I. Jeffrey A. Bell, “Creative Institutions: Deleuze and the Humean Legacy”

 Session 1. Human Nature: This lecture will take as its starting point Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature and focus on the relationship between human nature and the laws of nature. We will then bring in Deleuze’s Spinozist conception of nature and naturalism and by way of Peirce show how Deleuze and Hume offer complementary views on human nature, views that in turn shed light on Deleuze’s arguments concerning the difference between science and philosophy.Laws of nature.

Session 2. Historical Ontology: This lecture will pick up from arguments made in Deleuze’s Hume concerning historical ontology. In particular, we will extend the points made in the first lecture regarding Peirce and how his philosophy can serve as a catalyst to fuel a rethinking of the relationship between Deleuze and Hume. The focus here will be on the argument that the “beingness’ of any thing presupposes a historical process that is forever between being and non-being, or between, as Peirce says, existence and non-existence. The laws of nature themselves, it will be argued (following Peirce and Deleuze), are products of the habit formations of nature (nature understood here in the Spinozist sense set forth in the first lecture).  

Session 3. Instincts and Institutions: The first two lectures will provide the concepts and background that will then be used in my reading of Deleuze’s early essay, “Instincts and Institutions,” which was published shortly after publishing his book on Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity. We will expand upon Hume’s understanding of institutions by arguing for the importance of places, places taken here as a virtual multiplicity of developing tendencies and habits. These arguments will offer fruitful insights into work being done in macro- and microsociology, social theory more generally, and economics. Particular attention will be given to Max Weber’s magisterial Economy and Society.

Session 4. Creative Institutions: This final lecture will begin to answer a question hinted at in the third lecture—namely, if the health and vibrancy of society is better accomplished by the manner in which institutions are structured and regulated rather than being dependent upon the talents and desires of individuals, then what institutional structures and regulations are best? In sketching an answer to this question, and introducing other questions along the way, we will draw upon the work of Gabriel Tarde and Jane Jacobs, among others. The influence of Tarde and Jacobs on Deleuze is well known, but in the context of the arguments of the first three lectures we will discover a more profound connection than has been generally assumed. Although numerous institutions will be discussed in this lecture as we set forth the conditions for the creative effectiveness of institutions, special attention will be given to the institutions of higher education.

Session 1: Mechanism, Vitalism and Anorganic Life.

Session 2: Form and Individuation.

Session 3: Technics and Machinics.

Session 4: Geophilosophy, Ecosophy and the Politics of Nature.

Session 1: The Body without Organs

Session 2: The Assemblage

Session 3: The Abstract Machine

Session 4: Case Studies

The seminar will investigate the distinction between aesthetic figures and what Deleuze called "conceptual personae," that is, the distinction between aesthetic figuration in art and literature and conceptual creation in philosophy. Each seminar will focus on a key conceptual personae (often designated by a proper name) from Deleuze's works, beginning with Nietzsche's Zarathustra, and also discussing Tournier's Robinson and Friday, Melville's Ahab and Bartleby, Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas and Penthesilia. Students enrolled in the seminar should read the corresponding works beforehand.

Session 1: Zarathustra

Session 2: Robinson and Friday

Session 3: Bartleby

Session 4: Michael Kohlhaas and Penthesilia

Session 1. Deleuze, Cinema, and The Brain: 
In this lecture I will discuss Deleuze’s famous adagio that ‘the brain is the screen’ and ask what it means to take his invitation to look at the biology of the brain to assess (contemporary) cinema literally. What are the particular methodological challenges of such encounter between art, philosophy and neuroscience? And why could we speak of a ‘neuro-image’ now?

Session 2. Confrontation with Madness: 
Cinema and Schizoanalysis: Following from lecture 1, the next step is to look at the particular schizoanalytic principles that a Deleuzian approach of images entails. If contemporary culture is characterized by a cultural schizophrenia, it is useful to look at certain schizoid narratives in contemporary cinema that we will discuss.

Session 3. Wild Times: The Temporal Ontology of Cinema in the Digital Age: 
One of the typical pathological characteristics is the fact that temporal order is mixed up. We live in ‘wild times’. This lecture will look at the philosophical underpinnings, the temporal ontology of contemporary cinema (as ‘neuro-images’). Difference and Repetition will be the main source of reference here. Thinking ‘from the future’ is the main basis of this temporal ontology.

Session 4. The Open Archive: 
Cinema as World Memory: In the last lecture we will look at the ways in which the ‘wild times’ of our times translate in the continuously remixing of images, memories, history. This has political implications which will be discussed in this final lecture.

Session 1: Literature and Philosophy: Transcendental Empiricism.

Session 2: The Encounter between Deleuze and Guattari: Art as Capture of Forces.

Session 3: Experimentation, not Interpretation.

Session 4: Movement, Images.

The concept of image in Deleuze has its own dialectical transformation. In Difference and Repetition, image serves as representation, and is violently criticized within his philosophy of difference. Deleuze contends that true thought is a thought without image. However, when coming to his Cinema II: The Time-Image, image has become one of the most basic concepts of difference. Though the concept of image receives its theoretical shift from a concept less valued to the one more praised, it does not suggest that Deleuze’s thought undergoes a rupture or inconsistency. The concept of image in the two books is, I want to argue, intimately associated with different problems. Deleuze has created two concepts of image, rather than one: One is negative and representative, which is developed in Difference and Repetition, while the other is positive and different, and is addressed in Cinema II. Bergson and Plato, among other "conceptual personae," are "dramatized" in a passage of Deleuzian thought.

Session 1. Dogmatic images of thought and its zero degree.

Session 2. Image: Genesis of the difference.

Session 3. Transcendental empiricism of the image.

Session 4. Thought, virtuality and image.