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Please join us on Thursday, September 30, 2004 from 6:30-8:30pm at Slought Foundation for a public conversation with Dorothea Olkowski and Jean-Michel Rabaté. "The Mechanism of Death and the Limits of Deleuzian Ontology," a presentation by Olkowski, will precede the conversation. Deleuze’s ontology is celebrated for putting difference at the forefront of philosophical thinking, as it allows for a maximum of freedom and creation with respect to both thought and life. Yet, rarely do we stop to ask: a maximum of freedom and creation in relation to what? What is this maximum?
The ontology of difference is formed by a possible infinity of affects, percepts, precepts, and concepts. These influences, these inputs, are to be connected, torn apart, and reconnected in an infinite number of modes, in a manner that returns us to the dark myth of creation where every union is utterly destroyed by its own discordant productions. Are we to be eternally confined to this destructive trajectory, or is there some way to limit the productive power and effects of the mechanism of death and the ontology that produces it so as to reconnect our existence to its radiant and luminous origins?
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Dorothea Olkowski, a professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, is the former chair of philosophy and the former director of women’s studies. She is the author of Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, and is currently working on The Universal (in the realm of the senses) (forthcoming) and Merleau-Ponty, Desires and Imaginings (forthcoming).
Jean-Michel Rabaté, a Senior Curator at Slought Foundation, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania since 1992, and has authored or edited twenty books on Modernism, Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Lacan, Derrida, psychoanalysis and literary theory.
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