The prestige of Alphonso Lingis as a translator and his very personal philosophical voice may explain why the philosophical community has not yet recognized the radical reorientation of phenomenology that has been taking shape under Lingis’ pen for the last twenty years.   Our hope is that by dedicating our first issue of Singularum to his invention of another phenomenology, this oversight can be corrected, and a new appreciation or education of the senses can get underway.

What distinguishes Lingis’ phenomenology is his resistance both to the theoretical bias of phenomenology’s Husserlian roots and to the pragmatic bias of phenomenology’s Heideggerian developments. His ambition, as he puts it, is to “elaborate a phenomenology of the levels upon which things take form, the kinds of space, the sensuous elements, and the night.†(The Imperative 1998, p. 5)  This is another phenomenology.  A phenomenology that resists the pragmatic reading of our experience that we owe to Heidegger and to many of his American interpreters trained by Hubert Dreyfus.  The sensuous elements of the earth beckon us to sensual arousal.  They draw us from the comfortable worlds organized by our practical posture to the dangers and delights of the sensual earth revealed to a dissolute posture.

Lingis moves toward the sensual earth along two not quiet differentiable dimensions, which might once have been called the phenomenologies of the body and of language.  Along both dimensions Lingis’ other phenomenology explores the earth in advance of its organization by the practical purposes of our linguistic and perceptual lives.  The sensual elements of the earth should not be confused with Heidegger’s dark romantic earth, twinned as it is with the world, nor should it be confused with potting soil.  Lingis’ earth is alive with the activity of sensual elements.  What Levinas called the elemental.

This other phenomenology is a phenomenology of levels, and what the more familiar phenomenology recognizes as the lived body is here presented simply as how our worlds organize when our sensory-motor activities follow the directives of the beckoning level.  Lingis is interested in something else: “we set out to recover a substantive conception of our bodies given to excitement and lust.†(Sensation, 1996, p. x)  As Lingis tells the story, we can enjoy our bodies in this other way when we move levels, the passage between the levels.  It is at this point that Lingis’ work resonates with what Deleuze, in his appreciation of Francis Bacon, called the logic of sensation.

What are levels? Levels are understood in terms of relations of forces and qualities that emanate from things, as imperatives or directives. This helps to initiate an aesthetics, ‘beauty is imperative’, and an ethics, ‘emotions are also forces’, forces of the earth or the sensuous. (Trust 2004: 111; Dangerous Emotions 2000: 16) Furthermore, it points in the direction of a philosophy of nature congruent with the insight, which we owe to Deleuze and Guattari, that the true nature is unnatural.  The unnatural here figuring itself as the trans-substantiating passage between levels.

Lingis’ well-known itinerancy, his wandering wonders, are not, therefore, ancillary to, but a condition of, his philosophy. ‘The nomad is summoned not by distant things fixed on one equator, but by multiple spaces, multiple ordinances.’ (The Imperative, 1998: 116) Lingis writes, as a philosopher, from the earth he explores. His descriptions, the simple cadence of his prose, attest to his corporeal encounters, encounters that traverse philosophy itself. In the conclusion to Gilles Deleuze’s short presentation at Cerisy-la-Salle, Nomadic Thought, Deleuze inspires ‘who are today’s nomads, who are today’s Nietzscheans?’ (Desert Islands and Other Texts, 2004: 260) Our response is direct: Alphonso Lingis.

We imagine an issue of Singularum provoking, at last, an attempt to understand Lingis’ difference in phenomenology, and the difference this phenomenology of levels makes to Lingis’ appreciation of aesthetics, education, ethics, ontology, and perception.
Please send your submissions, due August 1st, to: hello@singularum.com

http://singularum.com/

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Vendredi 29 et samedi 30 avril

Organisé par Anne Sauvagnargues et Pascal Sévérac
avec le soutien du CERPHI (ENS de Lyon – UMR 50 37) et du Ciepfc (ENS de Paris)

Vendredi 29 avril à l’ENS-Ulm

Matin: salle Jules Ferry

9h45: ouverture

10h00 – 10h45: Chantal Jaquet (Paris 1) : « “Un balai de sorcière” (Deleuze et la lecture de l’Ethique de Spinoza) ».

10h45 – 11h30: Pierre Zaoui (Paris 7): « L’immanence spinoziste: un coup de force deleuzien? ».

11h30 – 11h45 : pause

11h45 – 12h30: Laurent Bove (Université de Picardie Jules Verne) : « Spinoza-Deleuze et la question d’Autrui »


Après-midi: Amphi Rataud

14h30-15h15:  Ariel Suhamy (La Vie des Idées): « Le cheval de labour et le cheval de course ».

15h15-16h00: Vincent Jacques (ENSAV): « De Différence et répétition à Mille plateaux, métamorphose du système à l’aune de deux lectures de Spinoza ».

16h00 – 16h15: pause

16h15 – 17h00: Pascal Sévérac (Collège International de Philosophie): « La sensation chez Spinoza et Deleuze: percept et affect ».

Samedi 30 avril à l’Université de Paris 1

Matin: salle Cavaillès

10h00 – 10h45: Charles Ramond (Paris 8 / LLCP): « Deleuze lecteur de Spinoza : la tentation de l’impératif ».

10h45 – 11h30: Antonio Negri: « Spinoza et Deleuze: le moment propice ».

