Rick Dolphijn is a writer and a philosopher. He wrote Foodscapes: towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption (Eburon Univ.Chicago Press 2004); New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (with Iris van der Tuin) (Open Humanities Press 2012) and edited (with Rosi Braidotti) This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life (Rodopi/Brill 2014). He teaches at Utrecht University. At the moment he reads Serres, Guattari, Deleuze, Whitehead, Simondon and Spinoza (more and more). He is currently finishing a book (edited with Rosi Braidotti) entitled Philosophy After Nature. A monograph entitled Surfaces: How Philosophy and Art Matter is in the making...
Ficando com o Problema (Staying with the Trouble) foi traduzida a partir da versão impressa da e... more Ficando com o Problema (Staying with the Trouble) foi traduzida a partir da versão impressa da entrevista conduzida ao vivo pelo Skype com Donna Haraway por Rick Dolphijn, realizada na ocasião do lançamento oficial da exposição de arte Yes Naturally (Haia, Holanda) durante os dias de pré-visualização profissional da documenta 13 (Kassel, Alemanha), 7 de junho de 2012. Foi publicada originalmente em Dolphijn e Haraway (2013). Na entrevista, é discutida a influência da teoria de Haraway no mundo da arte contemporânea, particularmente como seu trabalho inspirou e esteve em diálogo com muitos dos artistas que participaram das exposições Yes Naturally (2012) e documenta 13 (2012). Ao mesmo tempo, são traçadas conexões com as questões que permeiam a teoria de Haraway há muitos anos, como relações multiespécies, materialidades e naturezasculturas, e o trabalho de artistas contemporâneos que procuram engajar-se com temas e conceitos afins em suas criações artísticas.
Consumption Research Norway (SIFO) , OsloMet - Oslo Metropolitan University, Feb 28, 2020
In this report, we introduce the ways in which our research team jointly works on the theoretical... more In this report, we introduce the ways in which our research team jointly works on the theoretical framework that is being developed in our FOOD2GATHER project. Starting from the idea that “Foodscapes” - which are central to our analysis- are the subject of our permanent negotiation, this project does not build on the oppositions between theory and practice, between researchers and researched or between migrant and host. Starting from the negotiation, our aim is to show in what way foodscapes are changing, and how these signals a Europe in change
Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, 2017
The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze has, in recent decades, occupied the attention of Anglophone con... more The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze has, in recent decades, occupied the attention of Anglophone continental philosophy and cultural theory largely in light of the perceived political significance of his work. In particular, his analysis of capitalism in the texts co-authored with Felix Guattari, and his articulation of the logic of control-a logic which, he claimed, could be found emerging in the wake of those societies that Michel Foucault had characterized according to the logic of discipline-have served as the basis of an increasingly large body of extension and commentary. In this essay, I intend to highlight one particularly important aspect of the logic of control: the mechanism by which control captures practices of communication. This mechanism can be described, I argue, by reference to a concept that is familiar to statisticians, economists, and practitioners of 'numerical' social sciences: exogeneity. Additionally, I want to challenge the notion that antagonism to the logic of control can coincide with the affirmation of logics of 'plurality' or 'multitude.' The logic of control, insofar as it relies on exogeneity, is already a logic of radical plurality. [2] Deleuze only treats the societies of control in a few short texts: the interview "Control and Becoming" and the short treatise "Postscript on Control Societies," both of which can be found compiled in English translation within the late volume Negotiations; and a brief excursus within his commentary on Michel Foucault. [1] Each of these engagements take the form of a set of theses offered towards a theory of control societies; at most, they constitute a sketch of a theory, rather than a fully-formed engagement on the order of his engagements of psychoanalysis, capitalism-at-large (with Felix Guattari), or the history of philosophy. Nonetheless, these sketches can provide a uniquely fruitful impetus for an analysis of the logic of sociality under the conditions of financialized capital for two reasons. First of all because, under the rubric of control, Deleuze is able to think this financialization in terms of its enactment as a power relation. He is able to avoid, for instance, relying on the persistent fuzziness and the divisions between theory and practice that have plagued attempts to theorize this condition in terms of a generalized concept of 'neoliberalism.' Second, the articulation of control marks a particularly pronounced moment when Deleuze's attention turns towards the production of habits of negativity, and affirmations of nonbeing. [2] Without breaking from his strict attention to thinking according to a logic of pure immanence, Deleuze, in response to control, breaks from the strict identification of immanence and habits of positivity or affirmation. Neoliberalism, or Control? that we can only proceed on the basis of the One."
