Deleuze

Future gender studies in archaeology will in one way or another have to relate to the current neorealist approaches in philosophy. In this article I will use Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory and John Protevi’s framework of bodies-politic to show how neorealistic approaches can unite the somatic and the social through synchronic and diachronic perspectives. As a case study I shall focus on the ruler B’ajlaj Chan K’awiil of Dos Pilas and his daughter Ix Wak Chan Ajaw of Naranjo in Guatemala. The lives of these rulers’ were conceptualized as roads along which certain events took place. Common in the hieroglyphic corpus are dates of birth, accession, marriage and death of male and female rulers. During B’ajlaj and Wak Chan’s roads of life they encountered several thresholds that created their unique assemblages and bodies-politic.

"Beaulieu, Julie. 2012. “Virtualités à l'oeuvre dans le cinéma de Marguerite Duras”. Within Le cinéma de Marguerite Duras: l'autre scène du littéraire. Symposium hosted by Figura, Centre de recherche sur le texte et l'imaginaire. Montréal, Université du Québec à Montréal, 7 septembre 2012. Document vidéo. Available online: l’Observatoire de l’imaginaire contemporain. <http://oic.uqam.ca/en/communications/virtualites-a-loeuvre-dans-le-cinema-de-marguerite-duras>.

Dans cette communication, je m’intéresserai à l’apport du virtuel dans Le Camion (1977). Selon Gilles Deleuze, une perception équivaut à une particule: «[…] une perception actuelle s’entoure d’une nébulosité d’images virtuelles qui se distribuent sur des circuits mouvants de plus en plus éloignés, de plus en plus larges, qui se font et se défont». C’est dire que les images virtuelles «rebondissent» comme des particules sur l’actuel. Dans Le Camion, ce qui tient lieu de l’actuel, le film auquel le spectateur assiste, se fait complément ou produit, donc objet de l’actualisation, alors que cette dernière n’a pour sujet que le virtuel: le devenir-film contenu dans le texte. Le lecteurspectateur a pour rôle de «compléter» le film en jouant constamment sur ces deux niveaux: l’actuel et le virtuel. Son rôle est grand, complexe, à l’image même du film auquel il se voit confronté."

"The medical and social sciences offer us many ways of understanding the human body and what it can do. From biology and psychology to sociology and philosophy, a range of disciplines supply us with a rich yet challenging picture. On the one hand, our bodies are fashioned from genes, cells and organs; on the other, they are the foundation for our identities, our interactions and lived experiences from childhood to old age.

This book provides an accessible and informative account of the importance of the body for the caring professions. It offers a clear description of the latest theoretical perspectives, weaving the natural and social body into one. The book focuses on specific aspects such as health and illness, ageing, gender and sexuality, consumption, care, and medical technology.

The text is specifically tailored towards the needs of health and social care students, with case studies directly relating to concrete problems encountered by professionals in the field. The Body is an invaluable textbook for students of the caring professions and will bring to life the issues they face, both in their studies and in their future work with patients, clients and consumers."

""La présente thèse propose une exploration des rapports entre égalité et conflit de l’espace. Elle s’intéresse à une forme d’égalité que l’on nommera liminale – qui refuse la fixité de tout ordre – et aux espaces que sont le territoire, la parole (en tant que système d’attribution) ainsi que le corps. Plus précisément, elle cherche à voir comment la mise en scène de conflits de ces espaces détient le potentiel de manifester l’égalité dans sa contingence. La réflexion sur l’articulation espace/égalité permettra de formuler l’idée de transgression corporelle des espaces qui sont tenus pour manifester des rapports inégalitaires. L’émancipation dont il est ici question peut être qualifiée de processuelle ; elle va de pair avec la proposition une forme d'action politique événementielle qui tranche avec les conceptions eschatologiques de l’émancipation. La figure du carnaval sera employée comme heuristique de la politique du corps dans l'espace inégalitaire.

Mots-clés: Espace-temps; conflit; corps; parole; émancipation processuelle; égalité liminale; hiérarchie; geste; usage; propriété; carnaval.

