Customer Reviews (3)

Definitely a Classic! a must read!!!
Our Hero Deleuze is back at it once again on his Bergsonian quest to conquer the movement-image.This time descending light from the plane of immanence will guide our hero through phenomenological blunders. Wow! what an amazing book! Deleuze has done it again, I mean talk about the varities! Perception-Image, Affect Image and Action Image. It totally clairfies any misconsceptions about the liquid, gasous and solid states.If there is such thing as a rhizomatic world, could the Time-Image be a prequel? Deleuze is smoking!!!!

A must film and media theorists.
The above review of this book does a great job already, so I will try to complement it as best I can. Deleuze is a difficult thinker for newcomers. His ideas tend to refer to one another and have developed into a complex network of concepts over the course of his writings. The good news is that Deleuze is drawing an immense amount of interest in the US and UK now.
Deleuze sets out in the cinema books to create a theory of film and the image that stands in sharp contrast to the film theory we're most accustomed to. Deleuze does not accept that narrativity is a given in film. In fact, he wants to find a way of appreciating and describing what distinguishes film from language and narrative systems. For Deleuze, the moving image is not a system of reference. One doesn't refer to something through a segment of film. The filmic medium is direct, not referential.
Cinema 1 is thus a look at how the early cinema learned to produce the "movement image." It's a review of "auteur" film-makers and their experiments with the medium (in addition to those mentioned above are Welles, Godard, Eisenstein, Lang, Resnais, Hitchock...) to produce perception, affect, and action.
He contrasts montage with mise-en-scene. He shows how action corresponds to situations, either responding to situations or modifying them. He describes the discovery of depth of field, and use of affect in close ups and still images, the importance of shot and reverse shot sequences, and movement within the scene vs of the camera. He shows how pre-war film maintained a commitment to the whole. Characters' actions were motivated by situations, and films as a whole hung together.
The book concludes with Hitchcock's invention of the audience as a third term in the filmic experience: subject, object, audience. Audiences complete Peirce's sign system (firstness, secondness, thirdness) because they interpret the film. Indeed, Hitchcock's art was in showing the audience what the character would only discover later, and in making his films into logical puzzles rather than whodunits.
A dazzling book, I had to read it twice, and many of the films referenced won't be on dvd for years....

The finest reflection on cinema.
Gilles Delueze creates in his books on cinema a taxonomy, an attempt at the classification of cinematic images and signs. This classification is an insightful elaboration on Bergson's theses on movement and on Pierce's signs system. If this taxonomy is the core of the "movement-image" book, its heart is a brilliant and systematic history of aesthetic forms of the classical cinema. Some of the more interesting ideas are the two poles of the close-up, Goethe's theory of color and German expressionism, the space in Bresson, an account of Bunuel as naturalist, the difference between John Ford and Howard Hawks, the crisis of the action-image and the essence of comedy as in Lubitsch, Chaplin and Keaton. Nevertheless, it is not a book about cinema, nor is it a book of film history. It is the practice of concepts. Deleuze writes: "Philosophical theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object. It is no more abstract than its object...So that there is always a time, midday-midnight, when we must no longer ask ourselves 'What is cinema?' but 'What is philosophy?'". Only Deleuze, one of the greatest minds of our Century, could answer this question with so much elegance, profundity, ingenuity and mystical charm. ... Read more

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Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. He is a key figure in poststructuralism, and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. ... Read more

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The essays in this book present a complex theme at the heart of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, what in his last writing he called simply "a life." They capture a problem that runs throughout his work--his long search for a new and superior empiricism. Announced in his first book, on David Hume, then taking off with his early studies of Nietzsche and Bergson, the problem of an "empiricist conversion" became central to Deleuze's work, in particular to his aesthetics and his conception of the art of cinema. In the new regime of communication and information-machines with which he thought we are confronted today, he came to believe that such a conversion, such an empiricism, such a new art and will-to-art, was what we need most. The last, seemingly minor question of "a life" is thus inseparable from Deleuze's striking image of philosophy not as a wisdom we already possess, but as a pure immanence of what is yet to come. Perhaps the full exploitation of that image, from one of the most original trajectories in contemporary philosophy, is also yet to come. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

I thought it explained something
This book might be too *stigid* for you.The introduction quotes Deleuze on the nature of his philosophy, "... We will speak of a transcendental empiricism in contrast to everything that makes up the world of the subject and object."(p. 8, quoting Chapter One, Immanence:A Life, p. 25).For those who consider philosophy too confining to escape the metaphysics suggested by Kant, this might seem like a welcome suggestion, but the uniqueness of such a broad approach, as it might apply to changes in any particular life, is largely nebulous.Even Chapter Two, Hume, in which "A parallel conversion of science or theory follows:theory becomes an inquiry (the origin of this conception is in Francis Bacon; Immanuel Kant will recall it while transforming and rationalising it when he conceives of theory as a court or tribunal)" (pp. 35-36) is beyond my usual contemplation and "its attempt to reduce the paradox of relations;" (p. 37).The final chapter, on Nietzsche, strikes notes which I know well enough to become critical, and I find an assertion which must make this book more unique than most:

"Dialectics itself perpetuates this prestigiditation.Dialectics is the art that invites us to recuperate alienated properties."(p. 70).

Surely the right word for dialectics is prestidigitation, the sleight of hand that quickly moves things about to produce one thing where another was expected, but this book is produced in a world which is far more used to typing `prestige' when it has just been considering Kant, even if the paragraph preceding this unique assertion about dialectics ended with the kind of questions that Nietzsche was always throwing in Kant's direction:

"Who can really think that Kant reinstated critique or rediscovered the idea of the philosopher as legislator?Kant denounces false claims to knowledge, but he doesn't question the ideal of knowing; he denounces false morality, but he doesn't question the claims of morality or the nature and origin of its value.He blames us for having confused domains and interests; but the domains remain intact, and the interests of reason, sacred (true knowledge, true morals, true religion)."(p. 70).

Thorough knowledge of Nietzsche is indicated by the ability to make his philosophy illustrate the grand theme of "the symptoms of a decomposition."(p. 72).A key to this understanding is:

"Nietzsche is the first to tell us that killing God is not enough to set about the transmutation of values.In his work, there are at least fifteen versions of the death of God, all of them very beautiful."(pp. 71-72).

Going back to dialectics as prestigiditation, most people seem to be lost in the efforts to stigmatize, or hoping for stigmatism as a vision not subject to astigmatism, particularly "As long as the will to power is interpreted in terms of a `desire to dominate,' we inevitably make it depend on establish values, the only ones able to determine, in any case or conflict, who must be `recognized' as the most powerful.We then cannot recognize the nature of the will to power as an elastic principle of all of our evaluations, as a hidden principle for the creation of new values not yet recognized."(p. 73).

It might be possible to explain everything in this book by creating and giving value to words like *stigid* which unintentionally crept into the middle of a word in a complicated thought on the limits of the nature of philosophy.The complexity of transcendental empiricism might even relate to the explanation that Deleuze offers for "The will to power is the differential element from which derive the forces at work, as well as their respective quality in a complex whole."(p. 73).People who find this kind of thought too *stigid* for real mathematics, in which differential elements are usually determined easily if we know the formula from elementary calculus, but we rarely think about them otherwise, might not enjoy reading this book.People who already know a lot of Nietzsche will not be surprised to find, "Everywhere we see the victory of No over Yes, of reaction over action.Life becomes adaptive and regulative, reduced to its secondary forms; we no longer know what it means to act.Even the forces of the earth become exhausted on this desolate face."(p. 75).Perhaps the book has far more explanations than examples, and tends to emphasize the worst view of things overall, but it moves on, after "Zarathustra cries out his great disgust, his great contempt," (p. 90).

Eclectic Collection
This is the strangest assemblage of Deleuze's writings I have seen to date, though I am glad to have my hands on the Nietzsche article from '65, which nicely complements the Nietzsche monograph. It is very fine and extremely accessible introduction to Deleuze's idiosyncractic approach. The Hume piece is less strong; it is not Empiricism and Subjectivity. The first essay is trenchant, beautiful, and moving, penetrating what I had taken to be the heart of Deleuze's thought. A strong if uneven collection. ... Read more

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This book not only introduces Deleuze's ideas, it also demonstrates the ways in which his work can provide new readings of literary texts. ... Read more

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A great help
Colebrook's contibution to understanding Gilles Deleuze's thinking is especially of interest to anybody starting the study of Deleuze's and Guattari's philosophy. Their philosophy is very hard to grasp, if that is possible at all, by just starting with their original works. I am very greatful to Claire Colebrook and others for "lifting the lawn".

Finally-I May Understand Deleuze!
Well, after a couple of years of dabbling into Deleuze, something keeps pulling me back, I think I finally found the book that provides the needed clarity to see Deleuze and his ideas "as if a butterfly pinned to a piece of carboard." This is a really easy to read and lucid book. Now back to Anti-Oedipus and the revolution ahead!

The Best Introduction to Deleuze
This is an extraodinary book: an astonishingly lucid and well-organized introduction to Deleuze's philosophical project. Most of the secondary literature on Deleuze is simply unhelpful, because it presumes that the reader already grasps Deleuze's tremendously difficult ontological project and terminology. Colebrook begins at the begining, taking the time to explain and define key terms (the virtual, singularity, intensity, affect, becoming, immanence, etc.) and offers rich illustrations of these concepts via literature and film. Indeed, it seems to me that Colebrook understands these terms and their relationships to one another much better than do most of Deleuze's interpreters, who often throw around these terms without either explaining them or seeming to understand them. Other books on Deleuze (e.g., Ronald Bogue's Deleuze and Guattari) proceed book-by-book through Deleuze's career. But Deleuze's thought does not develop chronologically. Rather, throughout his career, Deleuze deployed many of the same concepts in different contexts. Colebrook focuses on these key concepts, which should help the reader through almost any one of Deleuze's texts. There are certainly wonderful high-level explorations of Deleuze's work (e.g., Brian Massumi's User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia) and very helpful introductions to single works (e.g., Eugene Holland's Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus). But this is surely the finest, most astute, accessible and concise introduction to Deleuze's basic philosophical view.

