Search

Referring to a poem by Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt wrote that the dark times of early-twentieth century Europe were characterised not by an occlusion of the brightly lit world of [...]

Contemporary right-wing populism mixes comic performance with authoritarian and reactionary sentiments in troubling ways, as much recent work has observed. We might thus be said to be living in an era of 'tragic farce' in which Marx's famous distinction between genres of historical action has collapsed. To engage with these questions, this article focuses on the clown as a figure in which aesthetics and politics intersect in crucial ways. Through readings of Adorno, Deleuze, Agamben and Žižek, I show how the clown has been an enduring concern for theory. I also analyze Todd Phillips' 2019 film Joker, including the furor that greeted its release, in order to argue for a mode of aesthetic populism in which the category of 'people' remains a virtual or potential category that can drive artistic practice. To describe this, I draw on what Deleuze, in his philosophy of cinema, termed fabulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a close reading of "The Geology of Morals," the third and possibly most important chapter, or plateau, of Deleuze and Guattari's magnum opus A Thousand Plateaus. I analyse some of the many philosophical and scientific sources informing Deleuze and Guattari's densely argued text. The authors' shift of emphasis from the critique of psychoanalysis to a geological or stratigraphic register is emphasized and explained by situating their project in relation both to contemporary debates surrounding the Anthropocene and to the problem of nihilism as this was articulated by Nietzsche and Heidegger. I argue that Deleuze and Guattari's stratigraphy, a topic that has received comparatively little attention in the secondary literature, helps us to understand the history of nihilism in terms of humanity's planetary impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates in ecological social theory are characterised by dualisms of nature and society. The author proposes the notion of 'ecological aporias' to account for these dualisms, focusing on three landmark examples of ecological thought over the past four decades from Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour and Jason W. Moore. He shows the persistence in this work of paradoxes and intractable contradictions revolving around the nature/society dualism. Rather than trying to dissolve these ecological aporias, he draws on recent work in eco-deconstruction to suggest that the ecological is itself an aporetic category and that this enables a new perspective for political ecology in an age of climate crisis. Rejecting Latour's identification of political ecology with the politics of dwelling, he argues that climate change demands we recognise forms of life irreducible to the ontological security on which the concept of the ecological has long been based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most pressing question for Deleuze studies today relates to how it constitutes its object: the question of how to read him must give way to questions of why. Deleuze [...]

Gregg Lambert. Who's Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? London: Continuum, 2006. 184 pp. Gregg Lambert's latest volume, Who's Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?, is less a book devoted to Deleuze's [...]

The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is often regarded as pre-critical, pursuing a pure metaphysics in the classical (pre-Kantian) sense. However, a closer inspection of Deleuze's work shows a complex engagement with the critical tradition. This article examines this engagement, and suggests that, where Kant failed to follow the consequences of his own 'critical revolution' Deleuze urges us forward, via the force of affirmation, towards its fullest realization. In this respect, I argue, affirmation and critique are not incompatible, and it would be a mistake for us to read the political intervention of Anti-Oedipus as merely affirmationist. This would be to ignore the fact that Deleuze and Guattari wish to suggest, through their notion of desiring production, a new means of evaluation beyond the capitalistic system of exchange from which psychoanalysis failed to extricate itself. This involves freeing judgement as a power of thinking from those constraints which are entirely illegitimate from the standpoint of a properly realized critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]