About

(For students wanting to contact me - details are below) 

Notebook Eleven is so named because I had ten A4 spiral bound notebooks filled by the time I finished my doctoral dissertation on Deleuze. This is the online version of my new notebooks, still focussed primarily on Deleuze but also taking in my other and changing research interests as well as notes for students on courses I teach.

I’m a philosopher and occasional film-maker from Brighton, with a keen interest in both traditions of philosophy. Deleuze, Wittgenstein and Quine are all thinkers I work on, as well as a number of others of course. I gained my doctorate from Sussex University in 2004 with a thesis on Deleuze and at the moment I’m teaching philosophy at Greenwich University in London. My staff page at Greenwich is here.

I make films alongside my partner who owns Indifference Productions, a little independent set-up she has going where she runs her own Avid suite (she’s an Avid editor) as well as a mass of other cameras, edit machines and the like, both dv and film (16 and super8 mainly), many of which are mine. I love my Bolex as much as my books and have just made contact with the excellent N.O.Where Lab in London where I attended a Bolex course in November 2007 in order to refresh my skills. I hope to spend a lot more time up there in the relatively near future.

You can have a look at one of my films online at the ‘Actual/Virtual’ website, a Manchester University Deleuze studies online journal where it was recently published:Click here to open in a new window. One of my other film projects (in 16mm) is the Fotamecus Film Majik project which is finally reaching completion.

I have a broad range of academic philosophical interests, though my central focus has been and still is the work of Gilles Deleuze and this focus will probably be maintained for a number of years. I came across Deleuze whilst studying for my doctorate, which was originally going to be on Heidegger. That first encounter, through the book What is Philosophy?, brought to life a form of philosophy I had been struggling to find, a philosophy that was directed at life, which was unafraid of leaving the confines of the academy and which spoke as though the force of thought was a living impulse within it. My research focuses on developing a materialism that isn’t reductive or naive and I concentrate currently on transcendental arguments and structures, in particular trying to understand and articulate the concept of a ‘transcendental empiricism’.

As part of my ‘Deleuzian materialism’ I also experiment with modern day shamanic and magical practices, the results of which are sometimes part of the ‘zine I produce and the associated website. I am working on a more detailed account of such practices from the standpoint of a ‘practical metaphysics’ that is derived from Deleuze’s account of becoming and which will include discussions of politics - particularly revolutionary passion - and political violence, speech and silence as well as love. These are all practices that I associate together as experiments with belief, something inspired by a particular passage in Deleuze’s ‘What is philosophy?’ a long time ago.

FOR MY STUDENTS (and anyone else who’s interested)

You can email me if you want to chat or speak to me via an Instant Messenger (IM) application of some kind.  I’m happy to chat to students online via an IM client and if you use one then you can always save the conversations (check out the help files for your particular IM or ask me and I might be able to help - it’s sometimes called logging and I usually log all my conversations).  I have also recently added Skype functionality so if you have Skype then you’re welcome to speak to me via that, again there is a status button (at the top on the bottom left of the picture) which shows if I’m online.

An ‘online chat’ can sometimes answer a specific question or a general problem, sometimes just be a little idle daydreaming and speculation.  If you have a specific question it’s good to identify the passages of text you are troubled by and if it’s not a course text then don’t assume I have it (although my library is quite large).

MSN: mattlee_in_brighton@hotmail.com, Googlechat: chinkoflight@googlemail.com, Yahoo ID: razorsmilechaos, Myspace ID:razorsmile, ICQ: 48599469, Jabber: chinkoflight@livejournal.com, Skype ID: razorsmile.

- you can use the chat module here, which will also tell you if I’m online…

Below is the current newsfeed from my Livejournal ‘diary’ site where I’m aka chinkoflight…if you want to read morejust click one of the headlines, they’re linked to the diary blog.
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