Raniel Reyes

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.

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 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.

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.’

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.