Kostas Bairaktaris: «..Η αποϊδρυματοποίηση δεν
αποτυπώνεται μόνον στο σώμα και στην ψυχή του εγκλείστου αλλά και στην
συλλογική συνείδηση του κοινωνικού σώματος …» Felix Guattari
Είναι από τις λέξεις που έχουν αποτυπωθεί από τα τέλη
της δεκαετίας του ΄80 στο μυαλό μας ως απόσταγμα των συζητήσεων με τον Guattari
στην Θεσσαλονίκη. Σκέψεις καθοριστικές, όταν μάλιστα προέρχονταν από έναν
διεθνώς αναγνωρισμένο φιλόσοφο και διανοητή της εποχής. Γιατί μας ενθάρρυναν
στις δύσκολες μάχες της εποχής .Διδάγματα από έναν απλό, προσιτό αλλά και αλληλέγγυο
συνομιλητή απέναντι σε νέους που δοκιμάζονταν σε εμπειρίες ,πρωτόγνωρες για τα
ελληνικά δεδομένα της εποχής εκείνης. Σε περιόδους απόλυτης κυριαρχίας της
ιδρυματικής λογικής, της ασυλιακής βαρβαρότητας, των εγκλημάτων κατά των
εγκλείστων και της απόλυτης κυριαρχίας του ψυχιατρικού παραδείγματος η
ενθάρρυνση αυτή μας όπλισε με ακόμα μεγαλύτερη αποφασιστικότητα. Σήμερα,
δεκαετίες μετά ,είμαστε μάρτυρες μιας περιόδου βίαιης ανακατανομής του πλούτου
(καπιταλιστική κρίση). Ιδιαίτερα χαρακτηριστικά εκλαμβάνει αυτή η κρίση σε μια
χώρα όπως η Ελλάδα όπου βιώνουμε έναν καπιταλισμό στην πιο χυδαία και
διεφθαρμένη μορφή του. Μια χώρα όπου διαχρονικά διακυβερνάται από το πιο
παρασιτικό , το πιο απάνθρωπο, άρα και πιο παθολογικό, κομμάτι της ελληνικής
κοινωνίας που την μετέτρεψε σε οικονομικό προτεκτοράτο τραπεζιτών και των
δυνάμεων που ηγεμονεύουν ως σύγχρονοι αποικιοκράτες μονοπωλιακά στην Ευρωπαϊκή
Ένωση. H δημοσιονομική λογική του νεοφιλελεύθερου μοντέλου και οι εγκληματικές
επιπτώσεις στον τομέα της δημόσιας υγείας διαχέονται και στον τομέα της ψυχικής
υγείας ακυρώνοντας , με την συνέργεια ενός νέο-συντηριτικού και δήθεν
εκσυγχρονιστικού κοινωνικο-ψυχιατρικού μοντέλου , την έννοια και τις πρακτικές
της αποϊδρυματοποίησης. Η χωροταξική μετεγκατάσταση των ατόμων με ψυχιατρική
εμπειρία ,με την εργαλειακή διαμεσολάβηση των κρατικοδίαιτων και δήθεν
μη-κυβερνητικών οργανώσεων και μη-κερδοσκοπικών εταιριών, έρχονται να
συνδράμουν στην επίθεση που δέχονται τα άτομα με ψυχιατρική εμπειρία .Η
προκλητική αποσύνδεση οποιουδήποτε αιτήματος υποστήριξης από την αναγκαιότητα
αλλαγής του κυρίαρχου ψυχιατρικού παραδείγματος καθιστά και το σύνθημα «Όχι στο
κλείσιμο των ψυχιατρείων» ιστορική ειρωνεία γιατί το επιβαρύνει με την υποψία
των συντεχνιακών κινήτρων και των ευκαιριακών συμμαχιών. Κίνητρα που
παραβλέπουν την αναγκαιότητα πραγματικής απελευθέρωσης των ατόμων με ψυχιατρική
εμπειρία μέσα από την αλλαγή του ίδιου του ιστορικά ξεπερασμένου επιστημονικού
παραδείγματος Ο εγκλωβισμός δε της συστημικής αριστεράς σε μια τέτοια λογική
την καθιστά συνεργό αλλά και υπόλογη για την αναπαραγωγή της ψυχιατρικής
βαρβαρότητας και του αποκλεισμού, δηλαδή την αναπαραγωγή του ίδιου του
οικονομικό-πολιτικού συστήματος και της καπιταλιστικής βίας και εξουσίας.
