Abstracts P

Helen Palmer, The Duplicity of the Snark: Dynamic Formalisms and Queer Multiplicities


This paper investigates the formula ‘pluralism = monism’ from the perspective of linguistic and philosophical formalism, and suggests how this perspective might be creatively used within queer studies. As the study of supposed linguistic ‘invariants’, formalism is seen as the search for structural staticity in language, but this paper will use the work of Deleuze and Guattari to posit formalism in terms of both dynamism and creativity. The fact that formalism celebrates a limit at the same time as its explosion is a paradox elucidated by the philosophical practice of Deleuze and Guattari and the literary practice of James Joyce. Deleuze’s differential ‘dark precursor’ is both one and many, word and thing, floating signifier and floated signified, Snark and Phlizz, and Joyce’s ‘chaos-cosmos’ of synaesthetic linguistic experimentation presents language as formal experiment but as a form that is multiple, dynamic , messy and vital. One way that language can be an emancipatory force is the liberation from preconceived structures of meaning. One area in which this is particularly pertinent is queer studies. Using some creative examples drawn from my own writing project ‘Heifers of Eos’ (a queer rewriting of Joyce’s ‘Oxen of the Sun’ chapter from Ulysses) I will explore the relationship between philosophical, linguistic and literary ‘formalisms’ as potential manifestations of the paradoxical formula ‘pluralism = monism’.

Helen Palmer teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (Bloomsbury, 2014) and is now working on a book called Queer Defamilarisation: A Reassessment of Estrangement. Her work focuses on language, philosophy, creative writing, feminism and queer studies.

h.palmer@gold.ac,uk



Dana Papachristou, Locative media soundwalks: a rhizomatic approach to urban public space sound art


Soundwalking as an artistic practice encourages conscious listening and interaction with the sound environment in a non-linear manner. There is a theoretical relevancy with promenadology (Burckhardt) and flâneurie (Baudelaire and Benjamin), as the user/listener is invited to wander within an “aurally augmented” urban public space. This artistic practice uses field recordings and soundscape composition, and creates new spatio-phonic routes that question the concept of linear urban planning in order to escape from the model of the -prominently visual- panoramic city. Most soundwalks and geo-located installations (like noTours, Soundscapes/Landscapes, SonicMaps, Urbicolous Disport, AffeXity etc) use open-source platforms that combine locative media (gps) with music / sound / performative compositions, by applying them onto a mapped area. The roles of the artist and the listener often coincide, both in cases where sounds are recorded while crossing the area and in those where the path chosen by the walker / listener determines the artistic result. In this approach I will suggest that soundwalks establish rhizomatic maps and lines of sound/audio routes in negotiation with the city, as perceived and aurally captured by the artist. I will connect such contemporary artistic practices (soundwalks, site-specific sound compositions and geo- located sound interventions in urban public space), with the concept of rhizome, as introduced and explained by Deleuze and Guattari and highlight the relevance of the rhizome concept with the practice of soundwalking as an artistic gesture.





Musicologist and artist, focusing in the combination of the Arts through the use of new technological media.
I was born in Athens in 1979. I studied music in the Hellenic Conservatory, Musicology in the Kapodistrian University of Athens, and Music Culture and Communication in the departments of Media and Music Studies, leading to my dissertation which looks into the relation of music and painting within Modernism throughout the correspondence of Schoenberg and Kandinsky. At the moment I am working on my doctoral thesis in the discipline of Philosophy of Music in regards with Deleuze and Guattari, the Aesthetics of New Media Art in their works Anti-Oedipus and Mille Plateaux in Paris 8 – Vincennes and the Ionian University. In addition, I am a senior student in composition in the class of Theodoros Antoniou, and a piano studies graduate (student of Vicky Chistophilou).
I have participated in some interdisciplinary research projects about contemporary music and its relationship with other forms of art (Einander zuhören – Stadt-(Ge)Schichten, Goethe Institut, Athens 2014). I am a co-organiser (together with George Samantas) of “sound circles” workshop in TWIXTlab. Finally, I have participated in several music projects (Delos project – Tango with lions), and I have worked as a musician in education.
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ntaniela@gmail.com



