[csaa-forum] Fwd: 2 Deleuze gigs

Tue Jun 8 15:45:25 CST 2004

>Apologies to the list for the last personal message, please ignore, 
>but note Melbourne dates below


>Daniel W. Smith:
>"Deleuze and the Theory of Immanent Ideas"
>
>Public Lecture
>Wednesday 16 June 2004 @ 6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
>Gryphon Gallery, 1888 Building, Grattan Street,
>University of Melbourne
>
>
>Daniel W. Smith: "Deleuze and the Theory of Immanent Ideas"
>
>This paper will examine the theory of ideas played in Deleuze's work 
>particularly Difference and Repetition, although Plato Kant and 
>Hegel are traditionally seen as the three great philosophers of 
>ideas in the history of philosophy, Deleuze can perhaps now be added 
>to the list, since he has attempted to take the theory of ideas to 
>its immanent and differential limit. My aim with this paper is to 
>trace the genesis of Deleuze's immanent theory of ideas in three 
>separate but related movements:
>1. First, Kant had already inaugurated the immanent interpretation 
>of ideas in the Critique of Pure Reason, where he critiqued the 
>ideas of the self, the World, and God as transcendent illusions. 
>Deleuze's own theory in effect starts with Kant but revises the 
>Kantian theory in light of the work of Salomon Maimon who was the 
>first post-Kantian to return to Leibniz. Ideas are immanent within 
>experience, Maimon argued, because the real objects are problematic 
>structures, that is, multiplicities constituted by converging and 
>diverging series of singularities - events. As Kant had already 
>shown, it is only the self that guarantees the connection of series 
>(the categorical "and . . . "); the transcendent form of the world 
>that guarantees the convergence of continuous causal series (the 
>hypothetical "if . . . then"); and the transcendent form of God that 
>guarantees disjunction in its exclusive or limitative use (the 
>disjunctive "either or"). When they are freed from these appeals to 
>transcendence, ideas take on a purely immanent status, and the Self, 
>the World, and God share a common death. "The divergence of the 
>affirmed series forms a 'chaosmos' and no longer a World; the 
>aleatory point which traverses and forms a counter self, and no 
>longer a self; disjunction poses as a synthesis exchanges its 
>theological principle of diabolic principle. . . .The Grand Canyon 
>of the world, the 'crack' of the self, and the dismembering of God" 
>(Logic of Sense, p.176).
>2. In order to characterize the nature of Ideas as immanent 
>multiplicities - now stripped of any appeal to transcendence (Self, 
>World, God) - Deleuze effects a post-Kantian return to Leibniz. It 
>is from Leibniz (and the model of the differential calculus) that 
>Deleuze will derive the formal criteria he uses to define ideas in a 
>purely immanent sense: singularities, problematic, multiplicity, 
>event, virtuality, series, convergence and divergence, zones of 
>indiscernibility, and so on. Manuel DeLanda in his Intensive Science 
>and Virtual Philosophy has masterfully explored the mathematical 
>origins of Deleuze's theory of Ideas, not only in the calculus 
>(Leibniz, Lautman), but also in group theory (Abel, Galois) and 
>differential geometry (Gauss, Reimann). In order to clarify the 
>nature of Deleuze's theory, I would like to focus on three of these 
>fundamental characteristics: the differential relation, 
>singularities and multiplicities (all of which are concepts derived 
>from mathematics) as examples of Ideas, I will briefly examine 
>Leibniz's theory of perception and his theory of freedom (motives).
>3. Finally, I would like to show how anti-Oedipus carries D's theory 
>of Ideas over into the ethico-moral domain. The object of Kant's 
>critique of Practical Reason was the faculty of desire, and Kant 
>defined the higher faculty of desire in terms of its synthetic 
>relation with the pure form of moral law. After eliminating the 
>transcendent ideas in the first critique, Kant was content to 
>resurrect them (illegitimately according to Deleuze) in the second 
