Federico Luisetti

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, EE. UU.
Associate Professor

Federico Luisetti teaches Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Plus Ultra. Enciclopedismo barocco e modernità (2001) and Estetica dell’immanenza. Saggi sulle parole, le immagini e le macchine (2009). He is currently writing a book on Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence.

Abstract

Nietzsche’s Oriental Topology of Immanence

The context for my paper is my current work on the topology of immanence. In my recent work (Estetica dell’immanenza. Saggi sulle immagini, le parole e le macchine. Roma: Aracne, 2008; Mundus praesens. Milano: Mimesis, forthcoming), I argue that, after Deleuze’s reinvention of Bergson’s ontology of life, Bergsonism can be understood as an unprecedented topology of action, an attempt to activate genealogically the «Oriental» segments of Western culture, such as Stoicism’s vitalism. In my presentation I wish to explore the «Oriental dispositif» of Nietzsche’s anti-philosophy of life. Moving from the Deleuzian description of Nietzsche’s topology of life-forces— active/reactive, intensive quantities—and the Foucaultian and post-Foucaultian biopolitical «machinations» of Nietzsche’s thought, I will propose a new conceptual image of the «Oriental dispositif» of Nietzsche’s thought. Having disentangled Nietzsche’s topology of life from an irruption of intensive «external forces» (in Deleuze, the relict of transcendence) and a «technology of the self» (in Foucault, the relict of Christianity), Nietzsche’s «Oriental dispositif»—from Dionysus to amor fati, from Zarathustra to the Antichrist—will appear as a radically immanentistic and polytheistic experiment, a political instrument for the distortion of Western founding categories.