#john protevi

[improvisedliturgy]

The concept of bodies politic is meant to capture the emergent—that is, the embodied and embedded—character of subjectivity: the production, bypassing, and surpassing of subjectivity in the imbrications of somatic and social systems. Individual bodies politic are cognitive agents that actively make sense of situations: they constitute significations by establishing value for themselves, and they adopt an orientation or direction of action. This cognition is co-constituted with affective openness to that situation; affect is concretely the imbrication of the social and somatic, tracking the ways our bodies change in relation to the changing situations in which they find themselves.

John Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic

[feelingpolitical]

I am struggling to get my head around Deleuze and Guattari and I was wondering if you knew of any supplementary texts that can offer some clarity?

Good question. I imagine my smart followers will have more suggestions, so please add them!

From me, a couple things come to mind: Massumi’s User Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia; the work of John Protevi (especially Political Physics, but also Political Affect; haven’t read his new book, Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the Sciences)  - none of his books are necessarily overviews of D/D&G, but in the course of his work one learns A LOT about D/D&G; Elizabeth Grosz in Volatile Bodies and some of her other work - again, not ‘about’ D/D&G but doing that kind of work; same with Braidotti in Metamorphoses. I haven’t read Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary (Bonta and Protevi), but I know other people that like it. Spivak has an important critique of Deleuze in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Nick Tampio has a book coming out this year on D/D&G’s political philosophy that I think will be very, very good. 

One of the go-tos for supplementary texts is Hallward’s Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation; but Deleuzeans think Hallward misses a LOT of what D is doing (see for example Protevi’s review of the book). Badiou has a book on Deleuze that Deleuzeans don’t like. 

This Oxford UP page on Deleuze has a collection of other books - I don’t know the ones that aren’t mentioned above; I’m not sure if the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy pages on D are any good, but they’ll have other secondary literature, and the SEP one is co-written by Protevi, so I imagine it’s good. 

Hope this helps, anon!

[eduhacker]

It's not the supply, it's the demand by John Protevi

“It’s not the supply, it’s the demand” by John Protevi, published by New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science.

Response to Rebecca Schuman’s Slate article regarding John Hopkins.

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[chikuwaq]

John Protevi, "Deleuze, Music, and Ancient Warfare" (par Andrew Marzoni)

[feelingpolitical]

...desiring-production – or better, its repression in social production – is responsible for the construction of bodies politic: as we will see, social machines produce interlocking social and somatic systems by regulating material flows as they pass in and out of civic and somatic bodies politics, as well as patterning the affective cognition habits of subjects

Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, 91

[feelingpolitical]

Political affect thus includes an ethical standard: Does the encounter produce active joyous affect? Does it increase the puissance of the bodies, that is, does it enable them to form new and mutually empowering encounters outside the original encounter?

Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, 51

[feelingpolitical]

Affect is inherently political: bodies are part of an ecosocial matrix of other bodies, affecting them and being affected by them: affect is part of the basic constitution of bodies politic.

Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, 50

[feelingpolitical]

These multiple situated gendering practices resonate or clash with each other and with myriad other socializing practices (racializing, classing, religionizing, nationalizing, neighborhoodizing). In other words, we have to think of a complex virtual field of these differential practices, a complex phase space for the production of bodies politic.

Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, 41