The first of the critical works on Deleuze was Alain Badiou's Deleuze: The Clamor of Being [Minnesota, 2000]). Badiou concentrated on the Deleuze of Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense and he argued that Deleuze is not so much a philosopher of the multiple as of the One.
Whence the book's subtitle, which refers to Deleuze's reading of the tradition of univocity in metaphysics: "A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings" (Difference and Repetition). The singular logic of Being resides beneath Deleuze's multiple interests and vocabularies.
I've just come across Mark Hansen's Becoming as Creative Involution?:Contextualizing Deleuze and Guattari's Biophilosophy---an attempt to unpack and clarify the genealogy of Deleuze'schanging, though lifelong, engagement with Bergson. Essentially,after starting off from a point of seemingly perfect convergence between philosophy and biology--Bergson's notion of the élan vital--Deleuze drives an ever-widening wedge between thebiological notions he appropriates from neo-evolutionism and what he increasingly comes to view as a model of creative evolution too fundamentally bound up with both humanism and a residual representationalism. Hansen argues that:
what compels Deleuze to distance himself from creative evolution and from a certain Bergson is his (paradoxically very Bergsonian) philosophical aim of furnishing a metaphysics for contemporaryscience, that is, a metaphysics of the virtual....Against such a metaphysics, I shall insist, against such metaphysics and with the support of contemporary biologists, that a certain priority be granted processes of actualization.
Alan Watt argues that despite its prominence in Greek ethical theory, friendship has generally been ignored by modern ethicists and that most of the recent attempts to revive it have been Aristotelian in inspiration. Hence the the impression of straight choice between ancient and modern perspectives has actually been re-enforced by
contemporary efforts at rehabilitation.
He argues that Iwe can usefully adding a Nietzschean – perspective, which cannot be subsumed within the ancient/modern dichotomy and which offers a way of connecting friendship and ethics very different from Aristotle’s.
For whereas Aristotelianism sees ethics as a search for the good life and character friendship as contributing to the creation of a shared understanding of the good, Nietzsche sees ethics as an arena of contest between different ways of valuing and “self-overcoming”, and character friendship as a process of challenge by
which we push each other further along our own very different paths.
the situated body.
As we have learned from Merleau Ponty the body is always situated in so far as it is a living and experiencing body. Being situated in this sense is different from simply being located someplace in the way a non-living, non-experiencing object is located. That the body is always situated involves certain kinds of physical and social interactions, and it means that experience is always both physically and socially situated.
One nation conservatism is a defensive reaction to neoliberal globalization that takes the form of populism. Populism has lost its original ideological meaning as the expression of agrarian radicalism. Ivan Krastev says that populism is too eclectic to be an ideology in the way that liberalism, socialism, or conservatism are. But growing interest in populism has captured the major trend of the modern political world – the rise of democratic illiberalism.
In Towards home and away from home: the networked cosmopolitanism of Federation Square in Crossings Fiona Druitt asks:
Is Federation Square a cosmopolitan site – and what might this mean? This paper concentrates on answering the theoretical aspect of this question (how the site is designed rather than how people interpret it) using Federation Square as a scaffold upon which to imagine a theory of networked cosmopolitanism. I will argue that the design of Federation Square imagines a framework for identity that reflexively engages with both a coming together and a coming apart in federating the Australian nation.
The urban desertscape might be read as an interior desert: a reference to negotiating the badlands of white Australian identity that intersect those histories of Aboriginal dispossession, a haunting return of an imagined desert (a strange, barren exterior) to the interior of the city and the self. Conversely, it might also be read as an appropriation of a central Australian desert, a centripetal red heart, that joins the states together in sand and in symbolism, in geographies both physical and imagined. The stones used in Federation Square (that look nothing like stones found in this part of the country) were mined in the Kimberly region and then cobbled in Perth, suggesting a national rhetoric of sharing, not only of resources, but of a symbolism. This kind of symbolic, desert nationalism is often iconic, which means that it signifies in excess of itself: here the excess signification is actually ironic, it evokes the very opposite of a desert (an exterior, a harsh, barren landscape), imagining a symbolic home for all Australians whether or not they have ever seen a desert before, let alone set foot in one. Federation Square is certainly redolent with national sentiment, from the flagpole out the front to the Australia collection hanging in the National Gallery of Victoria. [5]The urban interior desert at once holds us together and keeps us apart, just as that disparate, imagined desertscape of Australia brings us symbolically together and at once unconsciously undoes us. Since Federation Square is both a deconstruction and a construction, its urban interior desertscape is at once a self-conscious parody (a city desert) and a celebration of imagined nationalism (a bush desert approaching appropriation or iconicity in the city) that acknowledges both a coming together and a coming apart in terms of a dialectic of exterior and interior to place and space.
