Category: Deleuze

Deleuze, France, History

The Drama of Revolution

How revolutionary are revolutions? Are they accelerated historical developments? Or are they merely dramatic and shocking moments that somehow capture a moment, and lend themselves to compelling narrative? Having just finished Simon Schama’s monumental Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, I’ve been thinking a lot about how genuinely revolutionary revolutions are, so to speak. Schama himself is sceptical on how much the Revolution changed, and excoriating when it comes to the needlessness of the violence that surrounded the fall of the monarchy in France. While there was a disempowering of the clergy, and some transfer of wealth in that sense, little else really changed in France, in terms of social order and loci of control. While at the time the book was seen as a revisionist work, I am persuaded by his arguments that the required social reforms were underway well in advance of the Revolution, and that the subsequent reversion to traditional power structures further emphasised its vapid core. The General Will, as the wags had it, was ultimately replaced by the General’s Will, as the shadow of Napoleon loomed large over the epilogue.

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Deleuze, Henri Bergson, John Moriarty, Simone Weil, Spinoza

The Mysticism and Ecological Sensibility of John Moriarty

John Moriarty, the Irish philosopher and mystic, was as detached from the physical world as a philosopher can be. He chose to live remotely; that is, outside of the city, though he had travelled some as a younger man. In later life, he returned to his roots in Kerry, where he was buried – near Muckross – in 2007. In reading and studying Moriarty recently, I was struck by how familiar his work seemed to be, and how it danced across the gamut of modern western philosophy and philosophers.

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Deleuze, Heidegger, John Moriarty, Ontology

John Moriarty and the Rhizome
John Moriarty

In considering environmental ecologies – independent, perhaps, of humans – John Moriarty uses the concept of the rhizome, to make a point, about the rootedness (or otherwise) of things. ‘Unlike the dandelion,’ Moriarty says, ‘we have now no rhizome, no rhiza, no root, down into the nourishing earth.’ He laments in the same piece how the human mind is merely clever, impoverished in some ways by its ignorance of alternate, ecological sensibilities. I’m trying to identify the actual source, though I think it’s from Night Journey to Buddh Gaia. Moriarty wonders, just before this reference, whether – just as dandelion and the groundsel has their etymological roots in French and old English, respectively, each with its own eternal story (the dandelion from ‘tooth of a lion’) – these plants had their own names ‘among the leeches who tended the warriors who had been wounded at the Battle of Maldon.’ It is as if, in some way that is strange-to-us, the leeches had their own version of the academy, their own epistemic basis for understanding the world and their role in it. Moriarty’s vision is nothing if not all-encompassing!

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Deleuze, Spinoza

Deleuze, Foucault, King Charles

I revisited some work this weekend on two areas of interest – Deleuze and Foucault. More specifically, an analysis of Deleuze and Guarrati’s interpretation of Freud, and by extension that of Lacan), and Foucault’s commentary on power. Each is separate and distinct, but they both lead back to an understanding of time and contingency, and the Spinozan notion of substance, as distinct from subject. I’m beginning to suspect that the entire project of late twentieth century French philosophy was a kind of new-Romantic desertion of the focal subject, in the light of its failure to yield better things.

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Ancient Greece, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Philosophy, Spinoza

Consciousness and Ecology

A persistent set of themes in my research has been the concept of subject/object relations, relativism, and the impossibility of the absolute. These abstract themes are realised again and again in philosophy (cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am – therefore, what are you?), politics (native vs foreigner), theology (God versus man), technology (nature versus human) and metaphysics (Deluze’s philosopher as ontologist). In dialectics, as recently discussed, enlightenment versus romanticism. In the first instance, if we take Descartes’ cogito, the impossible ‘I’ is the flaw in the argument. Who, or what, is I? It is me, surely, my consciousness, my context within which the thought is occurring. And yet the actual cogito, the thought, can only be realised in relation to the world. Therefore, the only possibility for consciousness is that it must be conscious of something other than itself. Setting aside whether there would be any point in a self-referential consciousness, one that is only conscious of itself, one has to question what the mode of consciousness would be? Descartes’ fundamental concept of consciousness is intended as a metaphor to that which you and I define as consciousness, invariably considered as a kind of awareness of itself, of its existence. When Descartes says ‘consciousness’, I immediately relate that to my consciousness. It is not consciousness of my self; the self is constructed by and beyond consciousness. It is consciousness in and of itself, the base fact of consciousness. Set aside too the mechanisms that allow us as human beings to conceive of the idea of consciousness, which in and of themselves compromise such a pure concept, like the observer effect in quantum mechanics.