Kostas Bairaktaris is Associate Professor of
Psychology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is both
theoretically, as well as, in practice engaged with psychosocial systems,
social actions and movements. During the period from 1984 to 1990 he launched
for the first time in Greece the deinstitutionalization process at the
Psychiatric Hospital of Thessaloniki and created together with his colleagues
the Rehabilitation Unit, the Cooperative Therapeutic Units and a network of
apartments and hostels for former inmates. Since the late 1970s he
participated-with the "Leros Group"- in the public demonstration of
the psychiatric barbarism in Leros and in 1988 he was amongst the originators
of the de-institutionalization project of the National Hospice of Leros. In
1992 he worked as a temporary adviser of the Pan American Health Organization,
in the Dominican Republic, in Psychiatric Reform programs organized in the
context of developing Local Health Systems. He collaborated with the Department
of Criminal and Forensic Sciences of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
in vocational training and social rehabilitation of prisoners and ex-prisoners
programs In recent years he works together with students and socially excluded
groups drawing attention to the Voice of the Excluded through actions aiming to
rehabilitate social and political rights to the social body and the social
field.
trella@psu.auth.gr
Bruce Baugh, The open society and the democracy to
come: Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari.
In Bergsonism, Deleuze refers to Bergson’s concept of
an “open society,” which would be a “society of creators” who gain access to
“the open creative totality” through acting and creating. Deleuze and
Guattari’s political philosophy is oriented toward the goal of such an open
society. This would be a democracy, but not in the sense of the rule of the
actually existing people, but the rule of the “people to come,” for in the
actually existing situation, such a people is “lacking” or missing. When the
people becomes a society of creators, the result is a society open to the
future, creativity and the new, which is to say, that “the people to come” are
the people open to what is to come, and so open to their own creative
potential. This openness and creative freedom is the polar opposite of the
conformism and “herd mentality” condemned by Deleuze and Nietzsche, a mentality
which is the basis of all narrow “nationalisms” (of ethnicity, race, religion
and creed). It is the freedom of creating and commanding, not the Kantian
“freedom” to obey Reason and the State. This paper will use Bergson’s The Two
Sources of Morality and Religion, Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: For a Minor
Literature, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? to sketch Deleuze and
Guattari’s conception of the open society and of a democracy which remains “to
come.”
Bruce Baugh is Professor of Philosophy at Thompson
Rivers University (Kamloops), where he is Principal Investigator of the Walking
Lab, an interdisciplinary research group on walking. He is the author of French
Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (Routledge, 2003) and numerous articles
on Deleuze, Sartre, Derrida, Heidegger, Spinoza and others in journals such as
the Journal of Value Inquiry, Continental Philosophy Review, the Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and the Journal for the British Society for
Phenomenology. His translation of Benjamin Fondane’s philosophical essays,
Existential Monday: Benjamin Fondane’s Philosophical Essays will be published
by NYRB Books in 2015. His work in progress, Philosopher's Walk, contains
essays on walking and the philosophies of Descartes, Gassendi, Sartre,
Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Rousseau.Professor of Philosophy
Executive Editor, Sartre Studies International
bbaugh@tru.ca
Burcu Baykan, Becoming-Meat, Becoming-Whale,
Becoming-Inanimate: An Encounter with Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9
This paper is an exploration into the acts of bodily
transformation in the filmic production Drawing Restraint 9 (2005), by the
American multimedia artist Matthew Barney. Drawing on Deleuze-Guattarian theory
of becoming-other (1987), this paper addresses a series of bodily mutations;
modes of becoming in which the human body continually
becomes-something-other-than-itself in Barney’s filmic performance. Drawing
Restraint 9 as a project fusing cinema, performance, sculpture, architecture,
music, computer-generated effects and prosthetics that draws from mythology,
history, athleticism and biology, revolves around a series of strange and
unpredictable metamorphoses between the human and the non-human environments.
