Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

Conference | Paper

Is phenomenology a “nomad science”? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as interpreters of the Husserlian conception of scientificity

Davide Pilotto

Tuesday 13 September 2022

15:00 - 15:45

Ex ECA-Aula E

Can we argue that the Husserlian idea of scientificity that emerges from the Krisis responds to the theoretical demands that Deleuze and Guattari put forward about the notion of science? In A Thousand Plateaus, the two authors, distinguishing between a “royal science” and a “nomad science”, bring Husserl’s proposal into the latter, claiming that it gives rise to an idea of a science that is “vague” or “vagabond” – “neither inexact like sensible things nor exact like ideal essences, but anexactyet rigorous” (Deleuze-Guattari 1987, 367). The object of this “nomad science” would be a “region of vague and material essences” that Husserl would have discovered with his “protogeometry” (Hua 6, §9a, Appendix III): Husserl would thus come closer to the Simondonian thesis of an overcoming of hylomorphism (Simondon 2020), taking a fundamental step toward a “destratified, deterritorialized matter”. Can we consider Husserlian phenomenology as a “nomad science”? We will therefore ask whether, considering the bibliography that examines the mentioned passages from A Thousand Plateaus (Martin 2016, Lapoujade 2017, Sarti-Citti-Piotrowski 2022) and the literature on the “anexactitude” in Husserl (Derrida 1989, Pradelle 2013), the Husserlian idea of science may indeed fit Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation, in dialogue with those phenomenologists who suggest a detachment of Husserl from hylomorphism (Almeida 1972, Richir 1976), paving the way for a more articulated reflection on the innovative ways Husserl reforms the conception of scientificity.