Explores the concept of multiplicity in Deleuze and Guattari's work and its relevance to artistic practice
Western philosophy has habitually privileged notions of identity, essence and static existence. The importance of Deleuze and Guattari is that they critically interrogate this pattern, and instead emphasise multiplicities. This collection of essays from a range of philosophers and art practitioners, such as Mieke Bal, James Williams, Laura Marks, Gary Genosko and Eugene Holland, engages with the philosophical concept of multiplicity in novel ways.
Divided into two parts, the first section includes theoretical essays on the concept of multiplicities, on affect and politics as well as the thought of Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon. The second section presents essays on specific art practices such as the plastic arts, theatre, performance and music.
Illustrated with eight fascinating case studies of unusual and marginalised forms of artistic practice such as Islamic talismanic magic, refugee theatre and Aboriginal ritual, and featuring 18 illustrations by virtually unknown Eastern European avant-garde artists amongst others, the articles of this volume are at once a work of 'practical philosophy' in the Deleuzian sense and also a polyphonic artwork.
S. E. Wilmer is Professor Emeritus of Drama at Trinity College, Dublin
Radek Przedpelski lectures in Visual Cultures at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth and Trinity College, Dublin.

Radek Przedpelski is Lecturer in Visual Cultures at National University of Ireland, Maynooth and Trinity College, Dublin.

S. E. Wilmer is Professor Emeritus of Drama at Trinity College, Dublin. He is the author of Performing Statelessness in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge University Press, 2002); The Dynamic World of Finnish Theatre (Like Press, 2006). His edited and co-edited books include Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism (Oxford University Press, 2010); Deleuze and Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political and Performative Strategies (Routledge 2016).

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Introduction
Radek Przedpelski and S. E. Wilmer

Part 1: Philosophical Compositions of Multiplicity

1. Distributed Affects and the Necessity of Expression
James Williams

2. Multiplicity as a Life: Deleuze, Simondon, Ruyer,
Audrone¿ Zukauskaite¿

3. Modulating Matters: Simondon, Deleuze and Guattari
Daniela Voss

4. Multiplicities, Axiomatics, Politics
Eugene Holland

5. Movement, Precarity, Affect
Mieke Bal

Part 2: Multiplicities Across Different Artistic Media

6. The Magnetic Medium: David Wojnarowicz and Tape Machines
Gary Genosko

7. Steppe Cosmotechnics: Art as Engineering of Forces in Marek Konieczny and Beyond
Radek Przedpelski

8. Body without Organs as Pure Potentiality in Patricia Piccinini's Sculptural Installations
Burcu Baykan

9. Refugees as Multiplicities
S. E. Wilmer

10. Guattari's Ecosophy and Multiple Becomings in Ritual
Barbara Glowczewski

11. Ripples of Serialism: Boulez, Deleuze and the San Francisco Bay Area
Adi Louria Hayon

12. Talisman-images: from the Cosmos to Your Body
Laura Marks

Index.