On the Polemics of Literality and Learning in Deleuze’s Work

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the major debate in the Deleuzian studies of pedagogy in Brazil. In the II French-Brazilian’s Colloquium of philosophy of education, which took place between 18 and 19 of November of 2004, in the State University of Rio de Janeiro, the French philosopher François Zourabichvili was invited to make a presentation that would be disputed by Tomaz Tadeu da Silva and Peter Pál Pelbart. Zourabichvili's paper was published under the name "Deleuze e a questão da literalidade" [eng: Deleuze and the question of literality] in the following year, 2005. The main goal of Zourabichvili's paper was to propose a Deleuzian theory of learning based on the concept of literality. In the same event, René Schérer presented a paper on the subject of learning that, despite not addressing the question of literality, discussed the possibilities of a theory of learning based on Deleuze and some parallels with literature. Later, in 2009, Luiz B. Orlandi presented a third reply in the I Connections seminar: “Deleuze e Imagem e Pensamento e...” [eng: Deleuze and Image and Thinking and...], which took place in the Unicamp. The texts of the colloquium based in Rio de Janeiro were published in the magazineEducação & Sociedade, in the dossier “Between Deleuze and education”, in 2005. The text of Orlandi was published in the book “Deleuze e Imagem e Pensamento e…” in 2011. The discussion proves strategic since it brings together five philosophers of international reputation and significant influence in Brazil to think about the relationship between literality, literature and learning in the scholarship of Gilles Deleuze. We focus on the conceptual characters articulated in each paper to map the relationship between concepts and the pre-philosophical level. In the final part, we present a reinterpretation of Zourabichvili’s thesis based on a disjunctive synthesis of the previous texts examined thus far.