Programme

teaches continental philosophy at Bilkent University, Ankara, TR. He is currently on a sabbatical as researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie, where he is working on his book project on Deleuze. Zafer Aracagök is the author of three books (in Turkish) and various journal articles (in PMC, Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Symploke) addressing the issues of image, resonance and noise in philosophy and philosophy of music with respect to the thinking of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Derrida and Lacoue-Labarthe. E-mail: aracagok@bilkent.edu.tr

is professor at the Department of English and director of the Theory and Cultural Studies Program, at Purdue University, US. He has written numerous publications on Bataille, Hegel, Derrida and quantum physics, and is the author of The knowable and the unknowable: modern science, non-classical thought, and the two cultures (2002); Complementarity: anti-epistemology after Bohr and Derrida (1994); In the shadow of Hegel: complementarity, history and the unconscious (1993); and Reconfigurations: critical theory and general economy (1993). He is the editor of Idealism without absolutes: philosophy and romantic culture (2004). E-mail: aplotnit@sla.purdue.edu

This paper will explore the conjunction(s) between Gilles Deleuze’s concept (including Deleuze’s and Guattari's special sense of philosophical concept) of the virtual, ranging from his earlier works to What is philosophy? and modern mathematics and physics, including chaos theory and quantum field theory. While the essay will offer a comprehensive discussion of the relationships between the workings of the virtual in Deleuze and modern mathematics and science, its core argument will address the relationships between the idea of virtual particle formation, introduced by Paul Dirac as part of his discovery of antimatter, arguably the most radical idea of 20th century physics (even surpassing quantum mechanics) and Deleuze and Guattari's equally radical concept of chaos in What is philosophy?. In this work, Deleuze and Guattari argue that philosophy, mathematics and science are different ways to keep chaos at bay. They regard chaos both as an ‘enemy of thought’ and as a ‘friend of thought’, for instance in its war against opinion, or doxa. While supporting this argument, the paper will also argue that modern mathematics and science and, more specifically, its idea(s) of the virtual are also philosophical, indeed Deleuzian, and that mathematics and science in fact use this Deleuzian strength of their concepts to fight the chaos of thinking.

is assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Darmstadt, DE. He is the author of Gilles Deleuze: philosophie des transzendentalen Empirismus (2003) and Ereignis auf Französisch: von Bergson bis Deleuze (2004). E-mail: roelli@phil.tu-darmstadt.de

In the 26th series of paradoxes in Logique du sens (1969), Gilles Deleuze distinguishes between an order of language and an order of speech. Events make language possible and meaningful, because they separate sounds from bodies and free them up to take on the function of expression. On the other hand, manifestation, designation and signification belong to the order of speech. This order describes the representing forms of the actualization of language: the expressive sentence, the condition of the person uttering it and the condition of the object designated by the sentence. Language is understood as a structure whose blind spot or differential mechanism is found in the event, which cannot be designated (signified, manifested) as such and which circulates back and forth between the series of bodies and sentences, between the visible and the articulable. The differentiating system of language structures itself and is self-referential: In this sense Deleuze introduces a structurally immanent tense into language, expressed in the infinitive of the verb. The passage from (undifferentiated) roar to (articulated) speech is based on the structuralism he had recently developed in Difference and repetition (1968). Given the criticism of structuralism in the name of pragmatic thought in his later works (particularly A thousand plateaus (1980)), it can be shown that Foucault’s theory of productive power relations, developed in the 1970s, motivated Deleuze to locate and theorize the pragmatic dimension in the order of language itself, not only in the order of speech. From this perspective Roelli will pursue the question of how the relationship between pragmatism and structuralism in Deleuze’s writings on language can be characterized as a whole.

is director of the Netherlands Research School of Women’s Studies, Utrecht University, NL. She has published extensively on philosophies of difference, sexual difference, becoming woman, nomadism, and the materiality of the subject. She is the author of Patterns of dissonance: a study of women in contemporary philosophy (1993); Nomadic subjects: embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory (1994); Women, the environment and sustainable development: towards a theoretical synthesis (1994); and Metamorphoses: towards a materialist theory of becoming (2002). E-mail: rosi.braidotti@let.uu.nl

