Joshua Alan Ramey

In this essay I critique the identification of contingency with sheer arbitrary possibility in Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. After offering logical and metaphysical reasons for why such an identification is a limitation on the speculative potential of reason, I draw upon Charles S. Peirce, Gilles Deleuze, and Giambattista Vico to articulate the outlines of a view of contingency which can underwrite a different speculative position to one that is grounded upon an absolute of unreason. This form of speculation, a realism of contingency without an axiom of unreason, is indicated in outline by the structure of divination practices. I thus propose, without defending its actuality, at least the possibility of a divinatory form of speculation that is adequate to the absolute status of contingency.

Nathan Widder’s Political Theory After Deleuze presents Deleuze’s political work in the context both of Deleuze’s ontology and a broader “ontological turn” in political theory. Contrasting Deleuze with both the “politics of lack” espoused by post-Hegelian and post-psychoanalytical theory, as well as with the “politics of abundance” proffered by pluralists such as William B. Connolly, Widder provides a subtle articulation of the contours and ultimate stakes of Deleuzian micropolitics. The book provides a powerful introduction both to Deleuze’s broader systematic work and to the specifically political dimensions of that perspective.

The emergent field of Educational Futures has its beginning in futurology as a relatively new constellation of disciplines having a strong impact on policy in the form of foresight, scenario planning, and new utopian thinking. This article specifically focuses on Gilles Deleuze's unorthodox approach to epistemology as future-oriented and creative and emphasizes his attention to experimental and experiential becomings. While educational system is traditionally limited to acquiring the factual knowledge of the external world, inner knowledge or Gnosis is not addressed in a habitually secular context. In contrast to the prevailing episteme, this article positions Gnosis within the universal science of life, mathesis. The political impulse of Deleuze's thoughts on mathesis is related to new educational leaders as 'people to come'.

Henry Somers-Hall’s Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation: Dialectics of Negation and Difference offers a well-researched and clearly written study of Deleuze and Hegel as common inheritors of a Kantian problematic offering different but related alternatives to the failed project of relating concepts, as representations, to reality. In this review essay I focus on a particular issue, contingency or “chance” in nature. This is a place where the stakes of the Deleuzian option for “difference” rather than Hegel’s governing framework of “negation” are particularly high, but where there is a normative dimension—ethical and aesthetic—to the Deleuze-Hegel debate that is not adequately covered by Somers-Hall’s otherwise excellent account. I suggest that even if Deleuze’s conception of contingency in nature is more compelling than Hegel’s, there are nevertheless many unresolved issues to be considered, when it comes to the role of chance in thought and reality.

In his writing, Gilles Deleuze drew on a vast array of source material, from philosophy and psychoanalysis to science and art. Yet scholars have largely neglected one of the intellectual currents underlying his work: Western esotericism, specifically the lineage of hermetic thought that extends from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance through the work of figures such as Iamblichus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. In this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics, and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition. Identifying key hermetic moments in Deleuze's thought, including his theories of art, subjectivity, and immanence, Ramey argues that the philosopher's work represents a kind of contemporary hermeticism, a consistent experiment in unifying thought and affect, percept and concept, and mind and nature in order to engender new relations between knowledge, power, and desire. By uncovering and clarifying the hermetic strand in Deleuze's work, Ramey offers both a new interpretation of Deleuze, particularly his insistence that the development of thought demands a spiritual ordeal, and a framework for retrieving the pre-Kantian paradigm of philosophy as spiritual practice.