Jonnie Eriksson

While Aristotle has conventionally been perceived as a precursor for the taxonomy of modern biological systematics, such as that of Carolus Linnaeus, this essay investigates the relationship between Aristotelian metaphysics and natural history in order to demonstrate the problem of anomalies in any system of this kind. In particular, the problem involves the place that may be given to the unnatural (deviations form the norm of nature) in a system for nature – if there can be a taxonomy of anomalies (namely, a teratology), given the logic of Aristotelian philosophy

In “Postscript on Societies of Control”, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze proclaimed that “Everywhere surfing has replaced the older sports”. By this, he alluded to Foucault’s thoughts on older societal regimes and power diagrams of sovereignty and discipline, and that now such models have been supplemented with governance through control and allegations of increased freedom. This article has as its point of departure the potential of sports to reflect social change. Contemporaneously to the coining of Deleuze’s surfing sentence, a new sport emerges: parkour, in which practitioners “surf” the urban realm. This practice gained attention globally when it was featured in the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale. The analysis in this article revolves around the different ways of moving in and through the environment in the renowned parkour chase in the beginning of the movie. How do different kinds of displacement in the parkour chase of Casino Royale relate to the transition between the...

This dissertation studies the problem of the inhuman in relation to human nature in philosophy from antiquity to the present, highlighting the interrelationship between science and philosophy in the development of concepts of monstrosity in France from mid-sixteenth century to late twentieth century thought. By means of constraint, it focuses on Ambroise Paré (1509/10–90) and Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) as representatives of early humanism and posthumanism, respectively. The study is divided into four chronologically ordered parts. In part I, four teratological traditions of philosophical import are discerned in antiquity: the naturalist, the humanist, the metaphysical, and the hermeneutical (each associated with a set of key names: in particular, Empedocles, Lucretius; Socrates, Protagoras; Plato, Aristotle; and Pliny, Augustine). Part II follows these traditions into the Renaissance where they intersect in the ‘books of wonder’, among which Paré’s Des monstres et prodiges (1573) is v...

In opposition to the traditional interpretation of Protagoras's Homo Mensura-Satz ("Man is the measure of all things") as a founding tenet of Western humanism, this essay challenges the notion of an inherent anthropocentrism of the dictum (that all things are relative to man as species or individual). In a reading of the most important sources of antiquity, namely Plato, Aristotle and Sextus Empiricus, the sophist rather appears to base his thesis on ideas in Presocratic philosophy of nature as a becoming. The measure is then the capturing of a state of things out of this flow in a moment of perception, which is thought as the material relationship between the momentary qualitites of that which perceives and that which is perceived. Consequently, it is the measure which is central, not man, who is yet another instance of confluent qualities out of the potentiality of things; but man, like everything else, can always become anything else, including the non-human.

This article explores the holistic approach to Leo Hurwitz's documentary aesthetic, by looking at how "Dialogue with a Woman Departed" (1981) interweaves the portrait of an individual with the contemporary history of the American nation and with the cyclical processes of nature.

This dissertation studies the problem of the inhuman in relation to human nature in philosophy from antiquity to the present, highlighting the interrelationship between science and philosophy in the development of concepts of monstrosity in France from mid-sixteenth century to late twentieth century thought. By means of constraint, it focuses on Ambroise Pare (1509/10–90) and Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) as representatives of early humanism and posthumanism, respectively. The study is divided into four chronologically ordered parts. In part I, four teratological traditions of philosophical import are discerned in antiquity: the naturalist, the humanist, the metaphysical, and the hermeneutical (each associated with a set of key names: in particular, Empedocles, Lucretius; Socrates, Protagoras; Plato, Aristotle; and Pliny, Augustine). Part II follows these traditions into the Renaissance where they intersect in the ‘books of wonder’, among which Pare’s Des monstres et prodiges (1573) is v...

Den italienske filosofen Giorgio Agamben (f. 1942) reflekterar i sin L'aperto (2002) over manniskans forsok att skilja sig fran djuren, att skilja det manskliga fran det djuriska aven inom manniskan. I denna studie placerar jag in denna bok dels i Agambens overgripande biopolitiska projekt, Homo sacer, dels in den filosofiska stromning som kallas posthumanism. Syftet ar att analysera distinktionen mellan tre grekiska begrepp for former av liv – bios, zoe och therion – som problematiseras genom dessa texter, da de sammanfors i bilden av djur–manniska-hybrider inom biblisk apokalyptik. Vilket ord kan benamna en sadan livsform och vilken ar dess status i mansklighetens historia?

The paper compares Jean de Lery's account of his experiences of the French colonization of the coast of Brazil in the mid 16th century with the account made by his contemporary Andre Thevet. Instead of focussing on how the native tribes were depicted in icolonial discourse or how they were treated in reality, this analysis brings to the fore how the description of space from the point of view of the travelling subject can be shown to provide a "cartography" or "topography" of the process of colonization, in which the properties of identity begin to deterritorialize. From a perspective of the theory of Deleuze and Guattari, the becoming-colonial is thus tied to a becoming-savage.

As exemplified by Eloge de l'amour (2001), Jean-Luc Godard's work after Histoire(s) du cinema (1988–98) – which critiqued cinema's treatment of its contemporary cultural and oplitical history, – has made use of digital technology in order to explore the remaining potential of the medium after its purported demise and ethical failure. By drawing on concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Karen Barad, this paper aims to elucidate the techno-aesthetic conditions of Godard's implied method of imaging the dual flux of temporality: becoming history and becoming future. In this diffracting process, Godard's late films embody the present condition of visual culture as it splits between past and future from the point of a present crisis of its material conditions of representation. Neither virtual reality nor classical realism, a diffractive method of digital filmmaking explores the new materiality of motion pictures.

This article investigates the utopian visions of extreme sports as a postwar phenomenon by contrasting it to the violence of the extreme sport practitioner par excellence in postwar/cold war cinema: James Bond. Continental philosophy and cultural studies furnish extreme sport as a manifold of wholesome, meaningful, sustainable, life-enhancing, and environmentally intimate practices, less orientated toward human rivalry than its traditional namesake. Certain attention is thus paid to the movement of sliding in extreme sports that thrive on powerful natural forces such as air, wind, snowy slopes, and big waves, creating an ambivalent field between mastery and letting oneself go. Sliding, or glissade, is treated as a “figure of thought” that Bond is mustered to embody and enact with his extreme athletic repertoire. The analysis of James Bond’s extreme sport sliding is contrasted to the musings of glissade philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Serres. It is c...

... intelligens och cy-bernetiska organismer har starkt bidragit till spekulationer, med avsevärt populärkulturellt genomslag, kring en posthuman ... 22 och Keith Ansell Pearson ser honom som föregångare till den guattarianska ”begärande maski-nen” och ”det maskiniska omedvetna ...