This paper will focus on the theory of becoming in Deleuze's philosophy, from a materialist perspective. It will raise the question of which ethical affects can best sustain the effort to engage in political, cultural, personal resistance – not only in the critical mode expressed by the cultures of opposition, but also in the affirmative mode of creation of new alternatives. The key idea will be that of 'sustainable ethics.

is associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication and Design, Bilkent University, Ankara, TR. Among his recent publications are: ‘Writing the body: feminism, postmodernism...’ in Postmodern Culture (May 1999); ‘Benevolence’ in Victor E. Taylor & Charles E. Winquist (eds.), Encyclopaedia of postmodernism (May 2001); ‘On Empire’ in Rethinking Marxism, 13 (3/4, 2001); ‘Mapping the present: interview with Gayatri Spivak’ in New Formations, 36 (Winter 2001); ‘Reading difference: Antonio Negri’s theory of subjectivity’ in Abdul-Karim Mustapha & Timothy S. Murphy (eds.), Negri beyond Negri (forthcoming). E-mail: mutman@bilkent.edu.tr

Does the passage from noise to voice ever take place? Like a clank in the next room in the middle of the night, that which is heard should belong to the Other. However, religious discourse invented the voice of the Other beyond the self — even though it may be (heard) ‘inside’ the self. The question of what happened on the mountain or down in the plain, that is, what it was exactly that Moses heard, has been given a range of answers in the history of thinking (by Moses himself, by believers and other prophets as well as by various philosophers and thinkers, from Spinoza to Massignon to Althusser to Levinas or Lyotard). By going through a few of these answers, Mutman wants to argue that Levinas’ insistence on the dispossession of the self by the voice of the other makes it difficult to think of the voice as uttering a sentence, if anything is uttered at all. As Althusser has once said, without quite saying it, the prophet himself was unsure. Is the Other the community then? But who are they? This noise of the ‘who’ or ‘what’ will not leave us alone in the serenity of our well-formed sentences.
     In the recently growing literature on religion in the humanities from Emmanuel Levinas to Alain Badiou, Islam seems to have been excluded, or more precisely, to have been exiled to the departments of Middle Eastern Studies. Islam, too, begins with the voice of the other: the command ‘Recite!’, given to Muhammad by the angel Gabriel. In a critique of Freud’s theory of monotheism, the Moroccan psychoanalyst Abdelkebir Khatibi shows that the orphan and the illiterate Muhammad acknowledges his dispossession and sacrifices his signature, leaving behind a lost writing. In his reciting, the two voices are unified: the voice of Allah the addressor (the other voice of Muhammad) and Muhammad the addressee as recognized by the witnesses. The unicity of Allah and of the Arabic language marks and consolidates the difference of Islamic imaginary. But this surely does not mean that the unified voices do not still remain separate. After all, if they weren’t, we would have been able to read the lost book, or there would have been none. While recitation is circular, hermeneutic and dialogical on the institutional level, where it works as a power relationship between the imam and the student in the Qur’an course, it is at the same time always re-citing, therefore dividing and abysmal, a flow of sounds, silences and cries, which remains heterogeneous to the former level. The noise of lost writing keeps haunting and encrypting the sacred word, like an invisible passage or slippage from the voice to the noise. The recitation manual is designed to control this invisible passage in order to stop the haunting, to regulate and shape the haunted voice. But what is haunting? Can we ever know? It is surely the suffering of the world as it is known and lived, which throws the poor, the oppressed, the alienated and the submitted (‘Muslim’ in Arabic) into the beyond, into ‘the soul of a soulless world’. There, the word is fixed, the tongue is bound, in a beyond that is therefore no longer beyond. But are they, ever?
     In his lecture, Mutman wishes to argue that the opening opened as the voice or the noise remains open, beyond the word and beyond the faith, and in this opening, on the other side of its unicity, Islamic sign remains enigmatic and on the move. ‘Readability’ becomes the paradoxical imperative of this other, unreadable, cryptic or lost sign. What is it that haunts this reading, any reading? This reading, which perhaps requires a new literacy, might be called ‘spectralization’, following Derrida. This will take the argument to Assia Djebar’s fascinating feminist reading of the history of Islam in her novel Far from Madina. Taking his clue from Gayatri Spivak’s description of her reading as ‘counter-factualization’, Mutman will argue that Djebar’s calling of the ghosts of women on the margins of the history of Islam, her counter-(f)actualization, is bringing the event of sexual difference back, or ‘inheriting’ (Derrida) the event as a ‘problem’ (Deleuze). As Djebar returns to Hagar, Abraham’s maid, in the end of her novel, I ask whether we can read the last monotheism as the ending scene of mono-theism, in the sense of an ‘end’ which we have to re-mark, re-voice and re-cite.

