Introduction: Matthew Dennis (Co-organiser) ’The Contemporary Renaissance of Early Modern philosophy’

Cesare Casarino (Minnesota) ‘The Expression of Time: Deleuze, Spinoza, Cinema’

Charlotte Knox-Williams (Winchester) ‘The Studio Transformed: The Expanded Monad as a Model for the Studio in Practice-based Research’

6-8pm Tuesday 19th July 2011:

Guillaume Collett (Kent) ‘Deleuze and Spinoza: from Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza to The Logic of Sense‘

Robin Dunford (Exeter) ‘Assemblage Theory and ‘Emergentic Spinozism’

6-8pm Tuesday 26th July 2011:

Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmiths) ‘The Care of the Self versus the Ethics of Desire (or, Spinoza between Lacan and Foucault)’

Assunta Ruocco (Goldsmiths) ‘Monad and Multitude’

Concluding remarks: Nicole Osborne (Co-organiser) ‘Spinoza and Contemporary Practice’

Held at Goldsmiths College, London. Location will be confirmed at the beginning of July.

This essay will argue that Baruch Spinoza’s thought constitutes the conceptual foundation of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 (thereby diverging from existing scholarship that identifies Henri Bergson’s thought as foundational for Deleuze’s understanding of the cinema). In particular, this essay argues that in these two works Deleuze deploys and re-elaborates his earlier interpretations of Spinoza and especially of the concept of “expression” (in Expressionism in Philosophy as well as in Logic of Sense), so as to produce at once a non-representational theory of the cinema as well as a Spinozian theory of time.

Charlotte Knox-Williams (Winchester) ‘The studio transformed: The expanded monad as a model for the studio in practice based research’

This paper will explore the artists studio as an expanded monad-machine, applying and extending these concepts through practice.  The presentation will comprise a paper and a film, and is intended to show how philosophy and art practice might work through and in connection with one another.  Leibniz’s monad is based in a condition of closure, it encompasses in its depths its own privileged point of view on the one, chosen and best world.  Deleuze prises open these folded depths, moving in the final chapter of The Fold towards an expansion of the monad that makes it capable of containing non-compossibles and including disjunctions.  It is this expansion that the paper will focus on, and the ways that the studio might be understood in these terms.

Guillaume Collett (Kent) ‘Deleuze and Spinoza: from Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza to The Logic of Sense‘

This paper argues that Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (1969) attempts to complete the logic of expression outlined in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968). The latter text shows how univocal substance is both grounded in the logical proposition and ungrounds the proposition once substance has been expressed by it. Likewise, The Logic of Sense considers the proposition to produce sense (substance), aligning the 1969 text with (Deleuze’s) Spinoza and with structuralist psychoanalysis (which Deleuze draws on to deepen the logic of expression), and considers structuralist-psychoanalytic logic to be ungrounded by the univocal sense it generates, aligning it with Spinoza alone.

Robin Dunford (Exeter) ‘Assemblage Theory and ‘Emergentic Spinozism’’

I propose to bring Spinoza’s ontology into relation with the assemblage theory developed by DeLanda and conceptions of emergence found in the sciences of complexity in order to generate an ‘Emergentic Spinozist’ ontology. Emergentic Spinozism retains the commitment to immanence and substance monism that lies at the core of Spinoza’s philosophy, but replaces Spinoza’s explanation of mind and body as parallel attributes of the same substance with an account of mind emerging from a certain degree of material complexity, and replaces Spinoza’s determinism with an understanding of the one Nature as endlessly creative.

Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmiths) ‘The Care of the Self versus the Ethics of Desire (or, Spinoza between Lacan and Foucault)’

Is Foucault’s “Care of the Self” part of that ethical tradition that Lacan undermines in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychonalysis, or does the former in fact involve a different understanding of ethics that brings it closer to the psychoanalytic programme itself? Spinoza’s own Ethics will operate as the mediating term here, as well as offering insights into both Lacan and Foucault’s definitions of the ethical subject.

Assunta Ruocco (Goldsmiths) ‘Monad and Multitude’

An exploration of two concepts from Leibniz’s and Spinoza’s philosophical systems, and of the ways in which they have or could be deployed in contemporary politics. The focus is on the Baroque philosophers’ influence on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the different ways in which this influence has been received by the Italian thinkers of post-Fordism. If the monad, Baroque automaton, and the post-Fordist techno-subject are made to dance with each other, mirrored, if opposed, gestures compose the artificial ballet. But their retreat within the rows of the multitude is a differing scene.