The Best Introduction to Deleuze
This is an extraodinary book: an astonishingly lucid and well-organized introduction to Deleuze's philosophical project. Most of the secondary literature on Deleuze is simply unhelpful, because it presumes that the reader already grasps Deleuze's tremendously difficult ontological project and terminology. Colebrook begins at the begining, taking the time to explain and define key terms (the virtual, singularity, intensity, affect, becoming, immanence, etc.) and offers rich illustrations of these concepts via literature and film. Indeed, it seems to me that Colebrook understands these terms and their relationships to one another much better than do most of Deleuze's interpreters, who often throw around these terms without either explaining them or seeming to understand them. Other books on Deleuze (e.g., Ronald Bogue's Deleuze and Guattari) proceed book-by-book through Deleuze's career. But Deleuze's thought does not develop chronologically. Rather, throughout his career, Deleuze deployed many of the same concepts in different contexts. Colebrook focuses on these key concepts, which should help the reader through almost any one of Deleuze's texts. There are certainly wonderful high-level explorations of Deleuze's work (e.g., Brian Massumi's User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia) and very helpful introductions to single works (e.g., Eugene Holland's Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus). But this is surely the finest, most astute, accessible and concise introduction to Deleuze's basic philosophical view. ... Read more

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An "introduction to the nonfascist life" (Michel Foucault, from the Preface)

When it first appeared in France, Anti-Oedipus was hailed as a masterpiece by some and "a work of heretical madness" by others. In it, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari set forth the following theory: Western society's innate herd instinct has allowed the government, the media, and even the principles of economics to take advantage of each person's unwillingness to be cut off from the group. What's more, those who suffer from mental disorders may not be insane, but could be individuals in the purest sense, because they are by nature isolated from society. More than twenty-five years after its original publication, Anti-Oedipus still stands as a controversial contribution to a much-needed dialogue on the nature of free thinking. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (20)

More Taxes! Less Bread!
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus radically reconceieve the cartography of politics fused with a reconceptualization of desire, a desire that eschews and condemens Freud and Lacan's egregious transmogrification of what Deleuze and Guttari espouse its fundamentally positive nature. So the question that undergirds the text 'why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as thought it were their salvation?" posed by Reich and Spinoza because a diving board for Deleuze and Guattari as they excavate and render in new ways how the nature of desire has become directed towards socially sanctioned avenues, avenues that became conducive for the triumph of capitalism.

no easier
One would think postgraduate degrees would make these types of works readable, but unless there is plenty of time to spend on it, I think it advisable to purchase also some sort of Anti-Oedipus companion. Who knows, perhaps one has also to be smoking something. Despite the previous, one can get sufficient glimpses of some creative thinking and pondering about modern life in general and about western capitalist societies in particular, enough to make one pay close attention or go for a post-second reading. Foucault's preface misleads one into thinking the book is a piece of cake: great marketing strategy.

guide to an anti-fascist life
While studying philosophy at university, I was fortunate enough to have read this book. Some years hence, I am now middle management at a Fortune 500 company (it's very strange to me), and have just recently re-read it. The ideas about egalitarian models of leadership in this book are almost solely responsible for allowing me to remain a fundamentally good person. Without this book, I know there would have been instances where I would have done things unthinkingly and in error.

Amazing Stories
Although Deleuze and Guattari are usually invoked as part of a "postmodernist" litany, this work is refreshingly different from most postwar French theory. Derrida and Foucault, for all their revolutionary ambitions, are fairly traditional *maitre-penseurs*: the expectation is that you have a tip-top understanding of Hegel and other historical heavyweights, the better to appreciate their reversal. By contrast, *Anti-Oedipus* resembles nothing so much as the "philosophical" part of a work of hip science fiction: the line of argument is neither dialectically nor formally elaborated, but asserts only its plausibility in the context of the world being evoked.

I say this as a form of praise: in fact, unless you are (somewhat foolishly) expecting that an "intimate" knowledge of this book will advance your academic fortunes, your reading doesn't have to be especially careful to get something useful out of the book. As for its relation to thinkers who are properly venerated in the academy, it is (for all its contrariness) more accepting of Freud and Marx than most contemporary discourse is, so it actually isn't all that devastating a critique of them. But the enthusiasm they display for new hypotheses about these two is infectious: this is a book that makes you want to read *more* economics and psychology, not slam your head against the wall in protest against the impossibility of all understanding.

In the theory of schizophrenia advanced here, the "clinical" schizophrenic is carefully marked off from their treatment of schizophrenia as a process, so the anti-psychiatric implications of the book are only of the most general kind. Furthermore, a great deal of this process is elaborated with respect to imaginative literature by eccentric writers, not case studies of the clinically ill. But this means the results are not fundamentally incompatible with a contemporary understanding of psychotic illnesses: what opposes their resituation of schizoid desire as located at the most basic levels of work and social interaction are the normative intentions of those who study and control (or simply detest) the mentally ill, not scientific findings per se.

A thought-provoking book requiring no "theory" masochism to enjoy.

Original, brilliant... insightful, but distorted in perspective.
Why am I giving this book a five star rating? Because this work is an effort at a new theory that is systematic and terminologically consistent and must have been a torture for the writers to conjure up in their head.

It certainly is a torture to read this work. Not because I can't understand hard-core philosophy - I have read, understood and liked Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre and Derrida, considered amongst the most abstruse stylists - but because it is difficult to empathize with writers who characterize themselves and their readers as 'desiring machines' rather than as subjects with consciousness and will.

Is desire the only thing that defines human beings - what about will, thinking, compassion, judgment? And further why am I supposed to be a machine and in what sense? These are the questions that came to my mind. The authors never explain. The question of the subject is dismissed in one sentence.

It is also difficult to agree with writers who dismiss all seeking of power and all active resistance by implication as fascism and preach escape/flight as the most radical ideology of resistance and hope.

And it is difficult to find hope in the vain jargon of molecular vs. molar, in the lines of escape or flight, or in a schizoid approach to life (a schizophrenic has no control over himself - is a machine and hence is the authors' favorite).

The authors fail in their synthesis of Marx and Freud although they come close and fail to understand Nietzsche, one of their favorite philosophers. Marx, Freud and Nietzsche would turn violently in their graves, if they ever know what Deleuze/Guattari did to their philosophies. They speculations on incest, kinship etc., are just too weak, sketchy and merely assertoric to be taken seriously.

I do not endorse the philosophy of Deleuze/Guattari. To be sure they offer brilliant insights but their line of argument has as many holes as Swiss cheese.

Yet there are a few things that are brilliant in the work and it certainly remains an original and challenging work. Having, stated my disappointment with the work, now let me also state the better aspects of this work. This work has a very well argued theory of control mechanisms in primitive, barbarian and capitalist societies.

The authors rightly point out that capitalism governs well because it always generates new rules to survive (new axiomatic) and controls because all social codes are 'decoded' (de-codified) into flows (loose, lawlike systems of control) and de-territorialized. (Other writers have explained the same things in simpler jargon, but Deleuze-Guattari need to be given due credit for the brilliance of their analysis of capitalism, although their libidnalization of economics doesn't add anything valueable to the analysis of either libido or economics and seems forced).

The other hallmark of this work is that it offers one of the more interesting critiques of Freud's Oedipal complex, psychotherapy and its role in making humans conformist. They demolish the Daddy-Mommy-Me triangle and its implications in making us conformists quite effectively.

However, it may be borne in mind that there have been better criticisms of Freud's theories and Deleuze/Guattari are in some respects more Freudian than Freud with their libidinal interpretations of human beings as desiring machines and of economy as investment of desire (libidnal economy).

To sum up, this work is worth reading for its analysis of capitalism, and to some extent for its critique of psychoanalysis. However this is not a work that offers hope for the oppressed or an agenda for political action although followers of Deleuze/Guattari like Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou take their philosophy in a more positive direction. The best portion is the third section, followed by second. The least satisfactory portions and the last and the first, although they are essential to read in order to understand the relevant middle portion of the work.

And of course human beings are not desiring machines no matter what Deleuze/Guattari say. Beyond a metaphor, machinism is delusory. We are what we are. Happy to be human and animal rather than machines. Much as post-structuralist and post-modernists dismiss the question of the subject, the question remains - alive and active and kicking. ... Read more

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a rare insight into the life of a painter
I've been a painter now for over 20 years and very rarely have I come across the kind of insight and intelligence demonstrated in this wonderful book. For some reason at art school I avoided Deleuze but I'm glad I found him at what is probably the right time for me and my development as a painter.

I also read this book after seeing the recent Bacon retrospective at Tate Britain and its words resonated all the more clearly for this. As a discussion on the life and work of Bacon I feel it isinsightful if not biographically informative (but that's not really the aim or purpose here), but Deleuze goes much further than this. At its best it offers a series of interpretive, intellectual models of analysis for artists. Like Bergson before him, Deleuze offers a non prescriptive and discursive manual for others to spring from. It manages to confront that terrible old dichotomy of theory versus practice by creating a performative space in written language that has a qualitative relationship to the stuff of paint, bodily movement, smell and touch.

A must have book, not just for painters but for anyone interested in visual art and philosophy. It's also a very good introduction to the work of one the 20th century's greatest thinkers

modernist polemics
this is an excellent book for any artist or intellectual interested in modern art. Deleuze understands the canvas better than bacon,creating powerful justifications for the modern approach to art .
though people criticize him for unintelligablethinking,i feel it is more appropriate to say deleuze wages a war on the cliche, which includes our habitual methods ofthinking...to understand deleuze is to graduate from the sterile plane of habitual thought and enter a zone of creativity ..a zone that deleuze recognizes as the arena of art..

