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This volume addresses the issue of freedom in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. This is all the more challenging in that Deleuze-Guattari almost never use the term freedom, preferring instead, the concept of the refrain. The essays collected in the volume show that freedom has been understood in a remarkably narrow sense and that in fact freedom operates as the refrain in every realm of thought and creation. The motivating approach in these essays is Deleuze-Guattari's emphasis on the irreality of media and capitalistic sign regimes, which they perceive to have taken over even the practices of philosophy, the arts, and science. By offering a clear and engaging treatment of the underexplored issue of freedom, this volume moves the discussion of Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy forward in ways that will appeal to researchers in Continental philosophy and a wide range of other disciplines.
List of contents
Introduction: Freedom’s Refrains, Deleuze, Guattari, and Philosophy
Dorothea Olkowski
Translator’s Prologue
Constantin V. Boundas
Part I: Infinite Speeds and the Machine
1. Deleuze and the Freedom of the Machines
Jean-Clet Martin
2. Infinite Speeds and Practical Reason: A Kinematics of the Concept in What is Philosophy?
Michael Ardoline
Part II: Philosophy and Language
3. Try Madness: Creation and the Crystalline Brain
Dorothea Olkowski
4. Sense and Literality: Why There Are No Metaphors in Deleuze’s Philosophy
Daniel W. Smith
5. Who are Deleuze’s Conceptual Personae?
Gregg Lambert
Part III: Beyond Politics
6. Kafka and Melville: The Same Struggle for a People to Come?
Catarina Pombo Nabais
7. Affective Politics and "Crisis": The Examples of the HIV-positive Women’s Public Denouncement and of the Refugees’ Confinement
Sotiria-Ismini Gounari
8. Political Improvisation and "the Long March through the Institutions"
Eugene W. Holland
9. Geophilosophy and Revolution in Gilles Deleuze
Mohamed Moufli
Part IV: Art and Creation
10. Dismantling the Land(scape), Dismantling the Face
Philippe Mengue
11. Intensive Difference and Subjectivations
Pascale Criton
Part V: Deleuze and Others
12. Pluralism = Monism: What Deleuze Learns from Nietzsche and Spinoza
Alan Schrift
13. Deleuze and Guattari’s Geodynamism and Husserl’s Geostatism:
Two Cosmological Perspectives
Alain Beaulieu
14. Affirmations of the False and Bifurcations of the True: Deleuze’s Dialetheic and Stoic Fatalism
Corry Shores
About the author
Dorothea Olkowski is Professor and former Chair of Philosophy, Director of Humanities, and Director of Cognitive Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, USA. She is the author or editor of ten books including Postmodern Philosophy and the Scientific Turn (2012), The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible) (2007), and Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation (1999).
Eftichis Pirovolakis is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Peloponnese, Greece. He works on twentieth-century continental philosophy and, more specifically, on the relation between phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction. Pirovolakis has published articles in, among other journals, Philosophy Today, Word and Text and Literature, Interpretation, Theory. He is the author of Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters between Deconstruction and Hermeneutics (2010).
Summary
This volume addresses the issue of freedom in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. The essays collected in the volume show that freedom has been understood in a remarkably narrow sense and that in fact freedom operates as the refrain in every realm of thought and creation.
