Thinking Beyond Law and Representation: Asignifying Processes in Philosophy

Julie Van der Wielen, ed.

Deleuze and Guattari Studies, vol. 18 issue 1, Edinburgh University Press, 2024.

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Before Deleuze and Guattari met, in the aftermath of May ’68, they already shared an important concern, which remained central throughout their individual and collaborative (theoretical, and in Guattari’s case also clinical and activist) work. Both thinkers had been elaborating a critique of certain types of mediation, which subordinate asignifying processes to representation or signification, thus neutralising their creative, therapeutic or disruptive potential as well as their political significance.

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Taken together, Deleuze and Guattari’s (solo and collaborative) works provide the most comprehensive critique of representation and signification, and they are permeated with a rich philosophy of asignifying processes. In this context, affect, machinic and diagrammatic processes, becoming, and the minor (as opposed to the dominant discourse) come to play a central role, in contrast to the marginal – and sometimes problematic – role they play in most canonical philosophies. This issue of Deleuze and Guattari Studies compiles contributions addressing the philosophical significance of (particular) asignifying processes on the basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s works, thus responding to the task that Guattari sets philosophical research: the task of developing ‘conditions for establishing and maintaining a logic of nonsense as it emerges in every domain, updating the register of the possibilities of signification’ (Guattari 2015: 135). I hope that this will be of interest, not only to philosophers, but also to (for example) clinicians, artists or activists.

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