Cameron MacKenzie

Bio: Cameron MacKenzie is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 2 publications receiving 1 citations.

Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature (review)

Abstract: In 1992, Gilles Deleuze entered into a correspondence with Alain Badiou at the younger man’s urging, and for two years, these two thinkers exchanged letters on the aim and faults of one another’s projects, only ceasing after having “affected,” in Badiou’s words, “clarification.”1 Deleuze later destroyed this correspondence, urging Badiou to never publish or circulate his own copies. “In the corner of his study,” Jean-Jacques Lecercle writes of Badiou, “there must lie some of the most important letters in contemporary philosophy.” The imagination of what such letters may contain animates Lecercle’s fascinating and overdue study of these seemingly antithetical thinkers as a disjunctive pair. While the rhizomatic thought of Deleuze has been increasingly embraced by the “Anglo-American” philosophical community in recent years, the axiomatic work of Badiou has come along as a refreshing corrective to a complete splintering of discourse. For the literary theorist, the most pertinent question at this point has become less about what these philosophers think than how this thought may be utilized for the betterment of the discipline. The importance of Deleuze already in profound evidence, the rise of the speculative materialists gives weight to the increasing necessity to understand and manipulate the insights of Badiou if literary theory is to keep pace with the explosion in thought his major works have produced. Yet to approach Badiou without recognizing that it is “vis-à-vis Deleuze and no one else” that he posits his endeavor is to misunderstand the scope and aim of both projects, as well as remain only tangentially informed about the most fertile moments of the last thirty years of French thought. Welcome, then, is Lecercle’s study on the literary approaches (aesthetic and otherwise) of Deleuze and Badiou. Presenting the two thinkers not as the halves of a dialectic but rather as a correlative “disjunctive synthesis,” Lecercle is able to not only illuminate the specific areas of paradox in the thought of these two complex theorists but to also provide a cohesive background that joins them in their irreconcilable projects. Lecercle, an expert on Deleuze, is more clear and insightful in his treatment of Deleuze’s prose, concepts, and aesthetics, but the author then seems all the more taken— seduced, nearly—by the austerity of Badiou’s style and the asceticism of his position—responding, we might say, to the call of the Other. Other than the disjunctive synthesis—Deleuze’s concept in which two disparate notions may be jointly suspended on a background of convergence—Lecercle’s study is driven by what he calls “strong reading,” a process

The Performance of Non-Philosophy

Abstract: Are we ready for a return to Deleuze? The question might seem odd to the American reader, since the philosopher’s infl uence only continues to grow in the graduate programs that function here as the inculcator of critical theory. It is perhaps inevitable that this most elusive of thinkers has become the favorite among students who mistake the expostulations of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus as a release from all logical constraints. Given a climate in which the name of Deleuze is all-too-often invoked as justifi cation for the lazy or the inarticulate, the work of Alain Badiou has begun to function as a desperately needed corrective. But Badiou is not nearly as new or as fresh as he may seem. His fi rst major work, Theory of the Subject, was published in France over thirty years ago, and yet the recent growing fascination with Badiou has given birth to a virtual publishing industry, in which even the philosopher’s offhanded comments and class lectures merit hardback books (The End of History, In Praise of Love, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy). For those who have been reading Being and Event for nearly 25 years, the recent explosion of Badiou’s popularity must itself seem in equal need of a corrective. Enter François Laruelle’s Anti-Badiou: on the Introduction of Maoism Into Philosophy. Lauded in the pages of Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy for his development of a “non-philosophy,” Laruelle follows in Deleuze’s footsteps of upsetting less the suppositions of traditional thought than the deep schematics that govern it. Laruelle has developed his non-philosophy as a method by which he can circumvent what he identifi es as the fundamental fl aw of philosophical thinking: a decision made at the outset of any philosophy that the subject under question, before any analysis, consideration, or even naming, must fi rst be separated from its essence. This process of separation produces not the subject itself but a “specular” version of it, an abstraction more easily manipulated by philosophical thought. This process, inherent to all philosophy, proceeds to think the artifi cial abstraction it has created through the difference between such an artifi ce and that which is inevitably left over from the procedure. What philosophy does, in Laruelle’s mind, is

Crossing affordances: Hybrid music as a tool in intercultural music practices

Abstract: Crossing affordances: Hybrid music as a tool in intercultural music practices The article discusses aspects of intercultural musicking and how to analyse hybrid music as a tool in such practices. It investigates joint musicking as a field of negotiation, the result being more and less beneficial to the participants. The article thus suggests a way to analyse discourse in music as much as about music. Musical engagements are addressed in terms of affordance. By applying Simondon’s concept of the technical object, musical affordance is explored as played and made according to certain functions or playing rules, struggling to achieve a certain technicity, or way of functioning. The music realised may block or maintain various affordance logics. This perspective makes hybrid music a matter of point of view, as a relation of relations, implying different affordances at stake for different people. According to Simondon, a technical object is at the same time an aesthetical object, leaving it open to the discovery of new functions and playing rules not intended in the making. This suggests two different dimensions to music as a tool in intercultural practices: the fact that practices are maintained or interrupted and the fact that something new may happen. The article is based on an on-going research project and contains data material from an ethnographic fieldwork carried out within the group Fargespill (Kaleidoscope). Further results will be published in a forthcoming