[D-G] Fwd: COLLAPSE Bulletin 6: Volume III 'Unknown Deleuze' now available

Urbanomic office at urbanomic.com
Wed Nov 14 14:27:19 PST 2007


COLLAPSE Volume III 'Unknown Deleuze' is now available.  This volume  
contains explorations of the work of Gilles Deleuze by pioneering  
thinkers in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, music and  
architecture. In addition, we publish in this volume two previously  
untranslated texts by Deleuze himself, along with a fascinating piece  
of vintage science fiction from one of his more obscure influences.  
Finally, as an annex to Collapse Volume II, we also include a full  
transcription of the conference on 'Speculative Realism' held in  
London earlier this year.



Purchase/subscribe online at http://www.urbanomic.com/order.php

Readers can also download a preview of the Editorial Introduction to  
Volume III from
http://www.urbanomic.com/dl.php, where introductions to Vols I and II  
are also available.

Whilst books continue to appear at an alarming rate which claim to  
put Deleuze's thought 'to work' in diverse areas outside of  
philosophy, we submit, in this volume, that his philosophical thought  
itself still remains enigmatic, both in its detail and in its major  
themes. The contributors to this volume aim to clarify, from a  
variety of perspectives, Deleuze's contribution to philosophy: in  
what does his philosophical originality lie; what does he appropriate  
from other philosophers and how does he transform it?  And how can  
the apparently disparate threads of his work to be 'integrated' –  
what is the precise nature of the constellation of the aesthetic, the  
conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and what are  
the overarching problems in which the numerous philosophical concepts  
'signed Deleuze' converge?

The volume includes two newly-translated articles by Gilles Deleuze  
along with contributions from Arnaud Villani, Thomas Duzer, Quentin  
Meillassoux, John Sellars, Éric Alliez & Jean-Claude Bonne, Haswell &  
Hecker, Robin Mackay, Mehrdad Iravanian, J.-H. Rosny the Elder,  
Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier.

For anyone wanting to go right to the core of Deleuzian philosophy  
and to experience the challenge of Deleuze's thought, the articles  
collected in Collapse III will provide a virtually inexhaustible  
treasury of insights. As the featured authors shed light on this  
challenge from different points of view, they produce unexpected  
points of convergence, providing important resources for a more  
complete conceptual 'portrait' of Deleuze, and suggesting further  
lines of thought to be investigated. For anyone looking for an  
alternative to the emerging orthodoxy seemingly bent on broadcasting  
an 'image of Deleuzian thought', Collapse III provides a wide-ranging  
but uniformly rigorous and innovative survey of Gilles Deleuze's  
thought, and an illustration of the fact that, even if it is already  
fashionable to evoke a 'post-Deleuzian' era, we have not yet begun to  
draw the properly philosophical consequences of this thought.

–  Mathesis, Science and Philosophy, written by a 21-year-old Gilles  
Deleuze, has never before appeared in print in English and is  
published in Collapse in a new translation. Written as an  
introduction to a 1946 republication of a 19th-century esoteric  
philosophical work by Dr Johann Malfatti de Montereggio, this text  
offers a fascinating glimpse, set in an unexpected context, into the  
themes of Deleuze's early work, as they emerge, in an already  
characteristically-dazzling style.  Meanwhile, in the brief but  
illuminating 1981 interview with Arnaud Villani, Answers to a Series  
of Questions (also appearing here for the first time in English),  
Deleuze provides some tantalising intimations regarding the enduring  
concerns of his work over the years.

– In his own contribution to the volume, philosopher-poet Arnaud  
Villani (whose 1999 The Wasp and the Orchid was one of the first  
books to be published in France treating Deleuze's work as a whole)  
reflects on Deleuze's affirmation that he considered himself a 'pure  
metaphysician': what, precisely, does metaphysics mean for Deleuze?  
Through a sophisticated reading utilising the resources of  
aesthetics, poetics and philosophy, Villani not only defines the  
object of this metaphysics, but also shows clearly why it cannot be  
severed from its links with these other realms of thought, or from  
the question of the political or moral 'decision'.

– This allusion reminds us that an examination of Deleuze today  
would be unthinkable without reference to Alain Badiou's provocative  
Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, and in his article In Memoriam of  
Deleuze, Thomas Duzer undertakes, through a survey of the major axes  
of Deleuze's philosophy, to locate the precise nature of their now  
famous 'nonrelationship'; his defence emphasises that the positive  
features of Deleuze's thought cannot be reduced either to a  
'phenomenology' or to Badiou's polemical opposite.

