The 18th Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference and Camp

Transversality: Ethics & PoliticsAthens, Greece | 10-12 July 2026 | Camp 4-7 July 2026 Volos / Pelion, Greece

The 18^th Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference and Camp is devoted to the concept of transversality. Deleuze and Guattari develop this concept across different domains, from literary production to psychotherapy and from political to artistic practices. Transversality assembles heterogeneous components into a unified non-tοtalizable and non-hierarchical perspective. It describes novel ways of thinking and writing, the emergence of radical therapeutic communities, rhizomatic connections, cutting across disciplines, discourses and levels from the macroscopic to the molecular. This year’s conference, the first since the centenary celebration of Deleuze’s birth, welcomes contributions that explore this versatile and polysemous concept in different and intersecting fields. We invite scholars, artists, activists and practitioners from various fields to examine the concept of transversality in its diverse applications in science, art, politics, psychotherapy, as well as its potential for challenging and resisting hierarchies, generating new lines of flight and collective becomings.

The concept of transversality is inspired by topology to address spatial intersections in transformative and chaotic systems.  Deleuze invoked the term in the second edition of Proust and Signs as a means of understanding connection, differential change, and singularity, producing vectors of resistance which challenge higher unifying structures and essentialist thinking. Transversality, as antilogos, is used to counter hierarchical and platonic accounts of reminiscence and transcendence, envisioning intelligence in its immanent and singularizing becoming. Transversality evokes the conjunctive force of “and,” connecting flows, desires, and machines across heterogeneous fields.   Félix Guattari radicalized the notion of transversality, politicising psychoanalysis through institutional psychotherapy and later expanding its reach in The Three Ecologies to the environmental, social, and mental. For Guattari, transversality enables non-hierarchical relations, collective enunciation, and new cartographies of resistance, which can be grounded in experimental forms of organization, from the post-war psychiatric communities of Saint-Alban, La Borde, and Blida-Joinville, to contemporary movements combating alienation, racism, violence, and dispossession. In this sense, transversality -being simultaneously practical, aesthetic and philosophical- is a dynamic process that traverses institutions, disciplines, and systems of power. It disrupts both vertical hierarchies and horizontal homogeneity, revealing immanent lines of flight and collective processes of subjectivation. In recent times, the chiasmatic function of transversality has acquired mathematical depth, through topology, set theory, chaos theory, and the theory of catastrophe (René Thom), artistic resonance in painting and music and philosophical relevance as a concept that dismantles essences and subjects in favor of fluid systems and relational multiplicities.

The 18th Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference and Camp approaches transversality as a ritornello, an iterative, resonant refrain that cuts across the macroscopic, social, and molecular levels of existence: How does transversality assist in confronting the capitalist, colonial and patriarchal power formations? How can transversal practices in art, science, pedagogy, and collective organization reimagine institutional and social life? What new cartographies emerge when thought, feeling, and resistance intersect transversally? As a transformative and autopoietic concept, transversality traverses the boundaries of science, aesthetics, politics, ethics and culture, enabling new assemblages and collective war machines that resist the totalizing repressive logic of late capitalism. Therefore, we invite proposals for papers, panels, workshops, performances, and artistic installations that engage with transversality in its philosophical, scientific and aesthetic, ethical, ecological, and political dimensions.

Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

-Transversality across philosophy, art, science and politics.

-Transversality from the macroscopic to the molecular: Environmental, social and mental ecology.

-Transversality in literary production: antilogos, reminiscence, signs and symptoms.

-Transversality and psychotherapy: schizoanalysis, institutional psychotherapy, transference.

-Transversality in mathematics: topology, chaos theory, set theory, theory of catastrophe.

- Art as transversal resistance: participatory, aural, performative, and site-specific practices.

-Transversality and politics: authoritarianism, bureaucracy and resistance-Transversality across gender, race, class, ability and intersectional studies-Group transversality and institutional practice: subject-groups and group-subjects.

-Transversality as a method for collective research, activism, and social justice.