Cerebral Bacon
Gilles Deleuze is one of France's most important philosophers, and in that role he has influenced many branches of the arts with his scholarly investigation of the subjects he chooses to investigate.

Deleuze here writes about the 'sensational' aspects of Francis Bacon's art, art which he knows well, living with several of Bacon's works in his home.His exploration of the inspiration of Bacon's various trademark strokes and subjects grows naturally out of his applying philosophical musings on visual subjects: this book is a thesis on aesthetics for which Bacon is simply but powerfully the nidus.

Though the book was written in 1981, it remains one of the more fascinating books on aesthetics and the influences on Bacon's work along with sidebars on music, film, and writing that make the work more of an informed 'novel' than simply the intellectual volume it is.For this reader the addition of more visuals would have made more of an impact, but the writing (or translation from the French!) is so seethingly seductive that soon the visuals would become secondary.This is a tough read but a most important one.Grady Harp, July 06

new dimension about the will to knowledge
in this book, deleuze demonstrates that modern knowledge is no longer powered by dialectics or rationale, but by human sensuality. bacon's work is a good example to show that how art owns the ability to go beyonddiscourses. ... Read more

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In a remarkable instance of literary and philosophical interpretation, the incomparable Gilles Deleuze reads Marcel Proust's work as a narrative of an apprenticeship-more precisely, the apprenticeship of a man of letters. Considering the search to be one directed by an experience of signs, in which the protagonist learns to interpret and decode the kinds and types of symbols that surround him, Deleuze conducts us on a corollary search-one that leads to a new understanding of the signs that constitute A la recherche du temps perdu.

In Richard Howard's graceful translation, augmented with an essay that Deleuze added to a later French edition, Proust and Signs is the complete English version of this work. Admired as an imaginative and innovative study of Proust and as one of Deleuze's more accessible works, Proust and Signs stands as the writer's most sustained attempt to understand and explain the work of art.

Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, Vincennes-St. Denis. With Félix Guattari, he coauthored Anti-Oedipus (1983) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987). Among his other works are Cinema 1 (1986), Cinema 2 (1989), Foucault (1988), The Fold (1992), Essays Critical and Clinical (1997), and Francis Bacon (2003), all published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Richard Howard has received the American Book Award and the PEN Translation Medal. He teaches in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. ... Read more

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Only Art Will Save Us Now
A somewhat peculiar but readable book by Deleuze. Deleuze examines Proust's massive epic in order to look for understandings of love, time, and art. He concludes that art is the only way we really have to understand truth, all other truths denying the interpretation we are always making of the world, even its seemingly most basic parts.

Gilles Way
A short and rewarding study, more remarkable as a defense of Art than an analysis of Proust, per se. While Deleuze has many knowing admirers,I have generally found his work difficult and conceptually self-indulgent, despite having some background in post-modernist Fr. thought. This book I found very "approachable" since the Proustian theme grounds Deleuze's discourse. There were still things I didn't understand but for all that, a fascinating commentary on aspects of Proust that is, moreover, perhaps , an excellent introduction to Deleuze. Now I must go back and again try his -- you name it. Not to mention a return to Proust.

An excellent semiotic reading of Proust
I am doing a research on Proust which is very difficult but at the same time satisfactory to read. Deleuze makes an excellent reading of Proust and the meaning behind his text by referring to the certain linguistic signs. It says a lot about the reasons or the motives of the author behind the text; in other words, the truth behind the masks of words. You must read it definitely if you really like Proust or are working on his worldview. It says a lot about the age too, the Belle Epoque.

An original approach to Proust and a valuable intro to G.D
Proust is usually examined in terms of the themes of time and memory. He is, indeed, one of the few writers who has genuinely interesting philosphical insights into these phenomenon. Deleuze, however, prefers to concentrate on the circulation of signs within Proust's work. The apprenticeship of Marcel as a writer is conceived of as an exploration of different kinds of sign: the signs of love, the signs of bourgious life, the signs of art. Marcel is a decoder and producer of these different signs. He passes through the signs given in experience to arrive at the (superior) signs of art.
As someone interested in both Deleuze and Proust, I found this book consistently stimulating. What i think is especially refreshing (and philosophically valuable) in Deleuze is his ability to generate concepts from the literary text he is reading - rather then imposing prefashioned categories onto the work. His book on Kafka is particularly rewarding in this respect. ... Read more

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In this analysis of one major philosopher by another, Gilles Deleuze identifies three pivotal concepts - duration, memory, and élan vital - that are found throughout Bergson's writings and shows the relevance of Bergson's work to contemporary philosophical debates. He interprets and integrates these themes into a single philosophical program, arguing that Bergson's philosophical intentions are methodological. They are more than a polemic against the limitations of science and common sense, particularly in Bergson's elaboration of the explanatory powers of the notion of duration - thinking in terms of time rather than space. ... Read more

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Insightful into Bergson, but it's really Bergson-Deleuze
In this book, Gilles Deleuze analyzes and supplements the work of philosopher Henri Bergson. The importance of this book lies in its ability to give insights not only into the work of Bergson but also into the later work of Deleuze.

For example, the first chapter of this book deals with Bergson's method of intuition. Interestingly enough, Deleuze applies this method to Bergson's own philosophy. In very basic terms, this method involves distinguishing "differences in kind" between elements (this is important, since Bergson believes that we usually go by false generalizations) and then bring together these elements once again but such that we understand them as they truly are and not as what Deleuze calls a "badly analyzed composite". In analyzing Bergson's philosophy, Deleuze distinguishes elan vital, duration, and memomory as the basic concepts. Furthermore, each of these concepts can only be understood in terms of intuition for various reasons; for example, that only intuition can grasp pure movement (duration). Throughout this book, Deleuze usually (although not always) gives an account of Bergson's concepts without assuming complete knowledge on the part of the reader, which is helpful. However, on the other hand, Deleuze doesn't always tell us what is "his" philosophy and what is Bergson's. Because of this, "Bergsonism" should not be utilized as a summary of Bergson's work. That is, even though Deleuze is clear enough for someone with little background in Bergson to understand much of this book, this does not mean that this person would then "know Bergson" but rather a Bergson-Deleuzian hybrid. This isn't a flaw to the book; rather, it merely suggests how it ought to be read. This short book is complex, but very well written by Deleuze, allowing for a maximum amount of information to be intelligibly conveyed in relatively few pages (although this isn't necessarily true of his later work); it moves at a brisk pace without losing the reader and is reccomended for both readers of Bergson and Deleuze.

An Important Book on Bergson and Deleuze
This book is about Bergsonfs notions (especially matter and memory), but constitutes Deleuzefs view of the world because of his own interpretation of Bergson. At first, Deleuze mentions to this bookfs aim which is todetermine the relationship between the three notions, duration, memory, andelan vital in Bergsonfs philosophy. Then, he considers intuition inBergson which would be a method to achieve the aim. He sets five rules onintuition and probes the relationship between the three notions. Finally,he relates them in the process of differentiation. This notion ofgdifferentiationh is very important in Deleuzefs philosophy, which isclear in his other books. Moreover, this book contains some interestingdiscussions such as criticism to Einsteinfs theory and to evolutionism. Ithink that this book is important to understand Deleuzefs philosophy andthat it must be a very helpful guide to read his gCinema 1: TheMovement-Imageh and gCinema 2: The Time-Imageh. ... Read more

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For students of philosophy, this book was first published in France in 1986. It examines Foucault's principal themes - knowledge, power and the nature of subjectivity. Both a critique and an interpretation, it should be of interest to anyone concerned with Foucault and the impact of his ideas. ... Read more

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A fabulous hommage, I am floored.
Being a Foucault fanatic who had never read Deleuze, I bought this merely because I wanted to read more about my favorite author and also because I knew how influential and important Deleuze was, not only for Foucault himself but in the field of continental philosophy in the last century.

The further I read, the more fascinating I found Deleuze's analysis of Foucault's works and methods.Although he places his focus on mainly "The Archaeology of Knowledge" and "Discipline and Punish", he makes constant references to Foucault's otherimportant works.

What stands out as completely unique is the utterly and unsurpassably rigorous way in which Deleuze reads Foucault.Deleuze's prose is decidedly difficult, but if you're a Foucault reader who has had some contact with postmodern theories in the past then you'll at least grasp the meaning of his words.

What's more, Deleuze breaks down Foucault's epistemological and methodological theorizing to their barest, making this an extremely important learning experience for those who wish to understand Foucault in-depth.

This book is essential, but I also recommend you read it once you've become fairly familiar with Foucault... and as I said, I had never read Deleuze but that didn't stop me from finding this book to be absolute food for thought.Granted, it needs to be read MANY times to fully appreciate its potential and maybe integrate Deleuze's reflections into any kind of practical research... because I also found it to be enlightening in that respect.

Had Foucault lived to read this book, I'm sure he would have been humbled to tears.

Magnificent.

