The figure of the cyborg, or more latterly, the posthuman body has been an increasingly familiar presence in a number of academic disciplines. The majority of such studies have focused on popular culture, particularly the depiction of the posthuman in science-fiction, fantasy and horror. To date however, few studies have focused on the posthuman and the comic book superhero, despite their evident corporeality, and none have questioned comics’ readers about their responses to the posthuman body. This thesis presents a cultural history of the posthuman body in superhero comics along with the findings from twenty-five, two-hour interviews with readers. By way of literature reviews this thesis first provides a new typography of the posthuman, presenting it not as a stable bounded subject but as what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe as a ‘rhizome’. Within the rhizome of the posthuman body are several discursive plateaus that this thesis names Superhumanism (the representation of posthuman bodies in popular culture), Post/Humanism (a critical-theoretical stance that questions the assumptions of Humanism) and Transhumanism (the philosophy and practice of human enhancement with technology). With these categories in mind the thesis explores the development of the posthuman in body in the Superhuman realm of comic books. Exploring the body-types most prominent during the Golden (1938-1945), Silver (1958-1974) and contemporary Ages of superheroes it presents three explorations of what I term the Perfect Body, Cosmic Body and Military-Industrial Body respectively. These body types are presented as ‘assemblages’ (Delueze and Guattari, 1987) that display rhizomatic connections to the other discursive realms of the Post/Human and Transhuman. This investigation reveals how the depiction of the Superhuman body developed and diverged from, and sometimes back into, these realms as each attempted to territorialise the meaning and function of the posthuman body. Ultimately it describes how, in spite of attempts by nationalistic or economic interests to control Transhuman enhancement in real-world practices, the realms of Post/Humanism and Superhumanism share a more critical approach. The final section builds upon this cultural history of the posthuman body by addressing reader’s relationship with these images. This begins by refuting some of the common assumptions in comics studies about superheroes and bodily representations. Readers stated that they viewed such imagery as iconographic rather than representational, whether it was the depiction of bodies or technology. Moreover, regular or committed readers of superhero comics were generally suspicious of the notion of human enhancement, displaying a belief in the same binary categories -artificial/natural, human/non-human - that critical Post/Humanism seeks to problematize. The thesis concludes that while superhero comics remain ultimately too human to be truly Post/Humanist texts, it is never the less possible to conceptualise the relationship between reader, text, producer and so on in Post/Humanist terms as reading-assemblage, and that such a cyborgian fusing of human and comic book allow both bodies to ‘become other’, to move in new directions and form new assemblages not otherwise possible when considered separately.

Thesis (DLitt (Afrikaans and Dutch))--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation studies the depiction of character subjectivity in two text series of Alexander Strachan and Breyten Breytenbach. Strachan’s first three prose works are dealt with as a trilogy wherein one main character, Lenka, traverses three texts. Breytenbach’s five autobiographical prose works about visits to South Africa are also dealt with as a text series wherein one main character, Breytenbach, is depicted. In both instances the subjectivity, as portrayed by these authors, is read as a nomadic subjectivity, a term borrowed from the French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The study assumes the form of a Deleuze-Guattarian reading of Strachan and Breytenbach’s work with a sustained focus on the depiction of the nomadic subject in the works of both authors. During the course of the study many philosophical concepts, developed in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, are explained and implemented as thinking and reading instruments whereby the prose texts are read in a new perspective. Although a Deleuze-Guattarian reading of prose texts is a relatively uncharted territory in circles of Afrikaans literary theory, this study purports to indicate that when a schizo-analytical view of subjectivity is used to analyse the functioning of character subjectivity within literary works, the texts gain new life in interesting ways. Using the concept of the nomadic subject empowers me to establish a useful reading strategy for the reading of a character who refuses to become wholly subjected to the text and the world within which he lives and who rather experiences an existence of perpetual becomings. Eventually it is suggested that the creation of a nomadic character is not only dependent upon a different grasp of subjectivity as indicated in the text, but that the writing of a particular, revolutionary form of literature, a minor literature, is implied. The nomadic subject’s being implies perpetual becomings, and a successful literary portrayal of this subject must depict such becomings at stylistic and formal levels. This study moves systematically from an analysis of nomadic subjects in literary texts to the more general question of how a minor literature functions so that the nomadic being of the character is also kept alive in the form and style of the text.