This report is part of the HERANET funded project FOOD2GATHER. The project aims at understanding ... more This report is part of the HERANET funded project FOOD2GATHER. The project aims at understanding the question of integration/exclusion of migrants through foodscapes. An important step in this direction is to analyse the contextual framework within which food-related practices, norms and values are embedded in European societies. Food controversies that have raised and have been reported in the media since the “2015 migrants’ crisis” across Europe can reveal important aspects related to such norms and values and indicate possible tensions and compromises. This report presents and discusses relevant food controversies that occurred in the six countries participating in the study (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and the Netherlands). This will generate a contextual overview of the integration/exclusion of migrants through foodscapes. Controversy has been used as a tool and a scanner. Each of the six FOOD2GATHER teams provided two relevant controversies that have reached media attention in the last ten years. One of the two had to be related to halal food. The analysis of the controversies has been conducted by identifying issues they tackled, agents they involved, (public) spaces and situations in which controversies took place and what they produced. A comparative analysis of relevant variables related to migrations, such as the geopolitical position of the countries, organization of reception and food provision, has been conducted as well. The six countries included in the study have different traditions related to migration and have been exposed to the “migrants’ crisis” in different ways. These differences are reflected in the proposed controversies. However, some common traits tend to emerge and reveal power relationships within societies that are different or shared by the countries involved in the project. We show that these power relationships particularly deal with the right to food, citizens’ commitment, identity, the place of religion, animal welfare and political issues. Our study indicates that analysing controversies adds an important dimension to the study of foodscapes. Food controversies that reach the media attention are seldom something migrants have brought up themselves. The migrants’ representation in the media based on food controversies indicated that migrants are given little opportunity to negotiating values and practices, as norms about “the right” quantity and quality of food tend to reproduce the food model of the country they migrate to, also when there is a “positive” focus on ethnic business. To better understand these dynamics, we propose the concept of “food encounters” and illustrate how the type of food encounters can play a role in how foodscapes could evolve or even emerge.
In their Geophilosophy (in What Is Philosophy?), Deleuze and Guattari offer us an important conne... more In their Geophilosophy (in What Is Philosophy?), Deleuze and Guattari offer us an important connection between the movements of thought and the connections to the soil in which thought grows. They state that ‘thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth’ (1992, p. 85). Thought happens in a double movement: ‘territory and earth are two components with two zones of indiscernibility — deterritorialization (from territory to the earth) and reterritorialization (from earth to territory)’ (p. 86). As territory and the earth are inseparable from the moment that thinking (as a mode) began, it is impossible (for us) to take them apart; all thought removes itself from a territory, towards the earth, while it is at the same time installing a territory, removing itself from the earth. Thought itself, moving parallel to the matters from which it breaks free, necessarily involves both the earth and territory, while it is being deterritorialized and reterritorialized ad infinitum. Or, to use the concepts that Deleuze and Guattari introduced in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, p. 480), thought moves both by means of a directionality and a dimensionality.
In contrast to the dominant ideas of how 'game and play' work, which I label 'transce... more In contrast to the dominant ideas of how 'game and play' work, which I label 'transcendentalist' and 'sedentary', my study on Macao proposes an alternative, 'materialist' and 'nomadic', perspective. This comes down to thinking 'game and play' not as an 'artificial' activity that takes place in a safe, enclosed environment, but as an elementary part of life, crucial to how imagination works, and to how imagination is entangled in the materiality of the urban sphere. After mapping an alternative history of how to think 'game and play' differently, working with anthropologist Karl Goos, architect Aldo van Eyk, artist Constant, and in the end philosopher Gilles Deleuze, I engage with the city of Macao, its architecture, its politics, and its gambling practices. I use fiction authors Leslie T Chang and Louis Borges to show, finally, how Macao, in contemporary China, equals the infinite game of chance, materialized; the muc...