An introduction? Perhaps. The essentials? Without a doubt
While it is true that this is not an introduction to the thought of Foucault - Deleuze instead called his book a 'portrait' - on the other hand it is such a masterful grasp of Foucault's philosophy, written in chapters that move progressively from one essential stage of Foucault's thought to another until the bigger picture emerges, that one cannot but wonder whether one has really read Foucault until one encounter's Deleuze's portrait of him. So in that sense, if one means that an introductory book should truly explain the material, then this is without doubt an introduction to the thought of Foucault, and one not likely to be surpassed. This is a short book, around 130 pages. Given the Parisian milieu in which Foucault worked, and for a time was very good friends with Deleuze (Deleuze refers in this book to manuscripts that Foucault never published), this book offers us a highly developed look from the left bank onto the problems that Foucault found himself working through, and it articulates them chapter by chapter: each chapter is devoted to one philosophical problem, and then moves to the next level and onto a different problem in the following chapter, thereby allowing Deleuze to unfold the problems (there are three, under the rubric of Topology) and explicate their relation to Foucault's thought as a whole. It is in this sense that Deleuze's book is a philosophical portrait: he has captured the essentials of the philosophical thought that underlies Foucault's work. The style of the book is predicated on repetition, or seriality, which may madden some; but so long as one understands the book as a progression or unfolding the reader should be able to adjust his or her reading habits accordingly. A word of caution is however necessary: this translation is a very sloppy job, and the buyer should be aware of that. I have not taken off any stars for Sean Hand's failure here, as I am assuming that the reader only has access to the book in its English version. But it is not going too far to note in a review that this is the worst translation into English of any of Deleuze's books (which normally receive meticulous care), which is all the more unfortunate, because it is so very insightful.

Good Book
I am not sure where some of this hostility comes from but in my opinion this was a very interesting work regarding one of the pioneers of poststructuralist philosophy. The knowledge of Deleuze is in my opinion unparalleled. This is a very good book and as Nathan said above you do need to be well read in both philosophers. This would be especially helpful just to understand the writing style of deleuze. He is quite difficult. Regardless, I found this to be a great introductory text to one of the greatest philosophers of the modern era.

A pointless book-the blind by the blind
First off, I must state that I do typically enjoy philosophy.However, this book made me question myself.

I have read a fair amount of Foucault, and consider myself to have a strong grasp of his ideas.I stubbornly kept on through the dense and boring texts, until I finally understood it.I had heard some people talking about Deleuze with awe in their voices, as if he was some kind of god, so I figured he was an intersting/important philosopher.I picked up this book, and boy was I disappointed.

First of all, Deleuze seems incapable of writing a coherent sentence.The grammar and spelling in this text were atrocious.This may be a function of the translation, but somehow I doubt it.Secondly, Deleuze never really SAYS anything.It is all masturbatory talk.Now that I consider it, so is Foucault.So perhaps my title should instead be "the masturbatory by the masturbatory".

And as for the comments below me, by Nathan, you are far too kind to the book."[I]t is nonetheless brilliant and intellectually rigorous".Excuse me?This was perhaps the least interesting or stimulating book I have read in the last 5 years!And for you to say that this book is a philosophical masterpiece is simply ridiculous.Philosophical Grammer is a philosophical masterpiece.Being and Time is a philosophical masterpiece.Beyond Good and Evil is a philosophical masterpiece.This is not.In conclusion, this is most certainly NOT a treat.

DON'T BUY THIS BOOK!

The Rhizomatic Foucault...
Is there an event in philosophy called Deleuze-Foucault?In 'Theatrum Philosophicum' Foucault uncovers Deleuze's philosophy as well as elucidates his own agenda.In 'Foucault' Deleuze teaches us how Foucaultworks--perhaps they shared this event in philosophy?There is perhaps noone better to learn philosophy from than Deleuze... Perhaps one day theworld will become Deleuzian after all. ... Read more

Product Description

Praised for its rare combination of scholarly rigor and imaginative interpretation,Nietzsche and Philosophy has long been recognized as one of the most important analyses of Nietzsche. It is also one of the best introductions to Deleuze's thought, establishing many of his central philosophical positions.

InNietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze identifies and explores three crucial concepts in Nietzschean thought-multiplicity, becoming, and affirmation-and clarifies Nietzsche's views regarding the will to power, eternal return, nihilism, and difference. For Deleuze, Nietzsche challenged conventional philosophical ideas and provided a means of escape from Hegel's dialectical thinking, which had come to dominate French philosophy. He also offered a path toward a politics of difference. In this new edition, Michael Hardt's foreword examines the profound influence of Deleuze's provocative interpretations on the study of Nietzsche, which opened a whole new avenue in postwar thought.

Customer Reviews (11)

This one started it all
I was putting together my thesis on Nietzsche and, after pouring through the traditional secondary texts, was directed to Deleuze.Roughly twelve years later, I finally felt like I was able to make some sense of the damn thing.

Nietzsche wrote "for those with ears to hear".Deleuze heard and wrote in the same voice.Or, at least, with the same timbre.Brilliant, insightful, powerful, dense, abstract, chock-full of enough neologisms to make Webster blush.This book might be a complete departure from Nietzsche.But that is the point.While many might read closer to the letter of Nietzsche, no-one evokes the spirit.Not even close.

It is one of those ultra-rare literary experiences that challenges you to your utmost limit - never giving you a step of ground, but always hinting (seductively) at the glory at the top of the mountain.

If you read Nietzsche and felt that somehow all of the commentaries were a little "off", a little simplistic, then buy this book and give it a read.

one of the greatest books i have ever read
i firstpicked up nietzsche and philosophy in 1989and couldnt make it past the first chapter which discusses theories of forces,semiotics, and other unintelligable things..i regarded the bookas 'hyper abstract'..
I returned again to it in 1996 after reading deleuze's interviews, and, with a more general understanding of his ideas,the book became a revelation for me.
Deleuze presents a systematic and coherent philosophy for nietzsche, one which grounds hisrather paradoxical and sometimes enigmatic writings. deleuze clearly expresses nietzsche's core concerns, showing the sanity and genius ofthis sometimes denigrated 'mad' philosopher.
Its a pity this book will never find itself in the self help section because thats where it belongs..Feeling depressed and worthless? A bit burnt out or indifferent? read this book!Whilemost philosophy falls to the side with abstractions, nietzsche and philosophy goes after life itself , attacking every nihilistic habit in our psychic, social, and cosmological repetoire. Deleuze tracesnietzsche's assertions on how we are reactive and despicablecreatures and goes on toshowwhy and how wecan overcome, well, all those things that make humanity "the skin disease of earth'.....
so...since we all suffer from nihilism and its ailments, Nietzsche and philosophy provides antidotes and cure for our human condition...

below are some less than praiseworthy comments on this book..deleuze appropriates nietzsche, for example...or deleuze says simple things in a complicated manner...this is nonsense..
readers, this is not an easy book to grasp..its takes a few readings to fully understand whats being said..people who dont like this book just simply fail to understand it...or havent read it through at least once..
that may be the books fault..but if simple ideas are what one seeks, then try simplistic books. ..this isnt one of them

Fine for people who know Nietzsche or philosophy
Nietzsche would be the primary example of a philosopher who produced his work without being subject to the limitations which a publisher who was aware of refined taste and the boundaries of public opinion might have imposed.Reading NIETZSCHE AND PHILOSOPHY by Gilles Deleuze in an English translation by Hugh Tomlinson, with a new Preface by Deleuze written for the translation in 1983 of a work originally published in French in 1962, serves as a reminder of the limits imposed on thoughts which are expressed within a scholarly milieu.Philosophy is a goal which can easily be imposed upon Nietzsche because Nietzsche's writings show an in depth knowledge of pre-Platonic and Schopenhauer's philosophies, and a meaning restricted to the confines of decent philosophical practice is entirely praiseworthy.

What else could Nietzsche show?Pornographic practices hardly fit well in a social setting, and Nietzsche's tendencies to show autoerotic mental patterns in his approach to what Deleuze designates as species activities and culture lie beyond the scope of anything considered in this book.Nietzsche might also be thought to emphasize jokes and laughter somewhat more than Deleuze, who is not afraid to devote sections of this book to The Essence of the Tragic, The Problem of Existence, Hierarchy, Will to Power and Feeling of Power, Against Pessimism and against Schopenhauer, Realisation of Critique, The Concept of Truth, Art, The Problem of Pain, Bad Conscience, Responsibility, Guilt, Nihilism, Analysis of Pity, Nihilism and Transmutation:the focal point, Affirmation and Negation, and even Dionysus and Zarathustra.In fantasy as in reality, Nietzsche's ideas are suitable for consideration in a book on philosophy because they are capable of operating on a high level where "the selection of being which constitutes Nietzsche's ontology:only that which becomes in the fullest sense of the word can return, is fit to return."(Preface to the English translation, p. xi).

Before proceeding to compare this book to the works of Nietzsche which it discusses, it behooves me to remind myself and others how I obtained knowledge of the market for books by building a collection of rejection slips for MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK, which culminated in a letter informing me that such a book was extralimital to the presses' goals, particularly in philosophy.Even NIETZSCHE AND PHILOSOPHY seems to be aware of the joke which made a free world attack on godless Communists ironic:

"Pluralism is the properly philosophical way of thinking, the one invented by philosophy :the only guarantor of freedom in the concrete spirit, the only principle of a violent atheism.The Gods are dead but they have died from laughing, on hearing one God claim to be the only one, `Is not precisely this godliness, that there are gods but no God?'(Z III `Of the Apostates', p. 201).And the death of this God, who claimed to be the only one, is itself plural;the death of God is an event with a multiple sense.This is why Nietzsche does not believe in resounding `great events', but in the silent plurality of senses of each event (Z II `Of Great Events').There is no event, no phenomenon, word or thought which does not have a multiple sense."(p. 4).

The very funny thing that separates Nietzsche from this totally philosophical reflection on his work is the declaration "and I have seen the truth naked, truly! barefoot to the neck."(Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, "Of Great Events" translated by R. J. Hollingdale, p. 153).Considering this pornographic is a sign of the loss of appetite for further thinking along this line.Nietzsche appropriately saved this thought for after:

"And this is the tale of Zarathustra's conversation with the fire-dog:

"The earth (he said) has a skin; and this skin has diseases.One of these diseases, for example, is called `Man'.

"And another of these diseases is called `the fire-dog':men have told many lies and been told many lies about him."

