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Dear Friends,

 

We are delighted to announce thatCOLLAPSE Volume IIIwill be published in
mid-Octoberand is now available for advance purchase online at
http://www.urbanomic.com/order.php <http://www.urbanomic.com/order.php> 

 

 

 

Collapse Volume III: 'Unknown Deleuze'contains explorations of the work of
Gilles Deleuze by pioneering thinkers in the fields of philosophy,
aesthetics, music and architecture. In addition, we publish in this volume
two previously untranslated texts by Deleuze himself, along with a
fascinating piece of vintage science fiction from one of his more obscure
influences. Finally, as an annex to Collapse Volume II, we also include a
full transcription of the conference on 'Speculative Realism' held in London
earlier this year.

 

Whilst books continue to appear at an alarming rate which claim to put
Deleuze's thought 'to work' in diverse areas outside of philosophy, we
submit, in this volume, that his philosophical thought itself still remains
enigmatic, both in its detail and in its major themes. The contributors to
this volume aim to clarify,from a variety of perspectives, Deleuze's
contribution to philosophy: in what does his philosophical originality lie;
what does he appropriate from other philosophers and how does he transform
it? And how can the apparently disparate threads of his work to be
'integrated' what is the precise nature of the constellation of the
aesthetic, the conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and
what are the overarching problems in which the numerousphilosophicalconcepts
'signed Deleuze' converge?

 

The volume includes two newly-translated articles by Gilles Deleuzealong
with contributions from Arnaud Villani, Thomas Duzer, Quentin Meillassoux,
John Sellars, ?ic Alliez & Jean-Claude Bonne, Haswell & Hecker, Robin
Mackay, Mehrdad Iravanian,J.-H. Rosny the Elder, Graham Harman, Iain
Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier.

 

For anyone wanting to go right to the core of Deleuzian philosophy and to
experience the challenge of Deleuze's thought, the articles collected in
Collapse IIIwill provide a virtually inexhaustible treasury of insights. As
the featured authors shed light on this challenge from different points of
view, they produce unexpected points of convergence, providing important
resources for a more complete conceptual 'portrait' of Deleuze, and
suggesting further lines of thought to be investigated. For anyone looking
for an alternative to the emerging orthodoxy seemingly bent on broadcasting
an 'image of Deleuzian thought',Collapse IIIprovides a wide-ranging but
uniformly rigorous and innovative survey of Gilles Deleuze's thought, and an
illustration of the fact that, even if it is already fashionable to evoke a
'post-Deleuzian' era, we have not yet begun to draw the properly
philosophical consequences of this thought.

 

Mathesis, Science and Philosophy, written by a21-year-old Gilles Deleuze,
has never before appeared in print in English and is published in Collapsein
a new translation. Written as an introduction to a 1946 republication of a
19th-century esoteric philosophical work by Dr Johann Malfatti de
Montereggio, this text offers a fascinating glimpse, set in an unexpected
context, into the themes of Deleuze's early work, as they emerge, in an
already characteristically-dazzling style. Meanwhile, in the brief but
illuminating 1981 interview with Arnaud Villani,Answers to a Series of
Questions(also appearing here for the first time in English), Deleuze
provides some tantalising intimations regarding the enduring concerns of his
work over the years.

 

In his own contribution to the volume, philosopher-poetArnaud Villani (whose
1999The Wasp and the Orchidwas one of the first books to be published in
France treating Deleuze's work as a whole) reflects on Deleuze's affirmation
that he considered himself a 'pure metaphysician': what, precisely, does
metaphysics mean for Deleuze? Through a sophisticated reading utilising the
resources of aesthetics, poetics and philosophy, Villani not only defines
the object of this metaphysics, but also shows clearly why it cannot be
severed from its links with these other realms of thought, or from the
question of the political or moral 'decision'.

 

This allusion reminds us that an examination of Deleuze today would be
unthinkable without reference to Alain Badiou's provocativeDeleuze: The
Clamor of Being, and in his articleIn Memoriamof Deleuze,Thomas
Duzerundertakes, through a survey of the major axes of Deleuze's philosophy,
to locate the precise nature of their now famous 'nonrelationship'; his
defence emphasises that the positive features of Deleuze's thought cannot be
reduced either to a 'phenomenology' or to Badiou's polemical opposite.

