An [Un]Likely Alliance

This volume presents an original and in-depth study devoted to the discussion and relevance of the notion of ‘the environment’ and ‘ecology’ within the frame-work and ‘ontology’ of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Their non-dualist and materialist re-thinking of these issues is analyzed from various positions within Cultural Studies and the Sciences.

‘Thinking Environment[s]’ with Deleuze|Guattari is thus far removed from what might be termed ‘(intellectual) tree-hugging’—it is a call to think complexity, and to complex thinking, a way to think the environment [and environments] as negotiations of human and nonhuman dynamics. Such a thinking by default carefully evades [Cartesian] dualisms such as ‘nature’ versus ‘culture,’ ‘biology’ versus ‘technology,’ or ‘natural’ versus ‘artificial.’

At a time when the distinctions [as well as the transitions] between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are getting more and more fluid, Deleuze|Guattari's alliance with environmental thinking turns out to be a rather fruitful, exciting, and likely one, one that allows for a single mode of articulating environmental, evolutionary and technological registers and relations and for the conceptualization of a general, non-anthropocentric ecoscience.

This book thus aims at a radical re-thinking of these concepts from a Deleuzian|Guattarian (i.e. non-dualist and materialist) perspective.