Immanence

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

My argument is that while the dual categories of immanence and transcendence are often used in historical scholarship today as if they were universally valid, their actual use in this form cannot be traced back further than Kant. As a binary the terms become popular from the 1830s, partly in connection with ideological debates about the the future of religion. I reconstruct this development and then go on to show how they have been received by historical theologians and other scholars of ancient thought.

Among scientific impulses in Peter Greenaway’s film is his interest in biochemistry and evolution. Setting aside the TV biopic Darwin (1993), I draw special attention to his two early films displaying experimental imaginations of men becoming birds. A Walk through H (1978) depicts an ornithologist’s posthumous journey to a birds’ land mapped on the director’s own paintings, and The Falls (1980) lists 92 men’s symptoms of, or transformations into, ‘becoming-bird,’ after an apocalyptic disaster named the Violent Unknown Event. These fake documentaries unfold a unique obsession with the postmortem (de)evolution of the human, which is less eschatological than virtually liberating the organic structure of life into a non-systematic ‘body without organs’ as in Deleuze’s bio-philosophy. The Falls, especially, suggests how the ‘dynamic sublime’ of the VUE (foreshadowing fallout) brings about the ‘mathematical sublime’ of innumerable human birds, the animal ontology of being a multitude. This shift in the ‘sublime’ mode not only underlies the cinema of catastrophe (e.g. Hitchcock’s The Birds) and the society of proliferating simulacra, but also embodies itself visually through Greenaway’s later experiment on multiple screens and media interfaces.
From this point, I also relocate the postmortem evolution from the onscreen organic life to the film strip as such. Greenaway’s film biology A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), with its documentation of the animal decay, appears here as a key link to Bill Morrison’ film chemistry Light is Calling (2004), an optical reprinting of an early film as seen through the roiling emulsion of the celluloid itself. What matters is not just how the film represents a virtual evolution of the human, but how it presents its own actual death and postmortem rebirth. I delve into this reincarnation of the film which always works through art-and-science combinations, and becomes ever more problematic in the dematerializing digitization that raises the question on the end of film evolution.

La tesi presenta inizialmente il pensiero di Jacques Derrida sull'animalità. Il tema affrontato è la sovranità dell'uomo sul resto dei viventi, in particolare nei riguardi della discriminazione dell'animalità. Nei capitoli a seguire si attua un'emancipazione dell'animalità e non dall'animalità come la corrente umanista voleva. Attraverso l'ontogenesi del concetto di "umanità" viene decostruito il costrutto che sorregge la soglia che divide l'uomo dagli animali, laddove essi partecipano all'animalità in maniere differenti. L'emergenza di questa composizione dei temi trattati si erge ad azione esemplare con cui Derrida, prima di morire, ha lasciato delle tracce da seguire durante il ricevimento del premio Adorno.

The present thesis seeks to address, in a reading of the text Le bain de Diane by Pierre Klossowski, the specific modalities through which literature aims to understand the complex ties between concepts of 'immanence' and 'transcendence'. To do so, I begin by introducing the concepts necessary for such an undertaking ⎯ reading authors such as Plato, Apuleius, Pierre Hadot, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, all of whom have contributed to the concept of the 'demon' as described in Klossowski’s work ⎯ and by introducing the concept of 'simulacrum', a key concept in Klossowsi’s writing. By tracing the creation and representation of these concepts in
various texts and then identifying them in Le bain de Diane, I attempt to demonstrate the importance of literary figuration in our complex relationship with concepts of the 'sensitive' and the 'suprasensitive'.

