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Paper Information:
Type: Paper
Paper Title: ONE AND MANY WORLDS: ANTHROPOLOGY, DELEUZE AND ONTOLOGICAL POESIS
Author: STUART MCLEAN (University of Minnesota)   
Date/Time: Fri., 11:15 AM
Co-Author(s): STUART MCLEAN (University of Minnesota) 
Abstract: One of Deleuze’s most challenging insights concerns his recasting of the time-worn philosophical question of the relationship between the One and the Many. Rejecting any appeal to a transcendent Being that would create and ground the multiplicity of existing beings, Deleuze instead insists, simultaneously, on the irreducibility of difference as a self begetting process not subordinate to the principle of identity and on the “univocity” of being – that is, on the full and equal participation of everything that exists within a single register of being. Rather than looking outside the world for explanations of the world, Deleuze suggests, it must be acknowledged that there is only the world, but that it is, inherently, multiple. (That is, contrary to the claims of some of Deleuze’s recent critics, the univocity of being does not straightforwardly imply an all-subsuming unity or oneness). This paper follows Deleuze in pursuing one possible trajectory for the future becoming of anthropology as a mode of ontologically engaged creative practice. In doing so, it argues for a re-alignment between two key elements of the discipline’s theoretical and methodological inheritance – namely ethnography’s empirical attachment to the existing world and comparativism’s openness to a potential multiplicity of worlds. Rather than simply describing or comparing the ontological claims made by others, such an anthropology would experiment self-consciously with the co-instantiation of univocity and multiplicity as a ground not only for speculative ontology but also, potentially, for the fashioning of new realities.

Program Number: 3-0385
Session Title: DELEUZE AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Session Sponsor: Society for Cultural Anthropology
Session Date/Time: Fri., 10:15 AM-12:00 PM
Organizer(s): BHRIGUPATI SINGH (Harvard University), PETER LOCKE (Princeton University), STUART MCLEAN (University of Minnesota) 
Chair(s): JOAO BIEHL (Princeton University)  
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