Deleuze Seminar 2015-2016

Deleuze & Nature

Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn
Academic year 2015-2016

Time: Tuesday afternoons, 14.00-17.00
Location: Stijlkamer van Ravensteijn , Kromme Nieuwe Gracht 80, Utrecht University.
Organised by: OSL (Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies) with the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University
Convened by: Professor Rosi Braidotti and Dr. Rick Dolphijn (Utrecht University) With guest speakers.

For more information about Deleuze seminars and other activities please consult the website of the Deleuze Circle: http://deleuzecircle.wp.hum.uu.nl/

Registration is no longer possible, the seminar is fully booked.

osl-fgw@uva.nl and the Centre for the Humanities: gw.cfh@uu.nl.

Format

The seminar consists of ten sessions in English which will run throughout the academic year 2015-16 in Utrecht. Research masters and PhD students, as well as staff members, are welcome to participate. Students can get credits for their participation by attending regularly (attendance will be registered) and writing a final paper. Each session of the three-hour seminar will consist of an in-depth reading of a text by Gilles Deleuze (with or without Felix Guattari), sometimes alongside secondary texts by other theorists or philosophers.

Participants are expected to acquire the literature themselves, but wherever possible we will make pdf files available.

Seminar Theme 2015-16

Throughout his writings, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) devoted a lot of attention to reconceptualizing nature and the nature-culture link. He also rethought both the historical texts of empiricism, notably the pre-Socratics and Lucretius, and the concept itself. Deleuze’s theories of nature and of the Earth show a strong engagement with continental naturalism (post-Rousseau) and the monist strand in the history of thought. Following Deleuze’s intense collaboration with Guattari, the concept of nature becomes more explicitly political and it slowly turns into the geo-philosophy that becomes articulated in his/their later work. In this seminar we will read those fragments from Deleuze’s oeuvre in which his naturalism is most present and we will discuss more broadly issues of empiricism, human nature and the Earth. 2

Abbreviations of key Deleuze and Guattari texts:

ATP: A Thousand Plateaus
WIP: What is Philosophy?
N: Nietzsche and Philosophy
ES: Empiricism and Subjectivity
Cinema: volume 1 and 2
Desert Islands
Two Regimes

DETAILED SEMINAR PROGRAMME

SESSION 1: Introduction
(Braidotti and Dolphijn)
October 27, 2015

Reading Material:

  • A Politics of Things, Deleuze’s Course on Rousseau: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxeTjgod3jSSS3pvdkh4U2s0Nlk/edit
  • Deleuze Dictionary: “Ecosophy”; “Deterritorialisation”; “Transcendental empiricism”

SESSION 2: Continental naturalism
(Dolphijn)
November 17, 2015

Reading Material:

  • Logic of Sense Appendix 2 Lucretius and the Simulacrum
  • Deleuze Dictionary: “Earth/La Terre”; “Hume”; “Nietzsche”; “Organism”

SESSION 3: Human and other nature
(Braidotti and Dolphijn)
December 8, 2015

Reading Material:

  • D&R Introduction: Repetition and Difference
  • ES: Empiricism and Subjectivity: chapter 4: “God and the world”; chapter 5: “Empiricism and subjectivity”and chapter 6: “Principles of human nature”
  • Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: chapter 4: “Nietzsche contra Darwin”a nd chapter 5:”Viroid Life: machines, technics and evolution”.
  • Deleuze Dictionary: “Creative transformation”; “Creative transformation and biology”; “Spinoza”; “Spinoza and ethics of joy”;

SESSION 4: Knowledge and Nature
(Braidotti and Dolphijn)
January 12, 2016

Reading Material:

  • Spinoza Expressionism in Philosophy Part 3 XVIII Towards the Third Kind of Knowledge
  • Gilles Deleuze: Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Fransisco: City Lights Books: Ch.2: “On Difference between the Ethics and a Morality” 5
  • Deleuze Dictionary: “Body”; “Force”; “Freedom”

SESSION 5: the State and Nature
(Dolphijn)
February 9, 2016

Reading Material:

  • AO 3.2 The Primitive Territorial Machine
  • Deleuze Dictionary: “State”; “State and geography”
  • Mark Bonta and John Protevi Deleuze and Geophilosophy; a Guide and Glossary. Part II Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy

SESSION 6: Who does the earth think it is?
(Dolphijn)
March 15, 2016

Reading Material:

  • ATP 3:The Geology of Morals
  • Deleuze Dictionary: “Politics”; “Ecology”; “State”; “Geography”
  • Mark Bonta and John Protevi Deleuze and Geophilosophy; a Guide and Glossary. Part II Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy

SESSION 7: Deleuze on Affirmation
(Braidotti)
April 12, 2016

Reading Material:

  • In: Gilles Deleuze, 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Fransisco: City Lights Books:
    Ch.2: “On Difference between the Ethics and a Morality”
    Ch. 3: “The Letters on Evil (correspondence with Blyenbergh)”
    Ch. 6: “Spinoza and Us”

SESSION 8: Conclusion
(Braidotti and Dolphijn)
May 24, 2016

Reading Material:

  • WIP 4:Geophilosophy
  • J. Protevi: Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences (2013)
  • Mark Bonta and John Protevi Deleuze and Geophilosophy; a Guide and Glossary. Part II Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy