Jay Hetrick

At the core of Félix Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm is a conception of subjectivity that somehow relies upon the notion of animism. Even though this apparently Romantic return to animism may seem vague and perhaps even naive, it forms the very framework that Guattari asks us to pass through, at least provisionally, in order to fully grasp his last project. I will therefore attempt to demystify this important concept theoretically before showing how the aesthetic machines of Japanese contemporary art – and more specifically, the conceptual art of Yoko Ono – stage one key aspect of Guattari’s animism: machinic heterogenesis. Guattari travelled to Japan many times in the years leading up to the publication of Chaosmosis and Japanese contemporary art allowed him to bolster some of its theoretical claims with concrete examples. I will argue that it is through the lens of Japanese contemporary art that Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradigm might propel us beyond the old-guard strategies of modernism. Just as we are asked to pass through a certain notion of animism to understand the relational onto-logic of Chaosmosis, Japanese contemporary art itself demands a similar conceptual framework in order to be disappropriated from an all-too-Western canon. To this end, I supplement Guattari’s work with speculative readings of Japanese philosophy.

Abstract:In his book The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze seems to connect his concept of the event with the Mahāyāna idea of emptiness by stating that "the event is the identity of form and void." This article investigates this seemingly naive association in relation to the very few actual references to Buddhist philosophy in Deleuze's work. In the process, it is suggested that Deleuze's onto-logic—regardless of his actual intention with regard to Buddhism—may in some respects be more adequate than that of Nishida Kitarō, the founder of the Kyoto School, in forming a contemporary and comparative understanding of emptiness.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari offer a description of what they call ‘nomad art’ by detailing its three primary characteristics: close-range vision, haptic space, and abstract line. In an attempt to unpack the significance of this provocative term, this paper will sketch the provenance of the first two of these characteristics, both of which come from Deleuze and Guattari's particular reading of Alois Riegl. Together, close-range vision and haptic space delineate the synaesthetic vision of the artist as well as the space s//he creates in the work. Walter Benjamin will be invoked as a sort of phantom link between Riegl and Deleuze, a link that will both provide the proper orientation towards the central aspect of the haptic — against a Phenomenology of affect — as well as inject the necessary political significance into the discussion of nomad art.