The sense of condemnation that clings to experiences of this nature might be considered anti-social when applied to an existing society.Social activity is a narrow form of human endeavor, compared to which philosophy might be considered a vast wasteland, but one that is subject to considerable change.Comparing books about philosophers to the philosophers themselves, including the things which they did not say in their books, but sometimes only in their notebooks, is an activity fraught with confusion.Deleuze can be given credit for devoting much of his book to the philosophical context in which each philosopher has a unique self occupying a particular point in the grand sweep of ideas, but Deleuze and Nietzsche might not coincide in their views on particular individuals.The first example in the book, on "Nietzsche's twofold struggle:against those who remove values from criticism, contenting themselves with producing inventories of existing values or with criticising things in the name of established values (the `philosophical labourers', Kant and Schopenhauer, BGE 211)" (p. 2), does not mention the same philosophers as BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL section 211, in which Nietzsche observed:

"Those philosophical labourers after the noble exemplar of Kant and Hegel have to take some great fact of evaluation--that is to say, former assessments of value, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a while called `truths'--and identify them and reduce them to formulas, whether in the form of logic or of politics (morals) or of art."

Nietzsche sometimes considered Schopenhauer a better kind of philosopher, as in "it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind," but subject to the question, "Are there such philosophers today?Have there been such philosophers?Must there not be such philosophers?"(BGE 211).

Politics and philosophy have much in common.As Deleuze wrote, "It is difficult in fact to stop the dialectic and history on the common slope down which they drag each other.Does Marx . . . ?"(p. 162).

Dire
There are two ways to read this book. It could be read as an attempt to present what Nietzsche thought, or the perhaps unconscious core of his thought, or it could be read as a statement of Deleuze's own philosophy. Considered as the former, it is worse than useless. Deleuze's methodology is poor; he quotes selectively, and relies too much on the posthumous notes published by Nietzsche's sister, ignoring those that explicitly refute his claims. For example, he denies that Nietzsche ever considered that the eternal recurrence might be a literal truth about the world; this ignores, amongst others, a note in which Nietzsche sat down to calculate that it must actually happen given a finite number of atoms in the universe that they find themselves in the same configuration again. Furthermore, he attempts to consider Nietzsche's entire oeuvre as a coherent whole, entirely forgetting the enormous changes it underwent as he developed his thought. He makes no attempt to discover what questions Nietzsche actually set out to answer. Therefore, as a contribution to the Nietzsche bibliography, it is eminently forgettable.

As a work of Deleuzean philosophy, one has to be accustomed to this style of writing. If you are the type of person who finds mystic writings and meditations on religious texts to your taste, you'll probably enjoy his barely-coherent style and habit of presenting simplistic truisms as though they give great insight into the universe. Equally, if you feel that sophistication is best demonstrated by cloaking your meaning in meaningless words and phrases just for the pretty effect of oxymorons, then you'll be happy here. Otherwise, don't waste your time.

The best book about Nietzsche
Nietzsche was not a systematic thinker and so it is very difficult to construct a book on his difficult thought.Deleuze has, however, successfully accomplished that.A combined reading of this work and Pierre Klossowski's "Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle" would provide an understanding of Nietzsche that is well beyond what is presented in most books on the author.It is sad, but we english speakers have collectively written most of the bad literature on Nietzsche.It was the french after WWII that picked-up the mantle set forth by Nietzsche after the embarrassing abuse of his thought by the Nazis. ... Read more

Product Description
Since its publication in 1968, "Difference and Repetition", an exposition of the critique of identity, has come to be considered a contemporary classic in philosophy and one of Deleuze's most important works. The text follows the development of two central concepts, those of pure difference and complex repetition. It shows how the two concepts are related, difference implying divergence and decentring, repetition being associated with displacement and disguising. The work moves deftly between Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Althusser and Nietzsche to establish a fundamental critique of Western metaphysics, and has been a central text in initiating the shift in French thought - away from Hegel and Marx, towards Nietzsche and Freud. The author's other works include "Nietzsche and Philosophy" (1983), "Kant's Critical Philosophy" (1984), "Cinema I" (1986), "Cinema II" (1989) and "Logic of Sense" (1990). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Deleuze: 1968
One of the most radical evaluations of Western phenomenology and metaphysics, this book also contains the seeds of a radical political philosophy.A must read.

Don't read it, use it!
Just as all his books, this book should be used, no read (as Foucault puts it).
It is not a difficult book, except if you try to read it.
I tend to read every paragraph twice and go back every couple of pages and re-do it all. This is where meaning starts to emerge. Then you can use it as many times as you want.

This is Deleuze before taking off. This is not his greatest book. This book represents Deleuze talking to his past and contemporaries. Deleuze talking to us, now, about representation, individuality, etc. The unrepresentative future will bring MP to the top.

4 stars because there are next and "more unique" steps in his flight, this is the take off. It's obviously fundamental: no take off, no flight.

This book might be too much philosophy for the non initiated. MP (ou AE) is definitely a better start as its fun is much more accessible.

The brilliance of Deleuze
Difference and Repetition is the most brilliant work of philosophy I have read. However the book does rely on a huge amount of background knowledge which took my over a year and a half to compile. My advice for any reader attempting to read D&R is to read Manuel DeLanda's Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. All of the obscure references to mathematical and scientific concepts are throuroughly explicated in DeLandas book. I can honestly say that if it were not for Intensice Philsosophy and Virtual Science I would not have been able to comprehend the key philosophical concepts deployed in D&R such as singlarities as pre-individual attractors and the nature of the virtual.

D&R is a work which may require intense effort from the reader, as none of the concepts are adequately explained by deleuze himself. But the challenge is most rewarding as the book gives you the concepts to think about a world without pre established identities and stabilities. Only now is science beginning to comprehend the universe as inherently random and dynamical which gives rise to complex self organizing systems.

A classic of modern philosophy and a brilliant achievement by an author who thought outside all contemporary philosophical trends to overthrow the 'father' of philosophy: Plato.

Much worth the effort, if a 19 year old Undergraduate can make sense of this book then anyone with enough time, patience and conceptualisation should be able to master this brilliant work.

Grounding a Philosophy of Difference
This is (arguably) the most important work written by Deleuze for a reason that seems to me is often obscured or merely forgotten: it is (maybe) the only work that seeks to lay the foundation for a systematic treatment of `difference' and by ex-tension (or in-tension) `repetition'. It does not seek to derive `difference' and `repetition' (simply) from identity and the in-dividual. It seeks to think of `difference' and `repetition' in themselves. And this is what is important here: thinking (and not some petty play of figures and words in the frontal attacks or soul mating with particular thinkers) in its rhizomatic form rather than its arborescent one.

What is therefore central in this work is `idea', and (therefore) `perception'. In simple terms, Deleuze has managed to provide us with some foundational links with the philosophies of mind, language and time (and moreover besides). He has given to the philosophy of difference a central and unifying role (across such and other disciplines) to play.

In this sense `difference' and `repetition' are not only (simply) linked between them (in the sense that one leads to the other), but also linked with other important notions usually discussed and developed in other (philosophical) disciplines. Let me provide some brief indications.

Chapter 1 is concerned with `difference', not as mere `diversity', `otherness' or `negation', bur rather as `general' or `specific' difference, where the latter refers to the moment when difference is reconciled with the concept in general. In this manner, Deleuze sees `difference' as a concept of reflection in relation to `representation' that involves `movement'. He further discusses the notion of `eternal return' and questions the adoption of a `meta-viewpoint' for thinking about `difference' and `repetition' - the latter being the relation between originals and simulacra.

In chapter 2, Deleuze lays out the relation between (the dualities) `repetition' and `sensing', `habit', and `difference', under the guise that "difference inhabits repetition", in that it "lies between two repetitions" (p.76). He also makes the distinction between `natural' and `artificial' signs, hence the distinction between two types of `difference', one being the expression of the other. In parallel, he distinguishes `active' from `passive' synthesis (relative to time) in that "the activity of thought applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject" (p.86). Finally drawing on Bergson, he distinguishes the `real' centre from where emanates a series of `perception-images' from a `virtual' centre from where emanates a series of `memory-images'.

Chapter 3 is for Deleuze the most important (sic) because the thinking of `difference' and `repetition' is based on a dogmatic image of thought characterised by eight postulates, each with a dual form, the artificial and the natural.

In Chapter 4, this duality underlies the development of the notion of `idea' in that it is problematic, hence dialectical, an "n-dimensional, continuous, defined multiplicity" (p.182) in a `perplication' as the distinctive and coexistent state of ideas. Each `idea' is thus linked with `difference' and `representation' in that"the representation of difference refers to the identity of the concept as its principle" (p.178). In this manner he makes the claim for the superiority of problematic-questioning approach over the (traditional) hypothetico-apodictic approach because questions are imperatives.

Chapter 5 starts with the claim that "difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse" (p.222). Difference is therefore (a given) `intensity' expressed as `extensity'. There is `depth' that unites intensity and extensity. Therefore, `depth' is the intensity of being from where emerge at once extensity and the qualities of being. In this manner Deleuze accepts a dual condition of difference: one natural and one artificial.

In the concluding chapter Deleuze argues that 'representation' is a site of transcendental illusion which comes in four interrelated forms relative to `thought', `sensibility', `idea' and `being'. Hence the problematic of 'grounding' representation and his argument (or Idea) for 'groundlessness', and the justification of the use of (systems of) 'simulacra' as sites for the actualisation of ideas. Hence that of `difference' and `repetition' where the former is not only located between the levels and degrees of the latter, but also has two faces, namely, habit and memory.

Overall, despite the difficulty of the text itself as it takes for granted knowledge of the philosophies of some other thinkers (e.g. Bergson), it is a central text in the philosophy of difference and for just this reason, a text one must have read!

