desislava parashkevova

Biography

Desislava Parashkevova originally comes from Bulgaria, and lived in Bremen, Germany, for five years, before coming to Galway. She completed her BA in History and Theory of Art and Literature and MA in Intercultural Humanities at Jacobs University Bremen in Germany, and wrote a Master's thesis entitled "Leibniz's Vision of Being and language between Nature and Logos". In the writing of the thesis, she derived a lot of her insights from Deleuze's metaphysics of the virtual and the pure event, as well as from Merleau-Ponty's vision of sensible Being and possibility. This inclined her towards the thought of writing a doctoral thesis on Deleuze's concept of the univocity of Being, which is why she came to NUI Galway.

Current Research

The thesis is entitled “The Structure and Scope of Deleuze's Concept of the Univocity of Being”. Its aim is to trace the concept of univocal Being throughout Deleuze’s writings rather than only where it is explicitly mentioned, and to examine it critically.

The first step is to historicize the concept of univocal Being through the metaphysical problem of the One and the Many in relation to Being, starting with Plato, Parmenides, Aristotle, passing through medieval scholastics (mainly Duns Scotus and William of Ockham as pioneers of univocity), and flowing through Leibniz and Spinoza, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

The second step is to examine Deleuze's own conceptualization through several lenses – language, the sensible, logico-ontological truth, the virtual, difference and the pure event etc., and to show in a step-by-step manner how it radically transforms the historical visions of the concept of univocity, or put simply – to demonstrate what is new and original about Deleuze's vision.

The third step is to address critiques of Deleuze, and to unconceal his potential failures, delving, for example, into Alain Badiou’s conception of Being as multiplicity and interrogating his accusations against Deleuze's “fall into transcendence”.

The last step is to examine the scope of Deleuze's concept of univocal Being against phenomenologies such as Merleau-Ponty's, and to decide whether the vision of univocal Being really implicates “the death of phenomenology”, as Deleuze seems to suggest. Or, does the concept have phenomenological importance next to its metaphysical importance? Or, conversely, is Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology flowing into univocal Being, especially in his later writings, and thus giving in to the ontology of immanence in which univocal Being subsists? What does univocal Being mean for phenomenology, and how does Deleuze think we should proceed? And, should we proceed in the way he suggests we should?

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