 

In an exclusive translated extract from their new bookMatisse-Thought:
Portrait of the Artist as Hyperfauve, philosopher?ic Alliez (former student
of Deleuze's and author of The Signature of the World)and
art-historianJean-Claude Bonneanalysethe revolution inaugurated in painting
by Matisse during hisFauvist period of 1905-6,discovering that the rigorous
'quantitative' conception of the intensive which Matisse proposesallows not
only a new understanding of thesignificance of Fauvism for his later work,
but also clarifies and reaffirmsthe philosophical pertinence of a
Nietzschean-Deleuzian thinking ofintensity and extensity, the qualitative
and the quantitative.

 

On the basis of an examination of a 'fragment' from Deleuze and Guattari's
What is Philosophy?,Quentin Meillassoux, in a philosophical tour de
force,meticulously reconstructs the nature and the measure of Deleuzian
'immanence', proposing finally a 'subtractive' reading drawing on Bergson's
Matter and Memory,allowing us to understand, step-by-step 'from the inside'
the construction of thatsingular network of concepts found in Deleuze's work.

 

Sound artists RussellHaswell and Florian Heckercontribute some strange and
beautiful images taken from the electronic 'score' of their new sound work
Blackest Ever Black, an 'introduction to synaesthesia' created using
composer Iannis Xenakis's computerised UPIC system to transform contemporary
images into sound. An accompanying text by Robin Mackay analyses the
affinities between Xenakis's conception of a musical 'polyagogy' and
Deleuze's 'transcendental empiricism'.

 

Examining Deleuze's famous use of the supposedly Stoic theory of Chronos and
A? in Logic of Sense,John Sellars (author of The Stoicsand The Art of
Living)examines just how much it owes to actual stoic theories of time, thus
providing both a case-study in the Deleuzian 'ventriloquism' in the history
of philosophy and an informative example of the 'stratigraphic' time in
which, according to Deleuze, philosophy takes place.

 

Iranian architect Mehrdad Iravanian constructs a 'graphitext' which, taking
as its starting point a page from Deleuze's The Fold, undertakes a
non-interpretative 'ex-pli-cation' of its content. Employing a hybrid
methodology at onceliteral, textual and architectural, he brings to light
structures secreted within the folds of the text itself.

 

One of the many obscure 'personae' in the background of Deleuze's Difference
and Repetition, the mysterious figureJ.-H. Rosny the Eldernot only supplied
that work's repeated formula for the nature of intensity-as-difference, but,
as both philosopher and pioneering science fiction author, was also a living
embodiment of the notion that 'philosophy is a kind of science-fiction': in
his astonishing 1895 tale Another World, appearing here in English for the
very first time,Rosny evokes an alien world of abstract lifeforms
intersecting with our own, and examines with philosophical acuity the
process of bringing such unknown beings within the purview of scientific
knowledge.

 

As if all this were not enough ... Following the 'dossier' onSpeculative
Realismin the previous volume ofCollapse,Volume III also includes a full
transcription of the colloquium of the same name held at Goldsmith's
University of London in April 2007 featuring presentations by Ray Brassier,
Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman andQuentin Meillassoux on the problems,
and the promise, of this renewal of speculative philosophical
thought.Running to well over 100 pages, this is an important and exciting
document of contemporary philosophy in the making, proposing new conceptual
approaches, exploring the borders between science and philosophy, and mining
the history of thought for fresh insights into Nature, objectivity, and the
legacy of 'correlationism'.

 

Advance online orders for Volume IIIare priced (including postage)10 (UK) /
13 (Europe) / 16 (Elsewhere).

(Unfortunately a vastly increased page count, together with regular
unpredictable postal rate rises, have necessitated an increase in price for
this volume.)

 

***4-Volume subscriptions are also available online at a reduced price.***

Readers will shortly be able to download a preview of the introduction to
Volume IIIfrom the website

http://www.urbanomic.com <http://www.urbanomic.com/> /dl.php, where
introductions to Vols I and II are already available.

 

Help us :if you are able to post a notice in your place of work or study,
please download and print the flyer forCollapse Volume
IIIfromhttp://www.urbanomic.com/dl.php. We would also welcome and
reciprocate all links into theUrbanomicwebsite from blogs, etc. Finally,
please forward this bulletin on to anyone you know who is not on our mailing
list but who may be interested.

 

COLLAPSE Volume III

October2007.

Paperback 115x175mm 515pp (TBC)

Limited Edition of 1000 numbered copies.

ISBN 0-9553087-2-0

 

THOMAS DUZER

In Memoriam: Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995

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