Group items tagged

How do Deleuze and Guattari help us rethink our ecological crises beyond the impasses of State-sanctioned resource exploitation and reactive environmentalism? Do these authors not abstract concepts from earth- and life-sciences and assemble a geophilosophy with which to construe a new earth? Does A Thousand Plateaus not expressly evolve what Gregory Bateson calls an "ecology of mind"? Let us, then, examine those plateaus-the "rhizome" plateau, "the geology of morals" plateau, "the becoming-intense, becoming-animal" plateau, and "the refrain" plateau"-that draw most explicitly upon ecology, biology, zoology, ethology, geography, geology, meteorology, and chaos and complexity theory, and that compose an ontology and politics for enhancing creative terrestrial life. Let us unearth the ecological wisdom of their plan/e of composition by putting it to the test in pressing case studies. Do Deleuze and Guattari not give us multiple outlines for ecological experimentation in their collaborative "rhizome-books," as well as independent proposals for eco-critical and clinical transvaluation such as Guattari's green manifesto, Three Ecologies, and Deleuze's philosophical assemblage of a "radical naturalism"?

I want to argue that place, the place we find ourselves in and which has meaning to us, precedes space, the bounded and abstractly defined territory. Deleuze and Guattari will serve as an unexpected door into this topic. Unexpected, because they are heirs of Western philosophy, and explicitly draw on Western themes. Unexpected also because of some comments made in their final collaborative project about "geophilosophy" regarding the origins of philosophy. Nevertheless, they suggest a way to think place in a way that is of value to African philosophy.