Deleuze Studies Special Issues – serie

Unlike other philosophers whose work can be applied to questions of sex and gender, Deleuze's philosophy was motivated by the problem of desire and difference. Over the last three decades, feminist theory, gender theory and queer theory have been revolutionised and rejuvenated by Deleuze's provocation to consider sexual difference beyond the paradigm of the Oedipal family and Western humanism. In this volume, a series of prominent critical theorists extend Deleuze's already radical philosophy into ideas of the post-human, truth, reading, sexual difference and gender politics. Moving beyond the tired debates surrounding sex, gender and representation, these essays consider difference positively and provocatively, opening up new directions for the study of sexuality.

When Deleuze and Guattari wrote Anti-Oedipus they hoped it would be a call to arms for dissidents and political activists. Rather than set out a program of change, they tried to isolate the political, cultural and economic factors that inhibit change. In so doing they created a work that was instantly recognised as a philosophical watershed. It changed the landscape of political theory in a single sweep. In this volume, both critical theorists and activists analyse Deleuze and Guattari's critical tools on radical politics. The essays integrate theoretical elaborations and case-study problematisations on different political spaces and times, offering new ways to reflect on, and experiment with transformative politics.

Film criticism has always been about more than aesthetics, and by staging an encounter between Deleuze’s cinema project and his schizoanalysis work with Félix Guattari this volume attempts to open Deleuze’s aesthetic and philosophical analysis of film into spaces that can address his cinema books as a project that is also political, historical, industrial, economic, or cartographic in nature. Cinema no longer exists solely inside the cinematic apparatus – cinema must become television, digital imagery, web broadcast, advertisement; it must become open to a field of moving images and visual culture at large, and this volume opens Deleuze’s thought accordingly, inviting a range of leading scholars to question what can be done with Deleuze’s cinematic analyses if we are made to think of them as a further study in schizoanalysis.Key Features*Tom Conley explores an intersection between Deleuze and Blanchot in order develop a cartographic theorisation of film and visual culture *Patricia Pisters asks what a cinematic conception of Deleuze’s third synthesis of time might look like and begins to explore what she will call the Neuroimage*Richard Rushton charts the appearance of a Deleuzian imaginary in the films of Jean Renoir*Hanjo Berressem studies actual/virtual montage in Psycho and The Birds and uncovers a schizoanalytic Hitchcock of pure optical and sound images.

Presented as part of this special issue of Deleuze Studies is the complete text of Daniela Angelucci’s book Deleuze e i concetti del cinema. Translated by Sarin Marchetti, Deleuze and the Concepts of Cinema takes up Deleuze’s idea that the true objects of the theory of cinema are the concepts that cinema generates when understood as a practice of images. In this sense, philosophy alone is able, as Deleuze argued, to ‘constitute the concepts of cinema itself’. Deleuze and the Concepts of Cinema is both a significant exploration of some of Deleuze’s key concepts, as well as an excellent introduction to Deleuze’s Cinema books, aiming to avoid, as Deleuze himself once claimed, a double reproach: namely, both excessive erudition –which makes the reading complicated and tedious– and exaggerated familiarity.

Examining the core concepts of Deleuze and the surrounding literature, this Deleuze Studies Special Issue problematizes our ordinary understanding of the sense and status of the concepts of the virtual, the actual and the intensive.As Deleuze scholars, or as philosophers seeking to apply his philosophical insights in various domains, we sometimes speak and write as though Deleuze’s concepts were well understood. When we examine the literature, however, we find a surprising lack of consensus regarding the sense of his core concepts, even those as central as the virtual, the actual and the intensive. To take the concept of intensity as a significant example, commentators seem to be divided as to: whether the intensive is virtual in nature or whether it constitutes a third ontological realm; the proximity of the philosophical conception of intensity to the scientific one; the philosophical work which this concept is tasked with at different points in Deleuze’s oeuvre; and who the key thinkers are without whom Deleuze would not have been able to articulate his conception(s) of intensity. It is with an eye to these discordances that the present special issue has been assembled. We have not proposed to resolve them. Quite the contrary, we have wished to emphasize them. Each of the authors contributing to this special issue thus problematize in novel ways our ordinary understanding of the sense and status of the concepts of the virtual, the actual and the intensive, and collectively open up a problematic space in which we might think them anew.Key FeaturesExamines the discordances of the literature about Deleuze’s central concepts, such as the virtual, the actual and the intensive.Aims to emphasis, not resolve, the discordances, providing fresh discussions revolving around Deleuze’s insights.Combines writings from seven subject experts.

Deleuze Studies is a bold journal that challenges orthodoxies, encourages debate, invites controversy, seeks new applications, proposes new interpretations, and above all make new connections between scholars and ideas in the field. This book series highlights special, themed issues of the journal that are also published in book format.