The Generous Ethic of Deleuze

This paper argues that the affirmative philosophy of Gilles Deleuze opens for a generous ethic. Such ethic passes on new or different possibilities of life. The paper briefly outlines the basic ideas in Deleuze thinking that can be understood as generous. Then it suggests how paying attention is a prerequisite for practicing a generous ethics, that is, mainly being aware of what, how and why something happens. Finally, it exemplifies how--referring to Christopher Nolan＇s film Inception---we may practice a generous ethic.

Detour and Access,Deleuze and Guattari’s Researches on Chinese Immanent Becoming

This paper mainly discusses Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s researches on Chinese immanent becoming,they explain the theory of rhizome,the theory of becoming and the immanent philosophy from the relation between the grass and China,the line and Chinese Poetry Painting,the figure and chinese thougth,and display the others'visual angle from which they enter into Western philosophy by Chine.Meanwhile,by the intermediary of French sinologist Fran?ois Jullien,Deleuze and Guattari encounter the immanent transcendence of modern neo-confucianism on the plane of immanence.This shows the interleaving operation between Chinese thought and western philosophy,and presents the movements of the thoughts which become each other and fuse each other between Chinese thought and western philosophy.

“It Could Have Been Said!”—On the Dialogical Space Between Machery and Deleuze

This paper aims to parallelize the theorizations of Pierre Macherey and Gilles Deleuze.First,the author,according to Macherey,must have left something unsaid in his text.The unsaid or the narrative rupture is responsible for the multiplicity of the voices in the text,enabling the text to exist.Above all,Macherey argues that the unsaid or the narrative rupture emerges from how the author chooses to represent ideology.That is,Macherey’s so-called unsaid or narrative rupture is actually what the author could have said;it is in fact a potentiality embedded in the text.On the other hand,when postulating his virtual(ity)/actual(ity)couplet,Deleuze asserts that the virtual(ity)is actually a potentiality that can be tapped.To be more precise,the virtual(ity)has its own reality,and once actualized,it will be transformed into something entirely new and different.Here,the dialogical space between Macherey and Deleuze is plain to see:Macherey’s so-called unsaid or narrative rupture is literally Deleuze’s so-called virtuality.When the unsaid is said,a virtuality is actualized.And a potentiality is thus tapped.By such a reading strategy,we readers are presented with an enactment of an alternative case scenario of the text,namely,how the text could have been made over.In the end,an example of this reading strategy is provided:Macherey argues that Marquis de Sade’s desire-ruled society is more oppressive.What de Sade has left unsaid is the problematic relationship between desire and oppression.And it is exactly the potentiality in his works.

The Aesthetics of Nature in Deleuze＇s Philosophy

In Critique of Pure Reason （1996）, Immanuel Kant says that the term ＂aesthetic＂ means ＂the science of the laws of sensibility＂ and suggests giving up usage of it to indicate ＂the critique of taste＂ which executes the criticism of the beautiful. It is well known that Gilles Deleuze was inspired by all genres of the arts, namely movies, paintings, music, and so on. However, this paper argues that what is more essential for Deleuzian philosophy is aesthetics as a science of sensibility. What motivated Deleuze, especially from the 1950s to the 1960s, seems to have consisted in discovering the weaknesses of the Kantian aesthetic in order to take it apart. In fact, one of the main themes in Difference and Repetition （1994） was to free ＂sensibility＂ itself from Kant＇s philosophical system. This theme subsisted in his writing even after the 1970s, and led him to develop a ＂natural philosophy＂ of sorts. This is because the supposition that ＂the sensibility itself＂ is independent from any human faculties gave him an opportunity to carefully consider the multiplicity and productivity of Nature itself. Finally, Deleuze created his own ＂ethology＂ that would capture the increasingly interrelated movements within Nature produced by heterogeneous elements. This paper describes the process of Deleuzian thought as outlined above, surveying his view of Kantian philosophy and the development of his natural philosophy as ＂the aesthetics of Nature.＂

Corpus, Body, and Sense in Nancy, Deleuze and Charles H. Long

This article investigates the role of the body in Jean-Luc Nancy＇s powerful essay Corpus, and critiques it from the standpoint of Agamben＇s biopolitics. For Nancy, the body becomes the privileged site of both existence and sense in a way that threatens to obscure the logic of exceptional decision that Agamben takes from Carl Schmitt. As an alternative to Nancy＇s understanding of the body, we can see in Deleuze a series of bodies that works in parallel to a series of sense or language, where sense and body do not get collapsed into each other. At the same time, contemporary continental philosophy resists the idealistic separation of thinking and embodiment. Deleuze calls this relation between sense and body a cut, but we could also consider a parallax, following Slavoj Zizek. Finally, African-American historian of religion Charles H. Long＇s work complements some of Deleuze＇s insights in a more explicitly postcolonial context.

