Transversals: New Directions in Philosophy – serie

This is a detailed assessment of the life and work of Felix Guattari, "Mr Anti" as the French press labelled him, the friend of and collaborator with Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan and Antonio Negri, and one of the 20th century's last great activist-intellectuals. Guattari is widely known for his celebrated writings with Deleuze, but these writings do not represent the true breadth and impact of his thinking, writing and activism. Guattari's major work as a clinical and theoretical innovator in psychoanalysis was closely linked to his participation in struggles against European right-wing politics. This book introduces the reader to the diversity and sheer range of Guattari's interests, from anti-psychiatry, to Japanese culture, political activism and his theorizing of subjectification.

Based on an original synthesis of the work of Marx and Bergson, the key theorists of capitalism and creativity, the book presents an astonishing analysis of contemporary science and capital. Exploring in particular genetics, evolutionary theory, commodification and class consciousness, Philosophy in the Age of Science and Capital injects life back into contemporary politics, ethics and aesthetics.

This is a detailed assessment of the life and work of Felix Guattari, "Mr Anti" as the French press labelled him, the friend of and collaborator with Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan and Antonio Negri, and one of the 20th century's last great activist-intellectuals. Guattari is widely known for his celebrated writings with Deleuze, but these writings do not represent the true breadth and impact of his thinking, writing and activism. Guattari's major work as a clinical and theoretical innovator in psychoanalysis was closely linked to his participation in struggles against European right-wing politics. This book introduces the reader to the diversity and sheer range of Guattari's interests, from anti-psychiatry, to Japanese culture, political activism and his theorizing of subjectification.

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 Francois 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.

The Idea of Pure Critique will be invaluable to students of Kant as well as those interested in Deleuze and Guattari's contribution to philosophies of difference. More fundamentally, the book presents a series of stimulating political and philosophical challenges to the apathy and indifference that pervade modern life. What is required of critique if it is to overcome indifference? This question addresses core themes in modern, post-Kantian and European philosophy, challenging theory's resignation in the face of contemporary political and economic formations. In this book, Iain Mackenzie argues eloquently that if such indifference is to be overcome, critique must first be demarcated in its purity, as an idea of critique in and of itself. Moreover, for the idea of critique to become pure we must view it as being essentially the construction of difference. Only in this pure form, understood as the construction of difference, can critique hope to overcome the crushing indifference of our current age.

The Idea of Pure Critique will be invaluable to students of Kant as well as those interested in Deleuze and Guattari's contribution to philosophies of difference. More fundamentally, the book presents a series of stimulating political and philosophical challenges to the apathy and indifference that pervade modern life. What is required of critique if it is to overcome indifference? This question addresses core themes in modern, post-Kantian and European philosophy, challenging theory's resignation in the face of contemporary political and economic formations. In this book, Iain Mackenzie argues eloquently that if such indifference is to be overcome, critique must first be demarcated in its purity, as an idea of critique in and of itself. Moreover, for the idea of critique to become pure we must view it as being essentially the construction of difference. Only in this pure form, understood as the construction of difference, can critique hope to overcome the crushing indifference of our current age.

Abstract Sex investigates the impact of advances in contemporary science and information technology on conceptions of sex. Evolutionary theory and the technologies of viral information transfer, cloning and genetic engineering are changing the way we think about human sex, reproduction and the communication of genetic information. Sex is no longer a linear proces or a private act. It is now central to the proliferating world of cyber-capitalism. Humankind has entered a time of molecular sex, when information is traded not only across sexes but across species and between humans and machines. Abstract Sex presents a philosophical exploration of this new world of sexual, informatic and capitalistic multiplicity, and of the accelerated mutation of nature and culture. Luciana Parisi is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Cultures in the Department of Cultural Studies, University of East London.

The whole of modern European philosophy', wrote F.W.J. Schelling in 1809, 'has this common deficiency - that nature does not exist for it.' Despite repeated echoes of Schelling's assessment throughout the natural sciences, and despite the philosophy of nature recently proposed but not completed by Gilles Deleuze, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling argues that Schelling's verdict remains accurate two hundred years later. Presenting a lucid account of Schelling's major works in the philosophy of nature alongside those of his scientific contemporaries who pursued and furthered that work, this book does not simply aim to present Schelling's extravagant 'speculative physics' as an historical episode. Rather, Schelling's programme is presented as a viable and necessary corrective both to the rejection of metaphysics and the correlative 'antiphysics' at the ethical heart of contemporary philosophy.