Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Michaux: xenopathic ontology
AU - Saldanha, Arun
PY - 2012/8
Y1 - 2012/8
N2 - The hallucinogenic art of Michaux and other surrealists should never be regarded as advocating unbridled sensuous experimentation. The affects they generate may index absurdity, incongruity and comedy – they may ‘ridiculise’ our systematic thinking – but these affects thereby serve a more serious production of concepts. Through an abstemious aesthetics of existence Michaux becomes an ontologist of the prephilosophical sort. Carefully but ambiguously he explores the truths of matter, movement, body and modernity. As Deleuze saw clearly, the resulting ontology has strong affinities with that of Leibniz, though we have to insist on Simondon's transindividual dimension to obtain the full ontological purchase of hallucinogenic surrealisation.
AB - The hallucinogenic art of Michaux and other surrealists should never be regarded as advocating unbridled sensuous experimentation. The affects they generate may index absurdity, incongruity and comedy – they may ‘ridiculise’ our systematic thinking – but these affects thereby serve a more serious production of concepts. Through an abstemious aesthetics of existence Michaux becomes an ontologist of the prephilosophical sort. Carefully but ambiguously he explores the truths of matter, movement, body and modernity. As Deleuze saw clearly, the resulting ontology has strong affinities with that of Leibniz, though we have to insist on Simondon's transindividual dimension to obtain the full ontological purchase of hallucinogenic surrealisation.
KW - Michaux
KW - Leibniz
KW - hallucinogens
KW - ontology
KW - poetry
KW - humour
U2 - 10.3366/dls.2012.0072
DO - 10.3366/dls.2012.0072
M3 - Journal article
VL - 6
SP - 411
EP - 437
JO - Deleuze Studies
JF - Deleuze Studies
SN - 1755-1684
IS - 3
ER -