If literature’s importance for philosophy is a constant throughout Deleuze’s oeuvre, from his very first texts to Essays Critical and Clinical (1992), one can nonetheless also break this body of work up into stages corresponding to key programmatic developments in Deleuze’s understanding of literature’s relation to philosophy. One such development is to be found in the highly philosophical role played by Marcel Proust’s works in Deleuze’s radical critique of the dogmatic image of thought (1964). Another is to be found in the aim to establish an alliance with contemporary writers to create a new type of book blurring the distinction between philosophy and literary experimentation, as attested to by the opening pages of Difference and Repetition (1968). Yet another is the ‘manifesto’ for a minor literature found in Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka from 1975. And another spans ‘Nomadic Thought’(1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), namely the book now conceived as rhizome and multiplicity open to the outside; a cartography of becomings and of nomadic movements (equally of thought and of micropolitics). Lastly, what Logic of Sense (1969) had understood as an essential connection articulated between symptoms, becomings, and events, finds its concrete expression in the political notion of a ‘people yet to come’, as found in, What is Philosophy? (1991) and Essays Critical and Clinical (1992). A people yet to come is always minor and nomadic, living in the ‘atoms of the writer’.
How can we draw on such a rich and varied perspective on literature, today, when confronted by the geopolitical events of the first decades of the twenty-first century? How can we utilise this toolbox to better understand the symptoms of the new fascisms, or of ‘platform capitalism’s transformation of homo sapiens? In other words, which literary forms and styles, which writers, which territories and deterritorialisations can contemporary philosophy ally itself with to be able to continue dreaming – to virtualise – the literary traits of this people yet to come? Which literary symptoms can help us develop a philosophical clinic for the sad passions of our era – the ‘absence of an era’ (Blanchot) – the Anthropocene, with its digital nihilism and national-network-socialism deriving from the stupidity and resentment programmed and nourished by contemporary capitalism?
Topics can include but are not limited to:
- Geophilosophy and minor literature
- Writing in the age of social networks: between continuing to resist and the need to invent
- Metamorphoses of literature
- Literature and postcolonial theory
- Literature as symptomatology: perspectives on the 21st Century
- Contemporary philosophy and literary theory: between tradition and experimentation
- Ecology and literature: new territories of sense?
Contact: ladeleuziana_call@ladeleuziana.org
We encourage you to read our Code of Ethics and politics of evaluation (http://www.ladeleuziana.org/rules-of-publication-and-policy-of-evaluation/ ).
Timeline:
- June 1st: Submission of propositions
- June 1st – July 1st: Peer-review process
- July 10th: Evaluations and Results
- September 1st: Submit final draft
- October 1st: Online publication