Deleuze and Cosmology

This edited collection investigates how Deleuze’s interventions into cosmological thinking have transformed, challenged, or influenced, as well as been influenced by, the ways that cosmology has been thought and determined from the perspective of the philosophic tradition as well as from the perspective of science and arts.

These sixteen essays apply Deleuze’s cosmological perspective to a range of scientific, metaphysical, philosophical, and aesthetic issues, illustrating the intertwinement of the various modes of thought (philosophy, science and arts) on a cosmic scale, which lead to new ways of understanding relational beings, time/space, processes of variation, folding, potentiality and creativity. By integrating the observations and speculations of quantum theory, as well as other areas of cosmological thinking, with Deleuze’s cosmological vision, we find that philosophy, sciences and arts can provide each other with mutual inspiration, pushing the boundaries of thought to the outer reaches of the known and beyond.

Author Biography

Janae Sholtz is Professor of Philosophy, Director of General Education, and Coordinator of Women’s and Gender Studies at Alvernia University and Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg Philosophy Department. Sholtz received the Senior Neag Scholar award and the Junior Neag Scholar award from Alvernia University. She is the author of The Invention of a People, Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political (Edinburgh University Press), co-editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Feminism, and French and Italian Stoicisms: From Sartre to Agamben. She is an internationally recognized feminist and Deleuzian scholar, publishing on social justice and gender; aesthetics, affect, and desire; and Deleuze and the cosmic, currently writing on Deleuze, new materialism and a new image of thought. Alain Beaulieu is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Laurentian University, Canada. He has a Doctorat de 3e cycle in philosophy from the Université de Paris 8 with a thesis on Gilles Deleuze et la phénoménologie (Sils Maria/Vrin, 2nd ed. 2006). He published Cuerpo y acontecimiento. La estética de Gilles Deleuze (Letra Viva, 2012), Gilles Deleuze et ses contemporains (Harmattan, 2011) and (co)edited the following works: Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics (Lexington, 2014), Abécédaire de Martin Heidegger (Sils Maria/Vrin, 2008), Michel Foucault and Power Today (Lexington, 2006), Gilles Deleuze. Héritage philosophique (PUF, 2005), as well as Michel Foucault et le contrôle social (PU Laval, 2nd ed. 2008).