From ‘world’ to ‘earth’: non-phenomenological subjectivity in Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy

Abstract

With the invention of the concept of ‘geophilosophy’, Deleuze and Guattari did not intend to invoke a new subfield of philosophy; for them, all philosophy is geophilosophy by virtue of its constitutive relationship with contingency. What is less well understood, however, are the implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophical approach for how we think about subjectivity today. Working against phenomenological forms of ‘earth-thinking’ that tend to reduce the ‘geo-’ to a phenomenological concept of ‘world’, Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize the earth as an immanent plane of forces that both precedes and exceeds the subject. Turning to Deleuze’s earlier essay on the literature of Michel Tournier, this paper offers a reading of geophilosophy in which aesthetic practices help us to grapple with the unthought forces of the earth beyond the phenomenological logic of world, and where art itself becomes a process that radically refigures our sense of what subjectivity can become.

Seeds for Reclaiming Art in Education

“…Roberts et al . (2022, 138) argue, “It is through our encounters with art, and the mutant forms of subjectivity it produces that we can become capable of encountering the earth as that which precedes and exceeds the world.”…”

Geophilosophies: towards another sense of the earth

“…In the third paper, Tom Roberts, Andrew Lapworth and JD Dewsbury turn to geophilosophy as a unique means for complicating dominant understandings of subjectivity and, in doing so, contribute to the enduring concern within the social sciences and humanities to construct alternatives to the subject-predicate mode of thought. In this regard, Roberts, Lapworth and Dewsbury (2022) stage a keen distinction between geophilosophy and phenomenology, highlighting how Deleuze and Guattari's use of 'geo-' "as an earthly plane of deterritorializing forces […] cannot be contained within the horizon of a subject's phenomenal 'world'". Seeking to recuperate a 'nonphenomenological' approach to subjectivity, the authors emphasise Deleuze and Guattari's engagement with a diversity of aesthetic practices-from literature, music, cinema and visual arts-as privileged sites for the production of mutant forms of subjectivity.…”

“…One of the striking implications of this dimension of geophilosophy is that it stages a direct problematisation to phenomenology and the dualistic opposition it presents between subject and object, which itself is a problem of abstraction (see Debaise, 2022) given the tendency of the subject, as Deleuze (1998, p. 51) reminds us, to "abstract a reflection from the physical world of flows, a bloodless double made up of subjects, objects, predicates, and logical relations". This first possibility is one explored in depth by Roberts, Lapworth and Dewsbury (2022) who negate the phenomenological concept of 'world'-as an environment encircling and existing for a subject-in favour of the semantic choice of earth by Deleuze and Guattari as a deterritorializing and deterritorialized force that would unground the structure of a world on which phenomenology depends. For Elizabeth Grosz, thinking thought differently requires recognising that all forms of life-not least human-are products of earthly forces that exceed and continuously destabilise those same forms.…”