The Immanent Materiality of Human and Non-human Forces — ASN Events

The Immanent Materiality of Human and Non-human Forces (14758)

J-D Dewsbury 1 2
  1. School of Physical, Environmental and Mathematical Sciences, UNSW@Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia
  2. School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, BRISTOL, Avon, UK

In her essay on "Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance", Diprose promotes a practical ethos for fostering encounters that open up relations for generating social and cultural difference. Crucially, she spotlights the dynamic process of changing affective difference, at the heart of which is a redefinition of the will so central to Nietzsche's desire to overcome ideology and repression where the will is figured more as "the movement by which experience is constituted and entities come into being so that they are in relation and can be affected and can affect" (2002: 29). What I am particularly keen to tease out in this paper, is the way in which Deleuze's attentive engagement with Nietzsche's elusive concept of the will to power presents the dissolution of the willing and wilful subject in ways which point to the immanent materiality of human and non-human forces in the metamorphosis of life so central to Nietzsche's, and indeed Deleuze's, pluralism. The paper aims to outline some of the challenges these ideas present to our understandings of the relation between subject formation, responsibility and the political, challenges which herald vital problematics for rethinking the present in ways which open up the horizons of the future.