Dorothea Olkowski, Madly Creative or Creatively Mad:
The Crystalline Brain
Deleuze’s image of the crystalline brain raises an
important question. Is madness a prerequisite for creative genius? Is it the
case that the creation of new concepts or the creation of works of art that are
original and exemplary benefit from madness? My reasons for asking this
question are not only theoretical, that is, I want to understand Deleuze’s
point, but they are also personal. My grandmother and aunt suffered from
schizophrenia and recently, I realized that the rules of our household when I
was growing up resembled that “rules” that Alice encountered in Wonderland.
This talk examines the relationship between the organization of Wonderland and
the schizophrenic creativity of Antonin Artaud in the context of Deleuze’s
concept of the crystalline brain. Distinguishing between the doxa of ordinary
perception and the acute state of Artaud’s creative brain, implies that an
ethics of creation is what Deleuze demands from philosophy, from cinema and
from art. Whether one can slip in and out of this state like Alice, or must
remain embedded in it, like Artaud, is the question this talk explores.
Dorothea Olkowski is Professor and Chair of Philosophy
at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, Director of the Cognitive
Studies Program, and former Director of Women's Studies. Specializing in
phenomenology, contemporary continental philosophy, and feminist theory, she
has been a Fellow at the University of Western Ontario, Rotman Institute of
Philosophy and Science, the Australian National University in Canberra, and UC
Berkeley. She is the author/editor of ten books including Postmodern Philosophy
and the Scientific Turn (Indiana University Press, 2012), The Universal (In the
Realm of the Sensible), (Edinburgh and Columbia University Press, 2007), and
Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (University of California
Press,1999). Author of over 100 articles including essays, book reviews,
encyclopedia articles, translations of her work, and collaborations with
artists, she is currently working on the intersection of Deleuze’s philosophy
of creation with the doxa of phenomenology.
dolkowsk@uccs.edu
