Notre contribution présente les éléments caractéristiques de l’interprétation deleuzienne de la métaphysique de Baruch Spinoza effectuée dans Spinoza et le problème de l'expression et montre quels prolongements elle trouve dans les travaux suivants de Gilles Deleuze que sont Différence et répétition et Logique du sens. Pour bien comprendre le contexte et la particularité de l’interprétation deleuzienne du spinozisme, nous nous intéressons dans un premier temps à l'interprétation qu'en a offerte Martial Gueroult à la même époque dans Spinoza. I, Dieu (Éthique I). Nous accordons alors une attention particulière à sa lecture des premières propositions de l'Éthique et ainsi à sa thèse de l'existence d'une infinité de substances-attribut réellement distinctes et constitutives d'une Substance absolument infinie, c'est-à-dire Dieu ou l'ens realissimum. Nous nous attardons ensuite à la lecture expressionniste de Deleuze qui aborde directement le problème de l’unité de la substance et de la diversité des attributs en posant la question du type de distinction qui s'applique à l'absolu, question qui est au centre de la problématique de la relation de l'un et du multiple. Pour Deleuze, c'est l'univocité des attributs qui permet d’expliquer l’unité de la diversité des attributs dans la Substance de telle sorte que pour ce dernier, comme pour Gueroult, Dieu est unité d'un divers. Finalement, nous considérons que Deleuze s’approprie le maillage conceptuel qu’il dégage de l’expressionnisme de Spinoza et qu'il s’engage dans un travail de perfectionnement de celui-ci qui constitue selon nous une quête de l’univocité qui le mène au fondement d’une véritable ontologie univoque. Cette réappropriation qui passe par un aplanissement du spinozisme implique des déplacements que nous proposons d’aborder à partir de trois éléments clefs de sa lecture de Spinoza, soit sa conceptualisation de l'essence de mode comme degré intrinsèque d’intensité, l’assimilation de la distinction réelle à une distinction formelle et, dans un cadre plus général, la conception génétique de Dieu présentée dans les premières propositions de l’Éthique. Dans chacun des cas, nous relions la lecture deleuzienne et les prolongements qu'elle trouve dans ses travaux avec l’interprétation que propose Gueroult dans le premier volume qu’il dédie à Spinoza. En définitive, c'est principalement deux aspects de la métaphysique deleuzienne qui sont traités, soit la multiplicité substantive et la synthèse disjonctive, en montrant comment la logique de la distinction, l’univocité de l’être ainsi que l’immanence de l’un et du multiple sont intimement interreliées par l’expressionnisme qui permet conséquemment d'aboutir à la fameuse formule pluralisme = monisme.

The thesis examines Canadian and Japanese human security assemblages. It aims to delve below stereotypical imageries 'representing' these human security articulations. The concept of 'human security' is not a starting point, but a result of elements, processes, structures and mechanisms which need to be investigated in order to reveal insights about a given articulation of human security. Each human security assemblage is composed of messy discourses and practices which are loosely related and sometimes even disconnected. Academics have frequently avoided studying the messiness of political discourses and practices and their mutual dependencies or their lack thereof. By contrast, this thesis ascertains what has lain beneath Canadian and Japanese spatio-temporal articulation of human security and establishes the kinds of structural terrain which have enabled, shaped, or blocked the unfolding of certain versions of human security. The pivotal contention of the thesis is that Canadian and Japanese articulations of human security have been different because they have grown from completely different domestic economies of power governing the relationship between the state apparatus and the non-profit and voluntary sector. While the Canadian human security assemblage has been shaped by transformations in the country's advanced liberal model of government, the Japanese has been shaped by the continuities of Japan's bureaucratic authoritarianism. A novel approach is employed for the related process-tracing: a general series linking structural conditions with actual articulations of the human security projects, and their further development, including analysis of their unintended consequences.

