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The Problem of the Actual

Simone Bignall

in Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism

Chapter 3 seeks the basis for a new resolution to the problem ofpostcolonial agency by contrasting the problematic conception of agency grounded in the causal negativities of desire-lack and the ... More

Chapter 3 seeks the basis for a new resolution to the problem ofpostcolonial agency by contrasting the problematic conception of agency grounded in the causal negativities of desire-lack and the deficiency of difference (together with the process of social trans/formation it generates), with Deleuze's non- dialectical concept of different/ciation. This chapter shows how Deleuze offers an alternative philosophy of transformative process, or ‘becoming’, which is grounded in a positive model of desire and insists upon a positive and creative causal role for difference. On this view, history is not produced by the negation of difference, but by affirming and multiplying it through the creation of novel associations and complex social forms. This chapter outlines the kind of critical practice that is enabled by this philosophy of transformation, thereby addressing the concern that a purely positive philosophy of virtual difference, and a decentred and fragmented subject of transformative agency, is unable to sustain a critical and collectivist politics.Less

Signs Without Name

Nadine Boljkovac

in Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema

‘Signs Without Name’ offers an examination of time and thought in relation to cinema through Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil to argue that the film reveals dynamic movements of actual-virtual relations ... More

‘Signs Without Name’ offers an examination of time and thought in relation to cinema through Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil to argue that the film reveals dynamic movements of actual-virtual relations through doublings and ‘faces’ of horror and beauty. The chapter asserts that the film exposes the two sides of all things, the twofold synthesis of actual and virtual split continually into two like time’s past-future divide itself. Considerations of death, time, sensation, consciousness and subjectivity extend this chapter’s examinations.Less

Hans Arp: Resistance and the Philosophy of Virtual Creation

Dafydd W. Jones

in Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance

As an artistic movement, Zurich Dada offers very little visual residue. What remains is uneven and inconsistent but is wholly redeemed by the remarkable works that Hans Arp, and then Sophie Taeuber, ... More

As an artistic movement, Zurich Dada offers very little visual residue. What remains is uneven and inconsistent but is wholly redeemed by the remarkable works that Hans Arp, and then Sophie Taeuber, produced during this phase. In this chapter, Arp’s so-called ‘chance’ collages are documented in terms of visual strategies of cultural resistance, read through Deleuzian schizoanalysis as correlates for creation itself, and detouring to Herman Melville’s short story ‘Bartleby’, along with Deleuze’s readings of a passive yet destructive resistance thoroughly revised in their historical context.Less

Hard Bodies and Sex-Blobs: Deterritorializing Desire in Naked Lunch and Shortbus

Nick Davis

in The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema

This chapter highlights symmetries between Cronenberg’s film of Naked Lunch and several other literary adaptations that proved central to 1990s-era New Queer Cinema, a movement that nonetheless ... More

This chapter highlights symmetries between Cronenberg’s film of Naked Lunch and several other literary adaptations that proved central to 1990s-era New Queer Cinema, a movement that nonetheless discounted Cronenberg entirely. Next, it draws out analogies linking the more expansive, chaotic, and illusory world of Naked Lunch (as compared to Dead Ringers) to the “derationalized” grammars of post–World War II cinema that Deleuze evokes in his book Cinema 2 (as compared with its predecessor, Cinema 1). After analyzing the notorious “sex-blob” sequence as a pivotal illustration of how the movie derationalizes desire, the chapter defends Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch against charges of straightening and commodifying the revolutionary legacy of William S. Burroughs. Lastly, John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006), with its infamous scenes of “actual sex,” reveals how comparably counter-cultural but more eagerly embraced examples of queer cinema may perpetuate clichés about gender and desire in ways Cronenberg’s work avoids.Less

Virtuality of Concepts

Marc Rölli

Peter Hertz-Ohmes (ed.)

in Gilles Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism: From Tradition to Difference

Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts, nor a simple appeal to lived experience. Concepts are never ssimple. They are created out of multiple components and as the components change or ... More

Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts, nor a simple appeal to lived experience. Concepts are never ssimple. They are created out of multiple components and as the components change or new components are incorporated, concepts change. The intensional consistency of the concept gets lost if its components are assigned independent values or constant functions, as allowed by Frege. Creating and revising concepts is the philosopher’s transcendental or virtual mode of critique in the face of actualised practices. The problematic character of structures can be defined conceptually as a time problem, whereby the flexible concept appropriates time to interpret the virtual-actual different/ ciation process as a never-ending becoming.Less

Doing and Becoming: Warlpiri Rituals and Myths

Barbara Glowczewski

in Indigenising Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze

This chapter analyses the relation between Warlpiri myth and ritual from the perspective of the cosmological and ritual differentiation of male and female. It is a challenging repositioning of gender ... More

This chapter analyses the relation between Warlpiri myth and ritual from the perspective of the cosmological and ritual differentiation of male and female. It is a challenging repositioning of gender in relation to religion and spirituality based on an Aboriginal cosmologic which values a mythical androgyny of some hybrid totemic human and non human ancestors of current humans and their totemic species, animals, plants, or phenomena like rain or fire. To reactualise such a virtual androgyny in themselves, both men and women perform ceremonies reenacting through dances, songs and painted bodies the totemic travels but in ritual spaces restricted to one gender. In this ritual separation, they are both involved in land tenure and dream revelation of new designs to paint, sing or dance as a reactualisation of a virtual collective and earth memory. Women can dream for men and more rarely men dream for women. First published in French in 1991.Less

Conclusion: From the Becoming of Narrative to the Narrativity of Becoming

Ridvan Askin

in Narrative and Becoming

The conclusion briefly brings together the results of the previous chapters recapitulating how they all work to reveal becoming as the primary ontological virtual realm of any given actual narrative ... More

The conclusion briefly brings together the results of the previous chapters recapitulating how they all work to reveal becoming as the primary ontological virtual realm of any given actual narrative and that this has only been possible by following the reverse movement of the speculative becoming-virtual of actual narratives as they crack open their representational surface and burrow ever deeper towards their conditioning differentials. In addition, and taking its cue from chapter 4, the conclusion makes clear that the becoming of narrative also entails the narrativity of becoming. While the former has been the focus of the present work, elaborating the latter remains a task for the future. The conclusion ends by briefly delineating—with recourse to the recent speculative turn in continental philosophy—the first tentative steps of such a task thus, in true Deleuzian spirit, ending the book with the detection and formulation of a new problem to be tackled.Less