B.A. (York) M.A. (Leuven, Belgium), Ph.D. (Trent)
Thesis: Individuation, Intensity, and Humour: A Series of Explorations Into Deleuze's Philosophy
Examining Committee:
David Holdsworth (Supervisor), Constantin Boundas, John Fekete
External Examiner: Hanjo Berressem, Department of English, University of Cologne
Internal Examiner: Karen Robertson
Chair: Jonathan Bordo
Abstract
This dissertation comprises a series of explorations focused on several interrelated themes in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, structured around an exegesis of the concepts of individuation, intensity, and humour. The first chapter orients the complementarity of Deleuze’s concepts of irony and humour against the framework of several important theoretical precursors, who influenced the original philosophy of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. The second chapter explores the relationship between humour and the humours of pre-modern medicine, in contexts ranging from literature and philosophy to the history of political economy and modern medicine. The third chapter serves as a sort of “dress rehearsal” of themes to be further developed in the fourth and fifth chapters, while bridging them with the themes of the first and second chapters. The fourth chapter develops a connection between two instances of Deleuze’s engagement with the work of Antonin Artaud: the transcendental problem of stupidity, which is seen to mirror the transcendent exercise of the faculties to be found in Kant’s Critique of Judgement; and the Body without Organs, which is seen to mirror the hypothesis of the substantial attribute to be found at the beginning of Spinoza’s Ethics. The fifth chapter orients the concerns of Daniel Colson’s neo-monadological anarchism in relation to contrasting approaches to the law in the work of Leibniz and Masoch, as disseminated by Deleuze. We conclude with a brief discussion of some of the crossover points between the five chapters, and some suggestions for further exploration, which would take their point of departure from these crossover points.