This paper explores the concept of utopia in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy and its significance for cinema, placing his and Félix Guattari’s “geophilosophy” in the context of posthumanist ecocriticism. It relocates the notion of utopia from out of a paradigm of political fiction and speculations of a possible social progress, towards Deleuze & Guattari’s ideas of a geography and topology of time as conditions for creative thought. Considering the importance of the concepts of becoming and virtuality in this philosophy, a utopian image is no mere speculation or representation, but a force of creation. Deleuze’s notion that philosophers and artists share the task of resisting the present in creatively thinking “a new people” and “a new earth” can be developed to view film as a medium for re-imagining nature, creating a new set of earth-images or geosigns for future thought. 

As exemplified by Eloge de l'amour (2001), Jean-Luc Godard's work after Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98) – which critiqued cinema's treatment of its contemporary cultural and oplitical history, – has made use of digital technology in order to explore the remaining potential of the medium after its purported demise and ethical failure. By drawing on concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Karen Barad, this paper aims to elucidate the techno-aesthetic conditions of Godard's implied method of imaging the dual flux of temporality: becoming history and becoming future. In this diffracting process, Godard's late films embody the present condition of visual culture as it splits between past and future from the point of a present crisis of its material conditions of representation. Neither virtual reality nor classical realism, a diffractive method of digital filmmaking explores the new materiality of motion pictures. 

In the “sketch for a personalist aesthetic” in Le Personnalisme (1949), Emmanuel Mounier cautioned that the tendency towards abstraction in modern art was a sign of nihilism; but he also saw in it a promise to reveal a reality which transcends our habitual view of the world. To Mounier, there is a paradox in the nature of art: it is both realist and abstract; it deals with the reality of beings while attempting to communicate transcendence. If abstract art can avoid esotericism, it can make the personal communal and speak to the common man. This paper argues that such a personalist aesthetic is realized in Michel Henry’s later phenomenology - in his monograph on Kandinsky, Voir l’invisible (1988), and his subsequent Christological meditations - which treats the possibilities to express the mystery of subjectivity in a communal personhood. Theologically, this is revealed in incarnation; aesthetically, in abstraction. For Henry, the inner life of emotions cannot be communicated by representation, but only by a radical expression of human reality in abstract art. Thereby human subjectivity is joined with the person of Christ, for the essence of art, revealed in abstraction, is the “resurrection of eternal life.”

While Aristotle has conventionally been perceived as a precursor for the taxonomy of modern biological systematics, such as that of Carolus Linnaeus, this essay investigates the relationship between Aristotelian metaphysics and natural history in order to demonstrate the problem of anomalies in any system of this kind. In particular, the problem involves the place that may be given to the unnatural (deviations form the norm of nature) in a system for nature – if there can be a taxonomy of anomalies (namely, a teratology), given the logic of Aristotelian philosophy. 

This dissertation studies the problem of the inhuman in relation to human nature in philosophy from antiquity to the present, highlighting the interrelationship between science and philosophy in the development of concepts of monstrosity in France from mid-sixteenth century to late twentieth century thought. By means of constraint, it focuses on Ambroise Paré (1509/10–90) and Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) as representatives of early humanism and posthumanism, respectively. The study is divided into four chronologically ordered parts. In part I, four teratological traditions of philosophical import are discerned in antiquity: the naturalist, the humanist, the metaphysical, and the hermeneutical (each associated with a set of key names: in particular, Empedocles, Lucretius; Socrates, Protagoras; Plato, Aristotle; and Pliny, Augustine). Part II follows these traditions into the Renaissance where they intersect in the ‘books of wonder’, among which Paré’s Des monstres et prodiges (1573) is viewed to have had a lasting influence on the development of the science of teratology. Criticizing the positivistic conventions of interpretation of the book in question, notions of order, causality, diversity, and novelty are analyzed for the purpose of excavating from Paré’s work a natural philosophy which hinges on man’s capacity for knowledge; in such a humanist conception, monsters are not so much naturalized as nature becomes monstrous, while man is taken to reflect and encompass all the properties of natural things, thereby incorporating monstrosity in his singular variability. Part III provides an overview of the development of a scientific teratology from Cartesian mechanicism and rationalism, through theories of preformation, epigenesis, and transformation, to the materialist and vitalist debates of the early nineteenth century, when Étienne and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire create the discipline of teratology, and its aftermath in developmental and evolutionary biology. The general theme is the place of anomalies in the normal scheme of nature (and culture), as man becomes progressively taken as the norm for thought, ultimately rendering the inhuman as such unthought. Finally, part IV looks to Deleuze as an attempt in the late 1900s to construct a posthumanist philosophy of nature where monstrosity is the problem which rather generates thought; it thus chronologically traces formulations of a concept of monstrosity in his body of work, from the 1940s to the 1990s. In Différence et répétition (1968), Deleuze is found to furnish three interconnected theses to define monstrosity, regarding problems of determination, synthesis, and differentiation, where the problematic as such (the nature of difference itself) is conceptualized as the ‘idea’ of monstrosity, not any particular physical shape. After analyzing the concept of the ‘body without organs’ as an issue of identity and materiality, tracing it back to its formulation in Logique du sens (1969), these theses of monstrosity are then applied to a study of Deleuze’s later philosophy, emphasizing Mille plateaux (1980), Logique de la sensation (1981), and Cinéma 1–2 (1983–85), as side-stepping the human norm in order to think its anomaly (the inhuman) as the condition for creativity. This is evidenced in his ideas of technology and the arts as experimental practices of becoming inhuman. The monster is thus regarded as a ‘conceptual persona’ in a Deleuzian philosophy of the virtual Figure—challenging all actual forms—of an inhuman time for the experience of difference in itself.

Den italienske filosofen Giorgio Agamben (f. 1942) reflekterar i sin L'aperto (2002) över människans försök att skilja sig från djuren, att skilja det mänskliga från det djuriska även inom människan. I denna studie placerar jag in denna bok dels i Agambens övergripande biopolitiska projekt, Homo sacer, dels in den filosofiska strömning som kallas posthumanism. Syftet är att analysera distinktionen mellan tre grekiska begrepp för former av liv – bios, zoê och thêrion – som problematiseras genom dessa texter, då de sammanförs i bilden av djur–människa-hybrider inom biblisk apokalyptik. Vilket ord kan benämna en sådan livsform och vilken är dess status i mänsklighetens historia?

Till de utmärkande dragen i det sena 1900-talets idéhistoria hör en framväxt av teknologier som utmanar, omdefinierar eller överskrider gränsen mellan det naturliga och det artificiella, mellan det organiska och det tekniska. Detta kan ge upphov till dystopiska visioner om förlusten av mänskliga värden, till om med människans förlust som art i kampen mot sina uppfinningar, men också till utopiska bilder av människans överskridande av sina egna biologiska villkor. En inhuman fara står mot ett transhumant löfte. Problemet går emellertid djupare än så; det gäller själva idén om liv i denna tid av artificialitet och teknologi, det gäller mekanismerna för en utveckling som plötsligt omfattar maskinerna i lika hög grad som människorna, deras kultur och resten av naturen. Denna studie jämför två gestalter – Samuel Butler och Gilles Deleuze – åtskilda av ett århundrade, som på olika vis, på samma gång innovativa som representativa, teoretiserar villkoren för tänkandet av en teknikens naturhistoria och en maskinernas utvecklingslära.