UMP | University of Minnesota Press Blog: Author Q&A: On Gilles Deleuze, philosophical tools, and "Political Affect"

A preview from a recent Q&A with me. 

Q: How did you decide on case studies as a method of doing philosophy?

A: I think case studies are an important and under-used tool in philosophy, as opposed to thought experiments ... with case studies we’re not after essential distinctions at the borders of categories. Instead, we’re trying to explore concrete situations and the “problems” they express. Here is where my reliance on the thought of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze comes in. Deleuze did not think in terms of essences that would slot things into categories, but thought that events are the points of intersection of “multiplicities.” That’s a technical term for Deleuze which, roughly speaking, means a field in which several processes meet to produce events, much as a crystal or a lightning bolt or a hurricane forms out of a field of multiple processes. In dealing with analogous multiplicities in our social fields we see that (1) any one move changes the conditions for future moves and that (2) no one solution exhausts the potentials for future creatively different solutions ... The more we explore the Schiavo case, the Columbine case, the Katrina case, the more we realize that concrete situations are “crystallizations” of a problematic field, and that a change here or there, if it occurs at a critical point, might make all the difference in the world. (READ THE FULL Q&A)

via www.uminnpressblog.com

Q & A with me at the U Minnesota Press blog, about Political Affect.

Comments

[Michael~]

You write, "I think case studies are an important and under-used tool in philosophy, as opposed to thought experiments ... with case studies we’re not after essential distinctions at the borders of categories. Instead, we’re trying to explore concrete situations and the “problems” they express."

I wish many of your fellow academics would follow your lead here. Thinking about zombies and other universes generate hypothetical distinctions - synthetic propositions without actual referents - and does little for practical (not simply utilitarian) thinking-in-the-world as such. Philosophy might be better off helping to clarify specialist thinking on so many concrete problems.

Regardless, I sincerely enjoy your work, and look forward to following your projects as they continue to evolve.

m-