John Protevi

DEFINING THE LIMITS OF THE FIELD. Because 'consciousness and the body' is central to so many philosophical endeavors, I cannot provide a comprehensive survey of recent work. So we must begin by limiting the scope of our inquiry. First, we will concentrate on work done in English or translated into English, simply to ensure ease of access to the texts under examination. Second, we will concentrate on work done in the last 15 years or so, since the early 1990s. Third, we will concentrate on those philosophers who treat both consciousness and the body together. Thus we will not treat philosophers who look at body representations in culture, nor philosophers who examine socio-political bodily practices with minimal or no reference to consciousness. Finally, even with the philosophers we choose to treat, we cannot be comprehensive and will instead make representative choices among their works. With that being said, we will have a fairly liberal definition of continental philosophy, operationally defined as that which makes (non-exclusive) reference to the classic phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Thus we will include the radical..

Hurricane Katrina was an elemental and a social event. To understand it, you first have to understand the land, the air, the sun, the river and the sea; you have to understand earth, wind, fire and water; you have to understand geomorphology, meteorology, biology, economics, politics, history. You have to understand how they have come together to form, with the peoples of America, Europe and Africa, the historical patterns of life of Louisiana and New Orleans, the bodies politic of the region, bodies you need to study with political physiology. You have to understand what those bodies could do and what they could withstand, and how they intersected the event of the storm. In this paper, simply for the sake of time and space constraints, I will concentrate on New Orleans; the stories of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, or of Saint Bernard, Saint Tammany, and Plaquemines Parishes in Louisiana are complex and dramatic as well.

In this paper I investigate the mechanics of killing, brining together neuroscience, military history, and the work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. Investigating the Columbine killers and the way they negotiate with the intensity of the act of killing allows me to construct a concept of “political physiology,” defined as “interlocking intensive processes that articulate the patterns, thresholds, and triggers of emergent bodies, forming assemblages linking the social and the somatic, with sometimes the subjective as intermediary.” While most people must be in a blind rage to kill at close range, the Columbine killers raised the threshold at which an evolutionarily inherited non-subjective “rage agent” kicks in, thus allowing themselves to be subjects in the act of killing. Yet they were not “cold-blooded killers,” either, those who lower the intensity of the act of killing below the threshold that prevents most interpersonal violence from reaching lethal proportions, since they committed suicide soon after their killing spree from burning out. The success of the Columbine killing machine warns us of a “machinic phylum” whose singularities are virtually available for incorporation into bodies by subjects willing to undergo extreme experiments in political physiology.

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..

But first, let me note that these two are terms derived more or less directly from the collaborative work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Now I think it’s important that analytic and continental philosophers learn to talk to each other, and I’m convinced that Deleuze and Guattari’s work, when properly explained, provides a common ground for this discussion. That’s because they provide the ontology and epistemology for a world that is able to yield the results we find in using nonlinear dynamical modeling, as is common practice in quite a few scientific fields today, among them some of special interest to philosophers, such as brain studies. (Varela et al., “The Brain Web” Nature Reviews. Neuroscience 2001 is a review article covering one hundred or so studies of the 1990s that used non-linear dynamics for modeling brain function.).

For the most part, this is a fairly literal translation, but I have opted for a few English idioms for the sake of readability. In that spirit, I have kept the original punctuation, which results in very long sentences, but I have inserted paragraph breaks for readability. I mark these inserted breaks with this sign [¶]; unmarked breaks are in the original. In addition to providing the French for difficult translations, I also interpolate a few English words for readability. Simondon’s notes appear as footnotes; translator’s notes as endnotes

To be delivered at the 2nd "Deleuze Camp" in Cardiff, Wales, in August 2008. The intended audience is composed of students and scholars of Deleuze who are non-specialists in philosophy of biology. Thus these are introductory lectures with a good deal of simplification and exaggeration. I wish to thank Dominique Homberger, Vince LiCata, John Larkin, Chuck Dyke, and Alistair Welchman for critical and clarifying comments. They have helped immensely, and the remaining infelicities are solely my responsibility

Given Time and the Gift of Life explores the following nexus in Derrida's thought: the gift, the mother, and life. The first section examines life within the trajectory of the gift, the excess of gift over return in the gift of life, and the rewriting of Aristotelian generation in differantial species-being. The second section shows the quasi-transcendental nature of Derrida's thought. The conclusion sketches some of the political consequences of the gift of life thought as the quasi-transcendental gift of differantial species-being

Sociologists have known for some time of the widespread incidence of prosocial behavior in the aftermath of disasters (research summarized in Rodriguez, Trainor, and Quarantelli 2006). They have also criticized the role of media in spreading “disaster myths” which include the idea of widespread anti-social behavior (Tierney, Bevc, and Kuligowski 2006). In this essay I will investigate the evolutionary theory and neuroscience needed to account for such prosocial behavior, as well as to discuss the political entailments and consequence of media framing emphasizing if not inventing widespread antisocial behavior.

In the first part of this talk I show how some ideas in the new "4EA" branch of cognitive science (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, affective), 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 essay examines the idea of ―biological space and time‖ found in Evan Thompson‘s Mind in Life and Gilles Deleuze‘s Difference and Repetition. Tracking down this ―new Transcendental Aesthetic‖ intersects new work done on panpsychism. Both Deleuze and Thompson can be fairly said to be biological panpsychists. That‘s what ―Mind in Life‖ means: mind and life are coextensive; life is a sufficient condition for mind. Deleuze is not just a biological panpsychist, however, so we‘ll have to confront full-fledged panpsychism. At the end of the essay we‘ll be able to pose the question whether or not we can supplement Thompson‘s ―Mind in Life‖ position with a ―Mind in Process‖ position and if so, what that supplement means both for his work and for panpsychism

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.