DELEUZE IN THE LAND OF PALM TREES (port. version)
Geography of difference, philosophical winds and intensive encounters in Brazil
- The Marvel of Multiple Entries. Interview with Robert Machado
- A Geography of Philosophical Thought. by Roberto Machado
- Memories of an Epicurean Garden. Interview with Luiz Orlandi
- A Taste for Encounters. by Luiz Orlandi
- Pollination in Philosophy. by Peter Pál Pelbart
Organization, interviews and translations by Wolfgang Pannek
Prepared especially for deleuze international this ensemble of articles and interviews introduces to the philosophical production related to Gilles Deleuze in Brazil. In ‘the land of the palm trees’, or Pindorama, as its indigenous inhabitants, the Tupi-Guarani, used to call their country, the reception of Deleuze’s writings started flourishing at the end of the 1960ies. Thanks to the translations of important scholars of Deleuze and Guattari almost all of their works are today available to the Brazilian reader. Beyond this, a considerable variety of books, articles, symposia and, most of all, the widespread activity in philosophy and arts departments of universities located between the Amazon and Paraná rivers inspire the still increasing interest in the transformational potential of the concepts created by these French thinkers. The articles here assembled were authored by major exponents of the reception and reflection about Deleuze’s philosophy in Brazil: Roberto Machado, Luiz Orlandi and Peter Pál Pelbart.
SUMMARIES
A geography of philosophical thought by Roberto Machado
This article aims at the presentation of how Deleuze’s philosophy works, considering it as creation of concepts, in order to clarify its main principle: the constitution of a differential thinking based on the relations with philosophy, art and science. Therefore, my intention is to show that Deleuze’s differential thinking is possible due to the creation of a “discordant harmony” or a “disjunctive synthesis” between the act of thinking and what provokes it. I also intend to highlight how Deleuze’s philosophy is opposed to the representational thinking, as the latter subordinates difference to identity.
Roberto Machado is MS and PhD in philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, and retired full professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is the author, among others, of Zarathustra, Nietzschean Tragedy (1997), Nietzsche and truth (1999), Foucault, philosophy and literature (2000), The birth of tragedy: from Schiller to Nietzsche (2006), Foucault, science and knowledge (2006) Deleuze, art and philosophy (2009). Machado translated Difference and Repetition (with Luiz Orlandi, Graal, Rio de Janeiro, 1988) and Proust and the signs (Forense Universitário, Rio de Janeiro, 2003) by Gilles Deleuze, and Microphysics of Power by Michel Foucault (Graal, Rio de Janeiro, 1999), amongst others.
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A taste for encounters by Luiz Orlandi
Through a series of notes, this article aims to outline a sketch of the Deleuzian taste for intensive encounters. That taste is noticeable in the construction of Deleuzian conceptual variations. They imply Deleuze’s attraction to heterogeneous series of concepts from other philosophers, to multiplicities of aesthetic varieties … in short, a considerable constellation of signs. This indicates how much his thinking finds its own necessity outside of itself, and not in the logocentric gears of self-complacent representations. Moved by deterritorializations within the immanence of encounters, the Deleuzian constructivism therefore configures a philosophy of becoming. Intensive encounters trigger and return to trigger this philosophical opening, leading the system of difference, the system of complex differentiation, to repeat itself differently in each case.
Luiz Orlandi graduated in Pedagogy at the State University of São Paulo Júlio de Mesquita Filho, MA in poetry at the University of Besançon – France and PhD in philosophy by the State University of Campinas. Orlandi has been Director of the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH), Head of the Department of Philosophy at IFCH of Unicamp and worked as a Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. Orlandi wrote the books The voice of the interval (São Paulo: Ática, 1980) on Merleau-Ponty and Speeches of malevolence concerning research, verticality and profound reality (Cadernos IFCH, Campinas, 1983) and a great variety of chapters, essays, articles and introductions in books about Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, Zourabichvili and other philosophers. He translated the following works by Deleuze (and Guattari): Difference and Repetition (in cooperation with Roberto Machado), Empiricism and Subjectivity, Spinoza and the Problem of Expression, Anti-Oedipus, The concept of difference in Bergson, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, The Desert Island and other texts.
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Pollination in Philosophy by Peter Pál Pelbart
Wouldn’t it be possible – beyond the procedures of collage or virtualization detected in the work of Deleuze – to understand his passage through the history of thought as a philosophical “pollination”? We would then be facing the processes of “transport” of “philosophical pollen”, either in the interior of philosophy or on its outside, within a true ecology of emissions and disseminations. The problems arising this way would be less of the order of interpretation or reception, than that of hybridization, contamination and contagion. At the same time, the article seeks to establish a resonance of this speculative dimension with what today is called “pollen society”, where cognitive and affective production occurs by contagion and transversal pollination.
Peter Pál Pelbart graduated in philosophy at the Sorbonne (Paris IV 1983). He is PhD in Philosophy by the University of São Paulo (1996) and is currently full professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. Pelbart translated Conversations, Essays Critical and Clinical and parts of Thousand Plateaus. His own writings include From the closure of the outside to the outside of closure: madness and unreason (1993), The non-reconciled time. Images of time in Deleuze (1998), Capital life: essays on biopolitics (2003), and Cartographies of exhaustion: Nihilism inside out (2013). He is also editor of n-1 publications and member of the Theater Company Ueinzz.
