When Boulez returned to France in the mid 1970s, he assumed a number of significant roles in French cultural life, setting up IRCAM, forming the Ensemble Intercontemporain and assuming a professorship at the Collège de France. While undoubtedly a practical man, he was also interested in theorising about music and its relationship with the other arts, its place in culture and its philosophical underpinnings. The early years after his return to France brought him into the orbit of Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, three of the most active intellectual figures in France of the 1970s and all four of them were to participate in the seminar Le Temps musical, which Boulez organised as an IRCAM event in 1978. This chapter considers Boulez’s contact with these three intellectuals, the seminar on musical time which brought them together and the small body of letters they exchanged in the years that followed.

This introduction begins by setting up the core question of this book: why is it that disability is still frequently used as a metaphor, despite awareness that this is harmful – and what can we as readers and receivers of classical texts do about it? The role played by spectators, by models of reception, and by ways of understanding vision in this problem are underlined. The chapter introduces the concept of assemblage theory, seeing it as something that arises out of the focus on the reader evident in reception theory’s beginnings. It draws out some of the benefits of an assemblage-thinking model, weighing them against other ways of understanding reception and relation. It closes with some examination of the various activisms and limitations evident throughout the book.

The work of philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is drawn on in this chapter to make a case for looking beyond discourses of accountability and quality improvement for leaders in early childhood education and embracing more fully the affective dimensions of this work. In engaging with the inevitability of change, the chapter upends ideas about rationality, individualism, and time, turning instead to understanding the “leadership event” as complex, integrated, holistic, and laden with affect. Concepts and practices of group-decentered writing projects are introduced as a way of manifesting the ethical and embodied nature of work in early childhood education. An argument is made for the development of a “rhizomatic writing machine” to allow leaders to fully embrace the liminal, and even unconscious, aspects of the development of their subjectivities as leaders as they work in constant states of change and flux.

The pandemic has settled work and management situations in which collaborators more rarely meet. Beyond issues of maintaining a sense of co-presence, what seems to be more and more at stake is the dramatization and intensification of encounters on site but also the dramatization of remote narrative events in the future or the past. Collaborators, customers, need to meet physically at some point in a meeting room, and something need more than ever to happen at this moment. But beyond that, organizing needs also to have an intensity. Discussions around projects, problems, opportunities, happen in the flow of an open life, in a decentered way. Organizing events of the past and the future thus need to call each other, to intensively call each other in time. Managers need to build dispersed narrative events likely to intensively elaborate this dramatic resonance for people continuously coming in and out of ephemeral projects. This Intense Decentered Organizing (IDO) based on intense moments of co-presence and intensification of past and future events is a huge stake of our time. And more than ever, dramatization and theatralization appear as very important new regimes of historicity and eventfulness.

War features prominently in the broader formation of thought commonly referred to as French Theory. Particularly in the late 1970s and 1980s war attracted the attention of a number of the leading thinkers in France. In 1976 Michel Foucault offered his lecture course at the Collège de France, Il faut défendre la société; in the same year Raymond Aron published his large tome Penser la guerre: Clausewitz; in 1980 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari developed their theory of nomadology and the war machine in Milles plateaux; and in 1987 Guy Debord and Alice Becker-Ho published their wargame Le Jeu de la guerre, originally invented in 1965. This chapter examines the key role that war comes to play in French Theory from the 1970s onward. It traces the flux of historical concepts from early-nineteenth-century Prussian military thought into high theory in France and their transformation from military concepts into metaphors and figures of thought. It thereby offers an overview of the of the productive impact of war on French Theory, but also critically stakes out the limits of the militarization of thinking.

The Introduction sets out the key claims of the book, and provides an outline of its chapters. These claims are that the French tradition rejects understanding thinking and judging, that this leads to an ambivalent relationship with Hegel and a return to Kant, and that the French tradition develops a novel account of thinking, and a new model of sense.

Our final chapter begins by returning to Hölderlin’s account of the relationship between being and judgement. It argues that central to Deleuze’s philosophy is the introduction of an account of determination that operates differently from the subject-predicate determination discovered in judgement. The chapter draws on Chapter 4’s account of depth to show how Deleuze takes up and then expands Merleau-Ponty’s account of our perspectival relationship to the world. It further develops Kant’s notions of transcendental illusion to show why we tend to misunderstand the nature of thinking and the transcendental ideas to illuminate Deleuze’s account of how thinking produces sense prior to the introduction of judging.

Brian Massumi and others, such as William Connolly, draw together a number of approaches into what becomes a syncretic whole in developing a version affect theory that depends upon a sharp distinction between affect and emotions, and which posits affect as autonomous from cognition. The key elements of this mix are Deleuze and Guattari, Spinoza, and theories of affect drawn from psychology and neuroscience. In recent times, there has been significant criticism of some of the foundational approaches taken by this model of affect theory. The most telling relate to how this model of affect theory reads science, as set out by Ruth Leys and Moira Gatens. Both of their critiques are addressed to the work of Brian Massumi and particularly the systems he sets out in the first chapter of Parables of the Virtual (2002). In this chapter I will attempt to do a number of things. Firstly, I will situate the critiques Ruth Leys and Moira Gatens make of Massumi. Secondly, I will work through a reading of Deleuze’s, as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s, use of the concepts of affect and intensity and how these relate to Massumi’s understanding of these terms. Finally, I will briefly discuss the work of cognitive scientist Antonio Damasio and how steps might be taken to the ‘new paradigm of affect theory’ that Leys considers is now essential.

In this Introduction I begin by considering the interdisciplinary development of affect theory, and how it has been seen as splitting into two camps: that of the ‘cognitivists’, who see affect as involving emotion and cognition, and that of the ‘noncognitivists’ who don’t. I argue for a concept of literary affect that is neither strictly cognitivist nor noncognitivist. Through readings of Spinoza, Sylvan Tomkins, and Deleuze I show how they provide the basis for developing such a concept of affect, and I go on to develop a literary aspect to it through readings of a range of literature, criticism, and theory, including works by Longinus, Milton, Edmund Burke, Denise Riley, T. S. Eliot, Raymond Williams, William S. Burroughs, Virginia Woolf, and Lyn Hejinian. After giving examples of how a concept of literary affect is useful for reading texts, I outline the rationales of this book’s three sections while indicating how the sections’ chapters complement each other.