Overview

Antonia Pont shows us how to identify when practising is happening and explains, using the early philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, how it fosters transformation, and gives us access to deep memory and rest, while also cultivating stability and responsiveness in the present. Practising, in other words, gives us three kinds of time instead of one. Practising involves an interweaving of differences expressing themselves among intentional repetitions. By engaging in practising, we open times other than our habitual presents, we slip the binds of identity and we thin out our relation with behaviours that shut out the future. Whether you practise already, are curious about embarking, or are a reader of Deleuze, this book for makers, thinkers, lovers and activists is a rigorous account of why practising is hard to say, why it works and why it matters.

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9781474490467

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Reviews

"A Philosophy of Practising develops a philosophical understanding of the complexities and productivities of practices - artistic, sporting, nurturing or conceptual - that we engage with and call us beyond our current limits. It is a carefully conceived project that uses Gilles Deleuze's philosophical insights regarding difference and repetition to articulate the ways in which practising enables new modes of self-creation. -- ""Elizabeth Grosz, Duke University"" A remarkable book that asks an unexpected question: what is a practice, what does it mean to practise something, to be a practitioner? Pont's provocative claim is that a practice isn't about getting something done or preparing for a future performance. It is a laboratory for the production of a rich, textured and complex nothing, which can transform the way we relate to change. --Joe Hughes, The University of Melbourne Antonia Pont's achievement in this book is difficult to quickly summarise. This is a thinking-through practicing, displaying an extremely sensitivity to its manifold complexities; a meticulous, illuminating and fresh working-through of Gilles Deleuze's baroque philosophy of time; a consideration of rest and posture, injury and pain in their proper texture ... Pont does not simply reconstruct that familiar bridge between the clich� of blind practice and sovereign, panoptic philosophy. In place of application, this astonishing book instead presents a weaving, an intertwining, in the course of which the discrete places of philosophy and practice are themselves undone and redone over and over again, their original names lost in the difficult joy of their ceaseless transformation. --Jon Roffe, Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy Pont's remarkable study opens a largely unexamined dimension of experience to philosophical exploration. This is an important work for anyone interested in the subtleties and mysteries of masterfully practicing a discipline, an art, a vocation or an avocation. Highly recommended. --Ronald Bogue, University of Georgia"

Author Information

Antonia Pont, Senior Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture, Deakin University.

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