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""This edited volume deploys Deleuzian thinking to re-theorize fascism as a mutable problem in changing orders of power relations dependent on hitherto misunderstood social and political conditions of formation. It shifts the theory of fascism in International Relations from its prevailing macro-historical moorings to focus on what Deleuze called micro-fascism. It demonstrates the insufficiencies of both traditional and existing critical accounts of relations between fascism and modernity, contextualizing its own Deleuzian account in contrast with the development of historical, liberal, critical and post-structuralist theories of fascism developed to date. The book provides a theoretically distinct approach to the problem of fascism and its relations with liberalism and modernity in both historical and contemporary contexts. It serves as a seminal intervention into the debate over the causes and consequences of contemporary wars and global political conflicts as well as functioning as an accessible guide to the theoretical utilities of Deleuzian thought for IR in a manner that is very much lacking in current debates about International Relations.

Recognising that Deleuze & Guttari’s account of fascism aligns it with many of the concerns which continue to trouble International Relations theorists today – not least the global nature of war and the incessant desire for broader securitisation, so engaging with this aspect of their work is more pressing than ever. In light of this, this volume will draw upon their analysis to provide new critical commentaries into the phenomenon of fascism in the 21st Century. Covering a wide array of topics, all within the general remit of International Relations, this volume will provide a set of original contributions focussed in particular upon the contemporary nature of war; the increased priorities afforded to the security imperative; the changing designs of bio-political regimes, fascist aesthetics; nihilistic tendencies & the modernist logic of finitude; the politics of suicide; the specific desires upon which fascism draws and of course the recurring pursuit of power.""

""This paper explores the sculptural objects and spaces of Edward James’ surrealist folly ‘Las Pozas’, Mexico, which James constructed with the assistance of local artisans between 1960 and 1984. I will discuss ‘Las Pozas’ in terms of the surrealist marvelous, as a construction that blurs a multitude of classifications, such as art and nature, sculptural form and vegetation, English Gothic and Mexican tropics. The site richly bears out the intentions of its aristocratic auteur to create a space that envelops the traveler within a European fantasy of tropical escapism, which evidently draws on English garden traditions of the maze, sculpture, the folly, and the hothouse. Gothic arches and sculpted vegetal forms verdant with lichen emerge from walls of thick vegetation to evoke a colonial delirium in which echoes of James’ Gothic family seat, West Dean, mingle with colonnades of bamboo, organic concrete forms, and the curling fronds of ferns.

The entropic character of Las Pozas, the intentional ruination and engulfing of its manmade structures, has posed many questions for the Mexican conservators, who have managed the site with great subtlety. The destabilizing space, thick with humidity, in which one climbs up and down narrow twisting staircases, and across precarious walkways up to the cascading pools, from which the site takes its name, is a physically exhausting adventure in which the ontological topsy-turviness of nature and artifice, along with the colonialist semiotics within the tropical environment, affect a form of vertigo in which, in Roger Caillois’ terms, a form of psychasthenic space envelops the traveler, destabilizing spatial and temporal certainty.

A surrealist reading of Las Pozas will be countered with the critique offered by Melanie Smith’s recent video installation of the site, Xilitla (2010), in which the British Mexican-based artist takes up the trope of Robert Smithson’s Mirror Displacements (1969), and dismantles the oneiric space of James’ site with the roving eye of a mirror carried by the gardeners.
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"This book presents a timely reconfiguration of the relations between art, philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. Through connection with a range of contemporary social and philosophical issues and movements, this collection of essays highlights the imperative of sensorial aesthetics. The book focuses on the radical philosophical approach to aesthetics enabled by the works of Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. From these philosophers an older meaning of aesthetic has been recalled. Before it indicated primarily the theory of art and beauty, “aesthetic” referred to the sensibility, the capacity to receive sensations. In summoning this “sensorial” meaning of aesthetics in their respective works, Lyotard, Deleuze, and other recent thinkers turn the philosophical theory of aesthetics away from the dominance of cognitivist and reception theories, and towards a thinking of aesthetics through considerations of the movements of matter, affect, and sensation.

This vital transformation of aesthetics in turn allows a reconfiguration of the relationship between the domains of art, aesthetics, and philosophy. If aesthetics focuses on sensation, rather than cognition, then artists, musicians, and philosophers alike appear not only as phenomenological and empirical thinkers, but as experimenters with the parameters of the sensible, able to extend our perceptual interface with the world. Rather than artists deferring to philosophers in regard to the meaning of their works, this new understanding of aesthetics suggests that philosophers ought to defer to artists, who are understood as inventers in the realm of sensibility."