Deleuze Studies Special Issues
The year 2012 marks the 20th anniversary of Félix Guattari’s untimely passing in 1992 at the age of 62. This volume acknowledges the prescience of his insight into capital as a semiotic operator, which has been taken up by theorists of immaterial labour in the post-Autonomist movement, and invites his readers to meditate on the relevance of his thought for a critical diagnosis of present and future mutations of capitalism and labour in the turbulent global info-machinic ecologies of our time. Guattari tried to imagine a post-media era in which new subjectivities could blossom and experiments in controlled chaoticization would flourish. The essays assembled here answer why, and how, to read Guattari today.
Writings on Deleuze and Guattari's twin volumes, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, have often focused on questions about desire, body without organs, the schizophrenic etc. There have been a few notable exceptions that have attempted to articulate and expound upon the numerous political problems that Deleuze and Guattari attempt to resolve through analyses of concepts such as de-/re-territorialization, coding and re-coding etc, however a specter is haunting Deleuze and Guattari that has yet to be explained, articulated and debated; the specter of Karl Marx. This volume attempts to analyze the relationship between Deleuze (and Guattari) and Marx and their respective works. This volume is an intervention into the fields of Deleuze Studies, Marxist and Marxian philosophy and political economy, and critiques of capitalism through an examination of the relationship between Deleuze and Marx. Themes that will be covered in this volume include hegemony and theories of imperialism, the role of philosophy in changing the world, surplus, tensions between the virtual and the potential, ideology and noology, modes of production, and the very nature of anti-capitalist politics in Deleuze's work. This volume will be of interest to people interested in Deleuze Studies who are interested in questions of politics and critiques of capitalism, Marxist theory and philosophy and people interested in political economy.
Key Features
- offers new perspectives on Deleuze's early work
- illuminates new connections between Deleuze's and Marx's work
- includes a critical re-reading of Deleuze's work
- foregrounds a critique of Capitalism in Deleuze's work
Contributors include: Bruno Bosteels, Alberto Toscano, Jason Read, Jeremy Gilbert Simon Choat and Aidan Tynan.
Unlike other philosophers whose work can be applied to questions of sex and gender, Deleuze's philosophy was motivated by the problem of desire and difference. Over the last three decades, feminist theory, gender theory and queer theory have been revolutionised and rejuvenated by Deleuze's provocation to consider sexual difference beyond the paradigm of the Oedipal family and Western humanism. In this volume, a series of prominent critical theorists extend Deleuze's already radical philosophy into ideas of the post-human, truth, reading, sexual difference and gender politics. Moving beyond the tired debates surrounding sex, gender and representation, these essays consider difference positively and provocatively, opening up new directions for the study of sexuality.