On Honesty and Deceit： An Interpretation of Difference and Repetition

Foucault famously questioned the humor, and possibly the deceit, at the heart of Deleuze＇s philosophy by asserting its sincerity and seriousness. In this paper I address how humor and sincerity, and thereby truth and falsity, are philosophical concepts at the core of Deleuze＇s thought. Using Deleuze＇s work Difference and Repetition as the focal object of my interrogation, I seek to show how truth and falsity are structured by difference and repetition. Deleuze＇s philosophy of pure difference does not merely try to critique traditional notions of truth, but attempts to define a new model of truth and falsity that bears both differences and repetitions from the previous models in the history of philosophy.

The Dialogue Between Cinema and Philosophy： Hannah Arendt by Margarethe Von Trotta

Hannah Arendt, the new film by the German director Margarethe Von Trotta, does not seem just like another trying to represent philosophy through the classic cinematic storytelling. It builds instead a perfect dialogue between these two practices that never encroach each other： There is not any doctrine that prevents cinema＇s freedom to create images and any philosophy claim that forces cinema to find in images an alternative way of expression. Von Trotta leaves any biopic form and stages a harmonic building where cinema fulfills philosophy and philosophy fulfills cinema. In this way she gets an outright practical exhibition of a theory, the ＂banality of evil＂. We want to comprehend the reasons of this perfect building analyzing this film, its characters with their acts, all the images their montage, and editing, everything that supports the Arendt＇s philosophical notion. We work on the film with the philosophical categories created by Gilles Deleuze to study the history of cinema in two essays, Image-mouvement and Image-time. In this way we can unfold how Margarethe Von Trotta represents a theory through images, without any word as intermediary

Becoming-Music in 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds

In accordance to Langerian aesthetic theory, Mark Campbell （1992） concludes that Cage＇s 4 33＂ （1952） is by no means aesthetic music. I argue the antithesis： Cage＇s 433＂ satisfies Langerian aesthetic theory, and is indeed ＂aesthetic＂ music. Cage does something more： he satisfies Langerian aesthetic theory, yet he is not limited by it. He does not simply create music, nor does he offer listeners a musical space. He creates what Gilles Deleuze and Fe1ix Guattari （1987） call a line of becoming that passes between music making and a musical space. In 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, Cage presents a sense of emptiness and numbness felt simultaneously with fullness and explosion. In what appears to be stillness, the listener experiences the flux of movement; what appears to be devoid of depth, is filled with complexities. 433＂ embraces chance, uncertainty, and the unknown; it is an experimental process; it is becoming-music in 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

Deterritorializing the Nation： Deleuzian Time, Space and Narrative in the Video Art of Lia Lapithi Shukuroglou

The purpose of this paper is to engage with Gilles Deleuze＇s work on time and space in cinema as a theoretical trajectory for exploring the video art of Lia Lapithi Shukuroglou. In Cinema 2： The Time-Image （1989）, Deleuze argues that post-Second World War cinema has been shaped by a historical transformation compelling it to create new signs and images. Centering on the post-war landscape of Cyprus in 1974, the moment of ＂historical transformation＂ in Deleuze is transposed to this national context; examining Lapithi＇s response to the crisis of historical time in its relation to physical spaces. It negotiates a contextualized reading of three videos and argues that they manifest Deleuzian ＂time-images＂. These texts react to the territorialization of real spaces by deterritorializing official national history. Using Martin Jones＇ study, Deleuze, cinema and national identity： Narrative time in national contexts （2006） Lapithi＇s time-images are interpreted as ＂unruly＂ as they resist a linear narrative and destabilize public time. Contrary to Martin Jones＇s view that time-images constitute a temporary deviation from flowing national time, the author argues that Lapithi excavates alternative temporalities in perpetuity; whilst proposing that in the context of Cyprus the deterritorialization of space by time postpones the nation＇s identity.

Media Theory:The Turn from Humanism to Anti-Humanism

This article traces the shift in media theory from humanism to antihumanism,or from extensionism to assemblage theory and machinism.The suggestion is that the anti-humanistic orientation illuminates the human condition even better,especially in the post-industrial and digital ages when Kafkaesque absurdity characterizes human life.The article also points,if only in passing,to the relevance of interology to media-theoretic inquiry.

