Abstract
The international conference of Sign and Affectivity in the works of Gilles Deleuze takes place in Prague on 7. - 8. 11. 2015 and is organized by the Department of Electronic Culture and Semiotics. The conference aims to introduce new perspectives on the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, especially as we focus on the relationship between affectivity and semiotics, both of which play a crucial role in Deleuzian thought.
Deleuze first used the concept of affect in his book Nietzsche and Philosophy and again in his doctoral thesis on Baruch Spinoza. Affect was associated with the term ""becoming"", a theme of great importance for Deleuze, in his lectures on Spinoza in the 1980s, as well as in A Thousand Plateaus.
The concept of sign appears in Proust and Signs, which he later interpreted as an attempt to build up ""general semiology"", although, in one of many interviews Deleuze gave he said, ""Everything I've written is vitalistic, at least I hope it is, and amounts to a theory of signs and events"" (Negotiations: 143). The sign and semiotics as pragmatics or symptomatology also appear in Deleuze's text on literature and is strongly connected with the concept of affect.
Appropriately, the main theme of the conference is the relationship and implications between semiotics and affectivity, as articulated in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy. We welcome proposals from this field of inquiry as it relates to Gilles Deleuze's Semiotics, Signs and Image-Movement, Literature, Signs and Affectivity, Affect, Effect and the Power of Signs' and ""Turn to affect"" in contemporary philosophy.