This paper aims to understand meditation as a spiritual practice in the eastern religious traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, which is based on an important concept that a higher spiritual level in the inner world could be developed through a good skill of practicing meditation. Unlike western psychoanalysis based on the talking cure, eastern meditation in fact invites the subject to withdraw from any reliance on the therapists for any verbal interpretative analysis, the subject, in silence, gradually achieves his own inner awakening and builds up a sharper and better sense of self-recognition and inner security. Despite of the fact that meditation could help reduce anxiety, stress and anger and develop a good sense of well-being, confidence, compassion and love, it could restore and empower life energy in the body and as such, it helps achieve a good sense of reality that would traverse the pathological fantasy that has trapped the subject. Silence functions as a threshold to transport the subject into the virtual level of becoming within immanence into a state of the "superject," as a new awakened one discussed in The Fold. It's a virtual event that subtly creates a new sense of self. This eastern sense of the virtual forces within the body in fact is quite similar with the notion of immanence discussed in Deleuzian theories. Deleuze, unlike Cartesian dichotomy of the mind and the body, explains that the soul exists within the body, in other words, the body and the mind are the unity. Spinoza argues in Ethics that the body and the mind are united because God can be understood as substance; to him, God and Nature are one and the same thing, and thus the thinking nature is thinking substance. So with Deleuzian-Spinozian new understanding of the body, affects, in the virtual state, I attempt to understand the Deleuzian notion of affects within the body is related with the eastern idea of Chi (氣), the flow of life energy within the body, and thus practicing meditation is the silent regulation of the creative forces through the good skill of breathing and it could create the inner subtle level of self-awakening and also build up a stronger inner strength.

In his book, Capitalised Education: An Immanent Materialist Account of Kate Middleton, David R. Cole thoughtfully and thoroughly engages in an analysis that extends beyond the modern era to take into account a multiplicity of events and forces, which in their encounters produce social and cultural phenomena. Cole’s work is explicitly political as he engages in applied philosophy to elaborate upon the flows of capitalism and the emergence of Kate Middleton as a media object. The book, in its entirety, both is and is not about Kate Middleton. Through detailed and beautiful storytelling, Cole explores various historical plateaus (e.g., the death of Princess Diana, and monarchies of King George VI, Henry II and Lady Eleanor, the rise of industrialism, attitudes towards and about teaching) and describes the ways in which those plateaus are still at work, in some cases almost one thousand years later, to construct a capitalised education. Elaborating on the notion of capitalised education, Cole describes his project as a consideration of “the ways in which the factors analysed and revealed...come together and produce palpable social and cultural effects through Kate Middleton as media object” (p. 2). In his elaborations, Cole develops an immanent materialist analysis that is informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notions of assemblage, the rhizome, desire, and the Body without Organs, to name a few, though Cole does not get bogged down in explaining the theory itself. Rather, Cole embodies a Deleuzoguattarian ontology as he seeks to move beyond origins and causation and instead focuses on the at times more unfamiliar, but ever-proliferating intensities that impact the ways in which we emerge with that which we encounter, at times unconsciously. Students of philosophy, history, and education, and researchers who are interested in Deleuzoguattarian-influenced work will find Cole’s work both compelling and thoroughly enjoyable. ~ anonymous, Amazon site
The pomp and ceremony of a royal wedding might seem a strange anachronism in a world of global finance and cyber-capitalism. Yet, as David Cole demonstrates, the two are folded intricately into each other. Through an immanent materialist analysis that brings together key recent and historical moments or ‘plateaus’ in the emergence of capitalism, liberalism, and constitutional monarchy, and culminating in Kate Middleton’s 2011 marriage to Prince William, Cole’s wide ranging and provocative work reveals the complex and subtle ways in which capitalism’s decoding and deterritorialization go hand-in-hand with the continuation of social privileges and hierarchies. Along the way he speaks to the major political movements of the last century (liberalism, communism, fascism, empire, and decolonization), the globalization of media, the 2008 financial crisis, and more. Linking these to both established and emerging theories of radical political action, Cole traces the moments of rupture that might allow another politics to come to the fore. ~ Nathan Widder, Royal Holloway, University of London
Kate Middleton is an international celebrity, as well as a crucial figure in the biological, economic, and cultural reproduction of the British class system. In this book, David R. Cole offers us a multifaceted analysis of Middleton as "media object." Touching on topics as diverse as courtly love in medieval Europe and derivatives markets in contemporary finance, Capitalised Education traces a web of far-flung relationships that fatally lead us back to the absurdities of our collective fascination with the British Royal Family. ~ Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University
Cole has produced a masterful and critical evaluation of how the British Monarchy continues to assert and grow its influence in the 21st century. He significantly contributes to an almost muted discourse which critically explores how this influence is achieved and what is risked and gained in its attainment. The reader can’t but be left with a desire to question whether we should be comfortable with the process and effects this has on our behaviour, development and socialisation. ~ Roberto H. Parada, University of Western Sydney

