About
To coincide with the exhibition Henrik Schrat | Report on Probability B, IMT Gallery will be hosting a launch of the forthcoming book On the Production of Subjectivity with a talk by the book's author Simon O'Sullivan, in which he shall be introducing the themes and drawing the five key diagrams.
The book will be available to purchase during the event for £27.50, 50% off the cover price.
On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (Palgrave, 2012): How might we produce our subjectivity differently? Indeed, what are we capable of becoming? This book addresses these questions with a particular eye to ethics, understood as a practice of living, and aesthetics, understood as creative experimentation and the cultivation of a certain style of life. Central to the enquiry are the writings of Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze separately and in collaboration, as well as their philosophical precursors, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Henri Bergson. Each of these, it is argued, offer powerful resources for thinking subjectivity beyond its habitual and typical instantiations specifically in relation to opening up a different temporality of and for the subject today. Alongside this Deleuze-Guattarian trajectory the book also brings into encounter the writings on aesthetics and ethics of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, and pitches Deleuze against Alain Badiou's own theory of the subject. At stake in this philosophical and psychoanalytical exploration is the drawing of a series of diagrams of the finite/infinite relation, and a further development of Guattari's ethico-aesthetic paradigm for thinking the production of subjectivity as a speculative, but also pragmatic and creative practice.
Simon O'Sullivan is Senior Lecturer in art history/visual culture in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the editor, with Stephen Zepke, of both Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (London: Continuum, 2008) and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). His first monograph, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation was published by Palgrave 2005. He also makes art, with David Burrows, under the name Plastique Fantastique, who are represented by IMT Gallery.
