Matija Jelaca

Gilles Deleuze's thought is uniquely placed at the interface of post-structuralism and the speculative/ontological turn which marked the humanities in general and continental philosophy in particular at the beginning of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, Deleuze shares with his post-structuralist contemporaries the commitment to Nietzsche's project of overturning Platonism and the critique of representation. On the other hand, while post-structuralism for the most part unfolded under the aegis of Heidegger's pronouncements on the end of philosophy and the overcoming of metaphysics, for Deleuze the critique of representation constitutes the necessary condition for the reaffirmation of philosophy's rights to metaphysical speculation. In this respect, Deleuze can be regarded as an important predecessor to the speculative/ontological turn. Therefore an engagement with Deleuze's thought presents an opportunity to better understand the current conjuncture in the humanities. This paper presents an account of Deleuze's critique of representation by tracing his argument against representation and in favour of intuitive knowledge and speculative metaphysics through a close reading of a few select and particularly revealing places in Deleuze's early writings. The conclusion then places this discussion of Deleuze's thought in the context of the recent turn in the humanities and continental philosophy away from post-structuralism and towards speculative realism.

One of the most striking and frequently praised aspects of HBO's cult TV series The Wire is its purported realism. Why this series is virtually unanimously perceived as realistic is the main question that this paper will attempt to answer. The question is addressed from the perspective of Robert Brandom's neo-pragmatist rationalist philosophical project in general, and his account of the appearance/reality distinction in particular. The first part of the paper introduces Brandom's neo-pragmatist rationalist account of the relation between appearance and reality as explicated in his book Reason in Philosophy. The second part addresses the question of the verisimilitude of The Wire in these Brandomian rationalist terms. It is thereby suggested that, first, The Wire appears to be real because it is rational—i.e. because it rationally integrates all its commitments into a single unified whole—and second, it is recognized as real because it exhibits an expressively progressive structure—i.e. it gradually makes explicit the commitments that were held implicitly throughout the course of its five seasons.