In the article I argue that Hegel and Deleuze/Guattari construct two distinct political paths toward immanence. Both of these paths have as their starting point Rousseau's bourgeois. I show that both thinkers follow Rousseau in his attempt to construct political immanence and abandon the position of private man. However, in doing so they move in opposite directions. Hegel seeks to convert the bourgeois into the citizen , with the intention of reformulating the immanence of state-life presented in the The Social Contract by extending mutual recognition a distinct space in the form of civil society. In contrast Deleuze/Guattari move in the direction of becoming-animal along the lines of the Discourse on Inequality, by reformulating the relationship between life and society. At the same time, I argue that the overcoming of the problems that Hegel and Deleuze/Guattari identified in Rousseau introduces new ones and that the dangers inherent in the project of immanence cannot disappear.

This paper consider the experience of intoxication as one of immersion in immanence, rather than transcendent escape from reality. It critically traces the attempt to achieve experiential immanence in Deleuze and Guattari, Nick Land, and Beatriz Preciado. My claim is such attempts involve the fantasy of the dissolution of fantasy in immersion in 'real' production.

English Language Original Draft of “Имманентность и Жизнь” published in Логос: Философско-Литературный Журнал (“Immanence and Life: A Review Essay on Roberto Esposito’s Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy” in Logos:  Philosophical and Literary Journal)

Alex  Dubilet’s  essay  “The  Catastrophic  Joy  of  Abandoning  Salvation:  Thinking  the  Postsecular  with  Georges Bataille” explores  the  way  Bataille  belies  the  established  divisions  between  theological  and  philosophical  modes  of  thought  in  order  to  develop  a  critique  of  subjection  as  being  enacted  by  theologico
- religious  concepts,  operations,  and  structures  no  less
than  philosophico-secular  ones.  Building  on  Bataille,  Dubilet proposes rethinking the status of immanence and transcendence,  by  decoupling  them  from  their  usual  semantic  associations  that  align  immanence  with  secularity  and  transcendence  with  the  religious.  Dubilet  finds  an  important  element  for  a  novel  theory
of the postsecular in Bataille’s elaboration of catastrophic joy as a critique of investments in futurity and salvation found across the secular-religious divide.

"The short stories of Raymond Carver have been associated, since their publication, with a particular kind of American landscape, which became popularly known as ‘Carver Country’. This supposedly ‘dead-end’ suburban space resonated with the popular imagination of the time: post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, and headed into the decade of urban capitalist boom, the 1980s. However, the release of the unedited version of Carver’s first story collection last year, Beginners, reveals a very different kind of Carver landscape. A rich natural environment, which had been cut by the editorial changes of Gordon Lish now accompanied the green worlds already found extensively in Carver’s poetry.

In my paper I revisit Carver’s poetry to reveal ways that the poems use focal points in the natural environment, especially rivers, in order to invest significance into the material world. Poems that engage with non-material spaces such as dream landscapes and scenes from memory function to minimise ‘transcendent distance’ and create a sublime moment that approaches the Western philosophical conception of ‘Immanence’. This process, which operates in parallel, both in material space and textually on the page, charts a relationship between sensory perception, language as signifier and metaphorical flexibility. Carver’s poetic task is mapped in these ways onto natural material spaces, culminating in a reference to the ineffable, located at the simultaneously symbolic and sensory experience of the river.

My paper suggests ways in which one of the primary authors of so-called ‘minimalism’ was so powerfully suggestive in his representation of the expansive natural spaces of the American West, and the implications of his work for poetic spatial representation beyond his immediate time and place."

Call me wolfing. I was murdered in Lancashire (now a part of Cumbria) in 1390CE, by some pre-enlightened gentlemen. It was just before the perceptual turning point from Theos to Mechanos; from a transcendent God to little ghosts in your little machines.

