Manuel DeLanda
Professor at The European Graduate School / EGS.
Biography
Manuel DeLanda (b.1952 in Mexico City) is a New York-based cross-disciplinary theorist and artist.
Currently a lecturer at the School of Architecture at Princeton University (where he already held a Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in 2000/01) as well as at The Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program at Pratt Institute, he previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, among others. He holds a PhD from the European Graduate School (2010).
Having received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, he first worked in (experimental) film and digital media before turning to theory. While his first book, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (Zone Books, 1991) is a “philosophical and historical reflection on the changing forms through which human bodies and materials are combined, organized, deployed, and made effective”, the subsequent A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Zone Books, 1997) traverses geology, biology, and linguistics, offering a materialist philosophy of history following in the footsteps of Braudel, Deleuze, and Guattari.
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (continuum, 2002) outlines a philosophy of science (including geometry, complexity theory, and chaos theory) based on Deleuzian philosophy, whereas Philosophy and Simulation (continuum, 2011) provides an analysis of different types of simulation and, according to Andrew Pickering, “a fascinating and enormously wide-ranging introduction to DeLanda’s singular world-view”[1].
Philosophical Chemistry: Genealogy of a Scientific Field (Bloomsbury 2015) is an examination of classical, organic, social, and physical chemistry and “furthers Manuel DeLanda’s revolutionary intervention in the philosophy of science and science studies. Against a monadic and totalizing understanding of science, DeLanda’s historicizing investigation traces the centrality of divergence, specialization and hybridization through the fields and subfields of chemistry.”
Analyzing, overviewing and following Deleuze and Guattari, Assemblage Theory (Edingburgh University Press, 2016) applies assemblage theory to fields such as linguistics, economics, or sociology as well as to science and mathematics.
In his last book, DeLanda, together with Graham Harman, analyses “The Rise of Realism” (Polity, 2017) within continental philosophy.
Other book publications include Deleuze: History and Science (Atropos Press, 2010), A New Philosophy of Society (continuum, 2006), and Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason (Bloomsbury, 2011); he has also published numerous essays and articles in journals such as Verb: Architecture Magazine, Architectural Design or Domus.
[1] https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/philosophy-and-simulation-9781474252843/