Download You can find an example abstract from my own writings attached here.

Joe Krall
“Machines and Vital Impulses: Unity and Difference in Indeterminate Conflict”
Object of Investigation:
This page is intended to stage an encounter between vital and mechanistic theories of
materiality, as represented by the assigned readings in Bennett, Deleuze & Guatarri, and
Bergson.
Abstract:
This paper is intended to stage a confrontation between the visions of materiality presented by
the work of Jane Bennett and Deleuze & Guatarri. It is my basic contention that Bennett and DG
depart from Bergson’s notion of life force by alternate, and mutually exclusive paths. Where
Bennett locates the life force in the space of empirical materiality—a property inherent to
matter itself, which unifies matter in the performance of a creative “freedom”—DG maintain
that the material operates at the level of systemic difference, where change is “mechanical” in
its expression (Bergson 236). Here we see a recurrence of the conflict between unity and
difference staged by Derrida in his seminal “Violence and Metaphysics.” Where Bennett finds a
common property as the unifying structure of materiality, DG instead defer unity into
systematicity by posing the repetition of difference itself as the material. I suggest that the
recent work of Jacques Laruelle offers a possible solution to this dilemma. His suggestion of nonPhilosophy (or “Vision-in-One”) locates the material at the level of an indeterminate prior to the
philosophical (de)scission of thought into unity and difference. As this solution requires a step
outside philosophy (itself a move akin to differentiation), I anticipate potential counterargument
to take the Derridean route of offering philosophy as a universal (and indeed, unifying) edifice,
wherein recourse to a solution takes the form of differential/-iated orders operating in play.
Sources:

Bergson—Creative Evolution
I take this text as a point of genetic departure for both DG and Bennett. Bergson offers up the
initial theoretical impulse that I argue both diverge from in their various interpretations.

Bennett—Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
This is a central text for me as it offers up both Bennett’s interpretation of Bergson and her own
theoretical insight into the nature of vitality and materiality.

Deleuze and Guatarri—Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schitzophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schitzophrenia
In these texts DG develop their notions of machines. Further, they highlight the impossibility of
material unity in the figure of the body as assemblage, “a sum that never succeeds in bringing its
various parts together so as to form a whole.”

Deleuze—Difference and Repetition
This text offers the Deleuzian theory of difference which animates the later collaborations with
Guatarri.

Derrida—“Violence and Metaphysics”
In this text Derrida stages the confrontation between unity and difference as the central
problematic of western philosophy, arguing that systemic unity operates through a stratum of
difference, termed here differànce.

Galloway—Laruelle: Against the Digital
In his most recent book, Galloway attempts to think the implications of Laruelle’s vision of
materiality for media theory. Importantly, Galloway frames the Laruellean indeterminate real as
antithetical to the philosophical operation of (de)scission.

Laruelle—Philosophy and Non-Philosophy
In this text Laruelle offers an early attempt to think the non-philosophical through the operation
of “Vision-in-one.” Importantly for my purpose, Laruelle insists on the material as indeterminate
material for thought.