13th Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference: Territorialities, Exterritorialities, Non-territorialities

The conference will address the complex relation between territory and population, thus reflecting on the broad philosophical, political, and anthropological context of Deleuze´s and Guattari´s work. There are no empty territories; territories are always populated. State or regional territories provide living space for populations that vary in their organization, segmentation and cohesion. Relations between territorial aggregates and populations, however, involve not only identification but also divergence, which implies that the ties between such aggregates and populations are frail. This applies in particular to our current situation, when we are confronted with migrations which visibly split up territories and their populations. In this respect, Arjun Appadurai refers to ethnoscapes that, together with other forms of global cultural flows, create disjunctions of the semantic context of global civilization. He considers various types of deterritorialisation to be the most fundamental processes within modernity. In this regard, territories abandoned by a part of their population never remain intact; their structure transforms, or collapses.

Migrations of human populations also involve issues of social visibility and social invisibility. Deterritorialisations entail the becoming visible or invisible of a particular population, depending on the degree of its organization. In the context of a continuing migration crisis, Étienne Balibar identifies migrations as serious political and philosophical problems that challenge the integrity of nation-states and the idea of citizenship, along with the very idea of Europe. He argues that migration compels us to realize that Europe “has no borders, rather it is itself a complex 'border': simultaneously singular and multiple, fixed and mobile, internal and external.”

A complex investigation of the relations between borders, territories and movements also needs to acknowledge that migrations can bring about fatal processes of depopulation. Not only that migrations generate greater homogenization of a population on a given territory; they may create social deserts haunted by the ghosts of past social forms. This is one of the negative aspects of deterritorialisations: they turn social territories into unhospitable non-territories, and enable the formal structures of state apparatuses, insufficiently articulated to civil society and newly emerging social aggregates, to replace original territories. At the same time, deterritorializations increasingly atomize populations without creating possibilities for new forms of social relations.

Such undesirable aspects of deterriorialization processes also compel reflection on the negative impact that past and present traumas have on social reality. Thanks to the work of Catherine Malabou, we are able to decipher the structure of traumatized society in its inability to overcome the traumatizing effects of historical and political events. Her traumatopolitics makes us attentive to the traumatic effects of events, hence complementing Alain Badiou´s concept of the event. Political events such as the Soviet revolution or the Solidarność movement in Poland constitute compelling regional instances of such trauma. Provided that events establish spaces for new collective subjects, how do we then differentiate traumatized subjects from those collective subjects that are capable of constructive plasticity? How can we ensure that the events we experience will open pathways to new territories rather than leaving us in deserted wastelands?

Such troubling questions prompt us to recollect and reconsider the Deleuzo-Guattarian view of the social dimension of thinking, which Miguel de Beistegui contrasts with a phenomenological approach to the political. This comparison with phenomenology reminds us of one crucial aspect of deterritorialization: it is—perhaps first and foremost—a process occurring at the microscopic level of appearing, which goes beyond the macroscopic level of social visibility.

Considering such issues, the conference will investigate the territorial migrations of peoples, groups, images, and concepts. It intends to explore problems of social and symbolic condensations as well as problems of depopulation related to the deterritorialisation of inhabited territories. Notably, the conference will focus on the historical experience of Central Europe and its historical traumas that re-emerge in today´s global context. Ethnic cleansing and the social engineering of human suffering that take place in the Middle East, in the Post-Soviet republics, in China, or South America may remind us of the social impoverishment of Central Europe when it lost its Jewish and German populations, while constantly experiencing the exodus of its intellectual and cultural elites. Precisely this alarming situation forces us to examine the intricate relations between territorialities, exterritorialities and non-territorialities.

On top of all that, the works of Deleuze and Guattari resonate with the historical heritage of Central Europe to an even greater degree. Considering this heritage and its philosophical dimension, we intend to organize special sessions dedicated to Deleuze and Guattari´s relation to phenomenology, structuralism and Marxism. Psychoanalysis, in its historical development, is also deeply embedded in the social and cultural context of the Central Europe. For the same reasons, we cannot forget the literary works of Sacher-Masoch, or Kafka. It was Kafka´s work in particular that influenced Deleuze and Guattari´s reflections on minority writing and minority groups. What is a minority and what is becoming minoritarian? Deleuze and Guattari claim that it is neither a state of mind nor state of existence; rather, it is a process of deterritorialisation that escapes from the established territory of a majority, or, alternatively, transforms it from within. Becoming minoritarian is productive because it creates divergences. This is the spirit we hope will animate our conference as well.

Last but not least, the conference will thematize the manifestation of political and social processes in a broader cultural context: in film, TV, visual art, and music. Besides the reflection of political and social processes of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization in art and other media, the artistic domain itself is affected in turn by them. Art is for Deleuze and Guattari an operation of becoming, and, therefore also of deteritorialization; it is a process of flight from the system of coordinates, one that demands aesthetic reflection on territoriality as well.

Conference Panels

- Deleuze, Guattari and phenomenology

- Deleuze, Guattari and structuralism

- Deleuze, Guattari and Marxism

- Deleuze, Guattari and cultural anthropology

- Deleuze, Guattari and psychoanalysis

- Deleuze, Guattari and clinical practice

- Deleuze, Guattari and ontology

- Deleuze, Guattari and ecology

- Deleuze, Guattari and politics

- Deleuze, Guattari and feminism

- Deleuze, Guattari and neo/materialisms

- Deleuze, Guattari and science

- Deleuze, Guattari and technology

- Deleuze, Guattari and aesthetics

- Deleuze, Guattari and literature

- Deleuze, Guattari and film

- Deleuze, Guattari and music

- Deleuze, Guattari and painting

- Deleuze, Guattari and translation

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Arjun Appadurai, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Miguel de Beistegui, Catherine Malabou

Deleuze Camp: 22 June – 26 June 2020

The main theme of the Deleuze summer school is Deleuze and Guattari´s elucidations of literature in connection with the Central European tradition of literary writing. This involves authors such as Kafka, Sacher-Masoch, and their view of dislocated populations.

Submissions:

Deleuze Camp Applications: We kindly ask students interested in the Deleuze Camp to submit a brief letter of intent via our website. The letter of intent is to be approximately 250 words long. We also need a short bio with institutional details of up to 150 words.

Panel Proposals: We are accepting panel proposals pertinent to the subject of the conference. Panel proposals should involve a panel title and 250-word description of the panel’s aims and themes. If you already have a list of panelists, please, send us as well their paper abstracts and bios of the same word lengths as in the case of paper proposals. Panels will last 90 minutes and should normally consist of three paper presentations.

Paper Proposals: We invite all scholars interested in the themes of the conference to submit an abstract of up to 250 words and a brief bio with institutional details of up to 150 words. Speakers will be allotted 30 minutes, and we would expect a 20-minute paper presentation, plus 10 minutes for questions.

Deadlines for Submissions:

Deadline for panel proposals: 1st December 2019

Deadline for paper submissions: 19th January 2020.

Deadline for the Deleuze Camp applications: 19th January 2020.

Venue:

The conference will take place in Prague, whose historic center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The venue will be: Faculty of Arts, Charles University, nám. Jana Palacha 2, Praha 1.

Contacts:

http://www.dgs2020.org

http ://www .flu .cas .cz /en

[email protected]

http://www.dgs2020.org