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Freedom Within Convention: A Cooperative Analysis Of The Zhuangzi And A Thousand Plateaus, Giacomo Coppola

Student Publications

The Zhuangzi, a foundational text in Classical Chinese philosophy, presents a notion of ideal humanity that involves a seemingly paradoxical relationship between a liberated existence and the barriers that restrict it. To achieve ideal humanity, one must confront the boundaries and attachments that have coalesced into a web of socio-physical conventions and developed dominion over human thought and action. This paper aims at shedding some light on this tension by offering a comparative analysis of the Zhuangzi and A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in terms of their conceptions of ideal humanity. While an abundance of time …