Date: Thu, 02 Apr 1998 08:46:52 +0000
From: Graham Jones <jongr-AT-cougar.vut.edu.au>
Subject: Deleuze issue of journal!


Antithesis:

An interdisciplinary journal of criticism, culture and theory
(also including fiction, graphics and poetry)

Issue 8.2

'Time and Memory'

Price: $15 (Australian) not including postage
(see end of message for mail-order details)

Antithesis issue 8.2 is a fantastic book-sized issue of 316 pages
(weight: two thirds of a kilogram) containing a selection of the
proceedings from the 'Time and Memory' conference (and also the Deleuze
Symposium) held in Melbourne, Australia in September, 1996. It will
prove an invaluable aid to scholars interested in Deleuze's work and/or
the treatment of Time within contemporary theory. But don't just take
our word for it! See what the critics have to say themselves:

"It is an outstanding collection.  The importance of Bergson for Deleuze
is becoming increasingly apparent, and this volume's essays on "Time and
Memory" provide essential contributions to an understanding of that
legacy. With studies by such well-known Deleuze scholars as Boundas,
Goodchild and Ansell-Pearson, the issue also includes incisive papers by
a number of brilliant young scholars and artists.  Of the many special
issues devoted to Deleuze and Deleuzean themes, this ranks among the
very best."
- Ronald Bogue (Author of 'Deleuze and Guattari')


"This germinal issue of 'Antithesis' opens up for scrutiny one of the
most exciting, enduring and complex of philosophical issues: the
question of time, with its crucial links to memory, to futures and to
becoming. This is one of the very first publications to raise questions
of time and memory for systematic, postmodern speculations and
interrogation: as such, it will prove central to all those interested in
issues based around the politics and ontology of time. Bringing together
a number of well-established international figures as well as some of
the more exciting and innovative younger researchers and scholars, this
issue will prove necessary reading for those interested in politics,
culture and the real."
- Elizabeth Grosz (Author of 'Volatile Bodies')

--------------------------------------------------------

Antithesis 8.2

Issue contents include:

Deleuze on Time and Memory
Constantin Boundas

Time and Evaluation
Philip Goodchild

Poison: (scrambled extracts from a viroid life)
Keith Ansell Pearson

The Little Girl (A Deleuzian Perspective)
Catherine Driscoll

A Deleuzian Cinema of Seeing
Constantine Veveris

Deleuze, Proust and the Art of the Simulacrum
Graham Jones

Falling from the power to die (Artaud, Deleuze and the Death-drive)
Catherine Dale

DandGyism: Every Name in History is 'I'
Stephen O'Connell

A Thousand Tiny Stupidities: Why I Hate Deleuze and Guattari
Justin Clemens

The Morphology of Time: Sheldrake's Theory of Formative Causation
Paul Atkinson

Seditious Duration: Henri Bergson and Michel Serres
Gregory Adamson

Memory, Desire and Photography
Daniel Palmer

Logical Time in the Act of the Lacanian Analyst
Andrew Lewis

A more detailed description of the contents follow:

