New Books: Secrets of Becoming; Event and Decision

Roland Faber is pleased to announce the publication of

Secrets of Becoming: Negotiating Whitehead, Deleuze, and Butler, Roland Faber and Andrea M. Stephenson, eds., (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010)
Event and Decision: Ontology and Politics in Badiou, Deleuze, and Whitehead, Roland Faber, Henry Krips, and Daniel. Pettus, eds., Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010)

Secrets of Becoming brings into conversation modes of thought traditionally held apart: Whitehead’s philosophy of the event, Deleuze’s philosophy of multiplicity, and Judith Butler’s philosophy of gender difference. Why should one try to connect these strains of thinking? What might make the work of these thinkersnegotiable with one another? This volume finds that bridge in an emphasis on “becoming” that secretly defines the philosophies ofWhitehead, Deleuze, and Butler. Its three sections investigate their surprising confluence in a “philosophy of becoming” in relation to the question of the event, bodies and societies, and immanence and divinity. A substantial Introduction gives an extended comparison of the three thinkers.

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Event and Decision addresses the philosophies of Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, and Alfred North Whitehead in relation to the concepts of event, ontology and politics. For Whitehead, the event is the realization of becoming, the actualization of the ‘groundless ontological ground’ of creativity, the process of self-decision on possibilities yet undecided, the aesthetic and ethical impulse of existence. For Deleuze it is the expression of life without possession, bodies without organs, the virtual or actual reality of singularity and novelty. For Badiou, the event breaks from the situation, in which we always count (reality) as one and multiplicity as united. For all three thinkers, the event necessitates a radical politics that critiques traditional ontologies of social bodies, cultures, and art. The perspective that emerges from the book is of humanity constituted by, but also constituting a multiplicious event cycle: each person and thing bringing their own personal event into their experience of an event outside of themselves. The convergence of this multiplicity creates our complex world – a complexity not defined as aporia or impossibility, but rather infinity – that is always already still creating. ‘Event and Decision’ offers the reader a live experience of this eventual theory, an experience that mirrors the event of three philosophers themselves.