Catarina Pombo Nabais, Kafka and Melville: the same political struggle?
In Critical
and Clinical Deleuze writes: “Kafka (for the Central
Europe), Melville (for America), present literature as the collective
enunciation of a minor people, or of all minor peoples, who find their
expression only in and through the writer.” Yet, are we to believe Deleuze when
he suggests a harmony between Kafka and Melville? Is it the
same mode of collective enunciation of a minor people?
In his
understanding of Kafka, the collective dimension of the literary experiment is
the work of a minority in a major language as the construction of lines of
flight, of lines of deterritorialisation for singular or minority becomings.
However, his reading of the universe of Melville seems a little different.
Melville is not presented as being confronted with small nations asphyxiated by
empires. On the contrary, America is a great nation and Deleuze accentuates its
nature as a place of universal immigration. Moreover, according to him, the
political programs of the founding fathers have transformed it into a “free
stone wall”, without cement or an accomplished configuration. The diabolic
forces from the outside which knock on the door of these communities of
celibate people are not present any longer, as they were in Kafka.
Nevertheless, can one see there a similar political dimension of the
confabulatory function? Is it possible to assign the same prophetic role to the
celibate characters of Kafka and to those created by Melville?
Short Biography
PhD in Philosophy by Université Paris VIII, under the
supervision of Jacques Rancière, 2007.
Pos-doc Researcher at the Centre of Philosophy of
Science of University of Lisbon (CFCUL).
Author of «Deleuze: Philosophie et Littérature», Paris,
L’Harmattan, 2013.
Head of the CFCUL Science-Art-Philosophy LAB since 2014.
Head of the CFCUL Science and Art FCT Research Group from
2008 up to 2014.
Garrett Nelson, Independent visual artist and writer
Francis Bacon’s c1928 stool. Let’s start before
painting and so feed Bacon through his stool. An object that has no faciality
but does have grounding: we don’t look; we don’t replace looking with a desire
to touch (the painted surface): we sit and as we do we long to deeply feel,
inhere with, the thing (not just brush it); we use the stool not as spectral
aesthetic but as physical experience—we do so with our arses not our eyes.
Taken so, the stool is a primordial object chronologically prior to Bacon’s
virtual non-narrative scream, sedimenting all the multiple layers of OUR
meta-narrative and THE work simultaneously. The actual object is the locus of a
humanizing narrative of crouching, and a non-human anti-narrative where
Deleuze’s “sensation” and Bacon’s non-story unfold, in the virtual domain.
Further, the paintings Deleuze specifically addresses in The Logic of
Sensations each contain variations on chairs. Here, the actual folds and
contours of the chair in experience are wrapped around or enfold with the
virtual in a tripartite relation of Bacon’s aesthetic sense—his cultural
wherewithal (potential+possible), Bacon (a posthuman agent) as just one schist
of the beings of sensation that are prior to the artworks’ realization, and
finally as (a humanizing agent)—the single entity that steers the flux of the
virtual into the stool.
Garrett Nelson is a visual artist, writer, critic and
occasional filmmaker whose work is informed by referential impulse, theoretical
or historical research and literature. His critical work is primarily
non-textual but socially performative. Collaborative curatorial projects
include —The Traveling Artist, Budapest, Vienna & Basel, 2011 —The State of
Making Things, Locarno, 2013. Recent performances at Les Urbaines Lausanne,
Bone Festival for Performance Art, Stadtgalerie Bern, Canary Comfortable:
Special Island Issue, Die Diele, Zürich and Sinop Biennial, Turkey. His
forthcoming book of prose poetry will be published with Pyramid Press Basel in
2015. Garrett Nelson studied Fine Arts at Parsons, New York and received his BA
from the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts in 2006 in Studio Art with a
second degree in Art History. Moving to Switzerland in 2007, he completed a
Master of Fine Arts in Contemporary Art Practice at the University of Art, Berne
in 2010.
garrett@himself.ch
Peter Nelson, Gilles Deleuze and becoming-music.
… a style to speak the possibles that arise …
This paper considers ways in which Deleuze’s
philosophy of difference allows a rethinking of questions concerning the evolution
and purpose of music. Scholars since Darwin have raised the question of why and
how music arose and evolved as a human practice in the first place. Similarly,
developmental psychologists and neurologists have tried to propose for music a
central role in the instantiation and evolution of the individual. Despite some
fundamental disagreements, there are lines of thought that suggest that music
accounts for practices that are crucial to life and to thought, in terms of the
phenotype of musicality. However these more scientific approaches fail to
address some fundamental matters. Deleuze himself writes about music, and in
the theme of the refrain he places a musical image in a critical position
within his scheme of thought. This paper will explore the ways in which
Deleuze’s writing contributes to a clearer understanding of the nature of music
and musicality. It will also consider the rhythmic emergence of the subject as
style.