Deleuze is a monster
Difference and repetition struck me as nothing I've ever read before has struck me. The fun thing about "reading" it, is that, when you think about it, the act of reading itself makes understanding parts of this work more clear. Reading this becomes a "machinic" activity as it were: immediate, affective, with its own unpredictability, with many gaps, moments of insight, despair, and so on. It seems contradictory, because I think it is the most rigorous and analytic of all of Deleuzes works. But it is immensely dense, as other reviewers also say.
It is certainly the crucial work in his oeuvre. Really if you have tried it a few times, you will notice that many ideas of his later work are based on the crucial notions of this grand exploration. Anti-Oedipe is such a delight to read and easy to understand after this one.

And I think it is good for those who want to approach Deleuze's thought, to start with the Anti-Oedipus and Mille Plateaux, then read some of the smaller and intensive works (What is philosophy, Leibniz et le Baroque). Then try this book. You will get many references and want to read all others once again.

It is clearly in this work that you will find the first monstrous and frontal attack against Hegel's dialectic. The fun thing is that this is a complete "anti-work". Every conceivable concept of modern philosophy (from the concept of "common sense", "history", or "being") gets an "anti", with which Deleuze consistently builds his grand idea of the immediate, the pre- or non-representational and the virtual--against any metaphysics. It is moreover his first, and I think also his last work where he builds his philosophy in a consistent manner.
After this one, I think he started exploring fragments of his thought more deeply, in his other works, which are derivatives so to speak. This is his goodbye to classic French philosphy (strong tradition of exploring the "history of philosophy") and his entrée into his own experimentation with the concepts he just developed.
To conclude, just some practical notes. The problem with the book is that, unlike his other works, you have to read all of it (because it is so consistent). This makes it a project for months, or even years. Good luck. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Called by many France's foremost philosopher, Gilles Deleuze is one of the leading thinkers in the Western World. His acclaimed works and celebrated collaborations with Félix Guattari have established him as a seminal figure in the fields of literary criticism and philosophy. The long-awaited publication ofin English marks the culmination of Deleuze's career.Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between philosophy, science, and the arts, seeing as means of confronting chaos, and challenge the common view that philosophy is an extension of logic. The authors also discuss the similarities and distinctions between creative and philosophical writing. Fresh anecdotes from the history of philosophy illuminate the book, along with engaging discussions of composers, painters, writers, and architects.A milestone in Deleuze's collaboration with Guattari,brings a new perspective to Deleuze's studies of cinema, painting, and music, while setting a brilliant capstone upon his work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

Deleuze - Guattarion Philosophy, Excellent Read

Nicely reasoned work on the role of philosophy, science, and art in the human approach to organizing meaning in the material world. Deleuze is of course a key thinker in terms of understanding the current state of how we come to terms with origins and potentialities.It can be difficult at times because of translation and the unique terminology necessary to explore certain innovative concepts; but if you're not familiar with Deleuze, and want a fresh look at the subject, this is a good start.

Excellent Analysis
Of course Deleuze and Guattari's self-explication does not read like an introduction to philosophy, but this compact and rich text is a wonderful and provocative entry into their work. Deleuze has brilliantly reconceived philosophy as the production of concepts and has attempted to reintroduce metaphysics back into the project of creative thinking. If accepted, this is a radical and crucial turning point in the development of contemporary philosophy-Heidegger may not have the final word on metaphysics after all. This difficult text is composed of three essential parts, concepts, science, and art. There are mordantly brilliant critiques of logic and positivism here, as well as crucial articulations of Deleuze's commitment to artistic expression. In the final analysis, it is the `plane of immanence' that grips me most completely. The power and radicality of Deleuzian metaphysics will be felt for a long time.

Philosophy is Creation
Deleuze and Guattari's masterful reconception of thought, succinctly packaged and clearly articulated - although not the clear articulation you might expect. D&G define philosophy as "the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts," as opposed to science's art of describing patterns that already exist, or art's creation of percepts and sensations. Part One explains the nature of the concept; the plane of immanence on which all philosophy depends; the philosopher's use of conceptual personae to explore their concepts (like Plato's Socrates or Nietzsche's Zarathustra); and tracing the movement of the concept through its formations and reformations (what D&G call territorialization and deterritorialization). Part Two then compares philosophy's role to science's and arts, reserving special criticism for logic's (misguided) assumption of philosophy's role. Finally, D&G creatively introduce the brain as the intersection of these three planes: philosophy, science, and art. A wonderful final masterpiece from two "conceptual personae" who really cause us to think in an original way, and will not settle for anything less.

If you liked Khalil Ghibran, you will swoon over this.
Here is the big picture:thought has "three great forms -- art, science, and philosophy...."(197) This three-part framework is not explicated, but these categories clearly refer to culture, leaving out distasteful areas of culture, such as technology, which are certainly merely "material."
To explain culture, the writers move back and forth between two varieties of positivism: intellectualistic positivism and anti-intellectual positivism.Intellectualistic positivism is the position associated with Hume, Hobbes, and Locke that reduces culture to ways of thinking, especially among intellectuals.Anti-intellectual positivism is the position associated with Malthus and Darwin, and that derives culture from some underlying biological forces.

The book is divided into two parts.

Part I says that "forms" of culture arise from composing one's feelings (art), referring to instants of experience by measuring motion (science), and forming concepts (philosophy)."Concept" is some entity of "thought.""Concept" is never defined but is catalogued by words like "fragmentary whole, plural," and "incorporeal."Concepts, references, and feelings make up "planes," also never defined, which are "immanent" for concepts, "referent" for science, and "monumental" for art.
The "plane of immanence" among the academic philosophers is the highest plane, of course:
"If the three ages of the concept are the encyclopedia, pedagogy, and personal commercial training, only the second can safeguard us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third -- an absolute disaster for thought, whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism." (12)

Philosophers communicate their concepts by "personae...leaping like Kierkegaard, dancing like Nietzsche, and diving like Melville." (71)Scientists communicate their references by "observers," like Maxwell's demon (129).Artists communicate their feelings by compositions.All these are variations on the theme of intellectualistic positivism, the center of which is the philosopher's acting like an atom, swirling about, intellecting concepts.

Part I closes with a digression on sociologistic positivism shading into radical anti-intellectualistic positivism.The digression is on "geophilosophy." The writers adopt a form of radical anti-intellectualistic positivism: animals form territories, abandon them, and recreate them. So "social fields are inextricable knots in which the three fields are mixed up so that in order to disentangle them, we have to diagnose real types or personae." (68) Geopolitics means that some concepts, observations, and compositions are good ones, because they are "territorialized" by relation to the values of a particular society, as among the ancient Greeks.They are "immanent."
But others are bad ones because they are "deterritorialized" by political domination.They are "transcendent."Transcendent geophilosophy is "imperial," and "paradigmatic, projective, hierarchical, referential" (89) like Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, Islamic "pre-philosophy." Immanent "geophilosophy" is "syntagmatic, connective, linking, and "consistent" (91).Because of transcendent geophilosophy, the "two great modern revolutions, American and Soviet, have turned out so badly." (100)We are in just a terrible state today, having damaged our environment with our transcendent concepts. "The Greeks lived and thought in Nature, but left Mind in the "mysteries," whereas we live, think, and feel in the Mind, in reflection, but leave Nature in a profound alchemical mystery that we constantly profane." (102)

Part II recovers from geopolitical environmentalism, and the writers return to science, portraying science as measurements or "functives...propositions in discursive systems" (117) in a "plane of reference" (127) among states, "enunciated" by..."partial observers." (129). While science has reference, philosophy has logic, which "wants to turn the concept into a function" (135), but is just the confrontation of opinions about "virtuals."Art has "composition," by which the artist memorializes his sensations, especially the unhappy depressed ones like Van Gogh, Woolf, Dickenson, and Klee.Here a variety of cultural idealism emerges, as the concepts and the compositions take over.We are treated throughout to many precious metaphors ("The philosopher is the friend of the concept") and obscure references ("Kant's hose suspenders") which show how piquant it is to be an intellect aware that "immanence is only immanent to itself." (48)
The last chapter, "From Chaos to the Brain," returns to the intellectual and anti-intellectual themes. Thought (intellectual) must be localized in the brain (organic, anti-intellectual), because opinions are an umbrella we put up to protect us from chaos."The brain is the "junction" of the three planes: immanence of philosophy, reference of science, composition of art...." (217)In sum, "Art struggles with chaos...to render it sensory...science is perhaps inspired by a sinuous reptilian movement. (205) Philosophy struggles in turn with the chaos as undifferentiated abyss or ocean of dissemblance." (207)
Their position that the object world is grounded in chaos is really an assumption that science is impossible, because "chaos" has no intrinsic order.The book has an extensively commented bibliography of mostly continental writers in the footnotes and an index that valiantly substitutes a heroic catalogue of page references for definitions, since, in the end, they say concepts cannot be defined.

Sssshhhhwweeeeeet!
Condition? Unbelievable! Delivery? It arrived so fast, time was suspended and then went backward for about half a second. Seriously. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Unabashed Apologia For the Postmodern Literary Bureaucracy
This is not good literary exegesis, it is an unabashed apologia for a literary bureaucracy, another pamphlet of the endless "literary production" under the pseudo-Marxist homology of poststructuralism. It ends up merely as a political struggle to save Kafka for purposes of cultural and intellectual identity.

This book purports to get at "the real Kafka," by stripping the man and his work of all transcendent pretensions assigned him by critics of the old school, by making him a model for the new uniformed postmodernist-socialist man. In "Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature," Deleuze and Guatarri have done the same things they accuse the old Kafkologists of doing, in effect stripping Kafka of his old Kafkalogical baggage only to create a new Kafkology, one that focuses more on a weird interpretive biography of the man as celebrity than it does by trying to understand his works in their modernist setting.

