I have just had an article published in La Deleuziana as part of a Special Issue entitled Rhythm, Chaos, and the Nonpulsed Man, coedited by Obsolete Capitalism and Stefano Oliva. The article is entitled “Tragic Rhythms: Nietzsche and Agamben on Rhythm and Art”.
Here is the abstract:
This paper explores the question of the relationship between art, rhythm, and life through a mobilisation of Giorgio Agamben’s discussion, first, of Nietzsche and the active nihilist’s relation- ship to art, and second, on his diagnosis of rhythm as pertaining to the “original structure” of the work of art in The Man Without Content. Agamben’s notion of the “rhythmic” and “poietic” encoun- ter is one which situates the experience of rhythm as the experience of the originary dimension of temporality and of the human’s relationship to the world. Turning to Nietzsche, this paper seeks to complicate Agamben’s picture by discussing Nietzsche’s under-discussed explorations of rhythm and its connection to art (focusing primarily on his early works). Three distinct rhythms will be identified: Apollonian, Dionysian, and the tragic or joyful rhythms of the Apollo-Dionysus relation (discussed through Nietzsche’s reading of Heraclitus and of Deleuze’s reading of Nie- tzsche’s Heraclitus). Reading Agamben through Nietzsche, it will be discussed how Agamben’s no- tion of rhythm (1) blends Apollonian and Dionysian elements; (2) does not through this blending however offer a tragic or joyful notion of rhythm, which, for Nietzsche, follows from their double affirmative rhythmisation. Instead of a rhythmic-poietic encounter opening an originary and au- thentic experience of temporality and dwelling, Nietzsche offers an account of tragic and joyful rhythms which continually create new worlds.
The full reference for the paper is as-follows:
Heaney, Conor, ‘Tragic Rhythms: Nietzsche and Agamben on Rhythm and Art’, La Deleuziana, 10, 2020, 61-78
You can download the paper here, or directly from the journal itself (where you can also check out other ones in the Special Issue) here. (Note - to download the papers from the journal, click the page numbers beside the article titles.)
In addition, a collaborative chapter for which I was a co-author on with Iain MacKenzie, Hollie Mackenzie, and Phil Gaydon, entitled “How Do You Make Yourself a Chapter Without Organisation?” has just been published as part of the edited collection Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics, edited by shine choi, Anna Selmeczi, and Erzsébet Strausz. More information about the book can be found here.
The full reference for this chapter is as-follows:
Gaydon, Phil, Heaney, Conor, Mackenzie, Hollie, and MacKenzie, Iain, 'How Do You Make Yourself a Chapter Without Organisation?', in Critical Methods for the Study of World Politics, edited by Shine Choi, Anna Selmeczi, and Erzsébet Strausz (Oxon: Routledge, 2020), pp. 239-256