=09This issue is the result of a collaboration between Antithesis and the
Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP) which held its
inaugural conference at the University of Melbourne in September 1996 on
the theme of 'Time and Memory'. The philosophical orientation of many of
the papers in this issue reflects this collaboration. In particular, the
fact that the conference included a symposium on the French philosopher,
Gilles Deleuze and attracted a strong contingent of speakers interested
in his theories on time, means that a number of articles contained in
this issue grapple with Deleuzian concerns. But this issue also includes
papers from outside the Deleuzian framework that take up the theme of
time and memory in Lacanian psychoanalysis, in the writing of Walter
Benjamin and in the philosophy of Henri Bergson.
=09The three keynote speakers from the conference who offered papers for
publication in 'Antithesis' reflect this theoretical range. Constantin
Boundas and Philip Goodchild contributed papers based around Deleuzian
themes, while Keith Ansell Pearson's ficto-critical essay, 'Poison,' was
written especially for Antithesis and emerges out of a broader
theoretical field.
While acknowledging Deleuze's indebtedness to Bergsonian notions of
temporality, Constantin Boundas, in his paper 'Deleuze on Time and
Memory,' argues that this particular angle on Deleuze's work in the area
of time and memory is somewhat reductive. Instead, Boundas argues for a
more complex and contradictory conception of Deleuze's ontology of time,
contending that he attempts to bring together and move beyond the
apparently contradictory approaches of Bergson and Nietzsche, Kant and
Husserl, so that the virtual and the actual, the imaginary and the real
coalesce, becoming different and yet indiscernable. His essay outlines
the processes whereby Deleuze attempts this difficult move, discussing
its implications for a memory of a 'pure' past that has never been.
=09Philip Goodchild's 'Time and Evaluation' recounts the demise of
foundationalist notions of value. Drawing upon Deleuze and Nietzsche,
Goodchild contends that the death of transcendence has left a void that
has been filled by an alliance between time and capital. This mutually
interdependent relationship between money and temporality reinforces a
condition of subjection to an impersonal source of evaluations.
Problematising the assumption that being necessarily equates with
existing as a presence in time, Goodchild argues that time, as a
representational mode, actually excludes being from thought. Goodchild
suggests however that a realm exists beyond time and evaluation in which
the possibility of transcendental life, that is, thought liberated from
time, exists.
=09Keith Ansell-Pearson's paper 'Poison' critiques the notion of the
'post-human' that is prevalent within postmodern discourse. Examining
several different paradigms relating to evolution, life, complexity and
entropy, and their figurations in terms of contagion, rhizomes, genes,
viruses and catastrophes, Ansell-Pearson claims that the post-humanists
have been premature in announcing a complete break with past paradigms
of natural selection and evolution.
=09Catherine Driscoll's paper 'The Little Girl' is an evocative account of
the figure of 'Alice' in Deleuze's The Logic of Sense. For Deleuze,
'Alice' is the name for a 'becoming' (sometimes becoming-woman) yet, as
Driscoll suggests, she remains firmly 'a little girl.' Neither a
criticism of Deleuze's notion of becoming, nor a wholesale appropriation
of the concept, Driscoll manages to test the limits of this paradoxical
figure for those for whom 'becoming woman is not necessarily a line of
escape,' that is, women.
=09Constantine Verevis and Graham Jones both offer expositions of two
different Deleuzean texts. Constantine Verevis' paper 'A Cinema of
Seeing' traces Deleuze's account of the cinematic time-image in order to
develop an experimental-creative understanding that moves towards an
historical poetics of cinema. Graham Jones' paper 'Deleuze, Proust and
the Art of the Simulacrum' outlines Deleuze's radical 'reading' of
Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust's novel is famous for its
insights into the nature of time and memory, but these insights, Deleuze
argues, are achieved by the protagonist, Marcel, only by virtue of his
apprenticeship to regimes of signs and their vicissitudes.
=09Catherine Dale's 'Falling From the Power to Die' scrutinises Deleuze
and Guattari's rewriting of the Death Instinct in its emergence from
Freud's work on the repetition compulsion and masochism. For Deleuze and
Guattari, it is the full body without organs which becomes the model for
the Death Instinct. As a preliminary to extracting alternative readings
of a Deleuzean Death Instinct, Dale offers a specific critique of
Deleuze and Guattari's reading of the masochist body as an empty body
without organs.
=09Stephen O'Connell's paper 'DandGyism: Every Name in History is "I"'
