T H E D A R K
P R E C U R S O R
International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research
DARE 2015 | Orpheus Institute | Ghent | Belgium | 9-11 November 2015
O P E N - A C C E S S R I C H - M E D I A P R O C E E D I N G S
Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici
T H E D A R K
P R E C U R S O R
International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research
DARE 2015 | Orpheus Institute | Ghent | Belgium | 9-11 November 2015
O P E N - A C C E S S R I C H - M E D I A P R O C E E D I N G S
Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici
Audronė Žukauskaitė
Lithuanian Culture Research Institute, Vilnius, LT
Deleuze and Beckett Towards Becoming-Imperceptible
Day 2, 10 November, De Bijloke Auditorium, 11:30-12:00
In my paper I will explore Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of becoming-imperceptible and demonstrate how this notion works in Beckett’s texts. Deleuze often refers to Beckett’s characters, rethinking them in terms of desiring-production, schizophrenia, the body without organs, becoming, and becoming-imperceptible. The Beckettian characters, wandering in the schizophrenic promenades and obsessed with the combinatorial exercises of exhaustion, function not as a simple example but as an argument strengthening the contours of a new immanent ontology. This new immanent ontology raises the question of life in terms of non-personal and even non-organic power, which, by passing through different intensities and becomings, moves towards becoming-imperceptible. But what is becoming-imperceptible? How can we rid ourselves of ourselves and how can we evade perception and self-perception? To answer these questions we have to define the new immanent ontology and to discuss, in Rosi Braidotti’s terms, “the ethics of becoming-imperceptible” (Braidotti 2006). The new understanding of life as a non-personal and non-organic power requires the theory of immanent ethics that could redirect our thinking from the question of the individual or person toward the philosophy of the impersonal.
References
Braidotti, Rosi. 2006. “The Ethics of Becoming-Imperceptible.” In Deleuze and Philosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas, 133–59. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
Audronė Žukauskaitė is a senior researcher at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. Her recent publications include the monograph Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Philosophy: The Logic of Multiplicity (2011, in Lithuanian), and an edited volume titled Intensities and Flows: Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy in the Context of Contemporary Art and Politics (2011, in Lithuanian). She also co-edited (with S. E. Wilmer) Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), Deleuze and Beckett (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political and Performative Strategies (New York: Routledge, 2015).