On the Production of Subjectivity Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation

How might we produce our subjectivity differently? Indeed, what are we capable of becoming? This book addresses these questions with a particular eye to ethics, understood as a practice of living, and aesthetics, understood as creative experimentation and the cultivation of a certain style of life. Central to the enquiry are the writings of Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze (separately and in collaboration), as well as their philosophical precursors, Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson. Each of these, it is argued, offers powerful resources for thinking subjectivity beyond its habitual and typical instantiations – specifically in relation to opening up a different temporality of and for the subject today. Alongside this Deleuze-Guattarian trajectory the book also brings into encounter the writings on aesthetics and ethics of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, and pitches Deleuze against Alain Badiou's own theory of the subject. At stake in this philosophical and psychoanalytical exploration is the drawing of a series of diagrams of the finite–infinite relation, and a development of Guattari's ethico-aesthetic paradigm for thinking the production of subjectivity as speculative, but also a pragmatic and creative practice.

Simon O'Sullivan is Reader in Art Theory and Practice at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. He is the author of Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (2005), co-editor, with Stephen Zepke, of Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (2008) and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (2010) and co-author, with Jorella Andrews, of Visual Cultures as...Objects and Affects (2013).

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Contemporary Conditions and Diagrammatic Trajectory
1. From Joy to the Gap: The Accessing of the Infinite by the Finite (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson)
2. The Care of the Self versus the Ethics of Desire: Two Diagrams of the Production of Subjectivity (and of the Subject's Relation to Truth) (Foucault versus Lacan)
3. The Aesthetic Paradigm: From the Folding of the Finite-Infinite Relation to Schizoanalytic Metamodelization (to Biopolitics) (Guattari)
4. The Strange Temporality of the Subject: Life In-between the Infinite and the Finite (Deleuze contra Badiou)
5. Desiring-Machines, Chaoids, Probe-heads: Towards a Speculative Production of Subjectivity (Deleuze and Guattari)
Conclusion: Composite Diagram and Relations of Adjacency
Notes
Bibliography
Index