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Deleuze, Latour, Spinoza

On Trains and Transcendence
Bruno Latour, 1947-2022

The world, then, has lost one of its lights. Bruno Latour has gone. We don’t exactly know where he has gone, though his ideas remain with us. On my journey this weekend to Asia, I had with me, by chance, his We Have Always Been Modern, along with Steven Nadler’s excellent commentary on Spinoza’s Tractatus, each in its own way considering the ethereal soup within which we find ourselves, churning and spinning and scrambling around to try and make sense of it all. In truth I am only at the beginning of Latour’s work, which I was pleased to begin given he had been still alive and working. Perhaps I could write to him. I couldn’t write to Spinoza, or Deleuze – but maybe Latour would answer my questions. Now I just have to find the answers in his work, like with all the others.

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AI, Carl Schmitt, Church, Climate Change, Deleuze, Economics, Epistemology, Hayek, Legitimacy, Markets, neoliberalism, Ontology, Political Theology, Religion, theology, Truth

Epistemic Theology and Epistemic Technology
The 'Robotic Moment' | Essay by Sherry Turkle | Britannica
We are in what Sherry Turkle calls ‘the robotic moment’

In considering my proposal of technological theology as a waypoint in our current trajectory, from religious, political and economic theology, the idea of epistemic theology was brought to my attention in considering the grounding of Carl Schmitt. There have been questions about the theology of Schmitt (was he primarily Christian, or secular?), and some questions over whether political theology is about the politics of theology or the theology of politics; medieval political theology certainly appears to have been about the latter. Adam Kotsko suggests political theology is more concerned with the relationship between the two fields of theology and politics, though the consensus is moving towards what he calls a politically-engaged theology. My reading, reflects a range of kinds of theology, in that political theology is an ontological structure, allowing the world to be understood and engaged with. Just as Deleuze and Guattari argued that the role of the philosopher is to ‘create concepts’ (What is Philosophy?, 1991(FR), 1994(transl.), Columbia, p.5), so political theology is a way to understand the world, to understand the real in social, or more specifically political terms. It is, in Schmitt’s explanation, a secular theology (Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Chicago UP, 1985/2005).

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Christianity, Deleuze, Religion, theology

Temporal Gospel
In the modern lexicon, the phrase ‘gospel’ means something that is undeniably true. But does truth change over time?

In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), the late Pope John Paul II defended capital punishment, ‘…to redress the disorder caused by the offence’. While the pontiff considered the problem ‘in the context of a system of penal justice ever more in line with human dignity,’ it was heavily caveated; it was an almost reluctant accession to conservatism. Nevertheless, ‘[p]ublic authority must redress the violation of personal and social rights by imposing on the offender an adequate punishment for the crime,’ the pope wrote. Within two years, however, it was no longer church teaching. The update in 1997 to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, while recognising that the death penalty had long been considered appropriate on the part of legitimate authority, that was no longer the case. ‘Today,’ the Catechism goes at section 2267, ‘there is an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.’ In 2020, Pope Francis cemented the position of the Church in the encyclical Fratelli Tutti. ‘There can be no stepping back from this position. Today we state clearly that “the death penalty is inadmissible” and the Church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide,’ Pope Francis writes in section 263. How could an institution so committed to dogma, doctrine, and a unitary truth shift so dramatically in such a short period of time?

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Adorno, Art, Carl Schmitt, Deleuze, Democracy, Fukuyama, Hayek, Juergen Habermas, political philosophy

The Mirage of Liberal Democracy and the Importance of Art
The whole Liberal Democracy thing all started off so well. It deteriorated pretty quickly though.

Much has been written about political apathy, disenfranchisement, the democratic deficit – in essence, the political process has become distant from its protagonists in Western Liberal Democracy. This has been grist to the mill of libertarians, and small-state reactionaries, yearning for less government intrusion in people’s lives. But government, and in particular liberal democracy, is supposed to be of the people, by the people. Today, I’m going to look at Juergen Habermas’ work on the public sphere, juxtaposed against Hayek on Spontaneous Order, and Carl Schmitt on States of Exception, as well as Fukyama and Huntingdon on the concept of political decay. Finally I’ll look at art and the creative process as an antidote to modernist nihilism, bringing in Gilles Deleuze and a few others.

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Artificial Intelligence, Deleuze, Epistemology, Ontology, Technology

The Ontologies of Technology
Richard Lindner, Boy With Machine, 1954

In Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s 1991 book What is Philosophy?, the writers make the argument that philosophers are things of their time, creators of concepts through which the world can be interpreted. Philosophy, juxtaposed alongside science and art, provides the fundamental constructs that those disciplines require as a kind of prima terra, before any art can be made, or any science can be done. Philosophers, then, are in the business of creating ontologies.

This is of course a rejection of truth, at least in the absolute sense of the word. Richard Rorty distinguished between the concepts that ‘the truth is out there’ versus ‘the world is out there’. This goes all the way back to Wittgenstein and language, and the relations between the subject and the world: truth can only exist with language; and language can only exist with a subject. Therefore truth can’t exist ‘out there’, only the world can be out there – with its phenomenona (Husserl) and forms (Plato) and things-in-themselves (Kant).

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