Two Public Seminars on the Thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
Event description
Philosophies of Law, Laws of Philosophy Seminar Series hosts
Two Public Seminars on the Thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
with Dr Jon Roffe (University of Melbourne)
Friday 15th June 2012
Seminar 1
12:00-14:00
Location: Clore 203, Torrington Square (opposite the main Birkbeck Building)
Jon Roffe Introducing Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and the project of a transcendental empiricism
Discussant: Dr. Thanos Zartaloudis (Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck Law School)
Deleuze occasionally gives the name 'transcendental empiricism' to his philosophical endeavour, yet it is far from clear what this might mean. From the point of view of the history of philosophy, it seems a scrambling of terms; from the point of view of the uses to which Deleuze's philosophy might be put, it seems meaningless and unhelpful. This seminar will present an explication of Deleuze's landmark work Difference and Repetition with an eye to this nomination. Specifically, we will see that DR ties together both empiricism's emphasis on sensation and transcendental philosophy's demands with respect to structure and genesis, and that it does so on the basis of the categories of the (infamous) virtual, time and intensity.
Seminar 2
14:30-16:30
Location: Clore 203, Torrington Square (opposite the main Birkbeck Building)
Jon Roffe The State and capitalism according to Deleuze and Guattari Discussant: Dr. Nathan Widder (Reader in Political Theory, Head of Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London)
In two late chapters of their A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari develop - under a series of infamous rubrics like the nomad, the war machine and the capitalist axiomatic, and in keeping with their earlier analysis in Anti-Oedipus - a striking account of the reality of contemporary capitalist society. Despite its obvious power, the speed of their analysis and the manifest peculiarity of their mode of approach often make it difficult to extract the claims central to the analysis. The aim of this seminar will be three-fold: 1) to separate and outline the two approaches to politics in A Thousand Plateaus, which we will identify as the intra-social and State levels of the analysis; 2) to make sense of the opposition between the State and the war machine, and thereby grasp what they mean by the category of the State as such; and 3) to see how capitalism operates globally by engaging in local hijacks of various regulatory apparatuses, primarily the State itself.
All Welcome, no need to register.
