On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite–Infinite Relation

By: Simon O’Sullivan

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Synopsis: How might we produce our subjectivity differently? Indeed, what are we capable of becoming? This book addresses these questions with a particular eye to ethics, understood as a practice of living, and aesthetics, understood as creative experimentation and the cultivation of a certain style of life. Central to the enquiry are the writings of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze (separately and in collaboration), as well as their philosophical precursors, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson. Each of these, it is argued, offers powerful resources for thinking subjectivity beyond its habitual and typical instantiations – specifically in relation to opening up a different temporality of and for the subject today. Alongside this Deleuze-Guattarian trajectory the book also brings into encounter the writings on aesthetics and ethics of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, and pitches Deleuze against Alain Badiou's own theory of the subject. At stake in this philosophical and psychoanalytical exploration is the drawing of a series of diagrams of the finite–infinite relation, and a development of Guattari's ethico-aesthetic paradigm for thinking the production of subjectivity as speculative, but also a pragmatic and creative practice.