The film takes place on a Japanese whaling vessel where the two “Occidental
Guests” undergo degenerative and regenerative transformations over the course
of a love-making scene. Adorned in animal furs and bones and submerged in a
giant petroleum jelly sculpture, they mutilate each other’s flesh and slowly
undergo a mysterious metamorphosis that seems to transfigure them into whales.
Altogether, the love-making performance dramatically foregrounds the dynamic
interplay and mutational exchange between two human bodies, whales as non-human
animals, industrial spaces of the vessel and the petroleum jelly sculpture. The
intention of this paper is to address the engagement of the film in the complex
convergences of human and non-human, animate and inanimate structures. Of
particular interest for this paper is to explore how humans and different
species and non-living landscapes are put into contact with each other and the
impact of these entangling processes on the understanding of human
subjectivities and ontologies. Ultimately, the main focus pertaining to this
paper centers on a human being connected to a variety of environments;
industrial settings of the vessel, other species,
organic beings and inorganic things, and constantly
self-differing amidst such forces of connectivity, thereby facilitating Deleuze
and Guattari’s discussion of monism as that which implies pluralism.
Burcu Baykan is a graphic designer, performance and
body-based art researcher. She is in her final year of the four-year structured
PhD Program in Digital Arts in Trinity College Dublin, and pursuing a
philosophical investigation of multidisciplinary body-oriented art practices
including performance, installation, video art, sculpture, bio-art and their
interdisciplinary alliances. Specifically, she is interested in new forms of
collaboration and intersections between art-science-technology as well as the broader
critical theory which frames them. Having previously worked in the advertising
field, she has also been an adjunct faculty in the Visual Communication Design
Departments of Istanbul Bilgi University and Kadir Has University.
C.F. Bearn, Affectionate Attention: Communication and
Resistance in Deleuze and Gertrude Stein.
There is something dangerous about the appeal to
scientific results in philosophy. It is what Foucault warned against under the
heading: Anthropological Sleep. Today, the greatest danger comes not from
anthropology but from the neurosciences. Our temptation is to let recent
empirical theorizing do one's own philosophical work, to hide from the new in
the shadow of the contemporary. The question is how to enter brain science without
falling asleep: the use and abuse of brain science for life. just before
leaving Medical School and Baltimore for Paris, Gertrude Stein tried --
unsuccessfully -- to publish an article on the anatomy of the brain stem. Her
laboratory experiences give new insistence to the familiar characterization of
her writing as experimental. And yet she saw herself as turning away from the
useful medical biology of human nature to the creativity of human mind. Her
efforts, here, were to overcome communication by finding a resistant joy in
affectionate attention to singular things, a joy which lingers still in her
portraits' affectionate attention to singular words, their parts and their
particles.
Gordon C.F. Bearn teaches philosophy at Lehigh
University where he was the founding director of the Humanities Center. In
addition to various articles on Cavell, Derrida, Education, Art, and the
architecture of Arakawa and Gins, Bearn has published two books: Waking to
Wonder: Wittgenstein's Existential Investigations (SUNY 1997) and Life Drawing:
A Deleuzean Aesthetics of Existence (Fordham 2013). He is currently in the
early stages of a project which will emphasize the existential work done by the
sensual dimensions of linguistic life. This will involve a Foucault inspired critique
of analytical philosophy of language in both its formal and Wittgensteinian
guises, and a defense of the sensual force of linguistic life inspired in part
by Fluxus. As with his other books, this one takes off from Nietzsche, and
although it is presently untitled, it might be called: The Feel of Words:
Beyond Sense and Nonsense.