The work of the immensely popular Japanese noir or "sushi noir," as he calls himself (Mussari: 97... more The work of the immensely popular Japanese noir or "sushi noir," as he calls himself (Mussari: 97) author Haruki Murakami is characterized by an odd sense of repetition. Mark Mussari is right when concluding, for instance, that "Hotels play a recurring role in Murakami's writings, and they often function as portals to other planes of existence" (70). Yet the repetition here, contrary to how one might read this quotation, does not lie in the word "hotel,", or in the cats and crows or in any other word that often appears in Murakami's stories. It would make up a strange linguisticism to assume that the "hotel" in Kafka on the Shore should relate (because of the word used) to the hotel in 1q84, or that the cat in Norwegian Wood is necessarily connected to the cat in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. The repetition, instead, happens in the way "other planes of existence" are introduced with the hotel. The repetition appears to us in feeling the movement of withdrawal from under the words as these other planes of existence suddenly realize themselves, removing us from the familiarity of presence over and over again. Only then "something beyond words appears to make itself felt" as Hobson reads a similar movement in Derrida (1998: 211). Only then do the words of Murakami become haunted. Moving beyond the words themselves takes us to the breaths by means of which the words travel, by means of which they are being articulated. Being left to the tender mercies of these breaths, as they come from all possible directions, repetition takes place. Throughout his work, Murakami continuously breathes another space into a room, into a suburb of Tokyo, into a forest or into a highway. It clinches itself onto the objects, on the words being spoken, on the futures to come. Then, with a Lynchian slowness, this anotherness takes over. It is always already out there, as it is always in here. In his earlier short stories, space is still rather mechanistically approached as a means to release the breath of noir. In The Elephant Vanishes, for instance, we find ourselves in the suburb where the only attraction of a former zoo is an elephant that somehow disappears with its caretaker (which was impossible, considering the size of the elephant and the routes available). Similar to how H.P. Lovecraft, in his first short stories, experiments with an unknown and unknowable (for untraceable) secret that forms the center of his space (think of his The Music of Erich Zann), the early Murakami, too, circles around such a single crack in the world, a wormhole or vacuum solution that warns us fot the existence of another spacetime. Later in his oeuvre, however, the crack is not placed center space, but rather seem to be absolutized in the sense that, more and more, anotherness is approaching us from every possible angle. In his latest work, 1q84, this anotherness (established by the Little People) breathes into every possible space (from Tokyo to Chikura) as for instance the sky now always carries two moons: the moon we've always known is now accompanied by a small, green and hideous moon that haunts it just like the Mothers are haunted by the Daughters and the 'pupa of air' that is ready
Ficando com o Problema (Staying with the Trouble) foi traduzida a partir da versão impressa da e... more Ficando com o Problema (Staying with the Trouble) foi traduzida a partir da versão impressa da entrevista conduzida ao vivo pelo Skype com Donna Haraway por Rick Dolphijn, realizada na ocasião do lançamento oficial da exposição de arte Yes Naturally (Haia, Holanda) durante os dias de pré-visualização profissional da documenta 13 (Kassel, Alemanha), 7 de junho de 2012. Foi publicada originalmente em Dolphijn e Haraway (2013). Na entrevista, é discutida a influência da teoria de Haraway no mundo da arte contemporânea, particularmente como seu trabalho inspirou e esteve em diálogo com muitos dos artistas que participaram das exposições Yes Naturally (2012) e documenta 13 (2012). Ao mesmo tempo, são traçadas conexões com as questões que permeiam a teoria de Haraway há muitos anos, como relações multiespécies, materialidades e naturezasculturas, e o trabalho de artistas contemporâneos que procuram engajar-se com temas e conceitos afins em suas criações artísticas.
