About this project

who are we?

Some history

This project was born from the intersection of archival organization studies and philosophy. Before studying philosophy, I studied history and later dedicated myself to the field of archival organization. In an archive, we have to find a document, a photo, or whatever, among thousands of others. It’s the same in a library: how do you find a book among thousands? By diagnosing the collection, creating criteria and a classification plan that includes all the elements. When I moved from archiving to philosophy studies and was confronted with that conceptual ocean that is Deleuze’s work, I sort of automatically applied that archival tool to my studies. For every book I read in my graduate studies, I would jot down in a notebook the pages where the concepts appeared so that, when it came time to write the text, I could go to that database and return to the pages to find the concepts. This was enormously helpful, because as I was developing the problems for my thesis, I would consult my database and go to the pages where the concepts or problems appeared.

In addition to optimizing search time, reading was different: with the pages marked, I could now read a problematic development that ran through various works. Having finished my research for the postgraduate program, some people knew about my notebooks and would occasionally look me up, asking: Where does Deleuze talk about becoming? Some concepts are easier to locate because they’re the subject of specific books or chapters (like becoming, which has a whole chapter on it in A Thousand Plateaus). However, elsewhere in other books, there are very good definitions of the concept that aren’t so easy to locate. In addition, there are “minor” concepts and problems—such as the topic of “humor”—or some examples, or even some authors Deleuze cites. That’s also why I include “minor” problems in Deleuze’s thought in this tool, since there’s always someone interested in less-studied issues. The idea, therefore, is to help researchers find within this enormous body of work what interests them for their research. Of course, this tool is limited. It will help you find the references, but it will be up to the researcher to select, continue reading a little more of the reference given, and decide what is most important and what is not useful.