Helene Frichot

The investigation that follows will flex in four directions, backwards and forwards, along the elastic threadthat ties the event of the bullfight to sex and thence a warm spill of sensation. In order to enter the fraythat is the bullfight, I will appropriate a term from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari by way of which eachof the four thrusts I advance, or fights I present, can be read as asignifying ruptures [1] . With thisconcept we are encouraged to question the integrity of signification. By breaching the threshold ofsignification there results a momentary loss of the senses, at which point we might take the opportunityto search out or invent other modes of making sense. The activity of writing, for instance, as one meansof experimenting with sense, "has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping,even realms that are yet to come" [2]. Though the bullfight is organised by way of its own particularcodes ofoperation and signification, much is also left to chance and the unexpected [3] . With thisemphasis on unexpected novelty in mind, I ask you to consider this paper as an arena in which fourbullfights will be conducted. The twists and turns of the trope of the bullfight will be surveyed across fourdifferent textual terrains in order to explore the effects that result in bringing these terrains into thevicinity of each other. As such, I will touch upon the work of Georges Bataille, Friedrich Nietzsche,Francis Bacon and Michel Leiris. As Nietzsche has suggested, using the tauromachic trope, to enter intoa "frightful and dangerous" enterprise does not necessarily enable the capture of an enraged bull [4]; atthe outset we cannot necessarily be assured of what will eventuate with the outcome. Furthermore, thatthe bull is always vanquished merely holds to the dictates of good and common sense, conventions that,in this arena, are only tenuously maintained. It is instead the event that surfaces as an incorporeal blocof sensation, exploding in the midst of the spectacle, that this paper determines to pursue.

:It is now well over a decade since the artist Matthew Barney's epic work the Cremaster Cycle was completed. This essay returns to the post-human becomings of man that populate Barney's elaborately cross-referenced, aesthetic pluriverse, in particular addressing how the man-form labours amidst and on his environment-worlds, inclusive of the architectural augmentations that assist in the production of such worlds. Revisiting Barney's Cremaster Cycle now offers the opportunity to ask what becomes of the exclusionary and exhaustive world-making performances of the Anthrop once he has placed extreme stress on himself and his mental, social and environmental ecologies, so that any mutual support system is brought to the threshold of exhaustion.

Defining the lives of a majority of the world's population, the question of 'the city' has risen to the fore as one the most urgent issues of our time &quote; uniting concerns across the terrain of climate policies, global financing, localised struggles and multi-disciplinary research. Deleuze and the City rests on a conviction that philosophy is crucially important for advancing knowledge on cities, and for allowing us to envisage new forms of urban life toward a more sustainable future. It gathers some of the most original thinkers and accomplished scholars in contemporary urban studies, showing how Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical project is essential for our thinking through the multi-scalar, uneven and contested landscapes that constitute 'the city' today. Case studies range from the 'laboratory urbanism' of an Austrian ski resort and a 'sustainable' Swedish shopping mall to the 'urbicidal' refurbishments of Haifa.

Entwining the disciplines of philosophy and architecture, this essay proceeds from an account of the Anthropocene and its dark promise of a foreclosed human future toward the speculative gesture of feminist futures, with a focus on feminist architectural practices. To reflect on the ‘storms of progress’ that have issued in the Anthropocene Walter Benjamin’s famous angel of history is complemented with Bruno Latour’s more recent formulation of an angel of geohistory. Each angel posits the question of what is to be done in the aftermath of the destructions the Anthropos has wrought on a global scale, leaving behind the graffiti-like signature of human industrial toil in the very material geological constitution of the planet’s surface while altering its enclosing atmosphere. While each angel flees the material destructions of human progress they are at the same time confronted with what Isabelle Stengers calls the intrusion of Gaia, a mythical figure who cares little for human history. Drawing to a conclusion the essay ventures the speculative gesture of a feminist future and how this can be supported through feminist practices, specifically in architecture. Such a future does not seek to overcome, to escape or to flee, but as Donna Haraway would have it, to stay with the trouble, to work assiduously from the midst of the situations in which we find ourselves.

Architectural Affects after Deleuze and Guattari is the first sustained survey into ways of theorising affect in architecture. It reflects on the legacy and influence of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the uptake of affect in architectural discourse and practice, and stresses the importance of the political in discussions of affect. It is a timely antidote to an enduring fixation on architectural phenomenology in the field. The contributors offer a variety of approaches to the challenges presented in discussing the relation between affect and architecture, and how this is contextualised in the broader field of affect studies. Ranging from evaluations of architectural and urban productions and practices, to inquiries into architectural experience, to modes of affective inquiry in education, to experimental affective writing, each contribution to this seminal volume suggests ways of developing a more sustained approach to a crucial thematic domain. The volume will be of use to students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels; researchers, theorists and historians of architecture and related urban and spatial disciplines; the fields of social science and cultural theory; and to philosophy, in particular the studies of Deleuze and Guattari, and Baruch Spinoza.

Proceeding by fits and starts, this paper will be arranged as a montaged assemblage. By appropriatingthe technique of montage, inaugurated within the realm of modernism, I will attempt to create apost-modern experiment. The material of this fitful accumulation will be composed of a loose collection ofmonsters or monstrous offspring. As they line up , theirawkward forms will admit an ongoing debt to the magnanimous conjunctions of the imagination: a facultythat has always lent itself to the monstrous. Here, the figure of the monster will be organised as animaginary body bound up in the ongoing process of constructing subjectivity. Such an 'imaginary body'designates an uneasy collection of 'ready-made' images, symbols, metaphors and representations.This paper will be concerned with the arrangement of these 'fragments', that is, the construction ofsubjectivity through the process of montage. Once a search for the ungainly figure of the monster beginsthe ubiquity of its display becomes unnerving. It appears, for instance, at the juncture between the workof Gilles Deleuze and the eighteenth century empiricist philosopher David Hume. Desiring to sire amonstrous offspring, Deleuze takes Hume's work from behind and poses the following problem, "howdoes the subject constitute itself within the given?" Subjectivity, according to both Deleuze andHume, is a fiction of the imagination, but this is not to suggest that the expression of subjectivity shouldbe disregarded. Rather, its perpetual construction requisitions material from the plethora of the given byway of the expansive leaps of the imagination, which brings it into close proximity with the monstrous