[csaa-forum] 2 Deleuze gigs

[fcolman at clyde.its.unimelb.edu.au]

Dear Chris,

Hi, back from Canada... with Deleuzians in tow - following flyers fyi 
+ any pgrads who may be into Deleuze, Dan Smith is a brilliant 
speaker. I met up with Claire Colebrook, et al. at Trent Uni - it was 
a very 'intense' week with the Deleuzians!

Best, Felicity Colman.



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

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