John Protevi

Cette communication explorera la nature deleuzienne de l'ontologie présupposée par Foucault dans ses cours Sécurité, Territoire, Population et Naissance de la Biopolitique. L'objectif sera d'identifier certaines formules de Foucault qui font écho à un concept clé de Différence et Répétition: l'individuation comme intégration d'une multiplicité. Dans ces textes se trouveront pas mal d'éléments de l'ontologie deleuzienne: par exemple, le couple différentiation / différenciation; l'anti-essentialisme; et le champ différentiel, pré-individuel, problématique, ou virtuel d'où émergent, par l'auto-organisation, des individus actuels. Mais, on verra aussi des difficultés conceptuelles, surtout dans sa notion de "possibilité," que subit Foucault dans quelques-unes de ses réflexions méthodologiques, difficultés qui émergent pour lui en faisant ses propres analyses de "la mise en intelligibilité en histoire" pendant qu'il présuppose l'ontologie deleuzienne.

Upon first reading, the beginning of Chapter 2 of Difference and Repetition, with its talk of ―contemplative souls‖ and ―larval subjects,‖ seems something of a bizarre biological panpsychism. Actually it does defend a sort of biological panpsychism, but by defining the kind of psyche Deleuze is talking about, I‘ll show here how we can remove the bizarreness from that concept. First, I will sketch Deleuze‘s treatment of ―larval subjects,‖ then show how Deleuze‘s discourse can be articulated with Evan Thompson‘s biologically based intervention into cognitive science, the ―mind in life‖ or ―enaction‖ position. Then I will then show how each in turn fits with contemporary biological work on E. coli chemotaxis (movement in response to changes in environment)

This paper brings Georges Canguilhem and Gilles Deleuze together with the contemporary biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard. I examine the concepts of adaptation and adaptivity in Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological in light of West-Eberhard’s notion of “developmental plasticity,” which is, I claim, adaptivity in the developmental register. In turn, I interpret Canguilhem’s notion of “comparative physiology” and West- Eberhard’s notion of an “eco-devo-evo” approach to biology in terms of Deleuze’s notion of multiplicity

In the first part of this talk I show how some ideas in the new "4EA" branch of cognitive science, which gets away from the computer metaphor to talk about affective cognition as the direction of action of an organism, can be illuminated by Deleuze's ontology. Now that may sound ridiculous, as Deleuze's terminology is notoriously baroque – how could it ever "illuminate" anything? So I'm going to be using plain English translations of his concepts; I think his concepts are too good, too useful, for his terminology to be such a barrier to entry. Then I'm going to use this mixture of Deleuze and 4EA ideas to examine a case study which has, besides its metaphysical and psychological implications, some ethical, political, and legal ones as well. So to deal with them we'll deal just a bit with Agamben and Foucault

The Terri Schiavo case, the latest high-profile “right-to-die” case in the United States, whose denouement saturated the US mediasphere at the end of March 2005, is a particularly complex problem in the Deleuzean sense. Its solution, which took more than 15 years, actualized lines from legal, medical, biological, political … multiplicities. The ellipses indicate the impossibility of completely delimiting the forces at work in any case (the virtual as endless differentiation) just as it indicates the necessity of cutting through them in making any one solution work (actualization as differenciation). Thus that actualization, a creative resolution of the problem, brought some aspects of the virtual into distinctness, while others faded into momentary obscurity.1 The elements functioning most intensely in the Schiavo case cut across the fields of right, medical discipline and biopower, hence at the intersection of sexuality and racism, as Foucault explains.2 The turn to a liberal notion of the right to privacy as the right to die is never simple, for we remain trapped at the intersection of discipline and biopower if we ground that right in sovereign rights of personal autonomy and bodily integrity. The challenge to a Deleuzean jurisprudence is to creatively transform that right to show its basis in de-personalization. In other words, only in an extraordinary, ethical, situation, living along the fault line..