CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Calhoun, Elizabeth Banks |
|---|---|
| Title | 'Beyond' Representation: The Orientalist Imaginary Of A Thousand Plateaus And Its Implications For An Ontology Of Assemblage |
| Summary | Many scholars claim that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980/1987) has helped effect a turn away from representation as the praxis of critical theory and definitional framework of Western thought. Within and in response to this turn, postcolonial and feminist theorists have debated the implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s own representations of various ‘others’ of the West, with particular attention to the concepts ‘nomad’ and ‘becoming-woman.’ This thesis combines feminist and postcolonial critique without relying on a call for better representation, as most critics have, and without invoking either the ‘purity’ of these Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts or their ontological reality, as have many thinkers who find their work useful. Rather, I close read invocations of the ‘Orient’ in A Thousand Plateaus to argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s appeals to mutability, excess and multiplicity as defying representation are indebted to an Orientalist imaginary that is structural rather than incidental to their conceptualization of what might be before, beyond and exterior to Western representational thought. Putting this reading in conversation with the work of Jasbir Puar (2007), I argue that it is in part these qualities of an Orientalized ‘exterior’ in Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy that enable her analysis of contemporary ‘homonationalism’ to rethink ‘queerness’ not as an identity but as an ontological assemblage that emerges in the inevitable relationality between discursive figurations and the bodily register of affect. Thereby, this thesis augments current endeavors to represent ontological forces such as affect in theory with an argument that implicates anti-representational Deleuzo-Guattarian theory itself in a discursively modulated imaginary, thus opening up future work on how the anti-representational turn can be thought together with its representational legacies. |
| Supervisor | Timár, Eszter; Jones-Gailani, Nadia |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/calhoun_elizabeth.pdf |
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