La question posée dans ce mémoire de recherche concerne l’artiste contemporain japonais Aida Makoto, comme figure provocante et ironique, remettant en question les appareils de répression et d’aliénation de la société capitaliste japonaise. L’objectif de ma réflexion est de montrer l’apport de la schizo-analyse dans l’analyse d’œuvres plastiques comportant des prédispositions à l’utilisation de celle-ci. À travers les œuvres de l’artiste Aida Makoto où une multiplicité de corps emplit l’espace de la toile, et à partir des concepts de multiplicité et de sensation théorisés par Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, la recherche apportera une seconde lecture aux œuvres de cet artiste en mettant en avant les aspects révolutionnaires de sa création artistique. Constitué de deux chapitres, le mémoire porte dans un premier temps sur la picturalité de l’œuvre, d’ordre technique, esthétique et éthique, en mettant en avant les composés de sensation présents sur la toile, ceci afin, dans un second temps, d’appréhender la figuration, de la visagéité à la multiplicité, comme aspect central de l’œuvre. Ainsi, la Figure, au sens deleuzien du terme, permettrait à l’artiste Aida Makoto d’entamer une fuite schizophrénique à l’occasion de laquelle il pourra créer à l’abri de toute répression ou normalisation de ses machines désirantes par la société capitaliste japonaise. / The question posed in the research concerns the contemporary Japanese artist Aida Makoto, as a provocative and ironic figure, challenging the machinery of repression and alienation of the Japanese capitalist society. The purpose of my reflection is to show the contribution of schizoanalysis in the analysis of visual artworks. Through the artworks of the artist Aida Makoto, where a multiplicity of bodies fill the space of the canvas, and from the concepts of multiplicity and sensation, theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this research will bring a second reading to Aida’s works highlighting the revolutionary aspects of his artistic creation. Constituted of two chapters, the thesis focuses mainly on the pictoriality of the work from technical, aesthetic and ethics points of view, emphasizing the compounds of sensation present on the canvas, in order to, secondly, understand the figuration of faciality to multiplicity as a central aspect of the work. Thus the Figure, in the deleuzian sense, would allow the artist Makoto Aida to start a schizophrenic escape during which he can create freely from repression and normalization of desiring machines in the Japanese capitalist society.

The thesis Otherness and Identity deals with the discourse of Gilles Deleuze (Différence et répétition, 1968) and Deleuze in cooperation with Félix Guattari (Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L'Anti-Oedipe, 1972, Mille plateaux, 1980, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?, 1991). On the basis of their discourse the process of individuation is constructed, and is at first situated into deleuzean space-time. The process of individuation is based on the principle of inner difference that is understood as a generative principle which "makes the difference". In this sense, the concept of individuation represents a concept of otherness unlike the concept of identity. The first and the second part of the thesis present basic principles of thinking of Deleuze and Guattari. In the third part of the thesis the principle of identity is localized in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. This concept is understood as a consequence of illegitimate uses of the synthesis of unconsciousness. On this ground their critique of psychoanalytic reproduction of repressive Oedipal structures is presented. And the Oedipal structure in it's reproductive function is also presented as a construct of sexual identity. The fourth part of the thesis is devoted to confrontation of opinion motivations, views and strategies of Deleuze and Guattari...

In an age of unbridled global capitalism and caustic neocolonial relations to land and life, the question of the aims and approaches of doing counselling with young people, particularly those majoritarian youth who are inheriting the privileges and specters of capitalist and colonial conquest, is pertinent. This dissertation is a collection of three theoretical papers on critical counselling with majoritarian young people in the context of contemporary Empire. A critical lens drawn from decolonial analyses was applied to mainstream counselling practice and theory. By developing a map of how contemporary Empire functions as a permutation of settler colonialism and globalized capitalism, this work investigates the forms of power and discourse that structure contemporary counselling, particularly the bio-medical-industrial-complex of psychiatry and the pharmacology industry, societies of control and digital technology, affective labour, and coloniality. Practices of vulnerability, self-reflexivity, decolonization, accountability, and critique are weaved into a cartographic methodology to redefine counselling as an ethics-driven and politicized intervention in the reproduction of majoritarian subjectivity. In the 21st century, globalized capitalism and settler colonialism seek to push past material limits and appropriate the products of human relatedness—feelings, ideas, cultures, and creations. In resisting this affective extractivism, these papers explore what it might mean to position engagement, living encounter, and relationship in an ethics-based counselling paradigm of resistance and social justice. The challenge of a critical counselling praxis commensurate with such a paradigm is to find avenues to intervene in the majoritarian psyche’s capito-colonial grip on all forms of land and life. Counselling in an Age of Empire proposes that a politicized account of counselling with majoritarian subjects might prove to be a productive space for recrafting subjectivities. Through a careful critique of the majoritarian subject, in the roles of both counsellor and client, a praxis of counselling attentive to political context, based in living encounter, and grounded in a settler ethics of vulnerability and accountability is sketched out. Overall, the work is aimed at majoritarian students and counsellors, their teachers, and those interested in developing a counselling praxis grounded in settler ethics, critique, vulnerability, and the power of living encounter. / Graduate / 2019-09-30

