PoD#1: Jon Roffe - "The Embryogenesis of the World: From Ruyer to Deleuze"

Jon Roffe (University of New South Wales)

We are delighted to announce that the third series of Philosophies of Difference Seminars starts Tuesday, 7th March, 6pm @ RMIT City Campus.

PoD #1: Jon Roffe (UNSW): "The Embryogenesis of the World: from Ruyer to Deleuze"  

ABSTRACT: What does Gilles Deleuze means when he mysteriously asserts that “the world is an egg”? This seminar will flesh out the answer to this question by drawing on one of his important, if poorly footnoted, resources, the mid-century philosopher Raymond Ruyer. In close dialogue with the sciences of his day, Ruyer develops a dynamic philosophy of reality in which every being is a living being, unfolding according to a set of ‘melodies’ or ‘themes’ that make it irreducible to static definitions of the form of things (Aristotle and onwards) as well as crude materialism. Following Ruyer (particularly in Difference and Repetition), Deleuze will develop a generalised ontology of the embryo, such that every thing, up to and including the world itself, is a Ruyerian living thing.    

BIO:  Jon Roffe is a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New South Wales. The co-editor of a number of books on twentieth-century French philosophy, Jon is the author of Badiou’s Deleuze (Acumen 2012), Abstract Market Theory (Palgrave 2015), Gilles Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity (EUP 2016), The Works of Gilles Deleuze (forthcoming re-press 2017), and the co-author of Lacan Deleuze Badiou (EUP 2014).    

WHEN: 6pm – 7:30pm, Tuesday 7th March 2017  

WHERE: Building 9, Room 9.1.024 RMIT City Campus (cnr Bowen & Franklin)  

ABOUT: The Philosophies of Difference group (PoD) is a Melbourne based group of scholars working continental philosophy and interested in problems that have been marginal to the dominant traditions of Western thought. We engage with approaches including: critical philosophy of race, decolonial thought, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, philosophy of disability, philosophy of nature, queer theory, and trans philosophy. We especially welcome participation from women, people of colour, and other minority groups.    

The PoD Seminar Series #3 is supported by the Communication, Politics and Culture Research Centre