Dimitris Papalexopoulos, Locality Destabilized



As we move from the digital paradigm to the network paradigm, destabilized locality, considered through the Deleuzian deterritorialization, is proposed to be see as a machine of becoming. back in the '70, the very important critical regionalism of Slexander Tzonis and Lisne Lefaivre proposed a critical role for locality, through a Kantian perspective of continuous self-critique and reorientation of objectives. Today, with the hegemony of the network paradigm, we have to turn towards Deleuze and Guattari, in order to foster our tools to surpass a totslity's insoluble internal tendion: Εach locality experiences the tension between the constant search for its own and unique identity and the different identities assigned to it from the bundles of networks it participates in a networked world. We are witnessing a relocalization of globalization, the main question being who has the control of distributed and decentralized activities. I a deterritorialization's perspective localities are to be considered through their constant agen- cement of events, in continuous tension, as symptoms of ephemeral equilibrium of forces in presence. What seems stable should be read as containing the possibilities of its change. On an evolving local ground, any intention to define a stable approach directly related to an a priori given form led to theoretical impasses. A way to conceptualize locality as a machine of becoming, seems to be to consider the local as it evolves through the networked digital. To conceive conditions where localities are continuously evolving and not trying to seek the Ultimate Form of control. in other words, to think of a digitally existing local, which in fact is a networked local in a translocal, invented by collective intelligence produced by deterritorializations-reterritorializations.

Dimitris Papalexopoulos: Born 1953, Architect, PhD. Professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens. Director of Architectural Technology Research Unit (ATRU) (http://atru.arch.ntua.gr/ ). Director of Fab Lab Athens (http://fablabathens.gr/  ). Researches on interaction design, parametric design and building knowledge management. His post - graduate course on “Architecture and Information Technology” (since 1998) won prices at international competitions and participated in international exhibitions and conferences. A redefinition of locality through I.T. is researched. At Archsign, his architectural work (www.archsign.gr ) includes renovations and new buildings projects in the private and public sector. Author of articles on architecture and I.T.  Co-author (with Eleni Kalafati) of Takis Zenetos, Visioni digitali, architetture construite, EdilStampa, 2006. Author of Digital Regionalism, Libro, 2008. Sites: www.ntua.gr/archtech , www.archsign.gr.

Dplxs@otenet.gr



Brook WR Pearson, The Only Enemy is Two: The War Machine in an Era of Planetary Crisis


Taking my inspiration from an earlier version of the ‘PLURALISM = MONISM’ dictum being explored in this conference (from one of Deleuze’s Vincennes lectures, ‘dualism, monism and multiplicities’, 26/03/1973), in this paper I consider the notion of calling forth a people yet to come by way of the dissolution of dualisms in thought and in modelling thought: ‘There is only one form of thought, it’s the same thing: one can only think in a monistic or pluralistic manner. The only enemy is two… Wherever we leave the domain of multiplicities, we once again fall into dualisms, i.e., into the domain of non-thought, we leave the domain of thought as process.’

If this model is viable—and I think that it is not only viable but fundamental in our current struggles to produce the conditions for life to continue on our swiftly changing planet—then Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the war machine as something that, in the hands of nomads, produces a war that ‘simultaneously create[s] something else, if only new nonorganic social relations’ (ATP, p. 423) is an important conceptual and practical application of the notion that ‘PLURALISM = MONISM’.

Examples in this paper will rely primarily on those drawn from current opposition to carbon extraction.



Brook is a poet and a philosopher, currently teaching in the Humanities Department at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He has recently completed two books of poetry—Between Blue & Leek-Green, and Documents in Vanishing Ink: Love in a Police State—and is currently working on a third, Bronze. He holds a PhD (2001) from the University of Surrey, UK in philosophy, classics and religious studies, is the author of Corresponding Sense: Paul, Dialectic and Gadamer (Brill, 2001), and the editor of numerous books in religious studies. He is currently working on a philosophy book entitled Slow Think—applying primarily poststructuralist political thought (particularly that of Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and Derrida, with recourse to Wittgenstein) to crisis-induced models of resistance, and on a project examining the influence of Diderot and de Sade on poststructuralist philosophy. His scholarly work has appeared recently in Rivista di Estetica, Contours, Spanner, The Philosophy of David Cronenberg, Dune and Philosophy, and his poetry in Repurposed Magazine, and Rising Tide's Galvanizing Resistance.



Eftichis Pirovolakis, Deleuze and Derrida on Drawing and Painting: The Visible and the Non-Visible



In this paper I will investigate Deleuze’s and Derrida’s approaches to drawing and painting, with a view to reflecting on the contentious relation between the two thinkers. Their philosophical contiguity is almost self-evident, as both resist conventional representational interpretations of drawing and painting. Several concepts of Deleuze’s aesthetics attest to his construal of painting as a creative process whereby difference is affirmed as a state of permanent revolution. ‘Sensation’, ‘percepts’ and ‘affects’ bear witness to the force of an artwork, and question the ability of art to reveal an intelligible order. Simultaneously, Deleuze endorses the idea that painting can render visible the invisible forces that structure the relation between sensation and the world. The hypothesis I wish to test is that there is a tension between his affirmation of heterogeneous forces and the demand that these forces be ‘harnessed’ or ‘rendered visible’, even momentarily, in the painting. Although this movement from the invisible to visibility does not lead to an actual and full present, I will explore whether the way Deleuze formulates it still appeals to a conceptuality that undermines his emphasis on difference and becoming-other that painting epitomizes. It is precisely in order to displace any neat organization of the visible and the non-visible that Derrida grants a strategic priority to non-visibility and its absolute irreducibility. By insisting on non-visibility as the condition of a visibility that is at the same time possible and impossible, Derrida allows for a thinking of drawing and painting in terms of radical heterogeneity. The latter complicates any decision regarding an artwork’s even fleeting ability to render the inchoate visible.



