In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze presents a unique biophilosophical project, which culminates in a new concept of living organisms. But, to fathom the nature of these organisms it is necessary to go back to the “letter and spirit” of the Deleuzian ontology. Contrary to the most popular interpretations, I maintain that the ontology of Difference and Repetition revolves around the notion of difference of intensity, which displaces the abused concept of the virtual and affirms the necessary implication of the processes (...) of individuation in actual entities. Clarifying this point will lead me directly to the goal of understanding the peculiar nature of living organisms. Since the actual is anchored in intensity through a relation of implication, the real constitution of organisms is revealed as an “intensive actuality” which assembles two asymmetrical tendencies: one of intensive depotentiation, one of actual organization. As an assemblage, however, the organism needs to constantly negotiate its consistency and be sustained by an ethics of intensity that teaches it to simultaneously “affirm even the lowest” and “not explicate itself too much”. (shrink)

This article addresses the relationship between art, politics and resistance by focusing on the following question: on what basis can artistic practices and practices of resistance become mutually sustainable as forms of resistance to ‘integrated world capitalism’? The question arises from understanding Deleuze and Guattari’s account of schizoanalysis as ‘an incomplete project’ (Buchanan) and from within current debates about the relationship between art, politics and resistance. We argue that current understandings of the art-politics relationship tend towards two dominant motifs: the (...) contributory and the constitutive. Although both of these approaches provide considerable insight into the increasing areas of overlap between art and politics they nonetheless run the risk of instituting a hierarchical relationship between art and politics. We propose instead that the common space of contemporary art and politics is defined precisely where artistic practices and practices of resistance meet. This is demonstrated through a schizoanalytic reading of Johnny’s famously rebellious question in The Wild One (1953): ‘Whaddaya got?’. We present a reading of this question as a call for immanent and singular (rather than transcendent and universal) forms of resistance. We argue that resistance understood as an immanent and singular intervention in the world is best expressed as a form of artistic practice, and only when expressed as a form of artistic practice will practices of resistance have the theoretical resources to sustain themselves. The article concludes with the claim that schizoanalytical method is the artistic practice of creating sustainable forms of resistance within integrated world capitalism. (shrink)

As a philosophical paradigm, differential heterogenesis offers us a novel descriptive vantage with which to inscribe Deleuze’s virtuality within the terrain of “differential becoming,” conjugating “pure saliences” so as to parse economies, microhistories, insurgencies, and epistemological evolutionary processes that can be conceived of independently from their representational form. Unlike Gestalt theory’s oppositional constructions, the advantage of this aperture is that it posits a dynamic context to both media and its analysis, rendering them functionally tractable and set in relation to other (...) objects, rather than as sedentary identities. Surveying the genealogy of differential heterogenesis with particular interest in the legacy of Lautman’s dialectic, I make the case for a reading of the Deleuzean virtual that departs from an event-oriented approach, galvanizing Sarti and Citti’s dynamic a priori vis-à-vis Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. Specifically, I posit differential heterogenesis as frame with which to examine our contemporaneous epistemic shift as it relates to multi-scalar computational modeling while paying particular attention to neuro-inferential modes of inductive learning and homologous cognitive architecture. Carving a bricolage between Mark Wilson’s work on the “greediness of scales” and Deleuze’s “scales of reality”, this project threads between static ecologies and active externalism vis-à-vis endocentric frames of reference and syntactical scaffolding. (shrink)

The revolution that affected the Western thought during the 20th century also involved music, the way it is made and listened to. If music can be called by definition «art of sounds», on one hand, being thus part of those activities which are purely human, on the other hand one should think that, likely and maybe more manifestly than other arts, music can express itself as a mean to take the human being out from him/herself. This can result evidently in (...) the abundance of sacred and ritualistic music that we can find in our world and history. We propose hereby an interpretation of the musical phenomenon through which such a twofold guise can be analysed, using the pattern traced by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, mostly in A Thousand Plateaus. To this end, we will start from what seems to be the material on which music acts: the sound and the effect that a repeated sound produces, namely, the refrain. (shrink)