Writing and Immanence


Book Description

Writing and Immanence is a book that is attentive to the unabatingly potent, sometimes agonistic, forces at play in the continuing unfoldings of crises of representation. As immanent doing, the writing in the book writes to destabilise the orthodoxies, conventions and unquestioned givens of writing in the academy and, in so doing, is troubled by the ontogenetic uncertainties of its own writing coming into being. In the always active processualism of presencing, the fragility of word and concept creation animates, what Meillassoux has described as ‘the absolute necessity of the contingency of everything’. In working to avoid the formational and structural linearities of a series of numbered consecutive chapters, the book is constructed in and around the movements of the always actualising capaciousness of Acts. In offering engagements with education research and pedagogy and always sensitive to the dynamics of multiplicity, each Act emanates from and feeds into other en(Act)ments in the unfolding emergence of the book. Hence, in agencement, the book offers multiple points of entry and departure. Deleuze has said that a creator is ‘someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities...it’s by banging your head on the wall that you find a way through.’ Therefore, the writing of this book writes to the writing, pedagogic and qualitative research practices of those in education and the humanities who are writing to the creation of such impossibilities.




Pure Immanence


Book Description

Essays by Gilles Deleuze on the search for a new empiricism. The essays in this book present a complex theme at the heart of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, what in his last writing he called simply "a life." They capture a problem that runs throughout his work--his long search for a new and superior empiricism. Announced in his first book, on David Hume, then taking off with his early studies of Nietzsche and Bergson, the problem of an "empiricist conversion" became central to Deleuze's work, in particular to his aesthetics and his conception of the art of cinema. In the new regime of communication and information-machines with which he thought we are confronted today, he came to believe that such a conversion, such an empiricism, such a new art and will-to-art, was what we need most. The last, seemingly minor question of "a life" is thus inseparable from Deleuze's striking image of philosophy not as a wisdom we already possess, but as a pure immanence of what is yet to come. Perhaps the full exploitation of that image, from one of the most original trajectories in contemporary philosophy, is also yet to come.




Vision's Immanence


Book Description

"Lurie takes particular interest in the influence of cinema on Faulkner's fiction and the visual strategies he both deployed and critiqued. These include the suggestion of cinematic viewing on the part of readers and of characters in each of the novels; the collective and individual acts of voyeurism in Sanctuary and Light in August; the exposing in Absalom! Absalom! and Light in August of stereotypical and cinematic patterns of thought about history and race; and the evocation of popular forms like melodrama and the movie screen in If I forget thee, Jerusalem. Offering innovative readings of these canonical works, this study sheds new light on Faulkner's uniquely American modernism."--BOOK JACKET.




Racial Immanence


Book Description

Winner, 2021 NACCS Book Award, given by the National Association for Chicano and Chicana Studies Explores the how, why, and what of contemporary Chicanx culture, including punk rock, literary fiction, photography, mass graves, and digital and experimental installation art Racial Immanence attempts to unravel a Gordian knot at the center of the study of race and discourse: it seeks to loosen the constraints that the politics of racial representation put on interpretive methods and on our understanding of race itself. Marissa K. López argues that reading Chicanx literary and cultural texts primarily for the ways they represent Chicanxness only reinscribes the very racial logic that such texts ostensibly set out to undo. Racial Immanence proposes to read differently; instead of focusing on representation, it asks what Chicanx texts do, what they produce in the world, and specifically how they produce access to the ineffable but material experience of race. Intrigued by the attention to disease, disability, abjection, and sense experience that she sees increasing in Chicanx visual, literary, and performing arts in the late-twentieth century, López explores how and why artists use the body in contemporary Chicanx cultural production. Racial Immanence takes up works by writers like Dagoberto Gilb, Cecile Pineda, and Gil Cuadros, the photographers Ken Gonzales Day and Stefan Ruiz, and the band Piñata Protest to argue that the body offers a unique site for pushing back against identity politics. In so doing, the book challenges theoretical conversations around affect and the post-human and asks what it means to truly consider people of color as writersand artists. Moving beyond abjection, López models Chicanx cultural production as a way of fostering networks of connection that deepen our attachments to the material world.