examines how Deleuze and Guattari's theories of time effect the
recalling of past events in A Thousand Plateaus. He outlines the
structure of conceptual milieus in this book, and the way in which they
distribute 'universal' problematics, demonstrating how Deleuze and
Guattari's historiography reinvents the subject of historical inquiry in
terms of an 'aestheticism.'
=09From the conceptual milieus of 'A Thousand Plateaus', Justin Clemens
launches quite a different intervention into the Deleuzian critique.
Clemens' iconoclastic paper 'A Thousand Tiny Stupidities: Why I Hate
Deleuze (and Guattari)' mounts a frontal attack on Deleuze's repudiation
of meaning in favour of function, especially in relation to his concept
of multiplicities and the event. At the same time Clemens attacks from
the flank, moving to deflate the elevated status Deleuze currently
enjoys with a sociological account of Deleuze's upward mobility in the
field of Theory in France, America and Australia.
=09Moving beyond the Deleuzian framework, both Paul Atkinson and Greg
Adamson pick up on aspects of Henri Bergson's philosophy of duration.
Atkinson's 'Morphology of Time: Sheldrake's Theory of Formative
Causation' emphasises the relevance of vitalist thought to the
contemporary science of biology, especially in the controversial work of
the biochemist Rupert Sheldrake. In 'Seditious Duration: Bergson and
Serres,' Adamson takes a completely different tack, comparing Bergsonian
symbolisation with that of the contemporary French philosopher Michel
Serres.
=09In 'Memory, Desire and Photography' Daniel Palmer discusses the place
of photography, particularly the family snapshot, in the narration of
the self through memory. He poses a 'radical phenomenology' as a counter
to the tendency, within writers such as Proust, Barthes and Sontag, to
accord photography a melancholy role, in which photographs always
signify lack, nostalgia, loss or death. Palmer's article intervenes in
the debate as to the meaning and function of the photograph and its
relation to memory in taking on questions of bodily investments in the
image. He suggests that our relation to photographs is one of active and
embodied participation in the production of memories, and, indeed, in
the constitution of the subject.
=09Finally, Andrew Lewis' paper 'Logical Time in the Act of the Analyst'
develops a reading of the notions of temporality outlined in Jacques
Lacan's 'Le temps logique et l'assertion de certitude anticipée' in
Ecrits. Lewis focusses on the relationship between temporal modalities ^=D7
instant, time and moment ^=D7 and the implications of this relationship for
psychoanalytic practice.
Interspersed with the critical articles, the new fiction, poetry and art
also take up these themes of time and memory. Each of the pieces of
fiction included in this issue reflects a concern with the ways in which
memories shape the present and the self, in the process of narration.
Each also explores the limits of narrative, in that the conventional
teleology of narrative drive or resolution is absent. These 'stories'
reflect the way we make up our lives out of haphazard and arbitrary
fragments, and that the stories we end up telling have their own truth
or reality.
=09While the fiction seems preoccupied with memory as a recovery of the
past, the poetry figures the future as a memory of sorts, that is, the
individual moment, inflected as it is with the remnants of the past,
also invokes a future. Both prose and poetry turn on the desire for some
kind of revelation or knowledge which is finally withheld. But this is
not without some transition taking place, even if it is merely a
movement from one place to the next, from one kind of knowledge to
another, from confusion to equanimity.
=09Amidst the diverse critical approaches to time and memory reflected in
these contributions, there can be found an important conceptual unity.
Peter Osborne, in The Politics of Time, captures the sense in which
these articles intersect in his comments on the twentieth century
temporal dialectic. According to Osborne, the Aristotelian procedure
that seeks to understand time through change is reversed in contemporary
culture. Instead there is an attempt to comprehend change through time.
What holds these papers together, then, is this relation of time and
memory to change, where change is variously configured as becoming,
metamorphosis, transformation.

--------------------------------------------------------

Antithesis issue 8.2
Price: $15 (Australian) not including postage


Now available by mail-order from:

Readings Bookshop
309 Lygon Street,
Carlton 3053,
Victoria,
Australia

Ph: 03 9347 6633  (Australia)
Fax: 03 9347 1641

Please ring, fax or e-mail us for postage rates and currency conversion
rates.

Readings-AT-readings.com.au
http://www.readings.com.au/aa.htm

Major credit cards are welcome!

--------------------------------------------------

Please feel free to copy and forward this message to other relevant
mailing-lists or interested individuals.