is the author of L’Écriture de Maurice Blanchot: fiction et théorie (1999); Deleuze et l’histoire de la philosophie (1999); and Géophilosophie de Deleuze et Guattari (2004). E-mail: antonioli.manola@wanadoo.fr

Dans Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari définissent la philosophie comme « l'art de former, d'inventer, de fabriquer des concepts ». Dans le même ouvrage, ils présentent le concept comme une multiplicité qui a des composantes et qui se définit par elles. Toute concept est donc affaire d’articulation, de découpage et de recoupement et constitue un tout fragmentaire qui émerge du chaos qui l’entoure : « le concept se définit par l’inséparabilité d’un nombre fini de composantes hétérogènes parcourues par un point en survol absolu, à vitesse infinie ». Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? explicite également une dimension géo-philosophique qui est toujours présente dans l’écriture des deux auteurs : penser ne se fait pas dans les catégories du sujet et de l’objet, mais dans un rapport variable du territoire et de la terre, de la territorialisation et de la déterritorialisation, rapport qui a des dimensions politiques, esthétiques, conceptuelles et vitales. La ritournelle est un concept qui prend forme presque en même temps dans Mille plateaux et dans L’Inconscient machinique (ouvrage signé seulement par Félix Guattari), et dont l’hétérogenèse associe indissolublement une composante territoriale et géophilosophique, une composante esthétique, une composante politique (particulièrement évidente dans L’Inconscient machinique) , et une philosophie de la Nature qui dialogue avec les acquis de la biologie et de l’éthologie.
     Je voudrais étudier plus particulièrement la dimension musicale et la dimension politique de ce concept, ainsi  que les ‘zones de voisinage’ et les ‘seuils d'indiscernabilité’ entre ces deux composantes.
     [French spoken; paper to be distributed in English at the conference]

is advising researcher at the Theory Department, Jan van Eyck Academie. He is affiliated with the Arteveldehogeschool, Gent, BE, and with the Heyendaal Instituut, Nijmegen, NL. De Kesel has written numerous publications on psychoanalysis, political philosophy, political theology (religion, philosophy, politics) and he is the author of Eros & ethiek: een lectuur van Jacques Lacans Séminaire VII (2002); Wij modernen: essays over subject en moderniteit (2002); and De sfinx van de sociologie: een politieke filosofie van het geweld – Batailles bijdragen tot het ‘College voor sociologie’ [1937–1939] (1994). E-mail: marcdekesel@freegates.be

In Comment reconnaît-on le structuralisme?, (1972), Gilles Deleuze pretends to do what his title claims: he describes ‘how to recognize structuralism’ by summing up the common features in the thinking of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, himself and some others. In fact, however, he describes solely his own way of thinking, and, more precisely, almost literally retakes a chapter from his 1969 book Logique du sens, that is to say, the ‘series on language’. So, in Deleuze’s own eyes, his theory of language expresses the essence of structuralist thought in general, whereas each of the three other ‘structuralist’ thinkers have a radical different theory of language as well as a different kind of structuralist thinking or, even, a different relation towards so called ‘structuralism’.
     De Kesel wishes to focus on the fundamental differences between the Deleuzian and the Lacanian theories of language, with the intention of questioning the ontological suppositions in Deleuzian ‘structuralism’. He will explain how this question is decisive for that other huge question of 20th century philosophy, which is the question of the subject.