In Machina Res
According to Deleuze & Guattari, we have suffered too long amidst the retrograde critical judgements of mainstream Kafka scholarship.Ad nauseum, these pedestrian hacks have given us Kafka the alienated loner, Kafka the neurotic metaphysician, Kafka the theological invert, Kafka the gynephobic prisoner of ascesis, Kafka the self-hating Jew, Kafka the suicidal insomniac.Scholars have made their reputations by sending this great author on greased skids to Hell, earmarking him as an avatar of the Negative, a nodal point of absurdity and paradox, the pilgrim of an epic and hallucinatory Guilt Trip (partly at fault are the Muir translations, which categorically pitch the Kafkan voice as a syntax of doom and alienation).No doubt Kafka suffered immensely in his professional, family, and erotic life, in the anti-Semitic maw of Czech nationalism, in the iron-maiden of terrors both historical and metaphysical, but critics who reach their limit in expounding the pain and absurdity of the Kafka trajectory are providing us with a false and incomplete picture of this sublime literary event.

D & G decided to bring the hammer down on these reflexive doomsayers, to restore some of the joy and vibrant panache to Kafka studies.They wanted to bring him "`a little of this joy, this amorous political life that he knew how to offer, how to invent.So many dead writers must have wept over what was written about them.[We] hope that Kafka enjoyed the book that we wrote about him'"(xxv).It is useful to recall the evening Kafka read the opening chapter of *The Trial* to his circle of literary friends, assailed by roars of laughter, Kafka himself laughing so hard he had to constantly stop reading to wipe tears from his eyes.The ramifications of this episode have been repressed and overturned by the necrophilic martyrology of a reflexive Kafka scholarship.For here we have gone beyond any mere "laughter of the Abyss," the impish cackle of "black comedy," the doomed precincts of Camus's "cosmology of the Absurd."Kafka's hilarity is a laughter of resistance, of felicity, of squeezing some measure of freedom out of our peremptory and obstructionist universe.As argued in this text, the battle is within and against the political, economic, technological, bureaucratic, judiciary, and linguistic machines which held Kafka's language in thrall to its obstacles and terrors.

Here is a cento of principles developed by D & G in their dissenting text, the prolegomenon to any future in Kafka scholarship:

1. Isolation from the Law is not merely the absence of God (coinciding with the SNAFU of metaphysical realism) but rather entails the eternal suspension of judgement, ultimately an Artaudian desire "to have done with Judgement."

2. The question of ASCESIS.Deleuze has long underscored the idea that when a writer or philosopher espouses an "ascetic" lifestyle it is only as a means to achieving a more subterranean pitch of libertinism (or Life).Kafka had plenty of opportunities for conventional happiness, to live the life of a Max Brod, for example.Rather he followed the witch's wind of literary apprenticeship, a far profounder Life although, from a judgemental distance, appearing monstrous and ill-fated.

3. Kafka's oeuvre is characterized by a complete lack of *complacency*, and stands accordingly as a total rejection of every problematic of Failure.His suicidal fantasies, then, were not merely an agonizing cry of despair, but also a series of unmerciful thought-experiments designed to charge the literary machine, to clear the waters for fresh speculation.

4. Reflexive scholarship tends to move backward from unknowns to knowns (i.e. the castle is God, the beetle is oedipal frustration, the penal colony is fascism, the singing mouse is a writer, and writers are those who express CONTENT and represent THINGS).Rather we should take Walter Benjamin to his limit, by acclimatizing ourselves to a mode of literature "that consists in propelling the most diverse contents on the basis of (nonsignifying) ruptures and intertwinings of the most heterogeneous orders of signs and powers"(xvii).

5. Renovate the battlefield...: reterritorialize Kafka's "metaphysical" estrangement onto the concrete political arrangements with which he engaged throughout his life.Understand the political or "fantasmatic" nature of Kafka's simulations, that his fictions are not merely an allegory of resistance to fascism, but the infiltration of a ruptured sensibility into the fascistic functioning of the Law, a node of deterritorialization inside the torn apart.

6. The desire for innocence is as pernicious as the fetishization of guilt, since both imply an Infinity by which we can define and calibrate Judgement.Justice is desire and not law.Desire is a social investment traversed and legitimized by Kafka's literary machine, which "is capable of anticipating or precipitating contents into conditions that...concern an entire collectivity"(60), which speak for a people that may not be prepared to live through its message.

Perhaps I'm trying too hard to cram difficult arguments into tiny hard-to-swallow capsules.The text itself has to be read to be believed.Perhaps in response to those who felt *Capitalism and Schizophrenia* did not provide enough "concrete examples," D & G have steered their war-machine onto one of the most treacherous and misunderstood literary oeuvres of the preceding century.The result will either leave you cold (as is the case with virtually every reader I've conferred with on this text) or revolutionize your jilted perceptions of a great author.

Kafka and Deleuze hand-in-hand.
The detailed concepts on how Gilles Deleuze read Kafka still amazed me. To understand Deleuze, one must read Deleuze in relation to Kafka. ... Read more

Product Description

In recent years, the recognition of Gilles Deleuze as one of the major philosophers of the twentieth century has heightened attention to his brilliant and complex writings on film. What is the place of Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 in the corpus of his philosophy? How and why does Deleuze consider cinema as a singular object of philosophical attention, a specific mode of thought? How does his philosophy of film combine and further his approaches to time, movement, and perception, and how does it produce an escape from subjectivity and a plunge into the immanence of images? How does it recode and utilize Henri Bergson's thought and André Bazin's film theory? What does it tell us about perceiving a world in images -- indeed about our relation to the world?

These are the central questions addressed in Paola Marrati's powerful and clear elucidation of Deleuze's philosophy of film. Humanities, film studies, and social science scholars will find this book a valuable contribution to the philosophical literature on cinema and its pertinence in contemporary life.

Customer Reviews (9)

On the Translation
Please forgive me for commenting on an English translation that I have not read, but honestly I was put off from purchasing the English edition by the complaints of several reviewers, so I purchased a French edition instead.I am familiar with Deleuze and Leibniz, but not a specialist in either per se.I read French well enough, but not with the acumen of a French professor.However, Deleuze's French is deliberate and concise, startlingly brilliant and terse. Moreover, the substantive content of the text is not particularly difficult for anyone who has some mastery of the philosophical issues behind Leibniz' mathematics and the development of the calculus or a general mastery of Deleuze.After spending a few days with the French text, I find it highly unlikely that a Harvard French professor with the complicity of the University of Minnesota Press would botch such an important translation.Just for example, one reviewer complained about the word "corps."In Leibniz's philosophical writings on mathematics, natural philosophy, or the mathematical qua philosophical problem of the continuum, for example, he uses the word "body" and "bodies" any number of times in mathematical contexts ... for example "On Minima and Maxima: On Bodies and Minds" (1672-73), "On Body, Space, and the Continuum" (1676), "A Body is not a Substance" (1679), just to name a few.If you are interested in Deleuze's wonderful little book and can't read the French with as much profit or pleasure as an English translation, I suspect you needn't worry about the quality of the translation.With all due respect to the opinions of others...Stuart MacNiven, Rutgers University

Between Two Worlds
While my French is not good enough to judge others, I find it very easy to believe that this translation is not good. I found this book the most difficult of Deleuze's works, and I think the translator did not understand his task. To recover I needed to undertake a rereading of Leibniz so I could see through the English text before me and re-establish the original terms and questions.

Still, if you do not read French well, this very important book should not escape you even in this edition. Leibniz was a giant at the watershed between faith and science who was able to span this divide and think with complexity and innovation about the soul and mathematics. Since then, few can handle either vocabulary with such perspective, and almost none, save Deleuze, have tried to understand the demands of both.

If one does not, as almost all do, take for granted the givens of the centered subject and the rational world, their mutual differences demand a theory as powerful as the complexities they evoke. This book attempts to place that theory in play again with vigor.

A Refined Work of Philosophy
An earlier reviewer questioned what Deleuze was doing with Leibniz's calculus. While Leibniz's calculus is of course crucial for Deleuze, in this work Deleuze keeps returning to one equation that almost acts as a sort of musical refrain, and through it he uses Leibniz's invention to express a philosophical concept. This is an excellent example of the refinement and elegance of Deleuze's thought that pervades the book as a whole.

Here is the equation: d(y)/d(x). This is certainly not a differential equation that a mathematician would have hit upon. Instead it is Deleuze's expression of a philosophical concept via calculus. When plotted out the equation produces a clinamen, or swerve, with no constant, only variables. It is "a world that no longer has its center" as Deleuze phrases it on page 125 of the translation. It is a structure without a center, as Derrida would call it. But whereas Derrida's notion can only be stated as a paradox (because by definition there can be no such thing as a centerless structure), Deleuze succeeds in expressing it as a simple differential equation. In other words, there are nothing but differences (and, Deleuze would maintain, force). Returning to the equation, the function d(y) is dependent on d(x), which it is divided by. d(y) is dependent on a differential function d(x), that is, a continuously displaced variable. Absolutely useless to mathematicians, it is however a succint expression of Deleuze's thought, conveyed via Leibniz's calculus, that creates a distribution of remarkable points. Michel Serres' 700 page tome "Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques" is a wonderful companion to Deleuze's little book. It was published in English as "The System of Leibniz" by Clinamen Press.

one of Deleuze's very best
Deleuze's sojourns into the history of philosophy, as everyone knows by now, paint a stark contrast to his "independent" works; the former being wonders of concision and clarity, each one like a diamond cutter, and the latter being drawn-out, often tedious, and in general more difficult to pentrate.
The Fold falls somewhere in between the two as he wrote it so late in his life when most assumed he was done with history.We should be thankful that he wasn't.In order to get through this book, I'll just offer my opinion for those who it may affect: when I first picked it up, I read the first two chapters and almnost threw it across the room.I didn't pick the book up again because--presumptuous me--I thought the whole book was going to be like that.WRONG!As I said, Deleuze mixes it up here, and while you may not get every chapter, there will be those, like the short, almost curt, "What is an Event?" that will, um, blow your mind.
As for this being a discourse on Leibniz.Hard to say when we've read so little Leibniz, but Deleuze is willing to stick with his "compossible" world throughout all of the book until the end, which is pretty amazing---you know, since for Deleuze's world one of the first requirements is the reality of incompossibles.But it will give you a passion for Leibniz regardless, as the last reviewer made clear.
Finally, I think Deleuze here tries to answer some of the most difficult questions that faced him after years of expanding and 'deterritorializing' D&R and LofS.If you read the latter, for instance, did you have a sort of empty feeling when he got to the "Dynamic Genesis" and afterwards, as if his tying the incorporeals to the corporeals from the point of view of bodies wasn't as solid as from the point of view of sense?Deleuze will repay you here with interest, giving one of the most fascinating and detailed accounts of a body and its connection to monads I've ever read.It may not solve all of the problems for his materialism, but then again, it might.That's a judgment call and regardless of how you judge, this book will have riches for you.
10 stars.

