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7 Foucault and Deleuze on acid Drugs and the orbit of madness In an interview in 1984 on the work of Raymond Roussel, which had been the subject of Foucault’s early book Death and the Labyrinth (1963), the discussion touches on the subject of Roussel’s use of drugs. Foucault says that ‘the study of the culture of drugs or drugs as culture in the West’ was something that interests him greatly and that he would have liked to have undertaken a study of the drug culture which was ‘so closely tied to the artistic life of the West’ (1987: 182–3). Unfortunately he
This essay deals with the temporality of film through an examination of narrative, structure and image in Sam Mendes’ film American Beauty (2000), referring to both Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson‘s work on time. I argue that the repetition of formal elements (images, settings, colours, shapes, and textures) creates a kind of internal rhyme that is suggested appeals to human aesthetic rhythmic sensibilities and invites the spectators imaginative interplay. This temporal pattern speaks of a particularly human rhythmic design, and provides an escape from the ‘standardised, context free, homogeneous’ clock time ‘that structures and times our daily lives’.
The insights of Gilles Deleuze‘s film-philosophy offers a distinctive theoretical approach to Gothics remarkable affects and temporal effects. Introducing key critical tools, I apply them to Neil Jordan‘s Interview with the Vampire (1994), as well as asserting the broader relevance of Deleuze to Gothic studies.
Gothic horror author Poppy Z. Brite wrote a biography of former Hole singer Courtney Love in 1997. What seemed an odd departure for the former actually took advantage of the Gothic valences in the latter‘s life and depictions in popular culture. The narrative gothicises Love‘s story while simultaneously repudiating and relying on Goth subculture for some of its legitimacy. This articulation of gothic literary form with Goth popular culture constitutes one traversal of Brite‘s text. Using concepts from Deleuze and Guattaris work, the essays reading of Courtney Love‘s biography is one plateau among others in an ongoing study of what I call ‘minoritarian gothic’ in popular and literary culture.
Pablo Corro‘s 2014 book Retóricas del cine chileno (Rhetorics of Chilean Cinema) is a wide-ranging examination of the style and concerns that have come to characterise Chilean film-making from the 1950s to the present day. Corro demonstrates how ideas of national cinema are always to some extent dependent on transnational currents of cinematic ideas and techniques, as well as on local political contexts. The chapter presented here, Weak Poetics, adapts Gianni Vattimo‘s notion of weak thought to discuss the growing attention paid by Chilean films to the mundane, the everyday and the intimate. Corro‘s dense, allusive writing skilfully mirrors the films he describes, in which meaning is fragmented and dispersed into glimpsed appearances and acousmatic sounds. Corros historicisation of this fracturing of meaning allows the cinema of the everyday to be understood not as a retreat from politics, but as a recasting of the grounds on which it might occur.
towards migrants. In ‘Myths of Violence’, Brad Evans offers a possible explanation of what motivates solidarity with migrants and asylum seekers in Europe. For Evans, instead of the privilege of absolute power, violence is the outcome of asymmetric freedom, ‘the freedom to punish and destroy … over the freedom to resist or … to flee’. With reference to Gilles Deleuze, he argues that oppression not only denies the rights of the oppressed but restricts their movement. He challenges a conception of ‘the political’ that he feels legitimises the continuation of violence in
destroy, which triumphs over the freedom to resist or the freedom to flee. Paul Virilio was correct: all wars are wars of movement ( Virilio and Lotringer, 1983 ). And as Gilles Deleuze further rightly insisted, if a person is so oppressed, it is not that their rights are being denied but rather that their movements are restricted ( Deleuze, 1995 : 122). Arendt showed that in cases of extreme violence, what marks out the distinction between perpetrators and victims was that everything was possible, and nothing could be resisted ( Arendt, 1976 ). But no system of power
support improved innovation processes ( Obrecht and Warner, 2016 ) – not in itself a worthless task but one which fails to address the most critical barrier to both the generation and adoption of innovation. In the Marxian analysis that follows from Schumpeter, innovation ‘is adopted only from the perspective of the rate of profit its investment will offer by the lowering of production costs’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972: 253). The implication that private companies are the primary vehicles for
an assemblage. 3 I borrow this concept from the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari as they coined it in A Thousand Plateaus ( 2004 ). They introduce the concept of agencement that is generally translated as assemblage in English to capture the intricate interplay of agency and structure, contingency and structuration, change and organisation. 4 Important is the fact that ‘assemblages select elements from the milieus (the surroundings, the context, the mediums) in which the assemblages work’ ( Macgregor Wise, 2005 : 78). Therefore, it is needed to
The legendary poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, a fleeting figure on the periphery of early twentieth-century European avant-gardism, is frequently invoked as proto-Dada and Surrealist exemplar. Yet he remains an insubstantial phenomenon, not seen since 1918, clouded in drifting untruths. This study processes philosophical positions into a practical recovery – from nineteenth-century Nietzsche to twentieth-century Deleuze – with thoughts on subjectivity, metaphor, representation and multiplicity. From fresh readings and new approaches – of Cravan’s first published work as a manifesto of simulation; of contributors to his Paris review Maintenant as impostures for the Delaunays; of idle dissipation in New York as a Duchampian readymade; and of the conjuring of Cravan in Picabia’s elegiac film Entr’acte – The fictions of Arthur Cravan concludes with the absent poet-boxer’s eventual casting off into a Surrealist legacy, and his becoming what metaphor is: a means to represent the world.