In For a Baroque Aesthetic, A study of the Films of David Lynch Michael Cutaya says that there may be two tendencies within the baroque, but there may also be two different points of views from which to look upon the baroque.
The different appreciations of the baroque seem to spring for a large part from the question of what is reality. The classical point of view considers the essence, the origin of things; classicism researches the truth through the perfect form. From this perspective the baroque representation, with all its artifices, excesses, decorations, trompe l'oeils and multiplied images, is necessarily superficial and false. The baroque is the art of illusions deluding the beholder away from the truth of things. Thus theorists of the 18th century, invested in classicism, found no redeeming feature in the baroque. More recently however, its very artificiality has seduced many for being more revealing of a world made of deceptive appearances. A manifesto for the neo-baroque aesthetic written by Erminia Passannanti gives a good example of this point of view:Neo-baroque is the rediscovery, exaltation and re-evaluation of the kitsch, it is the attribution to its codes of a scheme of values, and it is indeed the re-activation of these values in the contemporaneity. It is believing in the power of the false, the artifact as being more meaningful of the true.
The neo-baroque era in which we are living is neither the result of a refusal of the classic, nor the outcome of a degenerative process. Neo-baroque’s "chaos" is not the contrary of classicism’s "order"; the first is, on the contrary, to be analyzed as a complexification of the latter.
In Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment Angela Ndalianis, who accepts the use of baroque and classic as transhistorical categories, refuses to oppose in an absolute way classic and baroque, and so she reestablish the fundamental historicity of each form taken by both tendencies
In this review in Leonardo Online Jan Baetens says that:
makes an important contribution to the field of cultural semiotics as well as to the theory of contemporary culture as visual culture. In this sense, it is not exaggerated to claim that the stances defended by the author deserve to complete the theoretical attempts to define "visual culture" in the wake of WJT Mitchell’s famous visual turn (Mitchell 1994). Taking here as a starting point the cultural semiotics of Lotman (1990), Ndalianis tries to give a more concrete interpretation of his very abstract boundary theory of culture. Culture, for Lotman, is based on a double mechanism of inclusion and exclusion (before anything else, the semiotic mind shapes a universe by tracing a limit between an inside and an outside) that Ndalianis interprets in terms of culture as "spatial formation" (one may hear correctly an echo of Foucault’s discursive formations) and finds illustrated in the tension between classic and baroque, the latter being fundamentally a culture oriented towards the lack or the break of limits (for instance the limits between inside/outside, real/fictitious, spectacle/spectator, etc.).
I've just stumbled across The View from Elsewhere courtesy of FXHolden at From A Lan Downunder whom I meet in Melbourne. From what I can gather the author works an educational institution in Alice Springs is on creative writing staff and publishes creative writing rather than research papers. The creative writing appears to be creative non fiction (CNF), which involves some Masters writing course in the US.
This insertion of yourself into the essay would seem to be an interesting way to come to grips with the interplay between the lives of white and indigenous people. Referring to the Americans it is observed:
I really liked the fact that they had a clear sense of the essay and of the personal essay as an entity. I'm not sure that we do have a strong sense of the personal essay: it does seem to me there's often a sense of it being subordinate or inferior to the political essay, or that if you've written something more up the personal end of the spectrum, you just haven't developed your political analysis enough. Coming from a policy background, the analysis has always seemed to me like the easy, straightforward part to write: it's refracting the political aspects through people's experience that's more difficult, and showing up how partial reality is, etc. But perhaps I'm wrong in suspecting this bias. It would be interesting to have a look at some of the Best Australian Essays series and see what types of essay are prioritised.
We have various panics about ‘the threat to reason’, which often are may be as irrational as the trends they purport to take on. Some of these are fevered jeremiads against religion, which have emerged in the past couple of years. Typically these champion a one-dimensional version of Enlightenment values in counterposition to crude caricatures of religion.
Dan Hind in his The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment Was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim It describes this unsophisticated counterposition of the rational to the irrational as ‘Folk Enlightenment’, noting that: ‘Enlightenment is normally invoked in the context of a conflict with its external enemies: reason is threatened by faith, science is threatened by superstition, and so on.’ Crucially, this casts Enlightenment as a kind of heritage to be defended against external threats rather than something to be developed in opposition to the conventional wisdom and established orthodoxies of our own time.
Hind agues that although modern science is one of the great legacies of the Enlightenment, we should be wary of what has been described elsewhere as ‘scientism’, the elevation of science to the status of a pseudo-religion in itself. This is especially true at a time when science is often invoked as a source of authority that is beyond question, rather than an open-ended endeavour based on radical scepticism.