Eftichis Pirovolakis works on twentieth-century continental philosophy and, more specifically, on the relation between hermeneutics, phenomenology and deconstruction. He is the author of Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters between Deconstruction and Hermeneutics (SUNY Press, 2010), which also includes his translation into English of Derrida’s essay ‘La parole: Donner, nommer, appeler’. He has published articles in, among other journals, Philosophy Today and Literature, Interpretation, Theory, and has recently been working on two texts on forgiveness in Derrida, Arendt and Ricoeur, as well as on an essay on the value of friendship in Aristotle. Pirovolakis has also co-organised two international conferences at the University of Sussex, UK: ‘Encounters with Derrida’ in 2003, and ‘Philosophy and Literature/Literature and Philosophy’ in 2008. Since 2001, he has taught a range of courses at the Universities of Sussex and Brighton in the UK, and the Universities of Crete and Patras in Greece. Currently, he teaches philosophy at the Hellenic Open University.

epirovolakis@yahoo.co.uk



Patricia Pisters, Metallurgic Noology: Bending World-Memory

Metal is not only the basic material for both weapons and tools, Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, but also the conductor of all matter in a continuous variation. The smith, the artisan-metallurgist is its first transformer. This lecture will consider filmmakers and artists as metallurgists of our time, repeating and recreating history, shaping collective memory with a difference. I will argue that, typical for cinema in the digital age or neuro-images, filmmakers “mine” our audio-visual archives, uncovering forgotten images, hidden sounds, and unconscious thoughts that they transform into a new aesthetic whole. Bending “world-memory” both on a cognitive and affective level these artist are metallurgic noologist, addressing the past looking for refrains of freedom for “a people to come.”. I will focus on one particular “metallurgic filmmaker” Tariq Teguia, whose Zandj Revolution (2013) revives not only a past revolution, the ninth century revolution of the Zandj slaves in Iraq, but also takes us on an ambulant journey from contemporary Algeria, to Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and Greece.

Patricia Pisters is professor of film studies at the department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam and (per February 2015) director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is one of the founding editors of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies. She is programme director of the research group Neuraesthetics and Neuocultures and co-director (with Josef Fruchtl) of the research group Film and Philosophy at ASCA (Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis). Publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford University Press, 2003) and The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford University Press, 2012). See for articles and more information also: www.patriciapisters.com

P.P.R.W.Pisters@uva.nl



Arkady Plotnitsky, From Chaos to the Brain:” The Quantum-Field-Theoretical Model of Thought in What is Philosophy?

This paper argues that What is Philosophy? represents a shift in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking concerning the nature of thought and cognition, from that grounded in a geometrical, specifically Riemannian, model, corresponding to the physics of Einstein’s relativity, to that grounded in a quantum-theoretical, specifically quantum-field-theoretical, model. The main reason for my argument is that, while Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of thought as a confrontation between the brain and chaos is not surprising, their conception of chaos, as the virtual, is unusual and even unique in the history of philosophy. This conception, I argue, is borrowed from quantum field theory and the concept of the virtual there, which also changes Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the virtual. It is this shift that defines their innovative conjecture concerning the architecture of the brain in the conclusion, “From Chaos to the Brain,” of What is Philosophy?

Arkady Plotnitsky is a professor of English and Director of Theory and Cultural Studies Program at Purdue University. He has published extensively on Romanticism, continental philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the relationships among literature, philosophy, and science. His most recent books are Epistemology and Probability: Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and the Nature of Quantum-Theoretical Thinking, and Niels Bohr and Complementarity.




Jean-Claude Polack, Felix Guattari, Jean Oury et la psyhanalyse

Mon apport au panel serait de parler du travail de Guattari avec Jean Oury à la clinique de La Borde.Donc de l'élaboration commune (avec Tosquelles à l'horizon) de la "Psychotherapie institutionnelle".Mais en même temps,je voudrais montrer comment Felix passe de la P.I. à la schizoanalyse, après sa rupture avec Lacan..,et comment,de mon point de vue, ce passage n'est pas une rupture avec la Psychanalyse,mais une expansion du projet freudien initial.

jcpolack@hotmail.fr



Yannis Prelorentzos, Quelle articulation entre le Bergson et le Spinoza de Gilles Deleuze?