Hem Spinoza hem de Nietzsche yalnızca içkin düşüncenin içine gizlenmiş aşkınlık tortularını temizlemekle kalmaz, aynı zamanda aşkınlığın arkasında yatan tipolojiyi de ortaya çıkarırlar. Bu, içkinlik düşüncesinin aslen pratik bir disiplin olduğunun en güçlü kanıtlarından biridir (Opus magnum’una “Ontoloji” değil “Etika” adını veren Spinoza’yı hatırlayalım). Her iki düşünür de “Kim aşkınlığı ister?” sorusunu –farklı formülasyonlarla- sorarak ahlaki dünya görüşünün ardında yatan varoluş üslubunu yaşamın gözünden bir değerlendirmeye tabi tutar.  Spinoza açısından aşkınlığı arzulayan ahlaki üçlü köle, rahip ve tiran olarak belirlenirken; Nietzsche güçsüz, kölece bir varoluş tipinin, “değerlerin değerini değiştirerek”,  yaşamı yasa ve yasak kavramları ile kıskaca alan aşkınlığı icat ettiğinden söz eder. Nasıl isimlendirilirse isimlendirilsinler, aşkınlıkla ilişkilendirilen tiplerin ortak noktası kederdir. Bunlar, kendi iktidarları için kedere ihtiyaç duyan; ölüme benzeyen yaşamlarının zehri ile -bilerek ya da bilmeyerek- dünyadan öç almaya çalışan tiplerdir. Spinoza tüm yaşamı boyunca bu tip bir varoluşun taşıyıcısı olan modus’lardan uzak durmuşken, Nietzsche daha örgütlü bir düzenlemeye göz kırparak içkinliğin büyük politikasına işaret eder: Güçlüleri güçsüzlere karşı korumak gerekir.

"De Bergson à Heidegger : rythme et lieu (esthétique immanente et logique immanente)",
article publié en japonais dans Annual review of the Philosophical Association of Western Japan,  no. 25 (Oct. 2017), p. 117-139. 西日本哲学会編『西日本哲学年報』第25号（2017年10月）、117-139頁。

The most original and shocking interpretation of Lucretius in the last 40 years.

Thomas Nail argues convincingly and systematically that Lucretius was not an atomist, but a thinker of kinetic flux. In doing so, he completely overthrows the interpretive foundations of modern scientific materialism, whose philosophical origins lie in the atomic reading of Lucretius' immensely influential book De Rerum Natura.

This means that Lucretius was not the revolutionary harbinger of modern science as Greenblatt and others have argued; he was its greatest victim. Nail re-reads De Rerum Natura to offer us a new Lucretius--a Lucretius for today.

This chapter examines the rhetoric of Máirtín Ó Cadhain (1906–70), an Irish-language writer and activist. Ó Cadhain developed a few key tropes in Irish-language expression—‘dead’, ‘live’ and ‘clay’—to reveal a series of analogies which he used to interrogate the views and policies of the Irish state and its cultural, intellectual, and political representatives. His writing and oratory drew its power from its use of these key figures to effect a reversal of perspective in terms of what we see as “living” and “dead” in Irish social, cultural, and political life. Cré (‘clay’) functioned as a key trope for Ó Cadhain, standing for sociality itself—the language and social life of people, especially the Western, Irish-speaking lower classes. “Clay” was also the soil they are formed by, soil which is largely man-made in many communities where Irish is spoken.
I suggest that, like our bodies and the clay they return to, tropes are alive because they are made of the same stuff as ourselves. Ó Cadhain’s poetics point to a radical immanence within human sociality, and I argue that this is the stance from which his interventions gain their power.

Both performance and pedagogy operate on a two–way communication between the agent and the recipient: the actor and the audience, the teacher and the student. Both performance and pedagogy have the potential to transform as well as to fail. We will explore to what extent performance means a becoming – a liminal experience both for the performers and the audience by exploring the proximity triggering elements. This paper will isolate these invitations that stem from the performance practice of the distinguished British experimental theatre troupe Forced Entertainment in engaging the audience. These moments of " summoning the presence in the absence " are allocated and applied into pedagogic principles to show how the common denominators of performance and pedagogy – liveness, fleetingness and irritability are intertwined. Rather than examining physical immersion we will explore how the virtual proximity, the " between and betwixt " , actor and spectator, between teacher and student, is achieved (or not) and how it contributes to mutually immanent, life illuminating experience. In the final part of the paper a practical application of conceptual findings from the theoretical part will be applied in English lessons to demonstrate whether these immanent invitations are easily executable or not.

