Deleuze2008: Keynote talks

Simon Duffy
‘The metaphysics of openness in Deleuze's approach to science and mathematics’

Throughout his work, Deleuze develops a number of mathematical problematics that he extracts from the history of mathematics, and which he then redeploys in relation to the discourse of philosophy as a part of his project of constructing a philosophy of difference. When assessing the openess of Deleuze's philosophy of difference or it's potential to be redeployed in relation to other discourses, an important characteristic that needs to be taken into consideration is whether the kinds of engagements that Deleuze undertakes between the discourse of philosophy and developments in the discipline of mathematics can be repeated. Are the engagements that Deleuze undertakes with the discipline of mathematics exhaustive? Or is the logic of these engagements able to be repeated in relation to other developments in the discipline of mathematics? I would argue that the logic of the generation of problematics, which orients Deleuze's deployment of mathematical problematics throughout his work, continues to effect the discipline of mathematics even after the subsequent reappropriation of particular problematics by it. Deleuze's work is therefore open to being redeployed in relation to the discipline of mathematics in order to generate new problematics, which can then be made available for redeployment within the discourse of philosophy, thus openning up the potential for the creation of new philosophical concepts, or within other disciplines to create like effects.

Roland Faber
‘…and the world, the universe, is itself the Open' — Contours of Deleuze’s Resistance to the Logic of the One


For Gilles Deleuze, the metaphysical quest for “reality” is led by his concern for a resistance to all regimes of oppression, be they ontological, aesthetical, ethical, or political. Gilles Deleuze associates himself with an underground tradition of untimely philosophies, such as Bergson, Hume, and Whitehead in their endeavor to deconstruct the world of closure into traces of indispensable multiplicity, creative unpredictability, and profound novelty; reinterprets some like Nietzsche and Bataille to fit a universe of irrevocable differentiation; and repudiates others, like Hegel, as expressions of closure, of a logic of the One, Deleuze must avoid at all costs. This paper will trace different appearances of this complicated multiplicity, creativity, and novelty in Deleuze’s work on the levels of ontology, epistemology, and politics as philosophical confessions of openness in the struggle against worlds of intricate networks of deceptive repetition, power inflicted necessities of hierarchical logic, and the seductive forces of the selfsame; and for a culture of Life.

Graham Harman
‘The Assemblage Theory of Society’

This lecture considers the interesting ‘assemblage theory’ of society found in Manuel DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society (2006), which links up with some of the key issues of classical and present-day metaphysics, not to mention some of the central themes of this conference.

DeLanda’s use of the assemblage has the great appeal that it allows him to avoid two typical exaggerated positions about the nature of individual things:

(a) for Leibniz, there is an absolute distinction between natural substances and artificial aggregates. By contrast, DeLanda holds that all genuine entities (whether machines, armies, or trees) are made up of swarming legions of tinier entities.

(b) yet despite this vision of entities as assemblages formed from multiple subcomponents, DeLanda does not adopt the pseudo-radicalism of claiming that ‘there is no inherent reality; everything is only a relational effect.’ Quite the opposite: DeLanda’s remorseless realism leads him to assert that even those societies created by humans have an inherent reality apart from everything that humans know about them. More generally, an assemblage of any kind is not reducible to its relational effects on other things.

Hence, an assemblage is a strange sort of entity, lying midway between the traditional substance and aggregate. An assemblage is like a substance insofar as it marks a surplus beyond any of its outer effects (relations are external to their terms). But an assemblage is also like an aggregate, insofar as it is many. It is not some final atom of reality found in nature in the manner of Leibniz’s monads. Indeed, assemblages are constantly created or destroyed and can be found in a wide range of sizes, from subatomic beings on up to international spy conspiracies.

Criteria are still needed for distinguishing genuine assemblages from random lists of entities. And DeLanda does offer such criteria, drawing convincingly from the work of Roy Bhaskar. The main goal of this lecture is to streamline and to some extent criticize DeLanda’s criteria for what makes an assemblage a real assemblage. In this way, new light is shed on Deleuze’s vision of the Open, and new questions raised about the role of ‘the virtual’ in DeLanda and Deleuze.

