︎ Deleuze without Guattari

October 13


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In the contemporary cultural, social and media theories (Actor-network theory, speculative realism, Object-oriented ontology, accelerationism) philosophy of Deleuze and Gvattari is often approached as the material nominalism or technocratic scientism, in which it is impossible to generalize empirical and aleatoric elements or reduce them to Subject, Idea or Event. Addressing such notions of Deleuze as the series, event, simple machine, abstract machine, causality, transcendental empiricism, repetition, Aeon, we shall try to inspect which of them fits Deleuze/Guattari tandem, and which is, on the contrary, difficult to inscribe in it. For example, while such concepts as event, death, Aeon, repetition, supreme being - are crucial for Deleuze’s ontology, they often go counter to the concepts developed in Guattari’s works or his tandem with Deleuze – such as -  the molecular, assemblage, machinic unconscious, etc. This incompatibility leads to contradictory interpretations of Deleuze’s ontology; when, for example, for Badiou Deleuze represents nothing but absolute empiricism – the immanence and “clamour” of being; while for Peter Hallward, conversely, he stands for only what is only virtual and “out from this world”. The lecture attempts to unpack this incompatibility by reconsidering the reasons why such Deleuzean concepts as Event, supreme being, repetition, Aeon hamper inscription of Deleuze’s thought into contemporary post-philosophies and object oriented positivisms.

(Keti Chukhrov)