Raniel Reyes

It is a complex task to provide a systematic Hanian theory of politics, as Han is more concerned with diagnosing the positive, psychopolitical, and infocratic dominations of neoliberal capitalism. To fill this gap, I curate his scattered critical remarks on the contemporary political climate, in conjunction with his philosophical vocabulary, towards what I call negative politics. This intervention necessitates a disquisition of his critique of neoliberal capitalism, as well as his theory of violence. To concretize these objectives, I first highlight the distinct character of Han’s theory of violence by engaging with some formulations of violence in the continental philosophical tradition. In the second part, I explain how neoliberal capitalist-authored violence provides an illusory freedom and adulterates contemporary political life. In the third, I explore his theory of infocracy within the context of global politics and crises. Given the dominance of algorithmically manipulated information in this new regime, the cult of positivity assumes more invincibility. Ultimately, I diagram and explain some revolutionary potentials embedded in his writings, which could rehabilitate contemporary politics and, more importantly, reconfigure atomized communities, thereby recovering the people’s ability to contemplate, question the status quo, and think about the future.

In this article, I re-visit and navigate Nietzsche’s concepts of genealogy, will to power, and the eternal return through the lens of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. Nietzschean philosophy occupies a significant part in the preliminary blueprints of Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, which relatively encompasses even his collaborative scholarship with Guattari. Hence, this research likewise diagrams some critical affinities between Nietzsche and Deleuze, in conjunction with other contemporary thinkers and issues. My disquisition of the aphorism as a philosophical style and genealogy grounds my engagement with the principles of will to power and the eternal return. Through the evaluative aptitude of the will to power and the differential and ethical powers of the eternal return, genealogy transforms into a philosophical device of critique, diagnosis, and creation. Genealogy criticizes and undermines all dogmatic images of thought; it diagnoses values, forces, and relations; and, it engenders new modes of thinking and living, or what Deleuze and Guattari would later call the world-to- come.

In this article, I present a critical exposition of and engagement with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s schizoanalysis, and its therapeutic and revolutionary powers. Firstly, I discuss how the aftermath of the May 1968 phenomenon shapes the formulation of schizoanalysis, specifically, in relation to the French people’s desire for voluntary servitude to what they call as ‘State philosophy.’ More importantly, I discuss desire’s social investment, syntheses, and parallogisms. Secondly, I elucidate schizoanalysis’ goal of achieving freedom from all kinds of Oedipalizations and capitalist exploitations from the family to the society writ large. In this regard, it is schizophrenia which is capable of subverting all forms of oppressions or totalizations fabricated by Oedipus and capitalism. Lastly, I explicate schizoanalysis’ aim, which is to reinstate desire’s revolutionary potentialities toward a revolution fueled by “schizophrenia as a process,” which Deleuze and Guattari call as ‘permanent revolution.’

Does talking about the triumph of the 1986 People Power EDSA Revolution still make sense nowadays? When the ideals of this glorious revolution are now nothing but contents of Philippine history textbooks and items of the culture industry, do we still need to re-imagine it? These are some of the reflective questions that will challenge and guide this paper‟s architecture. In what follows, the author will push all the possibilities for a Nietzschean re- thinking of the EDSA Revolution as “ the experience of difference and an exemplar of ascending life. ” In the first part, an account of the nature of EDSA revolution will be illustrated; while in the second, the principle of the „ Will to Power ‟ and „ Eternal Return ‟ will be explained using Gille s Deleuze‟s rhizomatic eyeglasses. In the third, the narrative of the revolution, i.e., the process on how the Epifanio Delos Santo Avenue turned into an arena for collective-political action will be delineated. Furthermore, the concept of difference will be utilized in explaining the dynamic occurrences produced by the Dionysian assemblage of Filipino bodies. In the last, the challenge of a different return of the said revolution will be explained.

This paper aims to explicate Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of Bergsonism. Specifically, I expound on Deleuze’s reconstruction of Bergson’s concepts of intuition, the virtual, and duration. Bergson’s formulation of these concepts is critically informed by traditional science and metaphysics’ insular obsession with quantitative differences, succession, homogeneity etc. In the eyes of Deleuze, this preoccupation redounds to the failure in perceiving real differences— the realm of qualitative difference, duration, intuition etc. Accordingly, real difference and the creative differentiation of its corollary concepts form part of Deleuze’s Transcendental or Virtual Empiricism. Ultimately, tracing Deleuze’s intellectual indebtedness to Bergson’s differential philosophy does not only disclose his own way of overcoming or antagonizing traditional science and metaphysics, but more importantly, it opens us to a life of self-reflexivity, pure becoming, and infinite durations.

Due to reason’s instrumentalization, the Enlightenment project turned into a myth of domination instead of freeing humanity from barbarism. This dialectic of Enlightenment, as the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkkeimer put it, destroyed our mimetic relation with nature and privileged the language of modern science and logical positivism over art, among other maladies, philosophical or otherwise. This predicament intensified upon the culture industry’s supremacy in the contemporary period that converted the artwork into a commodified product, and numbed the people’s critical acumen. Contra these marginalizations, I elucidate in this paper art’s material configurations and liberating potentials. In connection to this, I expound art’s critico-dialectical import, with a specific thrust to Mideo Cruz’s controversial installations at the Cultural Center of the Philippines last 2012. Significantly, upon art’s disclosure of the damaged life, Adorno claims, it can confront identity and immanently critique advanced capitalism for the fashioning of emancipatory possibilities. After constructing the building-blocks of a new aesthetic theory, I explain in the last part the lessons that philosophy can learn from art.

This paper is a brief philosophical analysis of the relationship between G.W.F. Hegel and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. In the first part, I will present Hegel’s dialectical philosophy as the opus’ point of departure including a truncated elucidation of the totalitarian aspect of his thinking. Since the Hegelian system is very comprehensive, it has also influenced other parts of Europe, especially France. Upon its arrival in the French soil, the system’s structurality was re-attuned in accordance with the materialities engendered by the political events besetting the French society during the 1960s. In order to explicate this hermeneutical fusion of horizons, I will utilize Deleuze’s philosophy of difference in order to undermine the Hegelian system. However, as Deleuze’s intellectual career progresses, his radicalism has mitigated. From an inclusive diagnosis of the said system, it has merely ruptured the metaphysical walls of the dialectic to become sensible to the pluralistic voices of difference. Amidst this so-called Deleuzian turn, I will delineate in the last part some additional albeit sophisticated convergence between their philosophies.