Thursday November 21, 2024

9:30-11:15 am:  Panel 1: Theory-notions

Éloi Halloran (Collège régional Champlain): "Dialogue avec Guattari"

If there are in Kenneth White's work a few mentions Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it is with the former that White dialogues. As he mentions it several times, his "interest in Deleuze and Guattari" is "mostly" for the former. Yet, when White criticizes Deleuze, it is often citing a work he has conducted from Anti-Oedipus [L'Anti-Œdipe, 1972] to What is Philosophy? [Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?, 1991] in collaboration with Guattari. White is not the only one to leave Guattari aside, this is a common fact in the comments on the conjunct work of Deleuze and Guattari, especially those who link it to White's work. This was already pointed out by Deleuze himself when he was alive, and he would underline a tendency to make Felix absent. That said, White might simply has forgotten Guattari because there was something about Deleuze that was very much alive: the memory of what Pierre Jamet calls their "quarrel". According to Jamet, White, whose Ph.D. he defended in 1979 before a thesis's jury including Deleuze, would have been concerned with a possible "proximity with Deleuze, introduced as a superiority, as healthily better (without being "feverish", "precocious" nor "schizoïd")" -- such terms White uses to qualify Deleuze and Guattari in Le Plateau de l’Albatros (1994). Jamet affirms this would be a "petty revenge 14 years after the offense was given", i.e., after Deleuze – and Guattari – had underlined, in A Thousand Plateaus [Mille Plateaux, 1980], "the deep ambiguities" of a nomadism à la White: aristocratism, (micro)fascism, racism, and so on. 

Less than a year after Jamet's text was published, White publishes Dialogue avec Deleuze (2007): an essay where white settles accounts one and last time with Deleuze refuting Deleuze's interpretation of the intellectual nomad and making a distinction between geopoetics and Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophy. Dialogue confirms Jamet's main conclusion: there has been a quarrel between Deleuze and White, because there is nothing similar in White's and Deleuze's work. And yet, according to Arnaud Villani, the quarrel between Deleuze and White reveals that "both represent one of the necessary sides of the problem": all the more so that what's left to do is "synthesize" them. If this synthesis has recently been started by Villani from the concepts of "outside" and "nomadism", Jason Skeet examines this synthesis using Deleuze to explore White's poetic work from a schizoanalytic reading. That said, Guattari is once again absent or neglected in that recent work of synthesis opened by Villani and Skeet in Journal of Scottish Thought.

I here suggest to extend this work with a reading of Guattari's work -– without or rather beyond Deleuze, to quote Carlos A. Segovia –- affirming it would be a cornerstone to synthesize the Deleuze-White nebula. More particularly, I will show how Guattari's later works –- those on autopoiesis and of Chaosmosis [Chaosmose 1992], on ecosophy and of Tree Ecologies [Trois écologies, 1989], on the production of subjectivity and of Schizoanalytic Cartographies [Cartographies schizoanalytiques, 1989], but also his work on his trips to Brazil and Japan and on his artistic collaborations with painter Gérard Fromanger or  film director and screenwriter Robert Kramer –- allow to solve certain bones of contention between Deleuze and White, if not to connect directly to White's anthropoiesis of the earth and the living. As a matter of fact, Guattari's enthusiasm for "the multiplying nationalitarian claims" in the Baltic States or in Corsica, which are, according to him, heralding a singularity as much as a potential microfascist retreat, complexifies Deleuze and Guattari's criticism of White's intellectual nomad. Deleuze and Guattari do not mean to associate the Celtic reference in White to fascim, but to seriously ask hoow should we do so that such a referent remains singular and  does not degenerates into fascism? It is on the terrain of environmental, mental and social ecologies, which resonate with White's triptych -- philosophy, poetry and science, that Guattari answers the question calling of an 'eco'-art: a "praxic opening-out (...) subsum[ing] all existing ways of domesticating existential Territories and is concerned with intimate modes of being, the body, the environment or large contextual ensembles relating to ethnic groups, the nation, or even the general rights of humanity.". This "praxic opening-out" cannot end, to borrow White's words, "on an ontologically richer ground": a space where, beyond quarreling and forgetting, the streams of geopetics and geophilosophy can finally meet as "one", to borrow Deleuze's metaphor, illustrating his collaboration with Guattari.

Olivier Penot-Lacassagne (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle / UMR THALIM): "Aux limites de la littérature, dire le monde de la terre"

In La Figure du dehors, published in 1982 in France, Kenneth White evokes the need for a "new poeticity" which would call for a new relatioonship woth the world, neither modern nor post-modern. These are reasons for the geopoetic projet White will develop from one book to the next. The essay Le Plateau de l’Albatros, published in France 1994, is a major step into the project. Subtitled "An Introduction to Geopoetics", the work explains this notion which, it is contemporaneous with Michel Serres's "natural contract" and Gilles Deleuze's geophilosophy or with Felix Guattari's "ecosophy", is different yet its demanding nature is close to these notions, all of them synonymous with a shift or a junction. "On the brink  of the human" (Saint-John Perse), they re-situate thought, re-found the word, try to re-make the world. Questioning our "cultural and conceptual heritage", White coins the notion of "geopoetics", from a scientific, philosophical and literary point of view (as a consequence it cannot be mistaken with ecopoetics, defined by Michel Collot as the study of literary forms shaping how places are used). Wishing to "open a world, along the lines of the Earth", seeking to "establish a relationship and find the language of this relationship", geopoetics is the expression of an existential project, equally poetic and political, presented as the possibility of a "new cultural ground" in a un-earthened world as Michel Deguy would say.

From La Figure du dehors to Affinités extrêmes (2009), from Plateau de l’Albatros to Mémorial de la terre océane (2019) many experiences of thinking the earth are charted, breaking from the "unearthing" (Lyotard) of modern knowledges. At the brink of literature a firmly topical thought is unfolding. This participates in the ongoing shift which calls for a deep reorganization of our societies.

Today's radical situation requires a "new conceptuality'" observes Bernard Stiegler. Kenneth White's, that's what will be shown, contribues to the emergence of such a new conceptuality which invents and experiences an other philosophy of the living world.

AMarie Petitjean (Cergy Paris Université /UMR 9022-Héritages / IUF): "'Méthodes, voies, chemins': lire Kenneth White en recherche-création"