Keren Shahar‬‏

For Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, representation is a crucial intersection between aesthetic and political concerns. Examining this nexus reveals the conditions necessary for minorities to gain visibility and voice in the collective public sphere. The ongoing crisis of democracy today raises fundamental questions about the relationship between democracy and representation: Is democracy a system in which all voices are accounted for? Does the election of autocratic leaders indicate an anti-democratic shift, or does it, in fact, express a radical dissensus that is intrinsic to democracy itself? Juxtaposing the perspectives of Deleuze and Rancière, I offer a critical examination of the limits of representation – not merely as a procedural mechanism of exclusion and inclusion, but as a philosophical framework with far-reaching political implications.

The article unpacks Deleuze’s understanding of the radical potential lying in Kierkegaard’s notion of subjectivity. It explains why Kierkegaard’s figure of the knight of faith is pertinent for our present age and traces the manner in which Deleuze reconstructs this figure for developing his own concept of becoming and, specifically, of ‘becoming nobody’. But why is Deleuze, a self-proclaimed philosopher of difference, attracted to the idea of ‘becoming imperceptible’? We answer this question by showing how the Kierkegaardian notion of interiority turns into a key concept within a new Deleuzian understanding of the political.

Focusing on the problematic of the visible and the invisible, my paper aims to analyze the dynamic relation of art, aesthetics, and politics in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. Drawing on Deleuze’s collaborative work with Foucault in the Prison Information Group as well as the new logic of sensation introduced in his book Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, I ask: How does the ability to see the unseen and render the invisible visible, which Deleuze attributes to both art and philosophy, relate to the power to resist the present in order to pave paths for new collective modes of existence? By analyzing Deleuze’s paradoxical notion of sensibility my intention is to go beyond the phenomenological concern of the visible and the invisible in order to give these concepts a political significance and to explore how the creation of the invisible renders “the possible” an aesthetic category in Deleuzian thought.

The concept of utopia was abandoned over the years, mainly following the tragic events of the twentieth century which led to the rejection of the grand narratives that characterized modernity. But the challenges of our time invite a rethinking of the concept. The purpose of this article is to offer a non-nostalgic understanding of the concept of utopia through an analysis of Ernst Bloch’s paradoxical concept of “concrete utopia”. My intention is, first, to trace back the genealogy of the concept of the concrete to offer a non-trivial understanding, of it; and, second, to emphasize the importance of the concrete in the creation of the new. I argue that this understanding, coupled with a nuanced way of thinking about the relationship between the present and the future, allows us to reject the simple metaphysical dichotomy between the two. This does not mean sacrificing the present for the sake of the future or vice versa but perceiving the present as containing future possibilities within it. In this way, we can think of utopia as neither a hypothetical ideal (no-where) nor an empirical fact (now-here), but as the no-where of the now-here. That is, as a process of becoming.