State University of New York at Stony Brook
Department of Philosophy
2015 Lecture Series
You are cordially invited to a
lecture by
Fred Evans
Duquesne University
Lecture:
“Deleuze’s Political Ethics: A Fascism of the New?”
Fred Evans is Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator for the Center of Interpretive and Qualitative Research at
Duquesne University. He is the author of The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of
Diversity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009; 2011), Psychology and Nihilism: A Genealogical Critique of
the Computational Model of Mind (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), and co-editor (with
Leonard Lawlor) ofChiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,
2000). Evans has published numerous articles and book chapters on continental thinkers in relation to issues
concerning psychology, politics, and technology. He is currently working on a new book, provisionally
entitled Citizenship and Public Art: An Essay in Political Esthetics, focusing on Chicago’s Millennium Park and New
York’s 9/11/01 memorial, and another book, this one on cosmopolitanism. He also worked for five years at the Lao
National Orthopedic Center and other positions in Laos, under the auspices of International Voluntary Services, and
taught philosophy for a year at La Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia.
The cosmology of Deleuze and Guattari emphasises the new. I raise the question of whether this emphasis
cancels out two other political virtues, solidarity and heterogeneity, and thereby amounts to a fascism of the
new. I reply that what Deleuze and Guattari say about cosmological unity and difference suggests that they
can avoid this negative designation. I support this conclusion by considering their statements on ethics and
politics and by translating their cosmological philosophy into the more immediate ethico-political context
of the alloplastic stratum. The latter effort is abetted by elaborating the two thinkers’ use of the term
‘voice’, for example, in Deleuze’s statement that Being is the ‘single and same voice for the whole
thousand-voiced multiple . . . a single clamour of Being for all beings’ or in the two authors’ notion of a
‘constellation of voices’ that makes up the ‘molecular’ or ‘unconscious’ collective assemblage of
enunciation. This elaboration is pertinent because political ethics is essentially which voices are heard, and
which not, or at least their relative levels of audibility in the alloplastic regime. I further clarify this
treatment of Deleuze and Guattari’s political ethics by linking it to the idea of parrhesia, courageous speech
and hearing.
Thursday, November 19th, 2015
4:00pm
Harriman Hall, Room 214
Reception to Follow
Harriman Hall, Stony Brook, NY 11794-3750 – Telephone 632-7570 Fax 631-632-7522