>critique where they appear as the necessary postulates of practical 
>reason. Like Kant, Deleuze will synthesize desire with a pure form, 
>the form of the idea, but he insists that such ideas must be 
>construed in purely immanent terms: "we say that there is an 
>assemblage of desire each time that there are produced in the field 
>of immanence, or on a plane of consistency, continuums of 
>intensities, combinations of fluxes, emissions of particles at 
>variable speeds" (Dialogues, p.98). From this viewpoint, 
>Anti-Oedipus is a reworking of the Critique of Practical Reason, as 
>Difference and Repetition is a reworking of the Critique of Pure 
>Reason. Deleuze's philosophy can thus be seen as both an inversion 
>and the completion of Kant's critical project, one in which the 
>theory of ideas, one in which the theory of ideas plays an important 
>directive role.
>
>
>
>Daniel W. Smith teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue 
>University, where he specializes in contemporary Continental 
>philosophy, philosophy of art, 17th-Century rationalism, Nietzsche, 
>and philosophy and literature. He is the author of numerous articles 
>on various topics in European philosophy, and is currently 
>completing a book on the work of Gilles Deleuze. He is the 
>translator of Gilles Deleuze's Essays Critical and Clinical (with 
>Michael Greco) and Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, as well as 
>Pierre Klossowski's Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle and Isabelle 
>Stengers's The Invention of Modern Science.
>
>Enquiries:
>Dr Felicity J Colman
>Cinema Studies Program,
>School of Art History, Cinema, Classics & Archaeology
>+61 3 83443359
>fcolman at unimelb.edu.au
>http://www.ahcca.unimelb.edu.au
>
>
>
>
>
>LECTURE RMIT Thursday June 17, 6pm, Blg 8, level 11, lecture hall 
>68, RMIT, Swanston St, Melbourne.
>
>Daniel W. Smith
>Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, and the Logic of Sensation
>The lecture will examine the analysis of Francis Bacon's paintings 
>presented in Gilles Deleuze's book Francis Bacon: The Logic of 
>Sensation.  
>
>
>
>
>
>Daniel W. Smith's important translation of Gilles Deleuze's 
>remarkable text Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation has been a 
>welcome addition to Deleuze scholarship in the Anglophone world.
>
>In the 2003 Minnesota publication (the translation has also been 
>published with Continuum, 2003), Smith offers an important 
>translator's introduction where he guides our approach to Deleuze's 
>treatment of Bacon along three conceptual trajectories. He names 
>these aesthetic comprehension, rhythm, and chaos, and draws 
>interesting connections to Kant's three critiques in order to 
>elaborate Deleuze's argument.
>
>As Smith points out, Deleuze frequently insists that he is not an 
>art critic, but always a philosopher. The task of the philosopher, 
>Deleuze and his collaborator Félix Guattari have insisted in What is 
>Philosophy?, is to create novel concepts.
>
>When Deleuze approaches Francis Bacon the artist, he creates 
>philosophical concepts for the artist's sensory and perceptual 
>aggregates.
>
>It is important to remember that none of these activities are given 
>priority over the other, as Smith argues "creating a concept is 
>neither more difficult nor more abstract than creating new visual, 
>sonorous, or verbal combinations." Instead, the disciplines, by 
>surveying terrains other than their own, enter into relations of 
>mutual resonance.
>
>
>
>Thursday 17 June, 2004, Lecture Hall 8.11.68, 6.00pm.
>
>Drinks beforehand from 5.00pm at level 11 bar.
>
>
>
>
>Hélène Frichot
>Lecturer
>Program of Architecture
>RMIT
>helene.frichot at rmit.edu.au
>p: +61 3 9925 2667
>

-------------------------------------
Dr. Felicity Colman
Lecturer, Cinema Studies Program
School of Art History, Cinema Studies, Classics & Archaeology
University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010

Ph: 613 834 43359
fax: 61 3 834 45563
email: fcolman at unimelb.edu.au
http://www.ahcca.unimelb.edu.au

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