The Dark Precursor

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The Third International Deleuze Studies in Asia Conference (http://deleuze2015.manipal.edu) will be held at the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, Manipal University, India from June 5 to June 7, 2015. The Third International Deleuze Camp in Asia will be organised as part of the conference in the same venue from May 29 to June 2, 2015.

The theme of this conference “Inter-national, Inter-connection, Inter-operativity” points to three key problems of our age: the interaction between nations, between people and machines, and between differently constituted systems. It invites us to think about the different ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s thought enables us to conceptualise the present world, paying particular attention to the powerful North/South and East/West segmentations that operate today, as well as the transversal and rhizomatic lines that pass through, between and around them. Recognising that there is no single way of answering these problematics, the conference invites participants to consider a global range of topics distributed over a wide and aberrant epistemic territory of science, metaphysics, politics, art, history, cinema, literature, culture, race, ethnicity and so on. This conference aims to bring together a set of professional scholars and amateur aspirants to reflect upon these areas with specific focus on the possibilities, challenges, difficulties and connections raised by them.

Topics
Bionics and Deleuze
Surveillance and Postcapitalism
Time, Memory and Desire in Asian Histories
Post-colonial Differentials and Ethnic Fragmentation in Asia
Gender, Culture, Identity and Politics
Transversality and Deterritorialization of Asian Religions and Philosophies
Asian Societies as Hierarchical Assemblages
Art, Cinema and Literature
Asia, Globalism and Crisis of Capitalism
Objects, Multiplicity and Simulacrum

Abstract should be around 250 words and presentation will be of twenty minutes.

8th international Deleuze Studies conference, Sweden. 29th of June – 1st of July 2015

‘Daughters of chaos’ describes the filial role with which Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator Félix Guattari have anointed the disciplines of philosophy, science and art, suggesting that disciplinary formations and their respective practices enable us to make sense of the diverse cultural and natural phenomena of local environments in relation to collective global concerns. “In short,” Deleuze and Guattari explain “chaos has three daughters, depending on the plane that cuts through it: these are the chaoids – art, science, and philosophy – as forms of thought or creation.” The disciplines of philosophy, science and art are said to be the disciplines that enable the capture of what Deleuze and Guattari, in reference to the ancient Greek notion, call chaos. The daughters support the emergence of order out of a fundamental chaos; they are like guides who assist us to make sense of things and to act together to manifest new subjectivities, social relations and environments. The three disciplines specifically cited by Deleuze and Guattari do not exhaust the broad range of territories of knowledge that the legacy of Deleuze, and also Guattari, has infiltrated. Rather than emphasizing just three disciplines we assume instead a multi-disciplinary matrix with many distinct but also many overlapping concerns. Daughters of Chaos, the 8th International Deleuze Studies conference, proposes to create a space of encounter between diverse disciplines by placing an emphasis on those habits, refrains and practices by which disciplines achieve their consistency, in turn enabling the sustainable work of composing new worlds to be undertaken.

The proposed subtitle of the conference is: practice, discipline, a life, by which we hope to draw attention to a contemporary ‘ecology’ of research practices all with their distinct requirements and obligations and environmental concerns. We also suggest that a practice is composed of habits and assumptions that are built up in relation to a specific research environment, in relation to both natural and cultural constraints and forces. That is to say, when addressing the ‘environment’ this pertains not only to natural settings or our constructed urban, rural, or other environments of human and non-human inhabitation, but also to social and work-based environments, and how these impact on mental or subjective health. We understand that ‘practice’ suggests an activity that is necessarily repeated so that experience and expertise can be achieved, but many implicit assumptions are also maintained where practices become overly habitual and resistant to critique or else curtailed by their local environments. Practices, once established and broadly recognized, inform a specific discipline into which researchers are effectively initiated and in which they are required to position themselves and their research work in order to argue for their specific contribution. Discipline also suggests the way in which researchers are ‘disciplined’ or encouraged to behave in one way rather than another, to direct their research questions here rather than there, and are rewarded accordingly, for instance, with grants and research positions. A life is the most elusive of the concepts we draw upon in our subtitle, but also the place where it turns out that everything is at stake. What constitutes a life; how it comes to be biopolitically measured at the scale of populations; how life is constrained and/or activated, also ‘disciplined’; the ways in which life is becoming increasingly captured by forms of intellectual property ownership; and crucially, how diverse instantiations of life are played out in different environmental contexts, these are questions that touch upon all the disciplines, especially in terms of ethico-aesthetic approaches to research.