In the early twentieth century, the modernists problematized ornament in their refashioning of architecture for the industrial age. Today, architects are formulating different responses to image and its (re)production in the information age. In both discourses of ornament and image, surfaces are often the perpetrators: visual boundaries that facilitate false appearances, imprisoning humanity in a shadowy cave of illusion. Such views follow a familiar metaphysical model characterized by the opposition between inside and outside and the opaque boundary that acts as a barrier. This model determines the traditional (Platonic) philosophical approach that follows a distinct hierarchical order and a perpendicular movement of thought that seeks to penetrate appearances in order to arrive at the essence of things. This thesis deploys Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy to advance a different understanding of surface, image and appearance in architecture. Using the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum as a catalyst, the thesis argues that many of the concepts with which commentators and critics analyse contemporary architecture follow models of thought that consider surfaces and their effects as secondary categories. Given the significance of visual (re)production and communication for contemporary society, the thesis proposes a different model based on surface as that which simultaneously produces, connects and separates image and reality. This non-hierarchical approach is inspired by surficial philosophy, which relates to Earth, to geology and topology, conjuring up a diversity of concepts from the thickness of the crust to the smooth fluidity of the seas. The result is an unfamiliar, polemical model of thought that does not define surface as a limit or barrier, rather a medium, a pliable space of smooth mixture. In this model, difference is not in the opposition between the two sides of a boundary line, rather it occurs upon and within the surficial landscape that consumes categories, promoting nomadic movements of thought that offer greater flexibility towards creativity and new possibilities. In surficial thought, images and appearances are not artificial copies of an originary reality, rather they possess a unique reality of their own. This approach allows architectural imagery to be theorised as a positive surfacing of architecture beyond disciplinary lines and the locality of a specific time and place.

This thesis argues that presence in the performing arts can be reconceived, via the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, as an encounter with difference or ‘differential presence’ which is variously defined as immanence, destratification, affect/becoming, and duration. These definitions are developed through a series of four analyses of exemplary performance practices: 1) The Living Theatre; 2) Antonin Artaud; 3) Allan Kaprow and 4) Goat Island. Chapter One recuperates the Living Theatre from a dominant narrative of ‘failure’, aided by the Deleuzian concepts of ontological participation, immanence, production/creation and ‘the people to come’. Reframing the company as pioneers of methods such as audience participation and collective creation, the chapter argues that their theatrical ambition is irreducible to some simple pursuit of undifferentiated presence (as authenticity or communion). Chapter Two provides an exposition of three key concepts emerging in the encounter between Artaud and Deleuze: the body without organs, the theatre without organs, and the destratified voice. The chapter proposes that To have done with the judgment of god constitutes an instance of a theatre without organs that uses the destratified voice in a pursuit of differential presence – as a nonrepresentative encounter with difference that forces new thoughts upon us. Chapter Three defines differential presence in relation to Deleuze’s concepts of affect and becoming-imperceptible and Kaprow’s concepts of ‘experienced insight’, nonart, ‘becoming “the whole”’, and attention. The chapter argues that Kaprow and Deleuze share a concern to theorize the practice of participating in actuality beyond the subject/object distinction, in a manner that promotes an ethico-political sense of taking part in “the whole”. Finally, Chapter Four focuses on the temporal aspect of differential presence, arguing that through slowness, waiting, repetition and imitation, Goat Island’s performance work acknowledges and responds to ‘the need to open ourselves affectively to the actuality of others’ (Mullarkey 2003: 488).

This Ethnological study, based on interviews with 8 pensioners with photography as a hobbyaims at finding the reasons the pensioners indicate are vital to them choosing photography asa hobby. The theoretical framework consists of Arnold Van Gennep’s ideas about Rites ofPassage and Gilles Deleuze’s theories of Becoming as a way to understand transitions in life.The results indicate that most of the interviewed persons seem to make a rather seamlesstransition from working life into retirement. The ones bringing their photo-hobby with themfrom earlier in life seem to make the smoothest transition of all.

This post-qualitative inquiry project investigated subjectivity (sense of self) among graduates of creative writing Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs. The project asked how subjectivity is involved in the creative writing process and how that process fuels further writing after a creative piece (such as the MFA thesis) is completed. A post-qualitative, thinking-with-theory approach was used to explore the role of subjectivity among four anonymous graduates of creative writing MFA programs who provided writing samples describing their creative writing processes. Following the thinking-with-theory approach, the data were analyzed using Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of productive desire. Study findings are presented in two formats. First, a traditional, qualitative presentation of findings describes how unconscious desires develop a beneficial weakening of subjectivity that may encourage creative writers to continue writing after completion of the MFA degree. Next, further findings are presented via a nonlinear, rhizomatic data assemblage. The project concludes with recommendations for the use of Deleuzian productive desire as a pedagogical framework in graduate-level creative writing courses, as well as a call for the consideration of post-qualitative research methods in the field of education.

