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Welcome to the official page of the 17th International Deleuze & Guattari Studies Camp and Conference Pedagogies of Philosophy: Nonsense, and…and…and joy. The Camp will take place from 12-15th of June and the Conference from 17th – 19th of June, in Stockholm, Sweden.The Conference and Camp will be hosted by Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design. The camp will be held in collaboration with Konsthall C.
The conference theme Pedagogies of Philosophy: Nonsense, and…and…and joy focus on the affirmative affects and challenging problems that the philosophies of Deleuze & Guattari make possible. We invite you to contribute to this event in ways that activate philosophy as a practice and center attention on philosophy as a pedagogical act of making sensible and arousing the senses. Together we aim to follow the movements, affects and politics of thought and learning. To use language, as philosophy teaches us to do, is to enclose movement in a body relative to the cartographic coordinates of a milieu. The body is compelled to act and it does so across a spectrum of continuous variation between passive affects and active ones. Without the body, movement remains virtual, awaiting processes of actualization. How can we explore the ethico-politics, as Félix Guattari calls it (1992), of philosophy, pedagogy and…and…and…a life? How can we explore affects and joys while still nurturing the need for what Donna Haraway calls a responsable ethics?
The transversality of the concept of and…and…and…invites an immanent thinking and doing from the midst of things. The process is wildly contingent, because “we do not know what a body can do”, as Gilles Deleuze argues in dialogue with Spinoza (1988). We aspire to find ways of opening onto multiplicities of ands…ands…ands…where we can begin to reformulate the sensible and what makes sense. We argue that we must break with the doxa, with habit, opinion, and cliché. Together we must venture a new image of thought so that we can collectively cope on this damaged planet.
We especially invite work-in-progress and a practical and artistic engagement with philosophy, the courage – and joy – of engaging in approaches that surprise us. Following the zigzag of lightning that Deleuze posits as ‘the event’, we chase generative and transformative affects that promise to shape and mold, fold and unfold, space-time anew. Reading Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, we find an invitation to engage in new ways of knowing, learning, and thinking – an invitation to imagine the missing people, the community to come. As Guattari and Deleuze develop their collaborative and joyful friendship, the question that persists is: What does it mean to think together? What missing peoples must we make room for, and, more importantly, learn from? What emergent assemblages are needed? How do they work? How can we practice with them? How and who do we discover ourselves becoming when we undertake this important work?
The question of politics is also crucial here, because there is so much at stake in processes of living, in a life. How can we, in the words of Florelle D’Hoest and Tyson E. Lewis, find ways to “study between” those encounter that entangle lives, disciplines, and practices? How can pedagogies and philosophies become ways of living life as “complete power, complete beatitude” as Deleuze urges in his late essay, “Immanence: A Life…”? This beatitude, the joy of a life, is always everywhere and inbetween moments. It does not simply reside in you or in me. It is you and you…and you…and…me on a wild witch’s ride of becoming. It is not simply a ‘happy face’, but the force of transformative politics. It is openness onto a transversality of thinking, acting, and experiencing a life, inviting in those who share life with us, and those with whom we can share a flourishing life. It is about caring for the living and maintaining a solidarity with life in all its heterogeneity.
Today, our world is dominated by a vocabulary of crises, war, environmental devastation, and ressentiment. How can we engage with philosophy, art, and education to recover from these passive sadnesses? How can we challenge the hegemonic center and make possible lines of flight, of leakage, of nonsense? It is the imperative of freedom: For all living entities, to live a life of freedom and…and…and joy.
Conference Dates:
12th to 15th June 2025 Deleuze & Guattari Studies Camp
17th to 19th June 2025 Deleuze & Guattari Studies Conference
Opening for submissions: 1st of October 2024. APPLY HERE
Abstracts Due: 31st of January 2025
Notification of acceptence: will be announced after deadline, 31st of January 2025