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What is the power of the monstrous? Where does it get this power? Jacques Derrida, who in his early work associated the future as such with a certain monstrosity (cf Derrida’s preface to Of Grammatology), said in an interview: A monster may be obviously a composite figure of heterogenous organisms that are grafted onto each [...]

Are you with the Occupation?

What is the nature of a connection? I have been influenced by Franco Berardi (Bifo) recently. He points out that definitions have to be approached through multiple strategies because what is important is shocking thought by the reconstitution of a virtual field of sense and sensation. In other words, part of what is at stake [...]

What’s your Virus?

Could a kind of resonance potentially form between post-Prigogine/Bohm-inspired physics and critical management studies? Both share a commitment to materialism and realism. But this assumes the continual transformation of both physics and CMS, given the temporal aspect of both matter and reality. In one sense I would like to argue that at their best, at [...]

Ingression

How does one engage an event? The event has gone through torsions in this blog. But we shouldn’t confuse an event with a blog. What is happening as I write in Libya is an event that changes the contours of everything, but not for everyone in the same way, or for the same duration, or [...]

Deleuze and Foucault on Marketing as Control

Gilles Deleuze never to my knowledge wrote extensively on marketing, but he had some choice words for it in “Postscript on Societies of Control.” I quote them below. I lectured today, minutes ago actually, on Foucault’s panopticism and Deleuze’s modulated control to my first year marketing and communication course at QMUL. I tried to make [...]

Fractal Decay

We have seen that the world was an infinity of converging series, capable of being extended into each other, around unique points. Thus every individual, every individual monad expresses the same world in its totality although it only clearly expresses a part of this world, a series or even a finite sequence. The result is [...]

Truths of Times to come: On Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, Part Two

The will to power: will does not want power. Power is “the one that wills in the will. Power is the genetic and differential element in the will. This is why the will is essentially creative” (85). Power is the elemental condition of mutation. So let’s say that power is a characteristic of a will, [...]

Multiplicity is the affirmation of unity: On Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, Part One

Nietzsche and Philosophy (hereafter N+P) is a fantastic work. It deserves all the praise it has received and more: Deleuze is at his most creative in his engagement with Frederich Nietzsche (FN). Both interpretation and concept creation, N+P introduces the reader to some of Deleuze’s lasting concerns: multiplicity, unity, force, sense, becoming, nondialectical difference. These [...]

On Delanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy

  What is Manuel Delanda trying to do in this reconstruction of Gilles Deleuze’s ontology? He is trying to provide an account of the interdisciplinary basis of Deleuzian philosophy, a philosophy that ranges from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to Henri Poincare’s topological geometry and beyond. Many things get lost along the way, like the [...]

On Bergson’s Pure Duration and Suzuki’s Sunyata-Tathata

Bergson writes in Time and Free Will: “To say that the same inner causes will reproduce the same effects is to assume that the same cause can appear a second time on the stage of consciousness. Now, if duration is what we say, deep seated psychic states are radically heterogeneous to each other, and it is impossible that any two of them [...]