Life, War, Earth

by John Protevi

A deep exploration of the many possibilities inherent in linking Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy to contemporary science, John Protevi’s Life, War, Earth demonstrates how Deleuze’s ontology of the virtual, intensive, and actual can enhance our understanding of important issues in cognitive science, biology, and geography. Protevi illustrates how a Deleuzian approach can illuminate a wide range of concerns and subjects, including ancient and contemporary warfare, human individuation processes, the “granularity problem,” panpsychism, the E. coli bacterium, the assassination attempt on U.S. representative Gabrielle Giffords, and the affective dimensions of the Occupy movement.
Frequently ambitious but always rooted in the empirical, Life, War, Earth shows how the social and the somatic are not opposed to each other but are interwoven on three time scales—the evolutionary, the developmental, and the behavioral—and on three political scales—the geopolitical, the bio-neuro-political, and the technopolitical.
Deeply attuned to the internalities of the thought of Deleuze, the book offers a unique reading of his corpus and a useful method for applying Deleuzian techniques to the natural sciences, the social sciences, political phenomena, and contemporary events.

Genres: Philosophy

268 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

John Protevi is Professor of French Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University. His research focuses on the intersections of dynamical systems theory; the cognitive, life, and earth sciences; and contemporary French philosophy.

Reviews

[Lukáš · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tough one to read at times, but generally, it is refreshing to see someone putting so much effort into using Deleuze in order to take contemporary science seriously. The task of this book, then, is to provide such a reading of Deleuze that is able to account and accomodate the developments in contemporary sciences, from neurophenomenology (in particular the enactive school), through cognitive science, affect studies and natural science (what the author, almost ironically describes as Geo-Hydro-Solar-Bio-Techno- assemblages), while still seeking spaces where we might find 'the political' in terms of expression and subjectivity, providing some interesting (although I've seen the paper before) interpretation of contemporary events such as the human megaphone at Occupy Wall Street. Difficult, but rewarding, and something tells me I've not touched this book for the last time.