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WRAP THESIS Albert 1999
Towards a Schizogenealogy of Heretical Materialism
A Warwick dissertation on creative matter, monism, and anti-hylomorphic materialism, working through Bruno, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuze.
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Core idea
Albert's thesis asks what a genuinely heretical materialism would look like once matter is treated as productive rather than passive. The argument is organized around monism and the problem of escaping hylomorphic models that impose form on dead substance.
It proceeds genealogically, moving across Bruno, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuze to build a philosophy of creative matter. Instead of one master system, it assembles a lineage of thinkers who push materialism away from inert substance and toward immanent production.
This matters here because it shows how close the wider Warwick department already was to the problems later amplified by the CCRU. It makes the local philosophical atmosphere around materialism and anti-transcendence unusually visible.
How to read this text
Begin with the summary, then move to the sections on monism and hylomorphism. Those pages give the clearest map before the historical and scientific material expands.
Treat Bruno and Deleuze as the two poles of the argument. The most useful reading path is to track how the thesis converts historical commentary into a live account of matter's creativity.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 3
summary The central problematic of this thesis is the formation of a philosophy of creative matter, a philosophical materialism, deriving from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Fdlix Guattari, and based substantially upon an examination of the consequences of their engagement with the philosophical tradition. I have supplemented the writers used by Deleuze and Guattari with the resources of Giordano Bruno's philosophy, as well as numerous examples and arguments from the natural sciences.
Definition · paragraph 3
I have supplemented the writers used by Deleuze and Guattari with the resources of Giordano Bruno's philosophy, as well as numerous examples and arguments from the natural sciences. Bruno is particularly important here, in that in his work and life, materialism is most tightly bound up with monism. Philosophical materialist monism can be crystallised as a sustained meditation upon one problem: that of the overcoming of dualism; and in this sense to speak of materialism is to speak of the problem of hylomorphism.
Definition · paragraph 3
I have supplemented the writers used by Deleuze and Guattari with the resources of Giordano Bruno's philosophy, as well as numerous examples and arguments from the natural sciences. Bruno is particularly important here, in that in his work and life, materialism is most tightly bound up with monism.
Definition · paragraph 3
summary The central problematic of this thesis is the formation of a philosophy of creative matter, a philosophical materialism, deriving from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Fdlix Guattari, and based substantially upon an examination of the consequences of their engagement with the philosophical tradition.
History · paragraph 2
Towards A Schizogenealogy of Heretical Materialism: Between Bruno and Spinoza, Nietzsche, eleuze and other Philosophical Recluses Eliot Albert Submitted for PhD University of Warwick Department of Philosophy 10-v-99 ? 'o ao $y 9921 437 rI -C- ` ýý *--I "C12 -
Appears in sections
Warwick and Formation Primary section
How the CCRU emerged around Warwick, Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and an unstable collaborative scene.