This thesis establishes a phenomenology of desire in Anne Carson’s novel-in-verse Autobiography of Red. It examines how desire constructs the self in the text and how it positions it in relation to its surrounding world. The self’s status in the text is read through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s understanding of desire and their concepts becoming and deterritorialisation as explicated in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These concepts are used to map the transformative power of desire in Autobiography of Red and provide an approach through which to understand the tenuous nature of self in the text. It reveals desire not as located solely in the relation between the text’s protagonist Geryon and Herakles, but as a movement that animates and constructs the text. It reads the “red” of the title, the presence of the volcano, of lava, as essential to the text, mapping how the force of desire positions the self and undoes the notion of a phenomenal “background”. Deleuzian desire has linguistic implications and the thesis further extends the use of becoming and deterritorialisation to understand Carson’s poetics and the text as the site that gives rise to a phenomenology of desire. The text is deterritorialised and Carson articulates a way of relaying experience beyond the representative mode. The thesis offers a reading of Autobiography of Red with a Deleuzian theory of desire, which is a new approach in Carson scholarship. As such it hopes to open up both the poetic text and theoretic text to new understandings and create points of departure for further research.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T20:39:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Rafael Domingues Adaime.pdf: 2962262 bytes, checksum: f1d0a77fd261ce9788d1ea724b3760a7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-03-27 / This dissertation is a study of experimental procedures in psychotherapy, in which I intend to give visibil ity through some cases and theoretical elements, to the way I have worked at the clinic through experimentation, by the influence of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the schizoanalysis / Esta dissertação é um estudo sobre procedimentos experimentais em psicoterapia, em que procuro dar visibil idade, através de alguns casos e elementos teóricos, para o modo como tenho trabalhado na clínica pela via da experimentação, por influência da obra de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari, a esquizoanálise

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T20:39:47Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Vanessa Maldonado.pdf: 283841 bytes, checksum: 2b1fa48500437b19dda676bf6ea8032e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-03-27 / This research intends to delineate a study interested in analyse and evaluate the way as relations politics and subjective involve us as informing of the capitalism contemporary. For in such a way, we will look for to understand as the workmanships of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, either of the critical interior of a philosophical one, either of the critical interior of the psychological one, they circumscribe the complex relation enters the way of capitalist production and certain lines of efetuação that cross psychological clinics. The choice of these authors was not given for exclusion of innumerable others, but mainly because certain reflections and determined concepts gifts in its writings still reveal decisive in the characterization problematic contemporary of an deserving one of the attention in the psychological clinic. Thus, this study the inquiry of the politician-subjective constitution of the gift is dedicated to it. Looking for to locate the micron become entangled that in involves them in socius and that in they bind them process to a complex of economic mundialização, cultural and subjective that if translates politics capable to instrumentalizar the life. We understand that this instrumentalização of the life directly implies on dynamic to the functioning of the desire and that, probably, this implication corresponds the producing politics of subjetivação of symptoms not only tied with the nosológico register of the psicopatologia, as also to the sintomatologia of a civilization. Perhaps of this form, this study in it helps them to inside configure conditions of possible interferences that if it can call generically capitalism, observing, in the same measure, the capitalist machine in its extensive and intensive domain of relations of forces, understanding its captures and the extension of its reverberações in the bodies / Esta dissertação pretende delinear o eixo condutor de um estudo interessado em problematizar o modo como relações políticas e subjetivas nos envolvem como partícipes do capitalismo contemporâneo. Para tanto, procuraremos compreender como as obras de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari, seja do interior da crítica filosófica, seja do interior da crítica psicológica, circunscrevem a complexa relação entre o modo de produção capitalista e certas linhas de efetuação que atravessam clínicas psicológicas. A escolha desses autores não se deu por exclusão de inúmeros outros, mas principalmente porque certas reflexões e determinados conceitos presentes em seus escritos mostram-se ainda decisivos na caracterização contemporânea de uma problemática merecedora da atenção na clínica psicológica. Para tanto, este estudo dedica-se à investigação da constituição político-subjetiva do presente. Procurando localizar micro emaranhados que nos envolvem no socius e que nos ligam a um complexo processo de mundialização econômica, cultural e subjetiva que se traduz em políticas capazes de instrumentalizar a vida. Entendemos que essa instrumentalização da vida implica dinâmicas diretamente ligadas ao funcionamento do desejo e que, provavelmente, essa implicação corresponda a políticas de subjetivação produtoras de sintomas não apenas vinculados ao registro nosológico da psicopatologia, como também à sintomatologia de uma civilização. Desta forma, este estudo talvez nos ajude a configurar condições de interferências possíveis dentro do que se pode chamar genericamente de capitalismo, observando, na mesma medida, a máquina capitalista em seu domínio extensivo e intensivo de relações de forças, compreendendo suas capturas e a extensão de suas reverberações nos corpos

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T20:40:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Paula Chieffi.pdf: 470461 bytes, checksum: 7e247d167739beb73ed1948b22db4310 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-06-22 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Based on concepts and thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the present research aims at outlining contemporary politics action. In this direction were interviewed six different people - different experiences, different social practices. This dissertation dialogues with art and political anthropology to compose desiring forces able to enlarge the potency to say yes to other forms of existence. The intensive experience and its expression, multiplicity and the direct act characterize politics as nomadic, disruptive and intense / Esta dissertação busca cartografar ações políticas contemporâneas. Para isso entrevista seis diferentes pessoas - que configuram práticas sociais e experiências distintas - e dialoga com a arte e a antropologia política para rastrear e pensar composições de força do desejo que favorecem a afirmação de novas possibilidades de vida. Tem como principal ferramenta o pensamento de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. O encontro intensivo e a expressão de seus efeitos, a multiplicidade, a ação direta, o pensamento em cruzamento com a cidade e o foco na experiência sensível são alguns elementos que caracterizam políticas nômades, transversais e intempestivas. Políticas outras

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