Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Deleuze’

The work of Jean-Luc Godard, who passed away a couple of weeks ago through euthanasia at the age of 91, has always seemed to me to be about the possibilities of cinema as a form of thinking. Cinema’s combination of sound and image, constrained by the capacities of the medium but also evolving as those […]

Read Full Post »

Those who missed the panel on “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” at last week’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Montreal will be able to view the videos of the talks at medieninitiative. Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, Mark Hansen and I entertained a standing-room only crowd (see the audience spilling out into the hall here). The first […]

Read Full Post »

The new issue of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy includes work by Quentin Meillassoux, Tristan Garcia, a review panel discussing Katrin Pahl’s Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion, and a piece by me on the objects-processes debate in speculative realist philosophy. The latter, entitled “Beatnik Brothers? Between Graham Harman and the Deleuzo-Whiteheadian Axis,” is an updated version […]

Read Full Post »

I’ve always been more of an improviser than a long-range planner, but my job requires that I occasionally dabble in long-range projections of my work. Here’s one. While a number of concerns have framed my scholarship over the years — ethical, political, cultural, ecological, and theoretical concerns — the philosophical core of it has been […]

Read Full Post »

Among the books coming out in this fall’s Duke University Press catalog (pdf) is one I’m particularly looking forward to: Elizabeth Grosz’s Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Grosz is among the most exciting thinkers in the post-Deleuzian landscape — a tremendous synthesist of the biological (especially Darwinian), philosophical (especially “vital materialist”), […]

Read Full Post »

Graham Harman’s note reiterating his position that Whitehead, Latour, Deleuze, Bergson, and Simondon (among others) do not make up a coherent philosophical “lump” — “pack” or “tribe” might be more colorful terms here (if philosophers were cats, how herdable would they be?) — makes me want to clarify my own position on these thinkers.

Read Full Post »

Isabelle Stengers’s Thinking With Whitehead arrived in the mail today. The publication of the English translation of this tome, a long nine years after the French original, is a genuine Event in the world of process-relational philosophy (or whatever you’d like to name the “beatnik brotherhood,” as Harman calls it, of philosophers of immanence and […]

Read Full Post »

Chris Vitale at Networkologies has a great series going on Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books. It’s rich with insights and video clips. It starts here and continues for several lengthy posts. Or scroll down the right here to the “Mini-Essays” links on “Reading Deleuze’s Cinema Books.”

Read Full Post »

It riles me up when intelligent people whose work I respect a lot say ill-considered, if not outright indefensible, things. Jodi Dean’s post arguing that communism “worked” strikes me as such a thing. I’ve provided a lengthy counter-argument on her blog, the gist of which is that the political projects that were actually carried out […]

Read Full Post »

At Space and Politics, Gaston Gordillo continues his Spinozan-Deleuzian account of the “revolutionary resonance” of the tumult spreading across the Arab world. “The longer a resonance lasts and the farther it expands the stronger it becomes. During most of human history, the maximum speed at which a revolutionary resonance traveled was the speed of the […]

Read Full Post »

Here’s a version of the theoretical model I develop in Ecologies of the Moving Image. (An earlier version can be found here.) Following Peircian phenomenology (or “phaneroscopy”) and Whiteheadian ontology, that model is process-relational and triadic. (*See Note at bottom for more on the relationship between Peirce, Whitehead, and their leading synthesist, Hartshorne.)

This means:

Everything is three. Or, everything there is can be thought of in terms of three relational processes:

(1) The thing itself, which is a qualitatively distinctive phenomenon. Let’s call it the thing-world, since it is an unfolding of a particular kind, which sets up a formal structure of internal relations and (externally) interactive potentials as it unfolds, and since our relationship to it is generally from its ‘outside,’ though we can enter into a relationship with it.

(2) The interaction of that thing with another. Let’s call this the thing-experience, since we (or others) experience it from the ‘inside.’ This experience is what happens with us when we enter into the relationship with (1). (Other things may be happening with us simultaneously; this thing-experience doesn’t exhaust us. It’s just what we’re trying to understand here.)

(3) The relating of the thing-world and thing-experience with the whole world. To keep things simple, we can call this the thing-world/extra-thing-world relation (with the thing-experience being a subset of this whole relation, and the only piece of it that is distinctly “ours”). Or we can call it the world-earth relation, or the world-universe relation, with the ‘world’ being the thing-world and the ‘earth’ or ‘universe’ being the unencompassable ground (considered either in its earthbound or its cosmic aspect) within which all thing-worlds have their being/becoming. This relation is the full set of connections and interdependencies within which the thing has its action. To map out this relation in its entirety is impossible, but to understand the more proximal and direct parts of it is possible and useful. It is, in effect, the thing come into its fullness: both its full glory and its full dispersion into (other) things.

[. . .]

Read Full Post »

One of the tasks of this blog, since its inception in late 2008, has been to articulate a theoretical-philosophical perspective that I have come to call “process-relational.” This is a theoretical paradigm and an ontology that takes the basic nature of the world to be that of relational process: that is, it understands the basic […]

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

Skip to toolbar