With this event, composed of conference and camp, we propose to take the challenge of ‘transdisciplinarity’ seriously, both in its relation to practices and in its promise to transform disciplines prepared to encounter one another.
we invite individual proposals for papers, panel proposals, as well as alternative approaches to presentation formats, such as dialogues, discussions, performative pieces and participatory actions.

Abstracts should be 300-500 words. Biographical statements and affiliations should be approximately 100 words.

Further preliminary information contact helene.frichot[AT]arch.kth.se.
http://daughtersofchaos.net

Deadline: 1 February, 2014

• The Second International Deleuze Studies in Asia Conference will be held at Toyonaka campus of Osaka University. The conference dates are Jun 6-8 2014.
• The Second International Deleuze Camp in Asia (summer school) will also be hosted by Osaka University, May 31 to June 3, 2014.

Both programs will be conducted in English.

In Japan, Deleuze and Guattari’s work has been influential since the 1970s when their work first began to be translated. It experienced a big boom in 1980s and has grown in importance ever since. now, in this century, their work is discussed in a wide variety of fields, such as cultural studies, literary studies, politics, culture, art, architecture and environment.

The Deleuze Studies in Asia conference is organized with the aim of providing a platform for all researchers with an interest in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, especially in Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China and Southeast Asia) regardless of fields and intensions. Participation by researchers from Europe, America and Latin America is welcome, indeed it is hoped that this conference will generate many new “rhizomatic” connections across the many islands of thoughts we all derive from.

The main theme of the conference is “Island”. Island is a big issue not only in terms of Japan as an island country, but also for Deleuze studies, further, with reference to the subject of “individual”.

Click here for more information.

7th International Deleuze Studies Conference: Models, Machines and Memories

Istanbul, July, 14-16th 2014 at the Department of Interior Design, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey

Deadline: 20 January, 2014

Models, Machines and Memories: 7th International Deleuze Studies Conference in Istanbul 2014 explores the themes related to the works of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari, and brings together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines and geographies. Exploring the relationship between the philosophy, space, architecture, arts, socio-political studies and sciences, through enriched views of trans-disciplinary perspectives, Models, Machines and Memories offers an open invitation to all scholars with an interest in the work of Deleuze and Guattari.

2014 Deleuze Studies Conference is hosted by ITU-Istanbul Technical University. It will be held in the beautiful Taşkışla Building of ITU-School of Architecture. One of the great cities of the world, Istanbul is a unique, historically rich and multi-layered city. Its extraordinary urban life, will provide the perfect milieu for the Deleuze Conference and the Deleuze Camp.

Click here for more information.

Conference on Deleuze’s Cultural Encounters with the New Humanities
9-12 June, 2014 at the Department of English and the Technoscience Culture and Research Centre, Hong Kong Shue Yan University, Hong Kong

Deadline: 15 January, 2014

The organizers of this conference are inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s thought on how the traditional humanities could be revitalized through an emphasis on a nomadic encounter between the East and the West. To encounter is to see differently of the world; and true
encounters are always with an outside, from roots to rhizomes. The conference is rooted in humanities studies of literature, various art forms, cultural texts such as media and films, etc, but the topics of studies flow over to concepts related to a revised humanities and particularly to the post‐human. The conference welcomes Deleuze scholars who explore into many of the ramifications of such a new humanities on the one hand, and on the other, those who aspire towards mapping and/or recreating cultural boundaries between the East and the West by experimenting with new concepts so as to create
interassemblages between them. It is the conference’s mission to “dislocate” any sense of cultural centrism, meanwhile relocating the very edges of encounters or interfaces within the context of a globalized, intercultural and sustainable nomadology in the 21st century and beyond.

Click here for full announcement (PDF).