Gregory Kalyniuk

Before coming to Trent, Gregory Kalyniuk completed an M.A. and an M.Phil. in Philosophy and an M.A. in Social and Cultural Anthropology at K.U. Leuven in Belgium, where he lived as a foreign student for six years. His research has led him from Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical and anthropological precursors to other sources from across the arts and sciences in an attempt to discover a new way of understanding what some of the practical implications of Deleuze’s philosophy might be.

Kalyniuk’s Ph.D. thesis, titled Individuation, Intensity, and Humour, links up Deleuze’s different theories of humour with the humoural doctrine in medicine (from the Ancient Greeks to early twentieth century psychology, neurology, and immunology) and in literature (Ben Jonson’s humours comedies), in an effort to open up the molecular dimension of the politically subversive humour which Deleuze associates with masochism. If the organism could be likened to a society better than a society could be likened to an organism, then the humours would be responsible for both the disintegration of constituted selves as well as the nourishment of their emergent larvae. Reorienting the problem of Being in relation to that of Having, the selves, as worldly perceptions, become possessions of the body, while the Other persisting within it, belonging to Nature, threatens to undo the harmony of forces constitutive of the embodied selves and reclaim their collective psyche as its own. Beyond the comic, humour emerges as the death upon which life thrives in spite of, or the non-organic life which could save humanity or lead it to its extinction.

Aside from his current scholarly preoccupations, Kalyniuk is also a virtually unknown experimental writer, musical composer, and visual artist. Some of the writing he did in his teens was praised by William S. Burroughs, one of his favourite writers still to this day.