Brian Massumi: Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (2011)

Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of “semblance” as a way to approach this question.

It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: “lived abstraction.” A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented–variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention–which he refers to collectively as the “occurrent arts.” Massumi argues that traditional art practices, including perspective painting, conventionally considered to be object-oriented freeze frames, also organize events of perception, and must be considered occurrent arts in their own way. Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance.

The artwork’s relational engagement, Massumi continues, gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aesthetic dimension. Massumi investigates occurrent art practices in order to examine, on the broadest level, how the aesthetic and the political are always intertwined in any creative activity.

Publisher MIT Press, 2011
Technologies of Lived Abstraction series
ISBN 0262134918, 9780262134910
220 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)

Michel Serres, Bruno Latour: Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1990/1995)

Although elected to the prestigious French Academy in 1990, Michel Serres has long been considered a maverick–a provocative thinker whose prolific writings on culture, science and philosophy have often baffled more than they have enlightened. In these five lively interviews with sociologist Bruno Latour, this increasingly important cultural figure sheds light on the ideas that inspire his highly original, challenging, and transdisciplinary essays.

Serres begins by discussing the intellectual context and historical events– including the impact of World War II and Hiroshima, which for him marked the beginning of science’s ascendancy over the humanities–that shaped his own philosophical outlook and led him to his lifelong mission of bringing together the texts of the humanities and the conceptual revolutions of modern science. He then confronts the major difficulties encountered by his readers: his methodology, his mathematician’s fondness for “shortcuts” in argument, and his criteria for juxtaposing disparate elements from different epochs and cultures in extraordinary combinations. Finally, he discusses his ethic for the modern age–a time when scientific advances have replaced the natural necessities of disease and disaster with humankind’s frightening new responsibility for vital things formerly beyond its control.

In the course of these conversations Serres revisits and illuminates many of his themes: the chaotic nature of knowledge, the need for connections between science and the humanities, the futility of traditional criticism, and what he calls his “philosophy of prepositions”–an argument for considering prepositions, rather than the conventionally emphasized verbs and substantives, as the linguistic keys to understanding human interactions.

Originally published in French as Eclaircissements by Editions Francois Bourin 1990
Translated by Roxanne Lapidus
Publisher University of Michigan Press, 1995
Studies in Literature and Science series
ISBN 0472065483, 9780472065486
204 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)

Alain Badiou: Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1997–)

“A major new voice from France offers a provocative reevaluation of Deleuze’s philosophy.

The works of Gilles Deleuze–on cinema, literature, painting, and philosophy–have made him one of the most widely read thinkers of his generation. This compact critical volume is not only a powerful reappraisal of Deleuze’s thought, but also the first major work by Alain Badiou available in English. Badiou compellingly redefines “Deleuzian,” throwing down the gauntlet in the battle over the very meaning of Deleuze’s legacy.

For those who view Deleuze as the apostle of desire, flux, and multiplicity, Badiou’s book is a deliberate provocation. Through a deep philosophical engagement with his writings, Badiou contends that Deleuze is not the Dionysian thinker of becoming he took himself to be; on the contrary, he is an ascetic philosopher of Being and Oneness. Deleuze’s self-declared anti-Platonism fails–and that, in Badiou’s view, may ultimately be to his credit. “Perhaps it is not Platonism that has to be overturned,” Badiou writes, “but the anti-Platonism taken as evident throughout this entire century.”

This volume draws on a five-year correspondence undertaken by Badiou and Deleuze near the end of Deleuze’s life, when the two put aside long-standing political and philosophical differences to exchange ideas about similar problems in their work. Badiou’s incomparably attentive readings of key Deleuzian concepts radically revise reigning interpretations, offering new insights to even the veteran Deleuze reader and serving as an entrée to the controversial notion of a “restoration” of Plato advocated by Badiou—in his own right one of the most original figures in postwar French philosophy.

The result is a critical tour de force that repositions Deleuze, one of the most important thinkers of our time, and introduces Badiou to English-speaking readers.”

First published as Deleuze: la clameur de l’être, Hachette, Paris, 1997.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2000
Theory Out of Bounds series, 16
ISBN 0816631409, 9780816631407
143 pages

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PDF (updated on 2020-7-5)