As God is omnipresent (Terrien 1978, 249), “All of life is lived in his presence. ”  Many have sought his presence through philosophy  and nature (Kreider 2014, 20, 25).  Martin Luther believed that “God is present everywhere, but he is really to be found in the holy scriptures, in his word, more than anywhere else. (Kolb 2015, 9)”  One of the several ways that God’s presence is found in the Old Testament is in intertextual references to the second person of the trinity.  All three persons of God are all found in the Hebrew Bible.  Each of the persons of the trinity has a macro and micro version of their presence, as seen in the Prophets and the Writings.  God the Father has both omnipresence and immanence.  God the Holy Spirit is the wind of creation and order and the inspiration behind the Scriptures and prophets (Hamilton, Jr. 2006, 33-34).  God the Son is both prefigured and theophanous.  God the Son’s appearances in the Old Testament were carefully delineated by the apostle Matthew when he composed his gospel.  There are over 55 directly quoted references from the Old Testament in Matthew (Blomberg 2007, 1) and many more allusions.
The very existence of scripture is a powerful apologetic for the existence of God.  Its canonical harmony and literary quality shows an overarching author who spans at minimum all of historic time to the closure of the canon, and who works through all the cultures and social strata represented in the books.  This is only enhanced by a sampling of the Prophets and the Writings, and those more easily discerned forms of the presence of God may be clearly seen.  In the Prophets, we have theophanies (Terrien 1978, 229-232), deliverer-messiahs with poor morals, kings who aspire to messianic status but don’t quite get there, the movement of the ark and building of the temple, God’s appearance and disappearance, the pathos or embodiment through the prophets of God’s suffering (243, 246) (Burns 2009, 130), prophetic visions (Vos 1975 [1948], 239-243) and God’s voice in the prophets’ inspirings (234-239).  In the Writings, the presence of God is not as easily discerned.  We get first of all, an emphasis on the reverential fear of God  (Von Rad 1972, 65-66) which is best explained as a function of his presence.  We also find an emphasis in both Job and Ecclesiastes on God’s radical freedom  which redefines when we can account our circumstances as the presence or absence of God and other ways we can interpret them.  The Writings even relate that God’s presence is found in the underworld  (Terrien 1978, 241, 272).

This chapter is from my book "Kulturelle Komplexität: Gilles Deleuze und die Kulturtheorie der American Studies" (transcript, 2015). Its aim is to delineate and discuss Deleuze's temporal understanding of the constitution of subjectivity, focusing on the three passive syntheses of time introduced in "Difference and Repetition."

Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks are today acknowledged as a classic of the human and social sciences in the twentieth century. The influence of his thought in numerous fields of scholarship is only exceeded by the diverse interpretations and readings to which it has been subjected, resulting in often contradictory 'images of Gramsci'. This book draws on the rich recent season of Gramscian philological studies in order to argue that the true significance of Gramsci's thought consists in its distinctive position in the development of the Marxist tradition. Providing a detailed reconsideration of Gramsci's theory of the state and concept of philosophy, The 'Gramscian moment' argues for the urgent necessity of taking up the challenge of developing a 'philosophy of praxis' as a vital element in the contemporary revitalisation of Marxism.

This paper deals with Cervantes’s Don Quijote and Kathy Acker’s punk, postmodern Don Quixote as two “aesthetic objects” that connect with each other across time and textual space in rhizomatic, non-linear fashion, in enriching and challenging ways. It presents an immanent view of these texts, through an engagement with some of the philosophical concepts of Ortega y Gasset, Deleuze & Guattari, and objected-oriented ontology philosophers, Graham Harman, and Levi R. Bryant.

Questo studio analizza il romanzo "Lolita" di Vladimir Nabokov utilizzando un approccio lacaniano. Evidenzia come l'opera possa essere considerata un capolavoro della letteratura contemporanea in quanto mostra in primo luogo le dinamiche profonde del desiderio, in secondo luogo le due strutture psicologiche più comuni dell'uomo, la nevrosi e la perversione, in terzo luogo la loro interdipendenza speculare, in quarto luogo il sorprendente risultato del loro confronto: una vera e propria autoanalisi portata a termine, un vero e proprio balzo “al di qua”, che approda dapprima al sinthomo e poi alla sublimazione. Mostra, in altre parole, il tortuoso percorso del protagonista verso ciò che la filosofia, dall'esistenzialismo in poi, ha designato col termine "autenticità". Lega inoltre tale concetto alla sintesi tra trascendenza e immanenza, rappresentandola attraverso la figura geometrica della spirale tridimensionale.​

