Interview: Nicholas Tampio on Deleuze’s Political Vision

Join B and John as they interview Nicholas Tampio, Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University, about his new book, Deleuze’s Political Vision, which comes out later this summer from Rowman & Littlefield. Professor Tampio tackles Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, mining it for its political and ethical possibilities. Using imagination as his theoretical impetus, Tampio tells us how our tree-like vision of politics ought to be replaced by the diversified Deleuzian garden of flowers. Could a rhizomatic ethic of the garden permeate our everyday political world, shaping new political imaginaries, making room for a praxis of creativity and coalition-building? Are we, or should we be, living in a Deleuzian era, as Foucault once predicted? Can Deleuze be read as a “cutting edge” liberal? What does a Deleuzean reading of Islamic political thought look like? And just as importantly, find out where Tampio would go, and when, if he could time travel with Deleuze. Tune in and find out!

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 of the episode here. RSS feed here. This episode’s music by B.

Links!

• Tampio’s homepage at Fordham, Twitter, and Academia.edu page
• Pre-order the book
• Toward the end of the interview, Tampio discusses education activism as Deleuzean politics; read his op-eds at Al-Jazeera America, The Journal News, and WYNC and watch his public talk on Common Core test refusal
• Drawing A Thousand Plateaus paragraph-by-paragraph
• The first-ever Always Already episode, on Anti-Oedipus

Tampio’s diagram of the art of caution in ATP

Tracing the etymology of Deleuzean concepts

Ep.3 B-Sides: Latour, continued

The rest of our discussion of Reassembling the Social by Bruno Latour. This part of the conversation features some critiques we have of Latour, the style of the text, the ethics and politics of his project and knowledge production more generally, and the relation between Latour and other theorists.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Advice questions to submit? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 here. Listen to the first part of the Latour talk here.

Thanks to Jordan Cass for the music in the episode.

Ep.1 B-Sides: More on Deleuze and Guattari (and Marx and Foucault)

In this edition of Always Already B-Sides, we bring you the rest of our conversation (which didn’t quite fit in episode 1) about the preface and first chapter of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Here, we discuss Marx and Marxism in the text, Foucault’s preface, whether we have a bit of a Deleuze and Guattari cult these days, and how to live a non-fascist life.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Advice questions to submit? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes.

Thanks to Jordan Cass for the music in the episode. Sorry for the weird echo and garbled sound at points!

 

Episode 1: Deleuze and Guattari; Susan Buck-Morss on history, temporality, secularism, and critical theory

This inaugural episode features a conversation about Chapter 1, Desiring Machines from Deleuze and Guattari’s major work, Anti-Oedipus. Rachel, B, and John tackled the thorny concepts of action and agency, subjectivity, machines, and desire, as well as the connection this reading has with practice(s) of everyday life. Your hosts did their very best to unpack the Marx-Freud doublet that preoccupied this chapter’s brilliant critiques of capitalism and psychoanalysis.

We then feature part 1 of our wide-ranging interview with critical theorist/philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, and end by giving advice on setting up one’s dissertation committee and answering an age-old philosophical conundrum.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Advice questions to submit? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes.

Thanks to Jordan Cass for the music performed throughout the episode.

Links

• Overview of Anti-Oedipus at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• On desiring-production, from Oxford Reference
• Ian Buchanan, “Is Anti-Oedipus a May ’68 book?“
• Fun facts about Deleuze and Guattari from Critical-Theory.com
• Susan Buck-Morss’ Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History
• Agata Bielik-Robson’s homepage at University of Nottingham

“A painting by Richard Lindner, ‘Boy with Machine,’ shows a huge, pudgy, bloated boy working one of his little desiring machines, after having hooked it up to a vast technical and social machine – which, as we shall see, is what even the very young child does” (Anti-Oedipus, 7)