– In an exclusive translated extract from their new book Matisse- 
Thought: Portrait of the Artist as Hyperfauve, philosopher Éric  
Alliez (former student of Deleuze's and author of The Signature of  
the World) and art-historian Jean-Claude Bonne analyse the revolution  
inaugurated in painting by Matisse during his ‘Fauvist’ period of  
1905-6, discovering that the rigorous 'quantitative' conception of  
the intensive which Matisse proposes allows not only a new  
understanding of the significance of Fauvism for his later work, but  
also clarifies and reaffirms the philosophical pertinence of a  
Nietzschean-Deleuzian thinking of intensity and extensity, the  
qualitative and the quantitative.

– On the basis of an examination of a 'fragment' from Deleuze and  
Guattari's What is Philosophy?, Quentin Meillassoux, in a  
philosophical tour de force, meticulously reconstructs the nature and  
the measure of Deleuzian  'immanence', proposing finally a  
'subtractive' reading drawing on Bergson's Matter and Memory,  
allowing us to understand, step-by-step  'from the inside' the  
construction of that singular network of concepts found in Deleuze's  
work.

– Sound artists Russell Haswell and Florian Hecker contribute some  
strange and beautiful images taken from the electronic 'score' of  
their new sound work Blackest Ever Black, an 'introduction to  
synaesthesia' created using composer Iannis Xenakis's computerised  
UPIC system to transform contemporary images into sound. An  
accompanying text by Robin Mackay analyses the affinities between  
Xenakis's conception of a musical 'polyagogy' and Deleuze's  
'transcendental empiricism'.

– Examining Deleuze's famous use of the supposedly Stoic theory of  
Chronos and Aîon in Logic of Sense, John Sellars (author of The  
Stoics and The Art of Living) examines just how much it owes to  
actual stoic theories of time, thus providing both a case-study in  
the Deleuzian 'ventriloquism' in the history of philosophy and an  
informative example of the 'stratigraphic' time in which, according  
to Deleuze, philosophy takes place.

– Iranian architect Mehrdad Iravanian constructs a 'graphitext'  
which, taking as its starting point a page from Deleuze's The Fold,  
undertakes a non-interpretative 'ex-pli-cation' of its content.   
Employing a hybrid methodology at once literal, textual and  
architectural, he brings to light structures secreted within the  
folds of the text itself.

– One of the many obscure 'personae' in the background of Deleuze's  
Difference and Repetition, the mysterious figure J.-H. Rosny the  
Elder not only supplied that work's repeated formula for the nature  
of intensity-as-difference, but, as both philosopher and pioneering  
science fiction author, was also a living embodiment of the notion  
that 'philosophy is a kind of science-fiction': in his astonishing  
1895 tale Another World, appearing here in English for the very first  
time, Rosny evokes an alien world of abstract lifeforms intersecting  
with our own, and examines with philosophical acuity the process of  
bringing such unknown beings within the purview of scientific knowledge.

– As if all this were not enough ... Following the 'dossier' on  
Speculative Realism in the previous volume of Collapse,  Volume III  
also includes a full transcription of the colloquium of the same name  
held at Goldsmith's University of London in April 2007 featuring  
presentations by Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and  
Quentin Meillassoux on the problems, and the promise, of this renewal  
of speculative philosophical thought. Running to well over 100 pages,  
this is an important and exciting document of contemporary philosophy  
in the making, proposing new conceptual approaches, exploring the  
borders between science and philosophy, and mining the history of  
thought for fresh insights into Nature, objectivity, and the legacy  
of 'correlationism'.

Online orders for Volume III are priced (including postage) £10  
(UK) / £13 (Europe) / £16 (Elsewhere).

***4-Volume subscriptions are also available online at a reduced  
price.***

Help us : if you are able to post a notice in your place of work or  
study, please download and print the flyer for Collapse Volume III  
from http://www.urbanomic.com/dl.php.  We would also welcome and  
reciprocate all links into the Urbanomic website from blogs, etc.   
Finally, please forward this bulletin on to anyone you know who is  
not on our mailing list but who may be interested.

COLLAPSE Volume III
October 2007.
Paperback 115x175mm 454pp
Limited Edition of 1000 numbered copies.
ISBN 0-9553087-2-0
£9.99

THOMAS DUZER
In Memoriam: Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995
GILLES DELEUZE
Responses to a Series of Questions
ARNAUD VILLANI
'I Feel I Am A Pure Metaphysician': The Consequences of Deleuze's Remark
QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence and Matter and Memory
HASWELL & HECKER
Blackest Ever Black
GILLES DELEUZE
Mathesis, Science and Philosophy
JOHN SELLARS
The Truth about Chronos and Aîon
ÉRIC ALLIEZ & JOHN-CLAUDE BONNE
Matisse-Thought and the Strict Ordering of Fauvism
MEHRDAD IRAVANIAN
Unknown Deleuze
J.-H. ROSNY THE ELDER
Another World
RAY BRASSIER, IAIN HAMILTON GRANT, GRAHAM HARMAN, QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX
Speculative Realism














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