11h30-11h45: pause

11h45 – 12h30: Anne Sauvagnargues (Paris 10): « De l’interprétation à l’éthologie : les deux lectures de Spinoza par Deleuze ».

Après-midi: salle Cavaillès

14h30 – 15h15: Kim Sang Ong-Van-Cung (Université de Poitiers): « Le pouvoir d’être affecté – Modes spinozistes et singularités chez Deleuze ».

15h15 – 16h00: Thomas Kisser (Université de Munich) : « La réalité du penser. L’interprétation de Spinoza par Deleuze ».

16h00-16h15: pause

16h15 – 17h00: Igor Krtolica (ENS de Lyon): « Deleuze, Spinoza et les signes ».

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For more information, contact Professor Jeffrey Bell at jbell (at) selu.edu.

Deleuze Camp

Preceding the conference students and scholars interested in the work
of Gilles Deleuze are welcome to participate in Deleuze Camp 6 which
will take place on 18-22 June 2012 in New Orleans. This venue will
provide an opportunity for participants to engage with experienced
scholars from different fields in readings of Deleuze’s texts. The
Deleuze camp will also include a student forum where participants can
present their own work and ideas.  Spaces are limited.

More Information: https://conference.cbs.dk/index.php/deleuze/conf

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Intensities and Lines of Flight: Deleuze and Guattari and the Arts

May 4-6, 2012

King’s University College and The University of Western Ontario

London, Ontario, Canada

INVITED SPEAKERS

Constantin Boundas (Trent University)
Dorothea Olkowski (University of Colorado at Colorado Springs)
Jay Lampert (University of Guelph)
More to be announced….

The Centre for Advanced Research in European Philosophy, King’s University College, along with the McIntosh Gallery at the University of Western Ontario invite proposals and submissions for a conference focusing on the intersection of the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and the arts. We seek to explore:

1.      Critical assessments of Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetic theory
2.      The legacy of and contemporary engagement with key themes and concepts of the Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophical framework as they come to bear upon and are influenced by the arts, including literature, film, poetry, music, dance, aesthetic theory, visual and media arts, painting and sculpture. Art here is broadly understood.
3.       The connection between Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and art, and how they may be used to further discussion of contemporary issues in politics, economics, environmental studies, social theory and philosophy.

We welcome proposals for papers, panels, and performance pieces.  Abstracts should be between 500-750 words.

Please send all abstracts and inquiries to:

Antonio Calcagno, PhD
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
King’s University College
266 Epworth Avenue
London, ON  N6A 2M3
CANADA

acalcagn@uwo.ca (Email preferred)

Tel: 519-433-3491 x 4533
Fax: 519-433-0353

DEADLINE: December 15, 2011

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Copenhagen 27-29 June 2011

Copenhagen Business School

Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts

Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture

Call for Papers

The fourth annual International Deleuze Studies Conference intends to explore current conditions for creative critiques. In the searchlight are potentialities for responding to a seemingly permanent, yet persistently mutating crisis. The conference intends to assemble ways of conceiving the current plurality of crises – financial, ecological, political, existential, aesthetic – letting their bindings show, analyzing their displacements and their disguises, exacerbating them, perhaps indeed taking us deeper into them. A micropolitics of global society is in need of articulation; this makes us desire philosophy as ever before.

The texts of Gilles Deleuze, once restricted to specialists, the French public, and tenants of radical politics, are now being put to work everywhere, and seem far from having lost their momentum. His readers – whether they be academic scholars, activists, architects, artists, designers, managers, workers or just marginalized – face a world that beckons comprehensive recompositions through inventive action.

The current situation calls for a renewed critique, but also for something more. It calls for a creativity in questioning the world, in the position and solution of its problems. The very scope of the difficulties calls for transdisciplinary awareness and attention to disparaties. The multiple lines connecting heterogeneous systems articulate as many virtual passages between (to name but the most apparent) the ecological, educational, financial and political crises which play together with the crises particular to the arts, to architecture, and to design. This is why Copenhagen Business School, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture and School of Visual Arts have joined forces in searching for a recomposition of the reception and application of Deleuze’s work.

Possible topics for papers may include but are not limited to:

–           Aesthetics inside and outside art

–           Urban planning and architecture

–           Social science and organizational practice

–           Creative Philosophy

–           Capitalism and its continuous crises

–           Nomadic politics and Social Sustainability

–           Neuroscience and Culture

–           Aesthetics of Life Sciences

–           Methodological interfaces between science and the Humanities

–           Gender and becoming

Length of presentations: max. 20 minutes. We welcome panel proposals.

Please submit your abstract (max. 200 words) and a short bio at www.deleuze-copenhagen.cbs.dk before the 1^st of February, 2011.

All kinds of academics, non-academics, artists, workers, salespeople and freelancers should join up for this event, a philosophical Copenhagen Summit.

Confirmation of acceptance will be emailed before March 15^th, 2011.  Selections will take place on the basis of the number of panel presentations.

Deleuze Camp 5
Creative Critiques

Preceding the conference, students can participate in a summer school: The Deleuze Camp 5 ‘Creative Critiques’. The camp will take place from 20-24 June 2011 in Copenhagen. Places are limited.

For conference and/or camp registration and further information, please refer to our website, which also hosts a list of confirmed Plenary Speakers: www.deleuze-copenhagen.cbs.dk

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