This thesis approaches hopelessness through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, situating their thought in relation to Baruch Spinoza and Brian Massumi. Drawing on Massumi’s theorizing of fear, and Spinoza’s theorizing the link between hope and fear, I argue that hope keeps bodies and politics bound to a future that comes to organize the present. From this perspective, I argue that hopelessness can become an important element of not only undoing the ways that future forces come to organize the present, but can open immanent ways of participating in the organization of emergent forces. The thesis also clarifies the differences between affect and emotion, and the body and the subject. This supports an understanding of politics as the undoing and warding off of hope through attending to hopelessness, and an increase in bodies’ capacities to experiment and participate in the organization of their own desires and situations. / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

The purpose of my research is to disrupt the all-too-human body through art in early childhood education and care. This study begins by constructing the problem of the all-too-human body as it is practiced in the classroom and through art. With this study, I attempt to disrupt this way of reading the body through an art encounter. This involves rethinking/rewriting how we come to practice art making. To do this, I turn to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and employ three concepts: the Body without Organs (BwO), assemblage, and becoming. With these concepts, this thesis is inspired by an immanent relational materialist onto-epistemology. / Graduate

Diss. Stockholm : Stockholms universitet, 2008.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Dr. S. E. Gontarski, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 14, 2005). Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 141 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Critics of Virginia Woolf's fiction have tended to focus their arguments on one of the following five cruxes: Woolf's personal biography, the role of art, the nature of reality, the structure of her novels, or they focus their arguments on gender-based criticism. Often, when critics attempt to explain Woolf through any of these categories, they succeed in constructing borders around her writing that minimize the multiplicities outside them. Post-structuralist theory helps to open up difference in Woolf's writing, specifically, the theories of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Their book, A Thousand Plateaus, allows readers of Woolf's novel, To the Lighthouse, outside the confines some past critics have put around it. I apply select Deleuze and Guattarian metaphors to Woolf's To the Lighthouse in order that multiplicities of the novel stand out. The Deleuze and Guattarian metaphors that are most successful in opening up difference in To the Lighthouse are strata; the Body without Organs; becoming; milieu and rhythm; and smooth and striated spaces. / Master of Arts

This project examines some of the most notable fiction of contemporary American writer Paul Auster through the postmodern lens of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome. Auster’s novels often feature characters that are also writers, characters that resurface in subsequent novels, and characters that bear a resemblance to Paul Auster himself. This thesis uses the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari to better understand the significance of these puzzling characters. Ultimately, the model of the rhizome reveals a particular connectivity between Auster’s works underpinned by multiplicities, refrains, and a dislocation of origins.

A argumentação da presente tese parte do New Journalism como plataforma para discussões sobre a linguagem jornalística. A Contracultura enquanto fenômeno político serve de enquadramento histórico sobre o qual se trabalha a noção de uma política antidisciplinar como recurso de enfrentamento às inscrições da imprensa sobre o plano da reprodução das ideologias hegemônicas. / The following thesis is an argumentation about the New Journalism as a plataform for the discutions envolving the ordinary journalistic language. The Counterculture is taken as a politic event featuring the historic plan wich is discussed by the anti-disciplinary protest. This notion is taken as a estrategy to resist against the passive hegemonic ideological reproduction.

A argumentação da presente tese parte do New Journalism como plataforma para discussões sobre a linguagem jornalística. A Contracultura enquanto fenômeno político serve de enquadramento histórico sobre o qual se trabalha a noção de uma política antidisciplinar como recurso de enfrentamento às inscrições da imprensa sobre o plano da reprodução das ideologias hegemônicas. / The following thesis is an argumentation about the New Journalism as a plataform for the discutions envolving the ordinary journalistic language. The Counterculture is taken as a politic event featuring the historic plan wich is discussed by the anti-disciplinary protest. This notion is taken as a estrategy to resist against the passive hegemonic ideological reproduction.

In this dissertation I explore a number of contemporary science fiction franchises in order to ascertain how the figure of the action heroine has evolved throughout her recent history. There has been a tendency in film criticism to view these strong women as ‘figuratively male’ and therefore not ‘really’ women, which, I argue, is largely due to a reliance on the psychoanalytic paradigms that have dominated feminist film theory since its beginnings. Building on Elisabeth Hills’s work on the character of Ellen Ripley of the Alien series, I explore how notions of ‘becoming’ and the ‘Body without Organs’ proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari can be activated to provide a more positive set of readings of active women on screen. These readings are not limited by discussions of sex or gender, but discuss the body in terms of its increased capacities as it interacts with the world around it. I do not argue for a Deleuzian analysis of cinema as such, because this project is concerned with aspects of representation which did not form part of Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema. Rather I use Deleuze and Guattari’s work to explore alternative ways of reading the active women these franchises present and the benefits they afford. Through these explorations I demonstrate, however, that applying the Deleuzoguattarian ‘method’ is a potentially risky undertaking for feminist theory. Deconstructing notions of ‘being’ and ‘identity’ through the project of becoming may have benefits in terms of addressing ‘woman’ beyond binaristic thought, but it may also have negative consequences. What may be liberating for feminist film theory may be also be destructive. This is because through becoming we destabilise a position from which to address potentially ideologically unsound treatments of women on screen.