Dreaming Forward: Postidentity and the Generative Thresholds of Tourism

This manuscript from Hollinshead and Vellah calls for researchers in Tourism Studies and related Fields to reflect upon their own role in refreshing the social imaginaries of“after-colonialism”under the nomadisms of our time.Deleuzian in outlook,it positions the“post”of postcolonialism not as an end to colonialism’s imperatives but as a generative-portal through which new-seeds-of-”becoming”are discernable as the postidentities(rather than the“identities”)of populations are interpretable in multidirectional,non-hierarchical,and not easily-predictable ways.In provoking(after Deleuze)thought per rhizomatic processes(rather than via fixed concepts),the manuscript-critiquing these dynamic matters of“postidentity”-then harnesses the insights of(Leela)Ghandi’s on hybrid-nomadic-subjects,and of Venn on alternative-(com)possible-futures.Thereafter,these concerns of and about“after-colonialism”are critically contextualised within Aboriginal“Australia”,via the views of a pool of Indigenous intellectuals there,who synthesise the disruptive dialectics of belonging-cum-aspiration which they maintain that they and fellow Aboriginal people(of many sorts)face today.Throughout this manuscript,the agency and authority of tourism hovers in its sometimes-manifest/sometimes-latent generative power to project empowering postidentities for the world’s“host”or“visited”populations today.

The Masquerade of Male Masochists： Two Tales of Translation of the Zhou Brothers （Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren） in the 1910s

Through reading two creatively translated stories by the Zhou brothers, Lu Xun＇s （Zhou Shuren） ＂The Soul of Sparta＂ （Sibada zhi hun, 1903） and Zhou Zuoren＇s ＂The Chivalrous Slave Girl＂ （Xia niinu, 1904）, this paper takes a close look at the intellectual trend in the first decade of the twentieth-century China of constructing strong and heroic women as the emblem of national power while rendering men as powerless. By focusing on a foreign heroine with traditional Chinese virtues, both translations creatively Sinicized and feminized the foreign power in the original tales. At the same time, male characters, prospective readers of the stories, and even authors themselves were marginalized, diminished, and ridiculed vis-a-vis the newly constructed feminine authority. Comparing this form of cultural masochism to other literary masochisms in modem China analyzed by Rey Chow and Jing Tsu respectively, this paper endeavors to excavate a hybrid model of nationalist agency grounded in the intertwined relationship of race, gender and nation. In my analysis, Gilles Deleuze＇s discussion on masochism is utilized as a heuristic tool to shed light on the revolutionary potential embedded in the ＂strong women, weak men＂ complex in the 1910s. I argue that the cultural masochism in late Qing represents one of the earliest attempts of the Chinese intellectuals to creatively use Chinese traditional gender cosmology to absorb the threat of Western imperialism and put forward a hybrid model of nationalist agency.

Playing Inside the Lines： The Fold, the Dispositif, and the Return Home

This paper seeks to examine a particular aspect of the communicological dynamic of play and boundaries. Working from an existential concept of play as creative, dialogic expression （and as the vehicle of new experience and new thought）, I will explore the human experience of limits, borders, and scaffolds. The existence of a grammar is vital to the function of both a language and a cultural system. But, as speakers and participants, we do not learn the language from the outside in. That is, we start speaking the language before we know anything about it. As infants, we hear sounds and observe gestures and we imitate them. Within this fold, we gain consciousness of an outside. Mastery of grammars and codes enable us to enter worlds seemingly closed off by boundaries, seemingly transforming alien and outsider status into group membership and inhabitant. As such, this paper opens up the question of what it means to be outside and inside. The standpoint of this paper is semiotic, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic. To this end, the essay will closely engage with the thinking of Merlean-Ponty, Deleuze, Foucault, and Kristeva.

A Shakespearean Critique of Emerson in Melville's Pierre:Metaphor as Smokescreen and Enthusiasm