Consumption Research Norway (SIFO) , OsloMet - Oslo Metropolitan University, Feb 28, 2020
In this report, we introduce the ways in which our research team jointly works on the theoretical... more In this report, we introduce the ways in which our research team jointly works on the theoretical framework that is being developed in our FOOD2GATHER project. Starting from the idea that “Foodscapes” - which are central to our analysis- are the subject of our permanent negotiation, this project does not build on the oppositions between theory and practice, between researchers and researched or between migrant and host. Starting from the negotiation, our aim is to show in what way foodscapes are changing, and how these signals a Europe in change
Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, 2017
The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze has, in recent decades, occupied the attention of Anglophone con... more The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze has, in recent decades, occupied the attention of Anglophone continental philosophy and cultural theory largely in light of the perceived political significance of his work. In particular, his analysis of capitalism in the texts co-authored with Felix Guattari, and his articulation of the logic of control-a logic which, he claimed, could be found emerging in the wake of those societies that Michel Foucault had characterized according to the logic of discipline-have served as the basis of an increasingly large body of extension and commentary. In this essay, I intend to highlight one particularly important aspect of the logic of control: the mechanism by which control captures practices of communication. This mechanism can be described, I argue, by reference to a concept that is familiar to statisticians, economists, and practitioners of 'numerical' social sciences: exogeneity. Additionally, I want to challenge the notion that antagonism to the logic of control can coincide with the affirmation of logics of 'plurality' or 'multitude.' The logic of control, insofar as it relies on exogeneity, is already a logic of radical plurality. [2] Deleuze only treats the societies of control in a few short texts: the interview "Control and Becoming" and the short treatise "Postscript on Control Societies," both of which can be found compiled in English translation within the late volume Negotiations; and a brief excursus within his commentary on Michel Foucault. [1] Each of these engagements take the form of a set of theses offered towards a theory of control societies; at most, they constitute a sketch of a theory, rather than a fully-formed engagement on the order of his engagements of psychoanalysis, capitalism-at-large (with Felix Guattari), or the history of philosophy. Nonetheless, these sketches can provide a uniquely fruitful impetus for an analysis of the logic of sociality under the conditions of financialized capital for two reasons. First of all because, under the rubric of control, Deleuze is able to think this financialization in terms of its enactment as a power relation. He is able to avoid, for instance, relying on the persistent fuzziness and the divisions between theory and practice that have plagued attempts to theorize this condition in terms of a generalized concept of 'neoliberalism.' Second, the articulation of control marks a particularly pronounced moment when Deleuze's attention turns towards the production of habits of negativity, and affirmations of nonbeing. [2] Without breaking from his strict attention to thinking according to a logic of pure immanence, Deleuze, in response to control, breaks from the strict identification of immanence and habits of positivity or affirmation. Neoliberalism, or Control? that we can only proceed on the basis of the One."
This report is part of the HERANET funded project FOOD2GATHER. The project aims at understanding ... more This report is part of the HERANET funded project FOOD2GATHER. The project aims at understanding the question of integration/exclusion of migrants through foodscapes. An important step in this direction is to analyse the contextual framework within which food-related practices, norms and values are embedded in European societies. Food controversies that have raised and have been reported in the media since the “2015 migrants’ crisis” across Europe can reveal important aspects related to such norms and values and indicate possible tensions and compromises. This report presents and discusses relevant food controversies that occurred in the six countries participating in the study (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and the Netherlands). This will generate a contextual overview of the integration/exclusion of migrants through foodscapes. Controversy has been used as a tool and a scanner. Each of the six FOOD2GATHER teams provided two relevant controversies that have reached media attention in the last ten years. One of the two had to be related to halal food. The analysis of the controversies has been conducted by identifying issues they tackled, agents they involved, (public) spaces and situations in which controversies took place and what they produced. A comparative analysis of relevant variables related to migrations, such as the geopolitical position of the countries, organization of reception and food provision, has been conducted as well. The six countries included in the study have different traditions related to migration and have been exposed to the “migrants’ crisis” in different ways. These differences are reflected in the proposed controversies. However, some common traits tend to emerge and reveal power relationships within societies that are different or shared by the countries involved in the project. We show that these power relationships particularly deal with the right to food, citizens’ commitment, identity, the place of religion, animal welfare and political issues. Our study indicates that analysing controversies adds an important dimension to the study of foodscapes. Food controversies that reach the media attention are seldom something migrants have brought up themselves. The migrants’ representation in the media based on food controversies indicated that migrants are given little opportunity to negotiating values and practices, as norms about “the right” quantity and quality of food tend to reproduce the food model of the country they migrate to, also when there is a “positive” focus on ethnic business. To better understand these dynamics, we propose the concept of “food encounters” and illustrate how the type of food encounters can play a role in how foodscapes could evolve or even emerge.