Contingency, Immanence, and the Subject of Rhetoric


Book Description

Contingency, Immanence, and the Subject of Rhetoric considers rhetoric as the historical counterpoint of philosophical and religious discourses via its correspondences with antique rabbinic exegetical practices and contemporary psychoanalytic insights into causation. Timothy Richardson takes up the rabbinic position to demonstrate how traditional Greco-Christian rhetoric might be insufficient to account for what we now mean by rhetoric as a discipline.




Diagrammatic Immanence


Book Description

Rocco Gangle addresses the methodological questions raised by a commitment to immanence in terms of how diagrams may be used both as tools and as objects of philosophical investigation. Gangle integrates insights from Spinoza, Pierce and Deleuze in conjunction with the formal operations of category theory.




Literature and the Encounter with Immanence


Book Description

In Literature and the Encounter with Immanence Brynnar Swenson collects nine original essays that approach the relationship between literature and immanence through methodologies grounded in the philosophy of Spinoza. One of Spinoza’s most provocative claims is a simple declaration of ignorance: “We do not know what a body can do.” A literary theory based on immanence privileges the ontological status of the text and the material act of reading. Rather than ask what a text means, the essays here ask what a text can do. Each essay documents a distinct literary and philosophical encounter with immanence and, as a result, opens up a space to read literature as one would read philosophy and vice versa.




The Work of Art


Book Description

What art is--its very nature--is the subject of this book by one of the most distinguished continental theorists writing today. Informed by the aesthetics of Nelson Goodman and referring to a wide range of cultures, contexts, and media, The Work of Art seeks to discover, explain, and define how art exists and how it works. To this end, Gérard Genette explores the distinction between a work of art's immanence--its physical presence--and transcendence--the experience it induces. That experience may go far beyond the object itself.Genette situates art within the broad realm of human practices, extending from the fine arts of music, painting, sculpture, and literature to humbler but no less fertile fields such as haute couture and the culinary arts. His discussion touches on a rich array of examples and is bolstered by an extensive knowledge of the technology involved in producing and disseminating a work of art, regardless of whether that dissemination is by performance, reproduction, printing, or recording. Moving beyond examples, Genette proposes schemata for thinking about the different manifestations of a work of art. He also addresses the question of the artwork's duration and mutability.




Post-Continental Philosophy


Book Description

Post-Continental Philosophy outlines the shift in Continental thought over the last 20 years through the work of four central figures: Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michel Henry, and François Laruelle. Though they follow seemingly different methodologies and agendas, each insists on the need for a return to the category of immanence if philosophy is to have any future at all. Rejecting both the German phenomenological tradition of transcendence (of the Ego, Being, Consciousness, Alterity, or Flesh), as well as the French Structuralist valorisation of Language, they instead take the immanent categories of biology (Deleuze), mathematics (Badiou), affectivity (Henry), and axiomatic science (Laruelle) as focal points for a renewal of thought. Consequently, Continental philosophy is taken in a new direction that engages science and nature with a refreshingly critical and non-reductive approach to life, set-theory, embodiment, and knowledge. However, each of these new philosophies of immanence still regards what the other is doing as transcendent representation, raising the question of what this return to immanence really means. John Mullarkey's analysis provides a startling answer. By teasing out their internal differences, he discovers that the only thing that can be said of immanence without falling back into transcendent representation seems not to be a saying at all but a 'showing', a depiction through lines. Because each of these philosophies also places a special value on the diagram, the common ground of immanence is that occupied by the philosophical diagram rather than the word. The heavily illustrated final chapter of the book literally outlines how a mode of philosophical discourse might proceed when using diagrams to think immanence.




Immanent Transcendence


Book Description

Overthe last twenty years materialist thinkers in the continental tradition haveincreasingly emphasized the category of immanence. Yet the turn toimmanence has not meant the wholesale rejection of the concept oftranscendence, but rather its reconfiguration in immanent or materialist terms:an immanent transcendence. Through an engagement with the work ofDeleuze, Irigaray and Adorno, Patrice Haynes examines how the notion ofimmanent transcendence can help articulate a non-reductive materialism by whichto rethink politics, ethics and theology in exciting new ways. However,she argues that contrary to what some might expect, immanent accounts of matterand transcendence are ultimately unable to do justice to materialfinitude. Indeed, Haynes concludes by suggesting that a theisticunderstanding of divine transcendence offers ways to affirm fully materialimmanence, thus pointing towards the idea of a theological materialism.