Gordon@lehigh.edu
Alain Beaulieu, Le géostatisme de Husserl et le
géodynamisme de Deleuze/Guattari: deux perspectives cosmologiques
Dans son essai «La terre ne se meut pas», Husserl
visait à fonder l'expérience sur une terre considérée comme plus fondamentale
en étant soumise ni au mouvement ni au repos. Ce faisant, il court-circuite la
science moderne et sa méthode expérimentale à la faveur d'une phénoménologie de
la «terre-sol» immobile. De leur côté, Deleuze et Guattari développent une
«géo-philosophie» où, notamment, la Terre affectée par des forces chaosmiques
devient libre par rapport au modèle hylèmorphique d'un tout parfaitement
organisé avec un système nerveux reliant les parties. Après avoir identifié
certaines similitudes et différences entre le géo-statisme de Husserl et le
géo-dynamisme de Deleuze/Guattari, nous discuterons les avantages du second qui
ouvre, entre autres, sur la possibilité de repenser le rapport de la Terre à
l'univers en évoquant l'idée d'une «cosmicisation des forces» et en concevant
une terre déterritorialisée qui n'est pas «seulement un point dans une galaxie,
mais une galaxie parmi d'autres».
Alain Beaulieu a obtenu son doctorat de 3e cycle en
philosophie à l’Université de Paris 8 sous la direction de Alain Badiou et est
professeur agrégé au département de philosophie de l’Université Laurentienne
(Canada). Il a publié notamment Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics (Coeditor,
Lexington, 2014), Abécédaire de Martin Heidegger (Dir., Sils Maria/Vrin, 2008),
Gilles Deleuze et la phénoménologie (Sils Maria/Vrin, rééd. 2006), Michel
Foucault and Power Today (Coeditor, Lexington, 2006), Michel Foucault et le
contrôle social (Dir., PU Laval, 2005) et Gilles Deleuze. Héritage
philosophique (Coord., PUF, 2005). Il est co-éditeur de la revue Foucault
Studies. ‹abeaulieu@laurentienne.ca›
abeaulieu@laurentienne.ca
Ronnen Ben-Arie, Deleuze and Palestine – Who are the People
to Come?
Gilles Deleuze was well known for his support for the
struggle of the Palestinian people, as is manifested in the few short texts he
published in the 1980s expressing his positions regarding the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although, in these short texts Deleuze is mostly
referring to current events in a rather blunt political manner and hardly goes
into developing a more theoretical conceptualization of the events, he does
bring up some of his ideas and concepts regarding politics and history. My
purpose in this paper is twofold. First, I aim to place Deleuze's writings on
Palestine within his political philosophy framework. That is, to explore the
function of his concepts in understanding the Palestinian cause and reality,
and the ways that these particular conditions might have been operative in the
moulding of specific concepts. Second, and based on that, I will reconsider the
pertinence and implications of Deleuze's political conceptualization to the
current Palestinian reality, which has changed dramatically in the three
decades that have passed since Deleuze wrote on Palestine. Specifically, I will
focus on the notion of the 'missing people', whose political implications have
been discussed before, including in relation to Palestinians, also by Deleuze
himself. What can we learn from the Palestinian experience and reality? Can the
Palestinian case be generalized to other struggles round the world? And if so,
what will be its embodiments today? Exploring these questions, I will address the
issues of liberation and decolonization, and the open possibilities for a
different future in Palestine.
Ronnen Ben-Arie completed his PhD studies at the
Department of Government and Political Theory at Haifa University. His
dissertation explores the concepts of resistance in the political thought of
Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, as a basis for thinking about possibilities
for change of political order. He is a research fellow at the Minerva
Humanities Center at Tel-Aviv University, and teaches at the Department of
Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion Institute. His current research
explores modes and practices of control, resistance and cooperation in
heterogeneous urban spaces in Israel-Palestine. Ronnen has published on the
spatio-political dimensions of the Israeli regime and a chapter on the Haifa
Destruction Machine is forthcoming in the edited volume Deleuze and the City.