Quelle que soit la dimension rationnelle et argumentative de toute sa philosophie, Spinoza ne peut en aucune façon être considéré comme un théoricien de la « justification » de l’action politique par référence à des « valeurs » que pourrait atteindre une « conscience éclairée » ou « morale », ou par le « droit » voire la « Constitution » de la République. Spinoza est ainsi républicain en un sens vague, mais démocrate en un sens très radical. Il soumet en effet entièrement le juste et l’injuste (comme le pieux et l’impie) au légal et à l’illégal, c’est-à-dire la morale (tout comme la religion) à la politique, à l’extériorité des comptes et des comportements plutôt qu’à l’intériorité des croyances et des intentions. Dans l’immanence des comptes, rien ne peut venir surplomber les préférences des peuples. Le véritable nom de la politique chez Spinoza, comme chez Rancière, est ainsi « Démocratie » bien plus encore que « République ». Opposer des « valeurs » ou des « Constitutions » républicaines aux « préférences » démocratiques des peuples serait faire revenir la théologie dans la politique, alors que l’effort premier et constant de Spinoza aura été de les séparer.

Lucretius was the first philosopher of immanence. It is he and not Democritus or Epicurus who holds this title. If we want to understand the historical emergence of the concept of immanence, we should start by distinguishing its precursors in Greek atomism from its first complete incarnation in Lucretius. This way, we can see exactly what first defined and distinguished immanence from its past. Therefore in what follows I would like to make three, perhaps controversial, claims about the emergence of philosophical immanence. 1) Lucretius was not an atomist, 2) Greek atomism reintroduced transcendence, and 3) It is the primacy of motion in Lucretius that defines his philosophical immanence. Lucretius was not an atomist This thesis is as counterintuitive as it is straightforward. The first major difference between Lucretius and the earlier Greek atomists is precisely that—the atom. For Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus atoms are always in motion, but the atom itself remained fundamentally unchanged, indivisible, and thus internally static—even as it moved. Thus instead of positing discrete atoms as ontologically primary as both ancient Greek and later modern theories do, one of Lucretius's greatest novelties was to posit the movement or flow of matter as primary. Lucretius did not simply " translate Epicurus, " as the Greco-centric story goes; rather, he introduced the first immanent kinetic materialism in the West. For example, although the Latin word atomus (smallest particle) was available to Lucretius to use in his poem, he intentionally did not use it, nor did he use the Latin word particula or particle to describe matter. The English translations of " atom, " " particle, " and others have all been added to the text in translation based on a certain historical interpretation of it. The idea that Lucretius subscribed to a world of discrete particles called atoms is therefore both a projection of Epicureanism, who used the Greek word atomos, and a retroaction of modern scientific mechanism of the fifteenth century onto De Rerum Natura. Lucretius rejected entirely the notion that things emerged from discrete particles. To believe otherwise is to distort the original meanings of the Latin text as well as the absolutely enormous poetic apparatus he summoned to describe the flowing, swirling, folding, and weaving of the flux of matter. Although Lucretius rejected the term atomus, he remained absolutely true to one aspect of the original Greek meaning of the word, τομος (átomos, " indivisible "), from-(a-, " not ") + τέμνω (témnō, " I cut "). Being is not cut up into discrete particles, but is composed of continuous flows, folds, and weaves. Discrete " things " (rerum) are composed of corporeal flows (corpora) that move together (conflux) and fold over themselves (nexus) in a woven knot work (contextum). For Lucretius, things only emerge and have their being within and immanent to the flow and flux of matter in motion. Discreteness is an apparent product of continuous folded matter, uncut, undivided, and in motion and not the other way around.