This article is intended as a differential contribution to the study of Melville, still the central novelist of American literature in his complex, meditative negotiations of the various and often contradictory strands of the history of ideas that have impacted the United States since its founding generations: Calvinism, democratic ethics, Emersonian self-reliance, and even the skeptical mode of vision of American modernism(as characterized by writers of immigrant or Southern provenance such as O'Neill, or Faulkner), yet which Melville tellingly associates with Shakespeare and Hawthorne. Indeed, I take as a starting point Deleuze's assertion that Melville stands as the precursor to a crucial line of nihilistic thinking continuing in Nietzsche and culminating in literary modernism, and I explore the ramifications of this claim with reference to Melville's disastrous and often derided novel Pierre(1852), a bitter and digressive rumination on American life and letters following the critical and commercial failure of Moby Dick. A still controversial semi-narrative account of disavowed incest and class intolerance in the privileged, Northeastern milieu of Melville's early years, Pierre is also his most philosophical work up to that point, abundant in stylistic and structural experiment, most particularly in regard to what might connect fiction and literary language to contemporary philosophical discourses of idealism, metaphysics, and democratic ethics. Melville ultimately finds the crux of this connection in metaphor as that which links sensual, aesthetic, and cognitive experience to the abstract ideological commitments that govern our moral choices. Crucially, that link is neither simplistically causal nor necessarily positive.I argue that Melville slyly associates the incongruent literary styles that he deploys in Pierre with the differing, contesting philosophical world-views that the novel explicitly evokes(most notably the so-called "Transcendentalism" of Emerson). The vehicle for this experiment appears to be a rather surface-oriented view of literary style characterized by an extravagance of metaphoric density. It is this quality that, I argue, seems to divide Pierre into two distinct conceptual and stylistic parts: the fi rst is characterized by an exalted, ecstatic literary rhetoricrepresenting the confidence and self-reliance of the young hero, characterized by a rather Emersonian ‘organic unity' of nature and the mind's creative and poetic faculties that is meant to transcend all questions of literary taste. The style here is ‘enthusiastic,' as Melville characterizes his eponymous protagonist, thus relating Pierre to what cultural historians have noted as the chief quality of democratic optimism, Emersonian philosophy, and what Harold Bloom calls "The American Religion." The second, conveyed through what could be called a series of styles and variations whose only commonality is the critical reduction of and skepticism towards our "symbol-making capacity"(Sacvan Bercovitch), is associated with the novels' dark heroine Isabel, a spiritual seductress represented by uncanny, sensual imagery, and a lack of causal, narrative, temporal, or descriptive coherence. She represents all that is unutterable in human experience, up against which Pierre's impulsive self-reliance and selfdefi ned moral absolutism crashes. This second half of the book is fi tted with astonishing(and subsequently condemned) negativity towards received ethical and literary discourses of midcentury America: including a cryptic pseudo-philosophical tract on the incompatibility of time and(Christian) truth that parallels Deleuze's claims.In view of this contrast, metaphor in Pierre acts as a kind of smokescreen, calling attention to its own palpable richness as a desirable, aesthetic mode of experience, and yet concealing much more than it reveals, essentially misdirecting all communicants of language from actuality, including that which our socially determined and hierarchical language does not wish us to acknowledge, from the social abject(Isabel and the prurient discipline of working class sexuality) to the Freudian abject—away from what we might generally call knowledge of the world(which for Melville is invariably negative and tragic) but also, more ambiguously, from practical wisdom. Philosophically, the result is a sort of tragic reinterpretation(rather than rejection) of Emerson in a Shakespearean mode: for if a leisurely mode of satisfaction in reference to the spiritual authority of nature is initially satirized as the privilege of a landed gentry who neither know the world(in its material and social forces) nor themselves, nevertheless, the ultimate fruitlessness and irrelevancy of human endeavor in a fated and indifferent cosmos necessitates a tragic self-knowing, or emptying out of personal illusions, that paradoxically liberates the decisive individual action that Emerson prizes, even as such action(in Melville's novel) condemns the doer to social ostracism and extinction.

The Incommensurate/Illogical in Perelman/Marx: The Linguistic Pragmatics of American Humor

This article offers a preliminary analysis of the language of certain varieties of American comedy that arose out of the Vaudeville theater(from roughly 1910–1930)and,later,out of the culture of popular magazines from(roughly)the 1920s to the 1950s.The focus is on the exemplary and highly original comic language of S.J.Perelman(1904–1979),the Jewish prose humorist,and Perelman’s quasi-mentor,the legendary stage and screen comedian Groucho Marx(1890–1979),who was renowned for his improvisational wit.The article’s purpose is to explicate,with reference to important developments in 20th century linguistics and semiotics,some aspects of these highly original,self-conscious and indeed modernist verbal practices.It also tentatively explores the signif icance of these unconventional linguistic intuitions in regards to broader questions concerning the possibility of effective communication and,thus,the links between discourse and social ideology in a mid-century American context.The theoretical perspectives brought to bear on this subject include Grice’s theory of conversational implicature and Austin’s Speech Act Theory—both cornerstones of linguistic pragmatics—as well as Deleuze’s concept of a‘minor literature,’a theory of modernist literary practice substantially determined by earlier developments in semiotic theory and philosophical pragmatism.