Christian Kerslake
'The Opening of the World: Heidegger, Axelos and Deleuze'

Heidegger spoke of human experience as existing in a 'clearing' opened up by the consciousness of finitude. On the Heideggerian view, the notion of “world” presupposes an “opening”. In his later thought, Heidegger expanded upon the historical and epochal dimensions of human existence, arguing that the development of culture and technology entails a progressive 'forgetting' of the most fundamental relations to 'Being'. The later Heidegger’s epochal approach to ontology was further unfolded by Eugen Fink (1905-1975) and Kostas Axelos (1924-). The latter, attempting to synthesise Heidegger and Marx, developed the concept of a 'planetary thought' that would be capable of combating the 'worldwide scaffold of representation', and regenerating our understanding of the significance of world history. “The ‘history of the World’”, says Axelos, “is not simply a universal or world history”; rather it should denote “the epochs of our openings to the world and our transformational operations” upon it.
Deleuze wrote two articles on the work of Axelos (collected in Desert Islands), and in them he takes up the late Heidegger's and Axelos' visions of a new 'planetary thought'. Deleuze suggests, however, that a future planetary 'Openness' can only be constructed by (1) taking into account the 'virtuality' of the whole body of the human past (via Bergson's theory of time), and (2) and by exposing (via Leibniz's theory of contingency) the "play in the creation of the world" at each level of being – the physical, the biological, the psychic, and socio-historical. He denies that the opening or clearing in which human beings stand should be characterised in terms of a 'transcendence', arguing that it should instead be conceived as a 'plane of immanence'. Planetary thought, in Deleuze’s sense, is an occupation of the ‘plane of immanence’. In Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari argue that human beings, having attained the plateau of ‘deterritorialisation’ relatively recently (less than 10,000 years ago), must now absolutely deterritorialise themselves to secure their de jure status as transcendental beings.
This paper argues that Deleuze's thought presents untapped resources for a re-thinking of our current place in world history. By developing a self-grounding philosophy of difference adequate to a truly planetary thought, and by stressing the ontological distinctiveness of biological and psychic life, Deleuze develops the means to renew the question of the point of human existence. What is it to have a world? What kind of world do we want to live in? Deleuze’s identification of the transcendental significance of human deterritorialization could be helpful for grounding the struggle against global capitalism. Deleuze’s thought could contribute to the construction of a progressive counterpower devoted to the dismantling the ‘worldwide scaffold’ of global capitalism, and the recovery of the real, intensive structure of global, and even cosmic, history.

Daniel W. Smith
‘The Idea of the Open: On Deleuze’s Theory of Relations’

The paper will examine Deleuze’s treatment of the Bergsonian theme that the Idea of the Whole, or of Totality (le Tout) is equivalent to the Idea of the Open. For Bergson, any movement in space expresses something of another nature, namely, a qualitative change in a whole. When night falls, it is an assignable change that constitutes an affection of a Whole: the Whole of a village, the Whole of a day, the Whole of the country. In this sense, Deleuze will argue, the Whole is more than the sum of its parts; rather, it is duration itself, real time, and thus is equivalent to the Idea of the Open.

James Williams
‘Openness and its physical limits: framing Deleuzian responses to world events’

What are the horizons of world events? How far back in time and how far into the future should we seek their limits? Where are their inner and outer boundaries? How small-scale should we go when observing their effects? When is a grand scale too great to do justice to the sometimes minute events toppling individuals from harmony to chaos? When we say the future is open and spaces limitless are we committing a serious logical error, for if they are open then we should know why and how, but if we know such things then have not our horizons already closed in? The idea of the event and its attendant problems are central to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. His view of events is characterized by an inherent openness: events have no intrinsic limits in space or time, including the strange kinds of limits that we often take for granted such as the bygone nature of the past, the immediacy of the present and the relative predictability of the future. Events only have ephemeral, incomplete and contingent limits necessary for the representation and expression of the event as actual. This necessity is not only a property of actual events but rather also a constraint for the event as without limit, since we must have a way of determining this lack of limits, or extreme openness, in order to avoid falling into an unthinkable chaos. For Deleuze, events are therefore necessarily universal and eternal. They reach even beyond the global defined as a current state of world economy, extending into the limitless times and spaces of the virtual and of the ideal as defined in his revolutionary Difference and Repetition. Yet events are also necessarily singular and local. Each event has to be expressed in a here and now torn apart, or more happily, allowed to expand into eternal relations beyond its present moment and current location. Today, we perhaps overemphasize the here and now of global events, where everything is urgent, not only rightly through the deep demands events make on our singular thoughts and feelings (the way our events make us and make us into moral agents) but also wrongly through a severe lack of historical perspective and sense of the pragmatic openness of the future (the way our events obliterate our memories of earlier errors and successes yet also constrict our confidence in the power of novelty). In this talk I will reflect on the openness of Deleuze’s events, on his recommendation for us to recreate our singular actual features through an open experimentation, and on the deep problems implied by the idea that wherever and whenever we start to think and to act, there is no final legitimate boundary for those thoughts and actions.