Deleuze / Guattari Studies in Asia, 7th international conference

Following the inaugural Deleuze Studies in Asia meeting in Taipei, Taiwan, in 2013, the Deleuze/Guattari conference has been hosted successfully in Manipal (India), Osaka (Japan), Seoul (Korea), Singapore and most recently Naga (The Philippines). It returns to the Japanese archipelago in 2019. This event remains the premier philosophical organ for Deleuze and Guattari studies in Asia and its transdisciplinary membership continues to contribute significantly to other Deleuze and Guattari gatherings across the world. With this in mind, and on the singularly precious occasion of Tokyo’s 2019 conference, we shall continue the indefatigable spirit of former meetings to exchange ideas, to discuss and to think about Deleuze and Guattari in new and challenging ways.
The theme for the conference is ‘War Machine, Conflict, Coexistence’. Why? Because we live in a world where the concept ‘war machine’ has now become so miserably commonplace and anodyne. How? In two respects: 1) the contemporary globalized form of capitalism has overwhelmed national economies and; 2) terrorism has replaced traditional forms of state-war. As such, conflicts are so pervasive on a global scale yet often elude traditional social, political and economic schematics.
In the play of perceptible and imperceptible, how should or can we coexist in such a world? How does the work of Deleuze and Guattari assist this new relation? One problem arises. As the idea of coexistence is not explicitly explored in their philosophy, how can we respond to this conspicuous lacuna? Given this bottleneck of reason, it is exceedingly timely to think contemporary geo-political problems and ideas from the perspective of Deleuze and/or Guattari. Our task is to begin thinking again; to shed another dogmatic image of thought.
Given this crisis and amid such devastating conflict, we are asking conference delegates to think about the concept of coexistence in a Deleuzian way. We are in search for nothing less than a new paradigm or image of thought.

Koichiro Kokubun (Professor, Tokyo Institute of Technology)
Joff P.N. Bradley (Associate Professor, Teikyo University)

PARTNERS
Edinburgh University Press
HMC: The University of Tokyo, Humanities Center
Nishihara Cultural Foundation
UTCP: University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy

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