John Protevi

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

The magnum opus of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, is not only the most important work of 20th century French philosophy, but also provides an unprecedented opportunity for philosophers and geographers to collaborate. Although neither were professional geographers A Thousand Plateaus constitutes a “geophilosophy,” a neo-materialism, which, in linking the philosophical materialisms of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud with contemporary science, avoids the traditional bogeys of materialism: determinism and vitalism. By the same token, as a rigorous and consistent materialism, A Thousand Plateaus provides an escape route from the paralyzing post-modernism that has trapped important contemporary schools of geography and philosophy. In addition, Deleuze and Guattari’s politicized stance–their historical-libidinal materialism–provides a relief from the arid scientism and naive realism to which critics of post- modernism have all too often fallen prey.

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

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.).

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

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. Translator’s notes appear as endnotes.