Gilles Deleuze: Thinking for Our Time

This course is organized as an intensive reading into works of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s work seems to becoming ever more present and influential. Scholars from various disciplines rely on his thoughts to rethink contemporary world. Deleuze’s thought is a big presence in literary theory, aesthetics, ethics, political theory, race and gender studies, affect studies, film studies, architecture, design, music and even animal studies. This influence is not easy to understand since Deleuze’s work is famously difficult and occasionally obscure; that’s because, as he himself often explained, one can’t simultaneously think and explain why he is thinking what he is thinking. High velocities of thought do not agree with a slow speed of expository writing. Thus, the task of the course will be to unpack some of the most difficult texts of Deleuze and to bring them in relation with the concepts he and Guattari proposed in Thousand Plateaus, perhaps their most famous and influential book. We will start with several works related to history of philosophy (to Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche) to unearth from them Deleuze’s theory of affect. We will then move to his most difficult texts, such as Difference and Repetion and The Logic of Sense, with a focus on his novel theory of subjectivity, passive synthesis, contemplation, and incorporeal events. This background will enable us to better access Anti-Oedipus and Thousand Plateaus, two texts with which we will spend significant amount of time, focused on concepts such as becoming, intensive and disjunctive syntheses, haptic space, etc. Additionally, we will pay special attention to Deleuze’s theory of baroque and concepts such as point of view and fold. After that we will move to his work in cinema, painting and literature and we will finish with What is Philosophy?, trying to elucidate such concepts as earth, brain and vitalism.