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.

OVERVIEW. The concept of emergence – which I define as the (diachronic) construction of functional structures in complex systems that achieve a (synchronic) focus of systematic behaviour as they constrain the behaviour of individual components – plays a crucial role in debates in philosophical reflection on science as a whole (the question of reductionism) as well as in the fields of biology (the status of the organism), social science (the practical subject), and cognitive science (the cognitive subject).1 In this essay I examine how the philosophy of Deleuze and that of Deleuze and Guattari2 can help us see some of the most important implications of the debate on the status of the organism, as well as prepare the ground for a discussion of the practical and cognitive subject.

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

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)

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

God has been called many things, but perhaps nothing so strange as the name of “lobster” which he receives in A Thousand Plateaus.1 Is this simple profanation a pendant to the gleeful anti-clericalism of Deleuze2, for whom there is no insult so wretched as that of “priest”?3 Certainly, on one level. But it is also a clue to Deleuze’s ability to use a traditional concern of theology, the name of God, to intervene in the most basic questions of Western philosophy, in this case, the interchange of theology, biology and politics inherent in the question of nature and the organism.

While Agamben acknowledges the Arendtian and Foucaultian thesis of the modernity of biopower, he will claim that sovereignty and biopolitics are equally ancient and essentially intertwined in the originary gesture of all politics; sovereignty is the power to decide the state of exception whereby bare life or zoe is exposed "underneath" political life or bios. Agamben then finds in the concentration camp the modern biopolitical paradigm, in which the state of exception has become the rule and we have all become [potentially] bearers of exposed bare life in that we are all subject to what I will call a "de-politicizing predication": to use the current American jargon, being named an "enemy combatant.".