concepts

This book foregrounds that English monolingualism reduces both our linguistic and conceptual resources, presenting concepts from the cultures of 4 continents and 26 languages.

Concepts seem to work best when created in the interspace between theory and praxis, and between philosophy, art, and science. Deleuze himself had generated many concepts in this encounter between philosophy and non-philosophy, including his ideas of affects and percepts, of becoming, the stutter, the rhizome, movement-image and time-image, the rhizome. What happens, if instead of "other disciplines," we take other cultures, other languages, other philosophies? Does not the focus on English as a hegemonic language of academic discourse deny us a plethora of possibilities, of possible Denkfiguren, of possible concepts?

Each contributor explores ideas that are key to thinking in their language – about sound and silence, voice and image, living and thinking, the self and the world - while simultaneously addressing the issue of translation. Each chapter demonstrates that translation itself is a way of invention, rather than just a rendering of concepts from one system in terms of another. This collection acts as a travelogue. The journey does not follow a particular trajectory—some countries are not on the map; some are visited twice. So, there is no claim to completeness involved here—it is rather an invitation to answer to the call.

Bernd Herzogenrathis Professor of American literature and culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster (1999) and An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach (2010) and editor of The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams (2012) and Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology(2009). His latest publications include the collections The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive (2017), Film as Philosophy (2017), and Practical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2020).