He is currently editing a special issue of Deleuze Studies on Deleuze and
Palestine and an edited volume on Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Spatial
Power.
ronnen.ba@gmail.com
Hanjo Berressem, “Degrees of Freedom:“ Félix
Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies
What does Félix Guattari mean when he talks, in
Schizoanalytic Cartographies, about ‘degrees of freedom’? And how exactly are
these degrees of freedom related to the notion of the refrain, which, as
Guattari maintains, “constitutes a sort of selector of choices, an option
machine, for the treatment of the bifurcations around which the degrees of
freedom of a system, the aleatory putting on hold of the enacting of
heterogeneous components, will play“?
Focusing on a number of privileged positions and
processes of transformation within the conceptual quadrophonics of Flows,
Plyla, Territories and Universes that defines Guattari’s magnum opus, the paper
develops the inherent logic of Guattari’s notion of ‘freedom.’ If
schizoanalysis, which provides the axiomatics of Guattari’s cartography,
concerns “the capacity of our societies to conquer new degrees of freedom in
relation to existing economic and social constraints, and recentre the
collective and individual purposes of human activity on new objectives,” how to
bring this collective capacity into play in order to create new modes of
existence?
Hanjo.berressem@unl.koeln
Ronald Bogue, The Time of the Intolerable
The time image is an image of crisis. Deleuze
identifies the emergence of the time image with a crisis of the action-image,
and he situates its origins in certain tendencies in post-War American film and
in Italian Neorealism. The time image not only induces a crisis in the
action-image but also inaugurates a state of permanent crisis that puts into
question truth itself. The crisis of the time image is marked by a
confrontation with the intolerable, something that exceeds the capacities of
the sensory-motor schema. The intolerable is an image that cannot be
“tolerated” within the clichés of the action-image; it gives rise not to
pragmatic movement but to a “fonction de voyance.” The intolerable is both “the
permanent state of a daily banality,” which impedes belief in this world, and
the basis of political cinema, which engages impossibilities in a practice of
fabulation. In order to situate these concepts within contemporary cinema, I
will discuss Godard’s Adieu au langage as an exploration of the intolerable and
of the time-image as permanent crisis.
Ronald Bogue is Distinguished Research Professor
Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia. He is the
author of Deleuze and Guattari (1989), Deleuze on Literature (2003), Deleuze on
Cinema (2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (2003), Deleuze’s Wake:
Tributes and Tributaries (2004), Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and
Aesthetics (2007), and Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History (2010). He
is the co-editor, with Hanping Chiu and Yu-lin Lee, of Deleuze and Asia (2014).
rbogue@uga.edu
Sean Bowden, Deleuze, Pluralism and Pragmatism: The
Influence of Jean Wahl
This paper will attempt to clarify the influence that
Jean Wahl’s work had on Deleuze. I will show that Deleuze’s understanding of
pluralism and pragmatism derives in large part from Wahl’s 1920 book, Pluralist
Philosophies of England and America, and
especially from the study of William James’s
philosophy to be found therein. First of all, I will highlight a number of key
points in Deleuze’s oeuvre where he is drawing on Wahl’s work on James, even if
Wahl is not always mentioned by name. Secondly, I will
argue that a number of well-known Deleuzian theses –
that relations are external to their terms, that difference is irreducible to
the negative, and that reality is ‘distributive’ or a ‘patchwork’ of plural
facts – can all be found prefigured in Pluralist Philosophies.
Finally, and perhaps more controversially, I will
suggest that the combination of metaphysical and noetic (or epistemological)
pluralism that Wahl identifies in James can also be identified in Deleuze.
Sean Bowden is Lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin
University, Australia. He is the author of The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s
Logic of Sense (Edinburgh UP, 2011), and the co-editor of Badiou and Philosophy
(Edinburgh UP, 2012) and Deleuze and Pragmatism (Routledge, 2014).
s.bowden@deakin.edu.au
Rosi Braidotti
This paper presents a few basic theses about nomadic
feminism as both a theory of subjectivity and as a political practice based on:
embedded and embodied locations; the politics of immanence; the formation of
transversal assemblages and the pursuit of an ethics of affirmation. Special
attention will be paid to sexuality in relation to a neo-materialist, monistic
political ontology that does not fall into binary oppositions but posits
difference as a process of becoming-minoritarian. The paper is in no way an
orthodox reading of Deleuze, but rather an anti-oedipal appropriation of some
of his concepts for the purpose of articulating a feminist praxis for today,
based on complexity, vital materialism and multi-directional or rhizomic
relationality.
