Abstract
This chapter asks how Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? helps thought respond to Beckett’s non-relational aesthetics, developing a method for research in Performance Philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari conceive of art and philosophy as struggling against chaos and opinion. Approaching artworks as autonomous composites of sensation, they ask us to forgo questions of interpretation or meaning in favour of trying to diagnose our becomings with artworks. Approaching philosophy as an ongoing struggle to think with immanence and as the invention of concepts, they also argue that philosophy can renew itself through this effort. Bringing these ideas into contact with Beckett’s aesthetics, this chapter proposes a new method for research undertaken at the borders of performance and philosophy, oriented around dynamics of failure and invention.
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Notes
- 1.
Despite insisting on Deleuze’s lack of sensitivity to the complexities of the theatre proper, Puchner describes Deleuze as ‘the twentieth-century philosopher who comes closest to recognising a specifically theatrical strain within modern philosophy’ (Puchner 2010: 166 ). In this regard, Puchner asks us to consider Deleuze’s interest in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and in the idea that philosophy is itself a dramatisation of ideas. While Deleuze develops this line of thought in Difference and Repetition and, Puchner argues, in What is Philosophy’s discussion of “conceptual personae”, we will not deal with these questions directly (171). Despite demonstrating Deleuze’s interest in the idea of the theatre, this does little to alter the fact that he remained largely insensitive to theatre and performance proper. Nevertheless, as should be clear in this chapter, the Deleuze offered here is certainly one who conceives of philosophical practice as an activity which creates new modes of life and whose concepts are performed through them.
- 2.
For example, we have not addressed Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the philosopher’s “conceptual personae”. In their account, the plane of immanence will always presuppose a conceptual persona who takes a particular perspective on immanence and dramatises the philosopher’s conceptual movements. While this may seem an unfortunate omission, we should note Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that a conceptual persona ‘only rarely and elusively appears for himself’ and that the philosopher does not have to consciously posit such a figure (WP: 63). Indeed, if we had explored this aspect of What is Philosophy ?, it would have been possible to propose our own persona to be the belacquobat whom we shall introduce in the following chapter of this study and see variations in as we proceed. Eventually, this belacquobat will be seen to exist within the propulsive centre of those dynamics of failure and invention this study pursues. And it will, perhaps, have been there all along.
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Koczy, D. (2018). A Thousand Failures and a Thousand Inventions: Towards a Method for Performance Philosophy. In: Beckett, Deleuze and Performance. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95618-3_3
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