This thesis contributes to contemporary debates on the nature of immanence and transcendence in political philosophy by developing the political and micropolitical implications of a philosophical position committed fully to immanence. For many in the current debates who maintain that politics requires some notion of a political subject, philosophies of immanence are considered incapable of mounting an effective politics because they deny the antagonisms and ruptures considered necessary for such a subject. These perspectives often define immanence in terms of ‘complete inclusivity’ of differences, and often accuse it of eschewing emancipation and siding with some form of bourgeois ethics. Against these dismissals, this thesis argues that a philosophy of immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of the political, one that re-orients our understanding of the self away from a still dominant reliance on an idea of the subject. It achieves this by conceiving of the Other or the Outside not (pace philosophies of transcendence) in terms of an absolute but never present fullness or lack, but instead as a disjunctive fold that goes beyond the opposition of interiority and exteriority in favour of the idea of intensity. In this way immanence becomes the ontological centre of a different type of emancipatory politics.

The thesis presents its argument by tracing out a lineage of immanence through the work of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Deleuze. Together these thinkers present a ‘spectre of immanence’ that counters Slavoj Žižek’s proclamation of a ‘spectre of the [Cartesian] subject’ haunting contemporary thought. Proceeding this way, the study shows how a common thread of immanence unites these four thinkers, informs their relations to one another (in terms of what each one picks up and discards from his predecessors), and unifies them in a shared attempt to reconceptualise the terms by which the political is thought. In this way, the theme of immanence acts as the primary catalyst or dark precursor to their thought as a whole. Though presented as an evolutionary chronology in the sense that it outlines a series of progressive moves from Sartre to Deleuze, the lineage the thesis establishes also works by way of a number of productive misreadings each thinker makes of the others. In this respect, the lineage accords with Nietzsche's comparison of the thinker to an arrow shot by Nature, that another thinker picks up where it has fallen so that he can shoot it somewhere else: each arrow is taken up in part through a misunderstanding, or at least a strained understanding.

This is a critical study of music for electric guitars by composer-performer Rhys Chatham (b. 1952), work that distils and synthesises elements from various genres, primarily, minimalism and rock. I investigate the development, realisation, and import of these works, created between 1977 and 2006, in an analytical, biographical, and cultural account that examines unpublished performance directions, scores, and original interviews with this significant, yet under-explored artist and his collaborators. An immanent sublime aesthetic characterises Chatham’s formative experiences in downtown music, and I explain how this informs his composition, performance, and listening practices (including attendant issues of entrainment, frisson, and perceptualization). This reading is situated within major music traditions of the later twentieth century and at the forefront of a nexus of postmodern radical pluralism, operating across the borderline of the avant-garde and the popular.
I use a range of research methods: aesthetics, cultural theory, interviews, musical analysis, music theory, and my own experience of performing several of these works. Part One maps Chatham’s development as a composer and performer through his engagement with modernist, serialist, electronic, minimalist, improvised, North Indian classical, popular, and rock music between 1952 to 1978, to interpret how he distilled key components of these experiences. Part Two outlines how he synthesised these elements in several non-notated works for the electric guitar, from 1977 to 1982, using idiosyncratic and inventive approaches to composition and performance. Part Three provides in-depth analyses of Chatham’s notated music for increasingly large ensembles of electric guitars from 1984 to 2006, to outline the development of his post-Cagean musical language, and interpret the wider import of these works.
I argue that the interpenetration and reciprocity of musical elements in these works expand, and implode, pre-established forms of art and rock music. While this eludes ‘either/or’ classifications, per se, this is a particular kind of post-minimalism, with significant components of popular music, identifiable as part of a post-1945 culture that was distinguished by immanence, participation, and subjectivity.

This review essay attempts to present a coherent and reasonably unitary picture of the contemporary ‘Speculative Turn’ as charted in the reviewed volume. Avoiding a more objective yet more anodyne chapter by chapter summary, I paint an intentionally synoptic view by selecting some common concerns of the authors involved, and group them under five ‘core themes’. Throughout, I try to keep open the comparative channel with the realist tenets of Critical Realism, and conclude vouching for the necessity of more bridge-building works to appear in the future.

Kabir, we may think, needs no introduction. After all we believe he was born a Hindu (miraculously of a Brahmin virgin widow according to Kabir-panthis), found in a lake and reared by Muslim foster parents; used a stratagem to become guru Ramanand’s disciple by lying down on the ghat at dawn, tripping up the guru and receiving his spontaneous exclamation Ram Ram! as a namadiksa; was denounced by the Kashi Brahmins and brought in chains before Sultan Sikander Lodi who passed the death sentence (as Kabir refused to bow to him) and after three unsuccessful attemps (the Ganges did not drown him, fire did not burn him and the elephant did not crush him) the Sultan bowed before the Kabir.

