Manuel de Landa speaking about the importance of Gilles Deleuze in the 21st century and the fundamentals of materialism in a seminar entitled Gilles Deleuze and Science at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Questioning the role of structuralism and the post-modern position in philosophy, de Landa argues for a view of a materialist world autonomously removed from the concepts of our own mind. His challenge, he says, is to remove a transcendental plane from material objects, that is to remove the concept of essence from the world, without giving rise to a metaphysical position. Towards this, de Landa used the analogy of the battlefield as an example of the social material space to illustrate a plane of existence of extreme materiality.

… or you may check out a shorter video of Manuel DeLanda lecturing about The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Public Open Video Lecture at European Graduate School EGS, Media and Communication Studies department program. Saas-Fee, Switzerland 2007.

… watcha you guys think?

This post is primarily for members of the Phil 458/510 Fall 2008 course to continue their discussion outside of the classroom (and possibly share information that might be helpful for our upcoming papers?), but others are welcome to contribute their insight or expertise.

I created this post because I was having some difficulty keeping up with the questions and responses over email. However, I believe that the site will notify you if your comments receive responses.

In order to make this discussion as easy to follow as possible, I would like to suggest that we post our questions by topic; e.g., if I have questions and related subquestions on three different topics, I would make three different comments instead of one long comment. Also, when you want to reply to a specific topic, hit “reply” underneath the comment that you want to respond to.

I’ve started off the discussion below.

I look forward to your questions and responses!

Theresa