Gilles Deleuze

philosopher · 64 mentions across 9 readings

In this course

Deleuze (with collaborator Guattari) provides a philosophical framework for understanding bodies, machines, and systems that resists organic vitalism and linear causality—concepts foundational to how the course's readings theorize AI, biological computation, and militarized life. The course invokes Deleuze-Guattari to critique vitalist thinking about biology and to develop concepts of material assemblage that allow theorists like Negarestani and Kluge to think beyond human exceptionalism and toward hybrid, distributed, or weaponized forms of agency. His work enables the seminar to navigate questions about what counts as living, thinking, or autonomous in contexts where biological and technical systems interpenetrate.

Background

Gilles Louis René Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition (1968) is considered to be his magnum opus.

Mentioned in 9 readings

James Brusseau

Deleuzes Postscript on the Societies of Control Updated for Big Data and Predictive Analytics

25

Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control Updated for Big Data and Predictive Analytics James Brusseau Abstract: In 1990, Gilles Deleuze published Postscript on the Societies of Control, an introduction to the potentially suffocatin…a society of control. This essay updates Deleuze’s Postscript with three aims. First, to show how the mechanisms of social control have developed over the last thirty years. Today, ‘control’ is no longer an abstract concept in political phi…Finally, the triptychal structure of Deleuze’s original composition is maintained here. Each of the three parts begins with a brief review of the original essay section, and then recontextualises the ideas within the big data reality. Hist…

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Stephen Zepke

Art as Abstract Machine

13

But let’s step back from this complexity that will nevertheless remain the condition of our investigation. We don’t want to crash and burn, not yet. Let’s try taking one question at a time. If our title is an imperative what does it bid us …But before we get into the intricacies of this technical philosophical terminology we should remind ourselves that we are speaking of practical matters, of machines and their constructions. Building an abstract machine is more DIY than tech…from which an abstract machine departs, following Spinoza’s “war cry” (the phrase is Deleuze’s) “we don’t even know what a body can do” (EPS, 255/234). This introduces another of our constant concerns, how can we create a new body, a new se…

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Tiqqun

The Cybernetic Hypothesis (2001)

9

apparatuses so blended with the capitalist project that it has become a political project, a gigantic "abstract machine" made of binary machines run by the Empire, a new form of political sovereignty, which must be called an abstract machin…"If motorized machines constituted the second age of the technical machine, cybernetic and informational machines form a third age that reconstructs a generalized regime of subjection: recurrent and reversible 'humans-machines systems' repl…tissue on the condition that the latter reconstitutes itself incessantly. That the ensemble of expenditures has a tendency to morph into valorizable qualities also means that Capital permeates all living flows: the socialization of the econ…

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Notes on Thinking Machine Imaginaries_ Llull

Leibniz, and Lovelace to 'Shoggoth with a Smiley Face'

5

Thinking Machine Imaginaries: Llull, Leibniz, and Lovelace to 'Shoggoth with a Smiley Face' SCOTT BENZEL JAN 20, 2025 Caption: Shoggoth with a Smiley Face annotated variant, 2023 (knowyourmeme.com) Figure text: Unsupervised Learning, Super…In his reply Leibniz insisted that no one else had accused him of not making himself intelligible and sought to distance himself from the Kabbalists. Although he mentioned Knorr's friendship with van Helmont, he made no mention of his own a…It is Leibniz who inspires this observation, since the seventeenth-century philosopher 'first posed the problem of communication resulting from closed units or from what cannot be attached'. By means of Leibniz's innovation, which marks the…

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Ben Woodard

from Slime Dynamics

4

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Mark Fisher

SF Capital

3

If you imagine for even a moment that positing capitalism as "the exterior limit of all societies" as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari claimed in Anti-Oedipus is fanciful, think about the interdictions on interest and usury in Islamic and …Cash is depotentiated capital: an enterprise cannot realise its capital, only a 'private' individual can, but this is effectively a translation from one kind of currency (fluid finance capital) to another (purchasing capital). In the proces…It's of course no accident that the current power elite (Spielberg, Lucas, Gates, Blair) belonged to the so-called counterculture of the 1960s. Capital, needless to say, is indifferent to individual human motivation, but happy slaves are be…

David Roden

Subtractive-Catastrophic Xenophilia

2

[^5]: Adrian Johnston, “Phantom of Consistency: Alain Badiou and Kantian Transcendental idealism,” Continental Philosophy Review, Vol. 41, No. 3 (2008), 352-54; Badiou, Being and Event, 28. [^6]: Ibid., 327-43. [^7]: David Roden, Posthuma…[^23]: Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 1; Katerina Kolozova, Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 99; François Larue…

Matt Colquhoun

Acid Communism

2

For Marx, “desire” is so often inseparable from the commodity. It is never without object. On the very first page of Capital, quoting Nicholas Barbon, Marx defines it in a footnote: “Desire implies want; it is the appetite of the mind, and …Barbon, Nicholas. 1696. A Discourse Concerning Coining the New Money Lighter. In Answer to Mr. Locke's Considerations, &c, London. Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. “Four Propositions on Psychoanalysis” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts & Interviews 1…

Claire Colebrook

A Globe of One’s Own, In Praise of the Flat Earth

1

Foucault, however, suggests an opposite path. The problem with biopolitics is not its inattention to bios or self-making but, rather, its maintenance of organic—or what I will refer to here as “global”—thinking. One could be misled by readi…