Bergson, Spinoza et Nietzsche sont les philosophes qui ont le plus influencé Deleuze –on doit plutôt parler ici de «rencontre» ou de «discours indirect libre» avec eux. Bergson est même le premier des trois sur lequel Deleuze a publié des écrits (dès 1956). J’essaierai d’abord de mettre en évidence : les deux jugements apparemment opposés portés par Bergson sur Spinoza ; quand et à quelle(s) occasion(s) Deleuze a étudié les deux penseurs ; quel était le niveau de sa connaissance de leur œuvre ; quel rôle ils ont joué dans son enseignement et dans son œuvre ; quels rapprochements entre Bergson et Spinoza avaient été opérés en France avant les décennies 1950 et 1960. Ensuite j’étudierai les rares endroits de ses ouvrages où Deleuze insiste sur la parenté profonde entre les deux philosophes (notamment à propos de l’immanence, du monisme caché derrière un dualisme apparent et de la joie), ceux où il met en valeur l’affinité de certaines thèses de Bergson et de Spinoza avec celles d’autres philosophes, et ceux où le spinozisme de Deleuze semble l’emporter sur son bergsonisme, et l’inverse. J’examinerai les références explicites ou implicites de Deleuze à Spinoza dans ses écrits sur Bergson et celles à Bergson dans ses textes sur Spinoza, et l’apport de Deleuze dans la mise en relief des rapports intimes entre la philosophie de Spinoza et celle de Bergson. Je terminerai par un examen des écrits des commentateurs de Deleuze qui ont rapproché, diversement, son bergsonisme et son spinozisme, et des commentateurs de Bergson qui récusent toute parenté entre Bergson et Spinoza.



Yannis Prelorentzos (PhD, Paris-IV-Sorbonne) is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Ioannina (Greece), where he is teaching since 2000. He was invited Professor at the University Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne (on november 2014). He is the author of Temps, durée et éternité dans les Principes de la philosophie de Descartes de Spinoza (P.U.P.S., Paris, 1996), and Knowledge and Method in Bergson (in Greek, Eurasia, Athens, 2012). He has also published a long series of substantial articles, in French and in Greek, on topics in the history of 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th c. philosophy. He has translated and commented the central books of Plato’s Republic in French (3rd ed., Hatier, Paris, 2007), and Descartes’ Passions of the Soul, Bergson’s Creative Evolution, Deleuze’s Bergsonism and Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe and other novels in Greek. His principal interests lie at the main aspects of the work of 17th century rationalist philosophers (especially Descartes and Spinoza), of Rousseau’s, Bergson’s, Sartre’s, Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s philosophy, at philosophical approaches of passions and emotions, at the various interpretations of Socrates in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy and, most recently, at 19th and 20th c. French philosophy. He is finishing a book on the relations between philosophy and literature in France (1930-1960).

Y. Prelorentzos has been nominated Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques on January 2015.

iprelore@uoi,gr



Constantinos V. Proimos Tectonic Signification and the Human Condition. Gilles Deleuze’s Concept of the Fold


This papers seeks to employ Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold as this was elaborated in his The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque in order to interpret recent developments in contemporary architecture having to do with the so called intensification of the architectural signifier, attributed to deconstructionist architects such as Frank O Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind. The fold or pleat of matter is a trait of baroque, according to Deleuze as well as an operative function which entails perspectivism and implies the individual and her/his primitive forces of desire. Associated with animality and inorganic life, the fold encapsulates all which are against societal conventions and cultural restrictions and confirms the power of instincts over civilization. The joint or the tectonic detail which according to Marco Frascari’s 1984 essay “The Tell-the-Tale Detail” is the generator of meaning in architecture as well as the site for invention and innovation has, in recent decades, become liberated from any restrictions imposed by need, form, reason, economy and all the like considerations that architects follow in design. Deleuze’s concept of the fold may allow for a conceptualization of architectural meaning as a product of tectonic intensification following the liberation of architectural desire. This very idea and use of Deleuze’s fold will be discussed and critically scrutinized.

Constantinos V. Proimos received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the New School for Social Research, NY, NY, USA (2001) after studying sociology, art history and philosophy in Athens, New York and Paris. He has published widely on aesthetics, philosophy of art and art history, his fields of interest and expertise, in Greek and foreign venues. He received a state scholarship (IKY) for his postgraduate studies and was a 1993-1994 Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. His first book, On the Limits of Aesthetics. The Role of Art in the Writings of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida was published in Athens in 2003 by Kritiki editions. He has taught at the University of Crete, the University of Cyprus and the Technical University of Crete and in 2003 was awarded a state scholarship (IKY) for his postdoctoral work. He currently teaches at the Hellenic Open University while being an art critic and curator. Adjunct Lecturer at the Hellenic Open University cproimos@otenet.gr