Hannah Stark

Deleuze and Love

This article examines Deleuze’s scattered references to love and positions this as an illustration of the ethics that could be extrapolated from his work. If the Deleuzian subject is commensurate with the ontology proposed in Difference and Repetition, then it is founded on a metaphysical difference that undermines identity as anything but a momentary congealing in time. How, I ask, might the extremely abstract subject that Deleuze proposes, a subject who can make no claim to identity, be considered to have a capacity for relating to others? Furthermore, how might this subject be capable of intimacy and love?

Judith Butler’s post-Hegelian ethics and the problem with recognition

Judith Butler’s recent work is exemplary of the trend in contemporary theory to consider ethics. Her deliberation over ethical questions, and the place of ethics in intellectual work, has undeniably intensified since September 11. This article will demonstrate, however, that this is a rendering explicit of what has always been implicit in her work. Rather than perceiving the ethical dimension of Butler’s writings in her increasing interest in thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt, I contend that it is in her sustained interest in Hegel, and specifically in Hegelian recognition, that her work can be read as engaged with ethical concerns. This article highlights the growing critical concern with the prevalence of recognition in ethical theory and questions the possibility of theorising ethics outside of the recognition-paradigm.

Deleuze and the Non/Human

Deleuze and the Non/Human brings together leading international voices to consider the place of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in the nonhuman turn. It examines recent debates about the figure of the nonhuman in fields such as new materialism, speculative realism, animal studies, and the environmental and ecological Humanities and scrutinizes the debt to Deleuzes work that is evident in these emerging fields. Accordingly, the contributors to the volume are drawn from across the academy. Deleuzes philosophy already anticipated many of the current debates about the non/human. The proposed volume continues this engagement, extending some of these lines of investigation, in disciplines such architecture, literary studies, gender studies, philosophy, geography and cultural studies. At the same time, its goal is to open up a critical line of questioning about what the nonhuman means in Deleuzes work itself. Deleuze and the Non/Human is thus both about the non/human from Deleuzes point of view, and about Deleuze from the point of view of the various problematics that can be included in the nonhuman turn. Deleuze and the Non/Human makes a timely intervention in a broad set of interdisciplinary debates, and demonstrates once again the force of Deleuzes philosophy for our critical examination of the contemporary condition.

Deleuze, subjectivity and nonhuman becomings in the Anthropocene

This commentary takes up Ruddick’s ((2017) Rethinking the subject, reimagining worlds. Dialogues in Human Geography) imperative to reimagine subjectivity against the backdrop of the current ecological crisis. It contextualizes Ruddick’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-animal with a broader trajectory of Deleuze’s work on subjectivity. It does so in order to question how a shift from the liberal humanist subject to constructivist and relational models of subjectivity might be beneficial as we grapple with the concept of the human in the Anthropocene.

Love’s Lessons: intimacy, pedagogy, and political community

Abstract This article provides a philosophical account of love in relation to contemporary Marxist and post-structuralist conceptions of politics. Shifting the emphasis away from both the ontological question, “what is love?,” and the epistemological question, “how do we acquire certainty about love?,” this article advances a pedagogical question: how might love enable us to learn? To answer this question we turn to the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. After examining the tensions between ontological and ideological conceptions of love, we explore Hardt and Negri’s work on love as part of the affective labour of the “multitude.” We then trace the development of Deleuze’s early work on love as an apprenticeship to signs to his later exploration (with Guattari) of love in relation to multiplicity. In doing so, this article seeks to renovate the concept of love itself, framing it in terms of difference rather than merging and unity, and locating it outside the confines of the heterosexual couple and nuclear family.

Introduction: Deleuze and the Non/Human

The double figure of the wasp and the orchid features at a number of key moments in the work of Gilles Deleuze. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari use this figure to illustrate a series of significant interrelated concepts, including the rhizome, becoming, de- and reterritorialization. They are fascinated by the way certain orchids display the physical and sensory characteristics of female wasps in order to attract male wasps into a trans-species courtship dance, which they describe as ‘against nature’.1 As these wasps move from flower to flower, desperately trying to copulate with them, so too does the pollen which has been transferred to their bodies. Through this seduction the wasps are unsuspectingly co-opted into the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. This is a signal example of what Deleuze and Guattari call a becoming: the wasp, enlisted into the reproductive cycle of the orchid, engages in a becoming-orchid. This is not, they stress, an act of imitation, but a genuine incorporation of the body of the wasp into the orchid’s reproduction. The same is true in turn for the orchid itself, which engages in a becoming-wasp, not by copying the female wasp, but by crossing over into the zone of indiscernibility between it and the wasp in a series of de- and re-territorializations.

Deleuze and the Nonhuman Turn: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz

Recently the category of the human has been besieged from all sides. Not only has it been revealed to have been complicit with the violent exclusions of those considered to be less-than-human, understood as a normative notion (women, nonheterosexuals, people of color, the disabled) but its metaphysical security has also been challenged by the flourishing of theoretical interest in the nonhuman: forces, animals, objects and plants. How do you position your own work in relation to the critique of the human — in both its liberal and metaphysical forms — and how do you see the nonhuman turn developing?

Non/human appetites and the perils of consumption in Under the Skin

ABSTRACT This article examines the complex and shifting appetites for meat and sex in Michel Faber’s 2000 novel Under the Skin and the 2013 Jonathan Glazer film adaptation of the book. Although almost unrecognizable at the level of plot, this article argues that considering these texts together highlights their deep and unsettling rendering of misogyny in relation to the pleasures and perils of consumption. In engaging with the confronting and, at times, politically ambiguous treatment of consumption in these texts, this article offers a reading of the intersectional relationship between the oppression of women in a patriarchal society and the exploitation of nonhuman animals as a resource for human endeavors.

Blended English: Technology-Enhanced Teaching and Learning in English Literary Studies.

This article provides an account of a collaborative teaching and learning project conducted in the English programme at the University of Tasmania in 2015. The project, Blended English, involved the development, implementation, and evaluation of learning and teaching activities using online and mobile technologies for undergraduate English units. The authors draw on the project’s findings from survey and focus group data, and staff reflective practice and peer review, to make the case for increasing technology-enhanced teaching and learning in English literary studies. The blended approach described in this article has the capacity to enhance disciplinary learning; increase accessibility for students in remote and regional areas; facilitate deeper scholarly enquiry; and encourage staff to develop innovative, collaborative, and flexible teaching and learning practices. Appendix 1 presents examples of the project’s practical outcomes, as well as outlines of and reflections on three of the activities developed during the project.

Deleuze and Critical Plant Studies

While much philosophical work on the nonhuman has focused on animals, objects, forces, as well as the monstrous and the divine, it is only recently that scholarly attention in the Humanities has been directed toward plants. The last few years has seen the eruption of a vigorous and intensifying debate about the place of plants in human systems of meaning, including their cultural life, their discursive framing in academic and popular understandings, and their philosophical meaning. Adopting many of the same agendas as critical animal studies, critical plant studies challenges the privileged place of the human in relation to plant life and examines this through a series of lenses: ethical, political, historical, cultural, textual and philosophical. The implications of critical plant studies are significant: it has an impact on the understanding of plant life and of human/plant relations in a diverse set of arenas including plant science, agriculture, food practices and politics, forestry, gardening, and environmental ethics. Much of the current critical attention directed at plants coalesces on Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), which is emerging as the seminal text in critical plant studies.1 This book is a provocation to account philosophically for plant ontology and to cultivate a new respect for plant life.