίπεδο, η ορθότητα ή μη αυτής της ερμηνείας, το κατά πόσον δηλαδή δικαιολογείται από τα κείμενα ή αποτελεί άσκηση ερμηνευτικής βίας. Αντ' αυτού του ερωτήματος, μας φαίνεται περισσότερο ενδιαφέρον -και εγγύτερο στο ντελεζιανό πνεύμα- να θέσουμε ένα άλλο: έστω ότι είναι βάσιμη ετούτη η ανάγνωση, τι συνέπειες έχει η παραδοχή αυτή για τη σκέψη του αναγνώστη, σε ποιες κατευθύνσεις μπορεί να την οδηγήσει και ποιες δυνατότητες της στερεί;
Kostas Filippakis is a post-graduate philosophy student at the University of Ioannina, currently working on his master's thesis on the meta-ontological problematics of Alain Badiou. Hiw interestes include the history of philosophy, ontology/metaphysics, social theory, metaphilosophy, and what is usually called "french theory" and "continental" philosophy in general.
Mpakallica@hotmail.com
George Fourtounis, “Pure immanence” is still
immanence?
Following Derrida, the Saussurean concept of the sign
can “shake” the metaphysics of presence, undermining the distinction/opposition
between signifier and signified, that is, between the sensible and the
intelligible -and, we may add, between the material and the ideal. These
dualisms can also be taken as constitutive of the thought of transcendence, in
so far as they describe aspects of the “equivocity of Being”. In that sense,
the Saussurean sign meets Spinozist immanence, as Deleuze correlates it with
the concept of expression in Spinoza, where “what is expressed has no existence
outside its expressions; each expression is … the existence of what is
expressed”. On the other hand, though, as Derrida has shown convincingly, the
Saussurean sign inevitably tends to recall the core of the western metaphysics
that it undermines, in so far as the duality between signifier and signified
cannot be totally suppressed: sign is always and unavoidably the sign of
something. In an analogous manner, immanence can be formulated only within the
language of transcendence: paraphrasing Derrida, the very signification
“immanence” can be understood as something being immanent to or in something
(“else”). Thus, immanence tends to reconstitute the duality it cancels.
What is involved in both cases is not some remnant of
metaphysics or transcendence, which would indicate an uncompleted critical
work, but a necessary limit, in that the complete elimination of the dualities
in question would render the concepts of sign and immanence redundant, thus
erasing their critical potential, and would restore the apparatus of the metaphysics
of transcendence: we would be left with the one of the two poles of the
duality, which would then be present in itself. In that sense, immanence is a
paradigmatic deconstructive concept that depends as to its critical effectivity
on precisely what it cancels/erases: the distinction between its constitutive
terms.
In this light, I propose to pose the question of “pure
immanence” in Deleuze’s late work, where “immanence is not in something, to
something”. In particular, I will propose the hypothesis that, if indeed the
“plane of immanence” cannot itself be immanent to something, we cannot think of
immanence other than as a relation, where the duality of something being
immanent to something is irrepressible, and that this tension, far from being a
retreat, is a condition of immanence as effective criticism of transcendence.
Accordingly, I propose to rethink the scheme of post-Heideggerean French
philosophy advanced by Agamben, and adopted by other commentators, where
Derrida and Deleuze are registered in divergent genealogies of transcendence
and immanence, respectively.
G.m.fourtounis@gmail.com
Helene Frichot, From the Exhaustion of the Dogmatic
Image of Thought that Circumscribes Architecture toward Feminist Practices of
Joy
A thought provocation toward a possible future of
architectural thinking-doing can be located in the question: Is a woman-form
and altered forms of practice possible to imagine across the plane of
composition that is architecture? What would be the implication of imagining a
new woman-form, even a ‘feminist future’ in relation to what has come to be
called the Anthropocene? These questions, which I fleetingly ventured in my
chapter contribution to Deleuze and Architecture (2013) are no doubt
inadequately formulated, exactly because of a disciplinary habit of
form-thinking in architectural design research. Too often, where the question
is architecture, the answer is assumed to be ‘designed form’, or ‘built
project’, or else the imposition of the aesthetic figure of the heroic,
creative genius, procuring a dogmatic image of thought that uncritically
celebrates contemporary architecture’s icons and idols. Amidst the exhaustion
of the dogmatic image of thought that pertains to contemporary architectural
production and consumption, rather than a search for a new woman-form or even
the pursuit of adventures in becoming-women, a simple shift of emphasis from
feminist theory to feminist practices is where I suggest a potential refrain of
liberty might lie, because ‘woman’ is also a living being; a working
individual; and a speaking subject. Attending this geologic age of the
Anthropocene, shaped by the after-effects of ‘man’s’ presumed conquest of
natural resources, I will further address what I argue is a correlate and
projective thought-image, that of the superfold, conceptualised by Gilles
Deleuze as the impending reorganisation of language, labour and life. The
superfold, or rather superfolding is a concept designating a dynamic milieu of
expression shadowed by the oppressive threat of our societies of control,
characterised as they are by increasingly sophisticated information
technologies, and their capacity to micro-politically modulate the affects and
percepts of the desiring subject. Despite the noopolitical threats that can be
associated with superfolding I want to argue that there persists the tenuous
promise of a becoming-other-than-what-we-have-been in relation to radically
reformulated existential territories and their relational ecologies: This
becomes a disciplinary challenge for architecture, among other disciplines.
While the refrain - through which we attempt to co-constitutively locate our
(architectural) territory and our processes of subjectification (in place) -
always risks coming undone through sheer material exhaustion, yet it could be,
by exhaustively pursuing feminist practices (and believing in this world), that
compositions of language, labour and life might be enabled to express greater
proportions of joy. These are some of the issues I propose to discuss at the
forthcoming Deleuze in Athens: Refrains of Freedom event.
Hélène Frichot is Associate Professor and Docent in
Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm Sweden
and Adjunct Professor in the School of Architecture and Design, RMIT
University, Melbourne. Her research examines the transdisciplinary field
between architecture and philosophy, while her first discipline is
architecture, she holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Sydney
(2004). A selection of recent publications include: “On Finding Oneself
Spinozist: Refuge, Beatitude and the Any-Space-Whatever”, in Charles J.
Stivale, Eugene W. Holland, Daniel W. Smith eds., Gilles Deleuze: Image and
Text (Continuum Press, 2009); ‘The Forgetting of the Ethics of Immanence’,
inArchitectural Theory Review, Vol. 7, Issue
Helene.frichot@arch.kth.se
