Tim Flanagan

Working out from the role of place names in Proust, this essay considers the sense in which certain encounters with language signal an intrinsic relation to their experience - one whereby any perspective on things comes to obtain less as a subject or viewpoint than as a certain "style" of predication. The underlying claim is that any rendering of these encounters requires consideration of certain philosophical positions to be found in critical developments of Leibnizian thought that extend the field of sensation beyond the given to include the imagined, the remembered, and the anticipated. These developments, as the essay shows, might well be said to be thoroughly transcendental - but importantly, only on condition that the modality by which things are thereby predicated of subjects (that is, by which objects are at all conceived) is to be understood as emerging by means of experience rather than as somehow conditioning what is generally thought to be experienced, or somehow taken to be universally experienced. As an example of the outlook of these "intrinsic denominations," the essay considers the effects of Proust's discussion of travel destinations.

As the end of the first quarter of the 21st century approaches, scholars of migration, diaspora, and empire studies are witness to global, interlinked crises that behove us to urgently rethink the ways in which “diaspora” has been conceived. Historically defined as populations that have been dispersed or displaced, diasporic communities today are adrift in the tumult of the global coronavirus pandemic that has exacerbated the contraction of economies and the closure of borders that might have once provided a safe port, or at least safe passage, to those forced to flee. Dehumanization of historically marginalized citizen-subjects (for instance, people of colour; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual [LGBTQIA+] people; migratory labourers) stages the broader sense in which, as a species, we are as much rethinking individual relations with one another as with our species’ relation to animals and the Earth. Indeed, the Anthropocene’s “collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history” (Chakrabarty 2009, 201) is itself silhouetted by what Thomas Nail (2019) has called “the Kinocene”, an epoch of movement characterized by the ontological sense of an era in which movement as much convulses human beings as it does life itself. To be is to be agitated.

An explicit feature of the World Health Organisation's response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been to ensure that naming conventions, both for the disease itself and for the variants of its underlying virus, should not have a stigmatising effect on any one population or region. An implicit feature of this undertaking is the recognition that the relation between 'what is said' and 'what is heard' involves an ongoing and even generative tension that cannot be mapped following a defined set of coordinates. The reason for this, the following paper claims, employing the work of Barbara Cassin, is that there is a uniquely performative (epideictic) aspect to language - one that takes place in a uniquely non-globalised space whose extension remains unscripted or extemporised, a space that is often distended and sometimes localisable but ultimately indivisible. Such a space, this paper shows, is one oriented by an understanding of rhetoric whereby utterances obtain according to the actual use [chreia] or decisive moment [kairos] - as opposed to any definitive place [topos] - of what is said.

This chapter proposes an extension of Georges Canguilhem's historical analysis toward contemporary concepts of milieu as flexible and dissipative territories, and as "adaptive landscapes" of living organisms such as the monarch butterfly and common swift. The chapter deploys and develops an understanding of certain vital processes in Canguilhem's account of milieu, by charting the experience to be found in various migration landscapes which cannot be understood independently of their taking place over time (and certainly not in abstraction). This is reflected in the second section where an account of dissipative images is given as a way of thinking the ephemerality of structures whose ramifications occlude the ongoing radiance of their energy. This much can be seen, as the chapter concludes, in the work of Gemma Anderson whose drawings of mitosis and epigenetic landscapes contemplate, through a set of visual "notes," how we might begin to both think and render energy fluctuations. We can thus visualize migratory patterns not as a series of fixed points but in a way that might help us to see "sky" as a unique, dynamic milieu of lived time and space.

Whatever the broader challenges, complexities, and even frustrations of arranging another's manuscripts for publication, the added editorial difficulty of providing a posthumous organization to any individual's work was something even further compounded in the case of Plotinus, Porphyry explains in the introductory essay to the collection that would become known as the Enneads, by the fact that whenever his former teacher "had written anything he could never bear to go over it twice; even to read it through once was too much for him, as his eyesight did not serve him well for reading..."

Whatever the more demanding elements of Benjamin’s 1925 Habilitationschrift, a clear characteristic of this otherwise obscure study is the concern to exhibit the sense of drama so typical of the baroque. In some ways this is what motivates Deleuze in the closing chapter of The Fold, with regard to ‘the new harmony’ that is to be found in seventeenth-century aesthetics, to acknowledge that indeed ‘Walter Benjamin made a decisive step forward in our understanding of the baroque’ (TF 125, translation modified). However, beyond what Deleuze here recognises as the perspicacity of the earlier study, it is imperative to note that the ostensibly art-historical implications of either thinker’s ‘baroque book’ does not circumscribe the ultimately philosophical problem of the baroque; since the significance of these works’ affinity with one another is, in the end, something whose own reality includes, only to exceed, whatever at all might be said of their true relation to one another.

This chapter reports the concept of history in Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze's ‘personal’ reading of Benjamin is completely problematic in that his reflections identify, and perhaps even go so far as to define the limits of what is conceptually possible in terms of the earlier study. Deleuze's interest in Benjamin must be seen in the context of the uniquely transcendental combination. Philosophical theses emerge as conceptual dramatisations of an Idea such that their very object is no longer amenable to simple logic, but rather to the metaphysics of those transcendental conditions of historical antecedence that adduce a thesis' virtual significance in the world at all. The elements of philosophical discourse that Benjamin and Deleuze try to suggest are what they refer to as those ‘baroque’ moments which behove a certain reconsideration of the sense of Darstellung in Immanuel Kant's transcendental project.