No abstract

The ecological crisis is also an ontological crisis. It raises questions about our ethical response-ability to this world, calling for a rethinking of the human–nature divide. Vitalist approaches and scholarship on the affective turn have shifted our understanding of our relations to nonhuman others, but they remain constrained: limited to proximate attachments; ambivalent or agnostic in the face of conflict; unable to move beyond the celebration of a lively earth. At issue I feel is a methodological individualism that haunts these offerings when confronted with questions of the ethical composition of a larger whole. Building upon Sharp’s invitation to explore ‘our continuity with nonhuman agencies’, I investigate the ethical basis for a reimagined subject in a series of becomings: the becoming nature of God, becoming animal of man, and becoming sign of earth. Drawing on the writings of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and Peirce, I rework this familiar terrain on two counts. First, I examine how the content of each becoming invokes distinct relational dynamics and complicates the ‘problem of composition’. Second, I draw on Spinoza’s differentiated concept of power (as potentia and potestas) and the concept of the composite individual to suggest an alternative way of framing our collaborations with the nonhuman world.

A boy was taken from his elementary school in handcuffs after his classmates turned him in for drawing pictures of weapons. The 11-year-old fifth grader was not charged with a crime in the Wednesday incident. His name is not being released to protect him, school officials said. "There were some drawings that were confiscated by the teacher," Oldsmar Elementary School Principal David Schmitt said. "The children were in no danger at all. It involved no real weapons." Still, Schmitt refused to discuss details of the boy's case. "All I can tell you is it was a threat. .. against students," he said. "Nobody in particular, but students in general.. .. We just need to get it through kids' heads that there are certain things you don't say and there are certain things you don't draw," he said. The boy was handcuffed by school police for his safety, according to Pinellas County School District spokesman Ron Stone. "That's normal procedure in a situation like this," Stone said. "The primary concern was to make sure we get appropriate services for the child."-Sun-Sentinel, May 11, 2001 There is a profound shift underway in the public institutions that are responsible for the training and socialization of children in Anglo-American nations, a shift that marks the final demise of a modern ideal of child

No abstract

How do we fashion a new political imaginary from fragmentary, diffuse and often antagonistic subjects, who may be united in principle against the exigencies of capitalism but diverge in practice, in terms of the sites, strategies and specific natures of their own oppression? To address this question I trace the dissonance between the approaches of Antonio Negri and Gilles Deleuze back to their divergent mobilizations of Spinoza’s affect and the role it plays in the ungrounding and reconstitution of the social body. This dissonance reveals a divergence in their projects, the way these political projects emerge as counter-actualizations, the means by which they are expressed, and the necessity (or not) of a particular kind of historical subject to their realization. Most significantly, it speaks to how we might engage difference and alterity within our own political projects, our collective creations. I conclude with a focus on the productive possibilities provided by Deleuze’s writings on the scream, as a vehicle to uncover new terrains of struggle and new possibilities for collectivity.