Conversations across boundaries: Forging futures with deleuze & Harris

Neither Gilles Deleuze nor Leonard Harris is suited for neat characterization as a philosopher. Deleuze has been called an empiricist, a left French radical, a vitalist and an existentialist, but features of his philosophy violate important facets of each school. The French Left, for example, is noted for describing the world in terms of class conflict, but not Deleuze. Harris, too, has been variously called a pragmatist, a black radical, an evidentialist, and an empiricist, yet while the black radical tradition is noted for promoting the interest of black people as a subjugated race, Harris promotes black interest and the struggle against anti-black racism as a race eliminativist. the impurity of these philosophers with respect to the tradition through which they think implicitly condones projects of creative contamination rather than rigid demarcation: this workshop invites papers that bring together these disparate thinkers as site of mutual exchange and critique. both Deluge's musings with Guattari in "What is Philosophy?" and Harris's claims in "A Philosophy Born of Struggle" admonish us to practice "philosophy" differently, but what can these bodies of work bring to fruition when put into conversation? What sorts of challenges and limits are faced by such an encounter? Is Harris's normative claim defining the requirements for a defensible philosophy -- one born of corporeal struggle -- compatible with Deleuze's radically creative philosophy of the new?

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This workshop also invites papers and presentations that engage more narrowly with concepts signed by these authors. For example, what are the consequences of individuating Deluge's immanent ethics with Harris's notion of an insurrectionist ethics rather than, as often occurs, a Levinasian ethics of the Other or a Foucaultian ethics of power?What resources do Deleuze and Guattari offer in their two volumes of "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" that can shed light on conditions of necro-being and the processes which sustain them? What can a Deleuzean discourse of the virtual offer to the Harrison problem of imagining the apparently impossible -- a world without race, for example, or a world without Capital? What are the limited benefits of imagination and how can it contribute to the creation of new societies of resistance? What happens when voices communicate across boundaries?