Violent Signs

Violent Signs takes its emblematic image from the work of Gilles Deleuze, whose ‘noological’ project is concerned at root with the overturning of the dogmatic image of thought. What this amounts to is a philosophical project with profound ethico-aesthetic consequences. In his work on the high modern literary figure Marcel Proust, Deleuze begins to describe and delineate a differential theory of the faculties, leading him to postulate the necessity of a post-Kantian sublime. Exceeding the inherent moralities of Kantian dogma, Deleuze insists that the origins of thought lie in interruption, via the shock posed to common sense or doxa by ’signs’. Such thought does not arise from any natural goodwill of the thinking subject, nor from any recognition of the objective world of extension, but rather from “an original violence inflicted upon thought… a strangeness or enmity which alone would awaken thought from its natural stupor or eternal possibility… thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy: everything begins in misosophy”. We break out of misosophy, the hatred of thinking that blocks thought, into philosophy, the love of thinking that makes thought flow, whenever “[s]omething in the world forces us to think – not an object of recognition but an object of a fundamental encounter… [that] can only be sensed”.

Violent Signs serves as a blog forum for those working with or curious about materialist philosophies of immanence. Whilst there are an increasing number of widely-subscribed blogs focusing on cultural and political criticism, Violent Signs will look to focus on contemporary strands of poststructuralist thought with an emphasis on the dynamic ‘encounters’ or ‘interface territories’ that subtend and insist between literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, art, cinema, ecology and technology. Posts will include, but not be limited to, discussion of the works of such thinkers as G. F. Hegel, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Ernest Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Arne Naess, Gregory Bateson, Alfred North Whitehead, Hakim Bey, Guy Debord, Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou. These writers and thinkers past and present have and continue to contribute substantially to our conceptions of difference, immanence, desire and alterity and Violent Signs should be seen as a place to test and contend ideas and images of contemporary (eco)critical thought.

Violent Signs is maintained and moderated by Tim Matts, a Ph.D candidate based at Cardiff University in the UK. His research interests rest chiefly with the ecocritical turn in American literary scholarship, and with post-Lacanian critical theories (principally Deleuze, Guattari, Jameson and Žižek).