Deleuze Seminars 2014-2015

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Deleuze and the New Humanities

Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn
Deleuze Seminar 2014-15

Date: Academic year 2014-2015 (see details below)
Time: Tuesday afternoons, 14.00-17.00
Venue: Stijlkamer van Ravensteijn , Kromme Nieuwe Gracht 80, Utrecht University.
Organised by: the 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.
Registration: please send an e-mail, including a biographical text of up to 100 words stating your affiliation and motivation for the seminar, to OSL: osl-fgw@uva.nl and the Centre for the Humanities: gw.cfh@uu.nl.

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

Format

The seminar consists of ten sessions in English which will run throughout the academic year 2013-14 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 2014-15

Wheras Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) started his career “rewriting” the History of Philosophy, the second part of his oeuvre (published in the 1970’s and the 1980’s mainly) focused more on politics and aesthetics. It is in this second period that many humanities scholars traditionally have found their inspiration as it is here that concepts that deal with emancipation, resistance, liberation, creativity and life, are being invented. His books on cinema, the Capitalism and Schizophrenia books written with Guattari, but also his analysis of particular writers (Proust, Carroll, Kafka, Melville, Woolf) and visual artists (Bacon, Klee) are of special relevance, as is his enduring reflection on what counts as the human within the Humanities in the past and the present.

At the start of the 21st century, an age in which the Humanities are undergoing radical challenges and profound changes, a new rereading of the inspiring oeuvre of Deleuze seems necessary. While the traditional readings of his work have not lost importance, emerging interdisciplinary fields of study ask for new conceptual apparati. In this seminar our aim is to experiment with the work of Deleuze in order to see how his ideas can help these emerging fields, to see in what way Deleuze already anticipated upon them and how his concepts are able to push the discussions forwards.

Abbreviations of key Deleuze and Guattari texts:

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

DETAILED SEMINAR PROGRAMME

SESSION 1: (Braidotti and Dolphijn)
September 16, 2014
Introduction: Deleuze on the Usefulness of Philosophy

Reading Material:

  • Cinema 2 Part 3 (1 page)
  • In Two Regimes: “How Philosophy is Useful to Mathematicians or Musicians” In WIP: “Introduction: The question then…” and chapter 3: “Conceptual Personae”
  • Introduction: “Deleuze’s Philosophy and the Art of Life Or: What does Pussy Riot Know?” In: The Deleuzian Century, Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn (eds.) Rodopi, 2014

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SESSION 2: (guest: Patricia Pisters, University of Amsterdam)
October 14, 2014
Deleuze on Post-Cinema

Reading Material:

  • “The Brain is the Screen”. In Two Regimes: What is the Creative Act? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DskjRer95s
  • ATP: Plateau 12 (on the war machine), especially “Proposition VIII. Metallurgy in itself constitutes a flow necessarily confluent with nomadism”
  • P. Pisters: “Flashforward: the future is now” in: Deleuze Studies vol. 5, 2011: 98-115

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SESSION 3: (Guest: Birgit Kaiser , Utrecht University)
November 4, 2014
Deleuze on the Postcolonial

Reading Material:

  • In Desert Islands: Desert Islands
  • In Desert Islands: Jean Jacques Rousseau: Precursos of Kafka, Celine and Pone
  • Logic of Sense Appendixes II (301-321): Michel Tournier and the World Without Others

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SESSION 4: (Braidotti and Dolphijn)
December 9, 2014
Deleuze on Posthumanism

Reading Material:

  • In Desert Islands: “Nomadic Thought”
  • In Desert Islands: “Humans: a Dubious Existence”
  • In Two Regimes: “Response to a Question on the Subject”
  • R.Braidotti: The Posthuman chapter 2: “Post-anthropocentrism”.
  • Deleuze: Course on Spinoza and Individuality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXBTOPE9AmI

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SESSION 5: (Guest: Sjoerd van Tuinen, Erasmus University Rotterdam)
January 13, 2015
Deleuze on Europe, modernism, ressentiment

Reading Material:

  • In Two Regimes: “Europe the Wrong Way”.
  • In Two Regimes: “May ’68 Did Not Take Place”.
  • R.Braidotti: “Nomadic European Citizenship” in : Nomadic Theory, CUP, 2011.
  • Franco “Bifo” Berardi “The European Collapse”, in The Uprising. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEg4Tc40rWM

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SESSION 6: (Guest: Piotrek Swaitkowski, Radboud University)
February 17, 2015
Deleuze on Economics beyond the State

Reading Material:

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SESSION 7:  (Braidotti)
March 17, 2015
Deleuze on Affirmation

Reading Material:

In: Gilles Deleuze (trans. Robert Hurley), 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”

In: Rosi Braidotti, 2011. Nomadic Theory. New York: Columbia University Press:

  • Ch. 10: “Powers of Affirmation”

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SESSION 8: (Guest : Kathrin Thiele, Utrecht University)
April 14, 2015
Deleuze and Feminist Theory

Reading Material:

  • ATP: chapter on “Becoming”: pages 232-309, esp. pages 232-243, and 272-286.
  • Rosi Braidotti on Deleuze and becoming-woman in the 2nd edition of Nomadic Subjects (Columbia University Press, 2011)
  • Elisabeth Grosz “The Future of Feminist Theory” (2011).

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SESSION 9: (Guest: Henk Oosterling , Erasmus University Rotterdam)
May 12, 2015
Deleuze on the Post-Disciplinary (Digital) Societies

Reading Material:

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NATIONAL DELEUZE SYMPOSIUM: Deleuze and Aesthetics
Date: to be confirmed
Radbout University Nijmegen
Organized by Prof. Anneke Smelik and Arjen Kleinherenbrink
(More details to be announced )

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SESSION 10: (Braidotti and Dolphijn)
June 2, 2015
Conclusion: on freedom through the understanding of our bondage, or : from Chaos to the Brain

Reading Material: