Deleuze Activities: Spring 2014

Centre for the Humanities, Utrecht University

CONTINENTAL NATURALISM: a SYMPOSIUM with JOHN PROTEVI
Centre for the Humanities, Utrecht University

April 15
th
2014
Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21, Utrecht

The Centre for the Humanities is proud to welcome Prof. John Protevi to Utrecht University.
This visit takes place in the framework of The Theory Labs activities of CfH.

John Protevi is Phyllis M Taylor Professor of French Studies and Professor of Philosophy at
Louisiana State University. His most recent book is Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences
(Minnesota, 2013). He has published: Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic
(Minnesota, 2009); Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida, and the Body Politic (Athlone, 2001);
Time and Exteriority: Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida (Bucknell, 1994); and co-author, with Mark
Bonta, of Deleuze and Geophilosophy (Edinburgh, 2004), He is also the editor of A Dictionary of
Continental Philosophy (Yale, 2006). He was the Scots Philosophical Association Centenary
Fellow for 2012. His research and teaching materials can be found at www.protevi.com/john;
he is also a blogger at New APPS: www.newappsblog.com.

PROGRAMME

13:00 Opening: Naturalism in Contemporary Theory
Rosi Braidotti
13:30 Keynote: Canguilhem, Deleuze, and Developmental Systems Theory
John Protevi
14:15 Respondent: Malabou, Serres and the Traumatized System Today
Rick Dolphijn
14:45 Roundtable: Alternative Eco-theory
15:30 End

The symposium is open but registration is necessary.
Please register by sending an email to cfh@uu.nl, preferably by 10 April.

More information about the programme can be found on the Centre for the Humanities
website.


ANNUAL NATIONAL DELEUZE SCHOLARSHIP CONFERENCE
Deleuze and the Passions

Friday, 16 May 2014
Erasmus University, Rotterdam
Keynote speaker: Jason Read, with response from Claire Colebrook

In recent years the humanities, neuroscience and the social sciences have witnessed an
affective turn, especially in discourses around post-Fordist labour, the economic and
ecological crisis, populism and political sentiments, cultural identity, mental health,
citizenship, agency and political struggle, contemporary artistic practice, and new
configurations of bodies and technologies. While no one quite agrees what affect is, this new
awareness of affect would be unthinkable without the pioneering work of Gilles Deleuze, who
Deleuze Activities: Spring 2014
Centre for the Humanities, Utrecht University
defined affects as pre- and transindividual becomings, i.e. processes or passages that augment
or diminish our capacity to act and engage with others and that are therefore primordial to,
albeit inseparable from, sensations, emotions, feelings, tastes, perceptions, meanings and all
other, higher forms of cognition. Working along the naturalist axis of Lucretius-Spinoza-
Nietzsche, Deleuze famously replaced judgment with affect as the very material of thought.
Besides entirely active affects, the highest practice of thought, there is no thought without
passive affects or passions. According to his magnum opus Difference and Repetition, thought
finds its own necessity in isolated and passionate cries that deny what everybody knows and
what nobody can deny : every true thought is an aggression. More concretely speaking,
whether we are dealing with emotions in psychology and sociology, sensation in art, passion
in theology, or the struggle with opinion in philosophy, the aim of thought is always to
denounce the sad passions, their causes, and those who derive their power from them. Sad
passions are affects that join desire to the illusions of consciousness and separate us from our
power to act. While joyful passions increase our power, sad passions enslave us. The essential
problem of politics, according to Deleuze, is the tyrants and the priests who inspire sad
passions in us. His work can thus be read as a critical and clinical encyclopedia of the sad
passions that constitute the affective infrastructure of contemporary capitalism: illness,
shame, spitefulness, guilt, bad conscience, stupidity, neurosis, mistrust, weariness, fatalism,
cynicism, ignorance, hope, anguish, disgust, contempt, cowardice, hatred, laziness, avidity,
regret, despair, mockery, malversation, and self-abasement.

This one-day symposium will consist of three panels each of which features three speakers,
one keynote address, a catered lunch and a concluding reception.

The event is organized by Sjoerd van Tuinen (www.svtuinen.nl) and the Centre for Art and
Philosophy (CAP, www.caponline.org) with the financial support of the Netherlands Scientific
Research Organisation (NWO) and the Trust Fund foundation. Scientific committee: Rosi
Braidotti, Rick Dolphijn, Andrej Radman, Sjoerd van Tuinen.

For more details please consult the website of the Deleuze Circle:
http://deleuzecircle.wp.hum.uu.nl/