Peter Nelson is currently Professor of Music and
Technology at the Reid School of Music at the University of Edinburgh, where
his research involves aspects of music cognition as well as musical
composition. He has written most recently about rhythm from a social
perspective, and about the nature of sound. His compositional output includes
orchestral, instrumental, vocal and electronic music, including the use of
real-time interactive computer systems. He is also editor of the international
journal, Contemporary Music Review.
p.nelson@ed.ac.uk
Chrysanthi Nigianni, Writing Difference: Towards a
Becoming Minoritarian
Gesturing towards a becoming-minoritarian is a
political gesture and a grammatical gesture, one that invites us to turn the
fixity of the noun into the intensity of the verb, to resist the suffix of
femimin-ism(s), a suffix that forms abstract nouns of action, state, condition,
doctrine; a suffix that tends to an ending, a closure and a consequent fixity.
Marxism, Calvinism, Communism, Nationalism, Neo-Liberalism the suffix -ism has
come to indicate a belief or principle, a school of thought, an ideology, the
result of a set of actions. Feminist scholarship has not escaped such closure
and has come to constitute such a doctrine characterised by master
methodologies (e.g. intersectionality, post-structuralism) and master concepts,
while feminist writing as a practice seems to have conformed into the
neo-liberal university and a standardised and increasingly regulated academic
writing more and more tied to proposals for funding and existing political
agendas. Against such majoritarian formations on the level of thought,
Deleuze’s becoming-minoritarian in language provides the space for a radical
criticism and creative resistance. The paper will argue that the essentially
political nature of the grammatical varieties of becoming-minoritarian can
challenge a fetishisation of and an increasing policing of ‘content’, language
and citational practices in academic writing and will favour instead
‘asignifying messages that escape dominant ideologies’ (Guattari). To live
ideologically is to narrow Life and Representationalism (as negative
determination) has failed Life, in its being exclusionary and blind to
non-linguistic difference. Becoming-minoritarian is a difficult engagement in
search of a ‘style’ in language/writing as the re-organisation and
recomposition of the real that will allow new arrangements and relationships to
form, an immanent movement of knowledge which in turn will be able to respond
ethically to the demand for a possibility of Life and of singular ways of existing
together in this world.
Chrysanthi Nigianni has written on the topics of
ethics, aesthetics, politics and the body. She is the co-editor of Undutiful
Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice (with H. Gunkel and
F. Söderbäck, Palgrave McMillan Press, 2012), Deleuze and Queer Theory (with M.
Storr, Edinburgh University Press, 2009), and ‘Deleuzian Politics?’ (with J.
Gilbert, 2010)—a Special Issue of New Formations: A Journal of
Culture/Theory/Politics. She is part of the Philadelphia Association
(Philosophy and Psychotherapy Community) and training to become a
psychoanalytic psychotherapist.
chrysanthinigianni@gmail.com
Vassileios Ntovros,Unfolding San Lorenzo's chapel:
Beyond the folding forms and symbolic notions
The content of this paper reveal a new interpretation
of the chapel San Lorenzo in Turin, designed by Guarino Guarini in 17th
century, as seen through Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical approach in his book
“FOLD, Leibniz and the Baroque”. In the first part the perspective of the fold
and the theoretical discourse of contemporary architectural practice are
presented. Seeking the philosophical origin of the concept fold that is found
in Deleuze's reading on the philosopher Leibniz, it's the basic way to
understand the fold both as a substance and meanings contained therein, as well
as a relationship. Finally a frame is suggested, where the fold can function as
a tool of analysis of the church. In the second part the main points of the
chapel are discussed through the perspective of the fold. The successive folds
of the chapel are sought and identified in the use of architectural elements
from all historical periods, while the relationship of these elements is
understood through the mathematical curve and the singularities contained
therein. The materiality of the chapel and its construction are treated within
the folds of material handling and intangible components within the folds of
the soul. At this point the allegorical figure of Deleuze on the baroque house
is adopted for the comprehension of the chapel instead the previous symbolic
interpretations: The infinite fold moves endlessly as a continuous relationship
between two areas, among the upper folds of the soul and the lower pleats of
matter
Ntovros Vasileios is an architect, graduated from
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, holding a master degree in
"Self-Sufficient Habitat" from IAAC-Barcelona, founding member of the
creative lighting collective Beforelight. His work have been awarded in
national and international competitions while have been published in
exhibitions, conferences and journals. He has collaborated with several
architectural offices including F451arquitectura and Miba in Barcelona. He is
working on its own architectural firm since 2009, while he cooperates in
projects for urban regeneration with other creative studios and groups in
Athens. In recent period his interest focuses on the theory and practice of
sustainable design using digital tools and fabrication methods in order to
construct symbiotic environments.
ntovrosvasileios@gmail.com