In their Geophilosophy (in What Is Philosophy?), Deleuze and Guattari offer us an important conne... more In their Geophilosophy (in What Is Philosophy?), Deleuze and Guattari offer us an important connection between the movements of thought and the connections to the soil in which thought grows. They state that ‘thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth’ (1992, p. 85). Thought happens in a double movement: ‘territory and earth are two components with two zones of indiscernibility — deterritorialization (from territory to the earth) and reterritorialization (from earth to territory)’ (p. 86). As territory and the earth are inseparable from the moment that thinking (as a mode) began, it is impossible (for us) to take them apart; all thought removes itself from a territory, towards the earth, while it is at the same time installing a territory, removing itself from the earth. Thought itself, moving parallel to the matters from which it breaks free, necessarily involves both the earth and territory, while it is being deterritorialized and reterritorialized ad infinitum. Or, to use the concepts that Deleuze and Guattari introduced in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, p. 480), thought moves both by means of a directionality and a dimensionality.
In contrast to the dominant ideas of how 'game and play' work, which I label 'transce... more In contrast to the dominant ideas of how 'game and play' work, which I label 'transcendentalist' and 'sedentary', my study on Macao proposes an alternative, 'materialist' and 'nomadic', perspective. This comes down to thinking 'game and play' not as an 'artificial' activity that takes place in a safe, enclosed environment, but as an elementary part of life, crucial to how imagination works, and to how imagination is entangled in the materiality of the urban sphere. After mapping an alternative history of how to think 'game and play' differently, working with anthropologist Karl Goos, architect Aldo van Eyk, artist Constant, and in the end philosopher Gilles Deleuze, I engage with the city of Macao, its architecture, its politics, and its gambling practices. I use fiction authors Leslie T Chang and Louis Borges to show, finally, how Macao, in contemporary China, equals the infinite game of chance, materialized; the muc...
The work of the immensely popular Japanese noir or "sushi noir," as he calls himself (Mussari: 97... more The work of the immensely popular Japanese noir or "sushi noir," as he calls himself (Mussari: 97) author Haruki Murakami is characterized by an odd sense of repetition. Mark Mussari is right when concluding, for instance, that "Hotels play a recurring role in Murakami's writings, and they often function as portals to other planes of existence" (70). Yet the repetition here, contrary to how one might read this quotation, does not lie in the word "hotel,", or in the cats and crows or in any other word that often appears in Murakami's stories. It would make up a strange linguisticism to assume that the "hotel" in Kafka on the Shore should relate (because of the word used) to the hotel in 1q84, or that the cat in Norwegian Wood is necessarily connected to the cat in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. The repetition, instead, happens in the way "other planes of existence" are introduced with the hotel. The repetition appears to us in feeling the movement of withdrawal from under the words as these other planes of existence suddenly realize themselves, removing us from the familiarity of presence over and over again. Only then "something beyond words appears to make itself felt" as Hobson reads a similar movement in Derrida (1998: 211). Only then do the words of Murakami become haunted. Moving beyond the words themselves takes us to the breaths by means of which the words travel, by means of which they are being articulated. Being left to the tender mercies of these breaths, as they come from all possible directions, repetition takes place. Throughout his work, Murakami continuously breathes another space into a room, into a suburb of Tokyo, into a forest or into a highway. It clinches itself onto the objects, on the words being spoken, on the futures to come. Then, with a Lynchian slowness, this anotherness takes over. It is always already out there, as it is always in here. In his earlier short stories, space is still rather mechanistically approached as a means to release the breath of noir. In The Elephant Vanishes, for instance, we find ourselves in the suburb where the only attraction of a former zoo is an elephant that somehow disappears with its caretaker (which was impossible, considering the size of the elephant and the routes available). Similar to how H.P. Lovecraft, in his first short stories, experiments with an unknown and unknowable (for untraceable) secret that forms the center of his space (think of his The Music of Erich Zann), the early Murakami, too, circles around such a single crack in the world, a wormhole or vacuum solution that warns us fot the existence of another spacetime. Later in his oeuvre, however, the crack is not placed center space, but rather seem to be absolutized in the sense that, more and more, anotherness is approaching us from every possible angle. In his latest work, 1q84, this anotherness (established by the Little People) breathes into every possible space (from Tokyo to Chikura) as for instance the sky now always carries two moons: the moon we've always known is now accompanied by a small, green and hideous moon that haunts it just like the Mothers are haunted by the Daughters and the 'pupa of air' that is ready
The significant changes that have dominated the social and the scientific world over the last thi... more The significant changes that have dominated the social and the scientific world over the last thirty years have brought about upheavals and critical re-appraisals that have proved quite positive in fostering 21st century thought. This interdisciplinary collection of state-of-the-art essays offers innovative and thought-provoking insights concerning contemporary philosophical and cultural reflection on the nature-culture interaction. Starting from the assumption that the binary opposition between the two terms has been replaced by a continuum of the two, the volume explores both the terms of this new interaction, and its implications.