r.braidotti@uu.nl
Peter Burleigh, Detritus as Chance
The Architect and artist Andreas Angelidakis uses
found material, virtual and actual, to build his sculptures. What he finds
browsing the internet is 3D printed and merges with what he finds flaneuring
the city. His assemblages are an undoing of processes, they’re a form of
ruination: a latter-day Cartier Bresson—the found digital image returned to
object form—meets the contemporary hoarder of worthless aesthetic things.
Thrust together, his little treasures become an anecdote for the undoing of
representation. In other work, becoming-redundant povera-modernist
architectural experiments are given a new lease of life in the digital world:
they up roots and roam through the city—transient, itinerant, mobile.
Angelidakis’ work is an attitude becoming form. A grammar of timelines, ruins,
repurposing, reversals. In both object and design worlds, Angelidakis explores
a Deleuzian monist space from which social critique seeps in a multitude of
directions. He undoes the hermetic sealing-off of truth to “photography.” Under
his manipulations (and by extension everywhere in the post-internet world) that
medium holds no claim over “true representation,” for the inclusion of
potential mergeability and reinventability within one
representation—pluralism—turns it into a momentary monism, transforming itself
at both ends of the “now” and capable of transmitting and transcending “stuff
worth being represented.”
Peter Burleigh first graduated in Engineering Science
BSc., then took a Masters of Studies degree in Linguistics at Oxford, and later
a Diploma in Communications at Goldsmiths, London. He has been teaching English
culture, language and linguistics at the University of Basel since 1995, and
critical and visual theory at the HGK, Basel since 2004. His main interests lie
in the theories and histories of photography, forms of visual representation,
and cultural studies. He has published in cultural studies and photography,
blogged for Fotomuseum Winterthur, and a recent essay is published in the
biennial European Month of Photography (2014) catalogue. Currently, he is
working on a doctoral project that addresses the complex relation between a new
form of photographic theory and Deleuze’s scepticism towards the photographic,
envisaging a revitalization of photogenesis through a Deleuzian lens.
p.burleigh@unibas.ch
Elzbieta Buslowska, ‘The Temptation to Exist’ or the
voiceless scream of desperate becoming
How can one occupy a voice from the position or
non-position of isolation in ‘what is’ of forced responsibilities and
compulsory happiness? How can one become other without ever having been
oneself? How can one become imperceptible ‘self’ without being defined by
‘others’? This paper will attempt to open up the concept of power through
bringing together Nietzsche (will to power), Spinoza (power to affect) and
Deleuze (passive vitalism/Body Without Organs) in a thinking against oneself
towards ‘independent choice’ (of non-choice) from without the oppositions of
inner/ outer, individual/social, self/other. This will be construed in terms of
intensity of living, between saying no to necessity and affirmation, resisting
what is and endurance. As such it will argue for the absurd, irrational belief
in the impossible from the ‘position’ of despair as the source of thinking.
Here the darkness pregnant with potentiality of not yet is not the opposite of
positivity, or resignation, but an affirmation of all intensities between, a
passion of ‘powerless’ sympathizing that destabilises the dominant structures.
Thus affirmed despair, as a voiceless scream towards ‘powers of action for
life’, produces its own rhythm liberating life towards creating; an affect as
power to reach towards that which is not yet, and thought as provocation of
movement. The ‘argument’ will take form of a cluster of desperate voices put
together in a creative fabric of encounters to generate a sound that might
release or set free what lives against asphyxiation of discourse.
Philosophising passionately through ‘haul words’ and ‘breath words’.
Elzbieta Buslowska holds a PhD in Film and Philosophy
from the University of Westminster (2012). Her practice and research interests
focus on the correlation between affect and thinking, and include the
relationship between philosophy, art and life, the questions of the image
(cinematic and photographic in particular), and the concept of writing as art.'
e.buslowska@yahoo.co.uk