Background: Segregation, within the context of this study, is the removal of a prisoner from the wider prison to an environment that is regimented and controlling, and functions through enforced solitude. There is very little research that explores this environment from the perspective of the prisoners who experience it. By using the voices of the prisoners this study provides rich description of the conceptual understanding of how they and resolved their segregation experiences. Research Aim: The aim of this research was to develop a grounded theory of how prisoners gave meaning to their segregated environment experience. Methodology: This study was guided by a constructivist epistemology and the principles and process of grounded theory (Constructivist Grounded Theory) as described by Glaser, Strauss, and Charmaz. Data was gathered from a participant group of prisoners who were experiencing, or had experienced within the previous two months, time in segregation, from one specific Category A prison, as well as comparable case studies. Data was collected through semi structured interviews, and case study documentary analysis, and analysed using the concurrent processes of constant comparative analysis, data collection, and theoretical sampling. Results: The participants expressed that the main concern of their time in segregation was a desire to survive this experience. They expressed this desire, and the actions and behaviours necessary to achieve it, through a process conceptualised as reframing contextual power. This has three 'subcategories‘ 'Power Posturing', 'Power Positioning', and 'Power Playing', each comprising of further subdivisions of the conceptualisation of the participants main concern. These consisted of 'Knowing Fixed Rules', 'Reading Emergent Rules', 'Relating', 'Resistance', 'Being Bad', 'Being Mad', and 'Being Cool'. Power was the major interlinking concept and this was fundamental to the strategies and actions necessary for the participants to achieve their main concern. While presented as three distinct 'subcategories‘ they are neither independent nor hierarchical, rather they are interconnected and interlinked. The participants were active in the utilisation and enactment of power actions and not passive recipients of power. A theoretical exploration of the power inherent in reframing contextual power demonstrated that no one theory or approach can sufficiently explain power within this context. It is proposed that, drawing from a number of theorists, an integrated approach to viewing and understanding such power is required to allow for a more sophisticated understanding of how the participants reframe contextual power. Conclusions: The findings of this study provide a method of understanding how the participants engaged with, and utilised complex strategies to survive the segregated environment experience. The findings also contribute to how we understand the processes of power within this current (and similar) context(s). I consider that the uniqueness of this thesis is important as it contributes to the extant body of knowledge in this field and thus offers a salient message relating to the (potential) future of segregation and the solitary confinement of prisoners.

This study examined parental perceptions of marketing to young children using a feminist post-structural theoretical framework to specifically examine the following questions, 1) To what extent are parents aware of the marketing tactics being directed toward young children? 2) How do power/knowledge relations and practices produce parent’s multiple subjectivities as they parent their children in regards to commercial culture? 3) How can early childhood educators adapt pedagogy and practice in order to meet the needs of children growing up within the context of a commercialized childhood? In-depth unstructured interviews revealed that parents within this study tend to view themselves as solely responsible for their children and do not support governmental regulation of the advertising industry. In most cases, the parents in the study empathized with marketers trying to sell their products to children. Furthermore, while participants in this study were concerned about how consumer culture influences children’s subjectivities, they were more concerned about “adult content” than corporate access to children. Many of the parental perceptions uncovered mirror neoliberal discourses including an emphasis on individual responsibility, the belief that government regulation is censorship and the privileging of economic rationale by systematically representing children as sources of profit. This study utilized Deleuzean and Foucauldian concepts in order to make visible the practices and discourses that discipline children and parents as consumers within the United States neoliberal assemblage(s). This analysis also revealed the very contradictions and complexities that are dramatically shaping parents and young children within the United States’ consumer cultural landscape(s).

In 1955, American artist Dorothea Tanning abandoned her figurative Surrealist renderings of dream-like scenarios in favor of a complexly abstract and fragmented style of painting. With few exceptions, the ways in which Tanning’s later works function independently of her earlier paintings tends to be downplayed in the scholarship on her oeuvre. Equally sparse is the scholarship on Tanning’s dog imagery, which pervades her oeuvre but becomes most apparent in her later phase. This thesis seeks to shift attention toward Tanning’s later abstract paintings; it also seeks to fill the gap in scholarship on Tanning’s dogs. Specifically, through the study of five Tanning paintings from the late 1950s and 1960s, with the theoretical aid of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the becoming-animal, this thesis will investigate how Tanning’s post-1955 paintings create and promote new ways for viewers to think about the relations between humans and animals in the human-dominated modern world.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Filosofía / El presente trabajo se inscribe dentro de una investigación vital de mayor amplitud que el tema que estas páginas pretenden abarcar. Es por lo mismo que ha de ser leído y comprendido de dos formas: una abierta y otra cerrada. La aprehensión de este trabajo de forma cerrada obedece al objetivo inicial que persigo y a la misma estructura en la que se presentan los contenidos: el presente ensayo es una introducción a una de las tantas formas de relaciones humanas que co-existen en nuestra contemporaneidad. Su objetivo es, por lo tanto, delimitar este territorio e introducir a cualquier investigador atrapado en este mundo complejo por otra rama de dicha complejidad, como son las relaciones BDSM. Qué es el BDSM y el por qué de su importancia serán puntos a revisar durante el trabajo mismo. Conténtese el lector por mientras de ver en esta introducción una guía a la lectura de este escrito.