Technology occupies a central place in the shift towards a nature-cultural continuum, but it is not the only factor. The consequences of economic globalization, notably the global spread of digital mediation, also account for this change of perspective. Last but not least the climate change issue and a renewed urgency around the state of the environmental crisis also contribute to bring the ’natural’ much closer to home. Digital mediation has by now become a standard way to live and interact. The electronic frontier has altered dramatically the practice of education and research, especially in the Humanities and social sciences, with direct consequences for the institutional practice and the methodology of these disciplinary fields. This book aims to explore the implications of these complex shifts for the practice of critical thinking.
This issue of APRIA Journal, Time Matters, was compiled and edited by the ArtEZ Theory in the Art... more This issue of APRIA Journal, Time Matters, was compiled and edited by the ArtEZ Theory in the Arts professorship. All of these reviewed artistic (research) and academic contributions were created and written specially in response to the fourpart seminar Time Matters (2019-2020). The aim of the publication and the seminar is to inquire into the changing concepts of time in the arts and other epistemic fields collectively, and to explore and test alternative – past, present and future oriented – temporalities.
Authors: Peter Sonderen, Laurie Hermans, Katía Truijen, Ienke Kastelein, Marijke Goeting, Jesse Ahlers, Paula Walta, Claudia Molitor, Liza Rinkema, Terike Haapoja, Alice Smits, Rick Dolphijn, Sharon Stewart, Frans Sturkenboom, Saskia Isabella Maria Korsten, Korsten&De Jong, Joep Christenhusz, Sophie Krier, Christel Vesters, Monique Peperkamp, Laurie Hermans.
Cover illustration: Denis Sinyakov, photographer, www.denissinyakov.com Library of Congress Contr... more Cover illustration: Denis Sinyakov, photographer, www.denissinyakov.com Library of Congress Control Number: 2015933470 issn 0167-9392 isbn 978-90-42-03916-2 (paperback) isbn 978-94-01-21198-7 (e-book)
This book is the first monograph on the theme of “new materialism,” an emerging trend in 21st cen... more This book is the first monograph on the theme of “new materialism,” an emerging trend in 21st century thought that has already left its mark in such fields as philosophy, cultural theory, feminism, science studies, and the arts. The first part of the book contains elaborate interviews with some of the most prominent new materialist scholars of today: Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux. The second part situates the new materialist tradition in contemporary thought by singling out its transversal methodology, its position on sexual differing, and by developing the ethical and political consequences of new materialism.
The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphysics series... more The world is due for a resurgence of original speculative metaphysics. The New Metaphysics series aims to provide a safe house for such thinking amidst the demoralizing caution and prudence of professional academic philosophy. We do not aim to bridge the analyticcontinental divide, since we are equally impatient with nail-filing analytic critique and the continental reverence for dusty textual monuments. We favor instead the spirit of the intellectual gambler, and wish to discover and promote authors who meet this description. Like an emergent recording company, what we seek are traces of a new metaphysical 'sound' from any nation of the world. The editors are open to translations of neglected metaphysical classics, and will consider secondary works of especial force and daring. But our main interest is to stimulate the birth of disturbing masterpieces of twenty-first century philosophy.
