ABOUT ME
In September 1978 my father, J. A. M. Felippe de Souza, arrived at Warwick to start his PhD in Engineering. I was born in Leamington Spa in 1982 near the end of his period here. Now, thirty years later I am the second Felippe de Souza to start a PhD at Warwick.
I am a British citizen of Portuguese descent. I grew up between England and Portugal. I have also spent periods living in Brazil and Italy and I have travelled extensivelly in Spain and France.
I took my BA course in Philosophy in the University of Lisbon in Portugal. There, I attended several courses by Professor Nuno Nabais. Towards the end of my time in Lisbon I was awarded a medal of outstanding achievement for my marks. I’ve graduated in 2006.
In 2007 I was awarded a scholarship by FCT, a Portuguese research council and I began my MA in Philosophy of Mind at Warwick. I’ve concluded my MA in the Summer of 2008 with a dissertation on “The Phenomenology of Attention” under the supervision of A.D. Smith.
In October 2008 I began to work on my PhD under the supervision of Miguel de Beistegui.
RESEARCH
My thesis[1] aims to bring together two new movements in contemporary thought probably for the first time. The first and main one is that towards the so-called rediscovery of the work of Gabriel Tarde (Alliez 2001, Schérer 2001, Lazzarato 2002, Thrift and Barry 2007, Toscano 2007, Latour 2008). The secondary one are the attempts to overcome the “Deleuzian century” by means of singling out and criticising Gilles Deleuze’s earlier works, especially Difference and Repetition (Badiou 2000; Zizek 2003, Hallward 2006; Meillassoux 2008).
These two topics come together when we realise that Deleuze resorts to Tarde on crucial moments of those early works. More specifically, Tarde comes up in the very first Deleuzean treatment of the concept of difference[2] as well as in his defining confrontation against Hegelian dialectics.[3] What makes this even more significant though, is that: on the one hand, Deleuze’s mentions were amongst the very few that Tarde received from philosophers throughout the twentieth century; on the other hand, even the closest interpretations of Deleuze typically neglect, overlook completely or in any case refuse to follow the lead towards Tarde’s own thinking.
More recently, while it is true that the so-called rediscovery of Tarde owes a great deal of its momentum to renowned Deleuzians,[4] there has been no serious attempt to approach Tarde’s essential philosophical positions directly. In spite of the fact that Tarde’s work is now beginning to be acclaimed as the ‘first great French critique of the [Hegelian] dialectics’,[5] and as ‘evidently play[ing] an absolutely determinant role between Maine de Biran and Bergson’;[6] and in spite of the fact that most of his writing would be best described as philosophical; he is still denied a proper place in the history of philosophy and relegated to the not especially flattering status of ‘the most “metaphysical” of all sociologists.’[7] As a result, the philosophical literature specifically on Tarde consists of: a lonely thesis on Tarde and the Philosophy of History (Milet, 1970); Maurizio Lazzarato’s book (2002), which bears the instructive subtitle “The Economic Psychology of Gabriel Tarde against Political Economy”; and a few partial essays and prefaces relating to the re-edition of some of his work. None of these works, and thus no work to date, has considered the entirety of the Tardean corpus as a philosophical positioning. This is part of what this thesis hopes to achieve. It is possible to trace back to Tarde an astonishing amount of original and fertile philosophical ideas from the last century, amongst them: a theory of multiplicities,[8] a modal philosophy of virtualities,[9] the reversal of roles between identity and difference,[10] the conjugation of difference and repetition,[11] the notion of rendering something docile,[12] of territorialisation, of an infinitesimal hazard in reality,[13] and the notion of plateaus in unstable equilibria.[14] For many reasons (having to do with to his particular place in French thought after Comte and Cournot), Tarde had a blurred view of disciplinary lines, divisions and compartmentations. But it should be quite clear for us that the requirement to be considered a philosopher, more than any declaration of intent or belonging, is simply to have produced philosophy.
This thesis aims therefore to carry out the much needed investigation of Tarde as a philosopher. This thesis hopes first and foremost to produce an important guide to Gabriel Tarde as a thinker – a guide indispensable for situating him in relation to his historical context, to a number of other thinkers past and present, and to different schools of thought and disciplines. While tracing Tarde’s thought however, this thesis also hopes to reveal Tardean ideas as contrasting with some of those recent positions that attempt to review the work of Deleuze. A tension between Deleuzian sources and Deleuzian successors will be thus (derivatively) explored, not as covert debate between Deleuze and his critics, but as a new debate held on more fundamental grounds.
1[UNDER DEVELOPMENT]
2
Deleuze, 1956, p. 296
3
Deleuze, 1968, especially p. 39
4
Such as Eric Alliez, who co-ordinated the republication of some of Tarde’s works in ‘Les Empêcheurs
de Penser en Rond’ editions.
5
Lazzarato 2002, p. 13
6
Alliez 2001, p. 172
7
Alliez 2001, p. 172
8
Tarde 1999 [1893]
9
Tarde 1910 [1874], and 1999 [1897]
10
Tarde 1999 [1893]
11
Tarde 1910 [1874]
12
Tarde 1999 [1893]
13
Tarde 1999 [1897]
14
Tarde 2001 [1890]
INTERESTS
[UNDER DEVELOPMENT]
