Fordham University Press Secrets of Becoming: Negotiating Whitehead, Deleuze, and Butler

Secrets of Becoming brings into conversation modes of thought traditionally held apart: Whitehead’s philosophy of the event, Deleuze’s philosophy of multiplicity, and Judith Butler’s philosophy of gender difference. Why should one try to connect these strains of thinking? What might make the work of these thinkers negotiable with one another? This volume finds that bridge in an emphasis on “becoming” that secretly defines the philosophies of Whitehead, Deleuze, and Butler. Its three sections investigate their surprising confluence in a “philosophy of becoming” in relation to the question of the event, bodies and societies, and immanence and divinity. A substantial Introduction gives an extended comparison of the three thinkers. Review Offers a lucid and nuanced introduction to some of the key concepts developed by Whitehead, Deleuze, and Butler. -----Mayra Rivera, Pacific School of Religion This collection of essays brings together three very different thinkers around their shared immanentism and anti-substantialism, attending to the differing ways that events, bodies, and gods become in the absence of a transcendent order of being. Operating without a form, essence, or original according to which becoming comes to be, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Butler share an attentiveness to that which has never been before. This volume promises a kind of newness at all levels: it stages an unprecedented conversation among thinkers committed to the unprecedented. -----Mary Jane Rubenstein, Wesleyan University About the Author Roland Faber is Kilsby Family / John B. Cobb Jr. Professor of Process Studies at Claremont Lincoln University and Claremont School of Theology, Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Claremont Graduate University, Executive Co-Director of the Center for Process Studies, and Executive Director of the Whitehead Research Project. He is the author of God as Poet of the World: Exploring Process Theology. Andrea M. Stephenson is a doctoral student in philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont Graduate University.