Inspired by Deleuze’s becoming-woman, new feminist materialists like Rosi Braidotti have offered ... more Inspired by Deleuze’s becoming-woman, new feminist materialists like Rosi Braidotti have offered a way of reading the sexed body that moves away from the linguistic, Lacanian one offered by Judith Butler. By proposing a monism in which the mind is an idea of the body whereas the body is the object of the mind, as Spinoza put it, they study what Grosz calls the “functioning of differential forces” as they produce mind and body in their envelopment. This new take on difference is mostly played out in theories of sexual difference, for instance when Grosz rewrites ‘a thousand tiny sexes’ of Deleuze and Guattari. But at the same time it is always already at work in Deleuzian concepts of race (as Saldanha has already done this when talking of ‘a thousand tiny races’). Following Deleuze and Guattari we can claim that race and sex are felt in every feeling. They never cease and never finish to exist in every becoming. This then we can conceptualize as ‘a thousand tiny intersections’. It is a rethinking of what is often referred to as ‘intersectionality’, i.e. the inextricable togetherness of what we consider to be various dimensions of human difference and social practices. Intersectionality then concerns in what way the race and sex immanently felt always already proposes a new praxis of the body.
The first gathering of the student exchange--between the Honours Progamme at the University of Ut... more The first gathering of the student exchange--between the Honours Progamme at the University of Utrecht and the Common Core at the University of Hong Kong--around self-selected issues of transdisicplinary importance.
The New Materialism Training School engages with the emerging and growing trend of new or neo-mat... more The New Materialism Training School engages with the emerging and growing trend of new or neo-materialism in research, art and curatorial practice. The training school will be led by renowned international scholars and members of the COST Action New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’.
This article centres around three ways in which ‘new materialism’ or ‘neo-materialism,’ terms coi... more This article centres around three ways in which ‘new materialism’ or ‘neo-materialism,’ terms coined by DeLanda and Braidotti in the second half of the 1990s, can be called ‘transversal.’ New materialism is a cultural theory that does not privilege the side of culture, but focuses on what Haraway would call ‘naturecultures.’ It explores a monist perspective of the human being, disposed of the dualisms that have dominated the humanities until today, by giving special attention to matter as it has been so much neglected by dualist thought. New materialism, a cultural theory inspired by the thoughts of Deleuze, that spurs a renewed interest in philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz, shows how cultured humans are always already in nature, and how nature is necessarily cultured, how the mind is always already material, and how matter is necessarily something of the mind. New materialism opposes the transcendental and humanist (dualist) traditions that are haunting a cultural theory, standing on the brink of both the modern and the post-postmodern era. The transcendental and humanist traditions, which are manifold yet consistently predicated on dualist structures, continue to stir debates, which have a stifling effect on the field (think of the feminist polemic concerning the failed materialism in the work of Butler, and of the Saussurian/ Lacanian linguistic heritage in media and cultural studies). New materialism allows for the conceptualisation of the travelling of the fluxes of matter and mind, body and soul, nature and culture, and opens up active theory formation. The three transversalities concern disciplinarity, paradigms, and the spatiotemporality of theory.
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Papers by Rick Dolphijn
Technology occupies a central place in the shift towards a nature-cultural continuum, but it is not the only factor. The consequences of economic globalization, notably the global spread of digital mediation, also account for this change of perspective. Last but not least the climate change issue and a renewed urgency around the state of the environmental crisis also contribute to bring the ’natural’ much closer to home. Digital mediation has by now become a standard way to live and interact. The electronic frontier has altered dramatically the practice of education and research, especially in the Humanities and social sciences, with direct consequences for the institutional practice and the methodology of these disciplinary fields. This book aims to explore the implications of these complex shifts for the practice of critical thinking.
Authors: Peter Sonderen, Laurie Hermans, Katía Truijen, Ienke Kastelein, Marijke Goeting, Jesse Ahlers, Paula Walta, Claudia Molitor, Liza Rinkema, Terike Haapoja, Alice Smits, Rick Dolphijn, Sharon Stewart, Frans Sturkenboom, Saskia Isabella Maria Korsten, Korsten&De Jong, Joep Christenhusz, Sophie Krier, Christel Vesters, Monique Peperkamp, Laurie Hermans.