But alas none of the above is true. Kabir was born a Muslim, did not have a guru, was not even a contemporary of Lodi according to the author’s research.

Speculative realists claim that almost all post-Kantian philosophy suffers from what they call correlationism: that we never know ourselves or objects in-themselves. Correlationism, they claim, originated with Kant's response to Hume. However, Deleuze's reading of Hume and his transcendental empiricism seems avoid the problem of correlationism. I argue that in doing so, Deleuze does not read Hume to produce a non-correlationist ontology but develops a non-ontological constructivist philosophy. Such an understanding of transcendental empiricism reveals that the speculative realist project itself fails to move beyond the logic of correlationism.

This chapter is an exercise in engaging with the concepts and functions populating Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (schizo)analysis of fascism. Immanence will constitute the conceptual pivot of the chapter. I contend that one must think through and expose the unresolved tensions in the philosophy of immanence in order to take the measure of the perils in store for contemporary anti-fascist struggles. Without such an exercise, we would fail to comprehend how new forms of fascism are insidiously emerging from within our everyday practices, contaminating our chances of standing against them. By inquiring into the triple aspect of immanence as (i) the self-perpetuating movement of capitalist accumulation processes, (ii) the most treacherous feature of micro-fascisms, and (iii) paradoxically, one of the conditions of resistance and revolution, I ask how a notion can be made to carry so much contradictory weight. The aim is not so much to trace the itinerary of the concept, but rather to put it into an echo chamber where it would resonate with other figures of immanence, borrowed notably from Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt, so as to bring out its real import. Although sketchy, the last part of the chapter aims to formulate the conditions under which an immanent notion of power may serve as a basis for rethinking the struggle against fascism in contemporary societies.

Cet essai porte sur le problème philosophique de la communication, à partir de la question, classique en métaphysique, de l’un et du multiple. Le but est de proposer une philosophie immanentiste de la communication, capable de penser la communication des paradigmes scientifiques et de les autonomiser par rapport à la philosophie, sans pour autant amoindrir l’intérêt en soi de la philosophie ni sa pertinence pour les questions communicationnelles. Car il semble difficile à première vue de ne pas reconduire un dogmatisme philosophique imposant une définition de la communication sur l’ensemble des paradigmes de la science. Derrière cette idée se cache pourtant un préjugé, à la fois transcendantiste et doxique, selon lequel il existerait une primauté ontologique de l’Un sur le multiple et de l’identité sur les différences, comme si la communication devait nécessairement signifier la recherche du consensus épistémologique ou du sens ontologique. Or, qu’en serait-il si des philosophies permettaient, chacune à leur manière, de concevoir une communication ontologique paradoxale, bousculant le sens commun et jouant sur la non-hiérarchie entre l’un et le multiple?

Dans cet essai, trois mouvements philosophiques sont produits successivement pour comprendre comment on peut contrer de différentes façons la transcendance, mais aussi comment on peut en arriver à soutenir une philosophie radicalement immanentiste de la communication. L’ensemble du raisonnement se construit sur deux lignes transversales de problématisation : celle du paradoxe ontologique de l’un et du multiple, puis celle du statut et du rôle du transcendantal. Le premier mouvement se penche sur une philosophie empiriste, se basant sur une herméneutique critique à la rencontre de Kuhn, Apel et Habermas, mais  trouvant sa pleine mesure dans la lecture aubenquienne de l’ontologie d’Aristote, tandis que le deuxième mouvement s’attarde sur l’interprétation dixsauïste de l’idéalisme de Platon. C’est lors du troisième mouvement que s’effectue un double renversement de l’empirisme et de l’idéalisme, à partir du paradoxal empirisme des Idées de Gilles Deleuze, auteur principal sur lequel s’appuie cet essai. On évaluera enfin la portée épistémologique de ce mouvement de problématisation au regard de la production philosophique et de la recherche scientifique, en interrogeant leur relation et en s’intéressant au rôle de la communication dans leur déploiement respectif.