A Key of sorts
Deleuze's book is, at least for no other reason, a worthwhile read for its sheer imagination.Secondly, it is worth reading as it shows just what is so wonderfully interesting about Leibniz.If you know Leibniz, read this book, even just a single section, and then you will understand why there do exist, in small obscure places, Leibnitians.If you are looking for a splendidly imaginative perspective, read up. ... Read more

Product Description
In May 1968, Gilles Deleuze was an established philosopher teaching at the innovative Vincennes University, just outside of Paris. Felix Guattari was a political militant and the director of an unusual psychiatric clinic at La Borde. Their meeting was quite unlikely, yet the two were introduced in an arranged encounter of epic consequence. From that moment on, Deleuze and Guattari engaged in a surprising, productive partnership, collaborating on several groundbreaking works, includingAnti-Oedipus,What Is Philosophy? andA Thousand Plateaus.Francois Dosse, a prominent French intellectual known for his work on the Annales School, structuralism, and biographies of the pivotal intellectuals Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Chaunu, and Michel de Certeau, examines the prolific if improbable relationship between two men of distinct and differing sensibilities. Drawing on unpublished archives and hundreds of personal interviews, Dosse elucidates a collaboration that lasted more than two decades, underscoring the role that family and history& mdash;particularly the turbulent time of May 1968& mdash;play in their monumental work.He also takes the measure of Deleuze and Guattari's posthumous fortunes and the impact of their thought on intellectual, academic, and professional circles. ... Read more

Product Description
Considered one of the most important works of one of France's foremost philosophers, and long-awaited in English,begins with an extended exegesis of Lewis Carroll's . Considering stoicism, language, games, sexuality, schizophrenia, and literature, Deleuze determines the status of meaning and meaninglessness, and seeks the 'place' where sense and nonsense collide.Written in an innovative form and witty style,is an essay in literary and psychoanalytic theory as well as philosophy, and helps to illuminate such works as . ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Deleuze's most misunderstood and second most important book
Let me state right of the bat that this book is head-deep in psychoanalytic terminology and to me represents the best confrontation (way better than anti-oedipus and a thousand plateaus) of Deleuze's philosophy with psychoanalysis.I think many readers of Deleuze get caught up in Deleuze's originality and forget that he didn't try to describe a completely new system of everything, but rather wanted to describe more precisely the logic of a creative ontology.For a serious critique of psychoanalysis, the logic of sense is the book to go to, not anti-oedipus.It is for this reason - his desire to confront lacanian psychoanalysis head-on that I consider this to be his boldest book.

Also let me mention that it is in the appendix of this book that Deleuze deals with an extremely important problem which is almost completely overlooked by most Deleuze scholars - the problem of the other.This problem is inextricably linked with lacanian psychoanalysis and hence any critique of psychoanalysis must rigorously understand the ontology of the other.Deleuze here says that the ontological status of the other is that of a "possible world"which complicates things a bit because of his earlier critique of the concept of the possible in difference and repetition.

In contrast to one of the previous reviewers, I consider the idea that Deleuze is or was ever a post-semiotic theorist is completely wrong.In many interviews when asked about what he tried to do, he answers that he tried to come up with a theory OF signs (this is even his answer after he worked with guattari, which is very curious)... This is evidenced quite clearly in that one of his earliest books is on proust and signs, and that in Difference and Repetition, signs repeatedly come up as being the "flashes" as Deleuze describes them, that connect intensive differences.A book coming out called "the primacy of semiosis" uses a synthesis of Deleuze's ideas about univocity and signs with other theorists and will probably provide useful reading for this problem.

You can certainly read this book for fun, but I think the more "fun" of Deleuze's books are the works with Guattari, which I am sorry to say, are also his worst books.All of the genius in them (mostly stylistic, not conceptual) relies on the genius of his early work (the concept creation).The concepts were created very early, and as Badiou claims, Deleuze just found different names for them in different contexts.Not to bash Guattari, I think his "Three Ecologies" is quite good (not his earlier stuff though), but the combined work is more interesting than it is philosophically serious.lets not forget something quite crucial: Deleuze states guattari saved him from psychoanalysis - which is why this book is so important since it is the only and last confrontation Deleuze ever has WITHIN psychoanalytic terminology.

Again, I can't stress it enough, to understand this book, you need to read Lacan since much of the book is most obvioiusly a response to and a re-internalization (through "buggery") of lacan (the chapter titles make this quite obvious).

I also recommend as a supplement to this:
1) The Lacanian Subject - by Bruce Fink... Incredibly clear book on lacan's theory of the subject.
2) Difference & Repetition (Deleuze's Masterwork)
3) The Anti-Oedipus papers: Deleuze and guattari's letters to each other in the production of anti-oedipus.Here the problems become more obvious and the genesis of the style explicit.

Post structuralist, post linguistic, post semiotic...
Logic of sense is a very difficult book to get in toto. I'm not sure that it's even meant to be read that way. The book is arranged in a series of paradoxes that each take on a concept or problematic through which Deleuze undoes the hermeneutics of "meaning" in order to replace it with one built around "sense." What makes this book rewarding is its importance to an understanding of expression and imagination in Anti-Oedipus, and various images and signs in his two cinema books. But it almost takes having read his books on Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson first to get the most out of Deleuze's strange and non-subjective ideas of sense and event. I will agree with the reviewer above that the book leans hard on the Stoics, but to stop there would be to miss Deleuze's project here. He wants to create a logic that establishes sense neither in speech nor in language, neither in sign systems nor in structures. He wants to place the production of sense in a philosophy that has restored its grasp of movement and becoming, has shaken its dogmatic belief in concepts and abstractions, and that creates and affirms through virtual qualities and events that, while communicating in fact and through the repetition of the familiar (order), still relate to and express pure qualities. This is really the companion piece to the cinema books but on literature. I don't know that his theory of sense carries well to performance and social convention. Which is frustrating, because we need a some good theories of social convention and language that can take us past linguistics and speech act theories. This is a fantastic book and one of his most inventive.

Carroll is the focus, but Stoics are the mainframe.
The Logic of Sense is a deceptive book, for you feel after the first 30 pages or so that you kinda grasp what's going on, only to put it down, take a breath and go: "Eh?" A reviewer once famously called it 'dry as a biscuit' or something to that effect, but I don't think it's dry so much as weird. Weird, that is, that it comes off so calm and *logical* when it's really so insane and delirious. Compared to Deleuze, the majority of postructuralists are like so many Fregeans.
All of which is not to say that the book is as inefficacious as he claims sense is. See, the book works almost as sense comes to by the end---at first shimmering but sterile, and then fecund and obscure. But rest assured, you do find your zone of clarity.
It is difficult, but nowhere near as difficult as the companion piece, Difference and Repetition. One will find many of the arguments there updated and clarified here.
Logicians and the analytic minded might find it annoying that Deleuze keeps referring to sense (which they might read "Sinn") but seems to be completely oblivious to the great Gottlob and his ilk. 'Tis true, after all, that Deleuze sleeps with the enemies in this one; namely, the Stoics and that evil ontological hyperinflationist Meinong.
Which brings me to a word to the wise: it can only help you to have a good understanding of Stoic physics, logic, and ethics before coming to this book of Deleuze's. He may jump from place to place a bit, but--and this is my reading--this book remains fundamentally Stoic. Basically, change "God" to "the aleatory" and endow "sayables" with a potency they were often denied in Stoic logic, and you got yourself a pretty good grasp of the material you'll find here. Or at least a start. IMO, it really does help to just slap your mind into Stoic mode and think about his approach from that angle, rather than simply trying to wrestle Anti-Oedipus or Cinema 2 into the Logic of Sense rubric.
I agree with one of the other reviewers, and believe me it pains me to say it, that the six or so series (chapters) on psychology and dynamic genesis pretty much blarney. They're boring and seem to stop the motors of the book by needlessly colliding with Freud. And since they take us away from the interesting Stoic stuff, and bring us to the other psychology stuff, one can't help but feel they're at least obsolete with respect to Anti-Oedipus and the Fold.
Other than that, it's mega.

Deceptively playful
This was the first book of Deleuze's that i read. The book begins with an analysis of Lewis Carrol's "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass". The often playful style of writing is deceptive; the concepts explored are often extremely complicated. Furthermore, i personally found it difficult to link together the various concepts, although of course Deleuze is not trying to write a unified whole. The first section of the book in which Deleuze deals primary with Carrol discusses, amongst other things, paradox, "pure becoming", and explores the relationship between the "surface" and the "murky depths". Somwhere a little after half way through "The Logic of Sense", Deleuze begins the "pyschoanalytic" portion of the book, applying several of the concepts developed previously, especially the relationship between "surfaces" and "depths". Personally, I enjoyed the first half of the book, and all of the talk about phallus' and orality seemed to come out of nowhere; there is no transition or preparation for this shift. The essays including in the appendix provide added (and helpful) insights into the main text and into Deleuze's thought in general. Overall, i found the "surface" of the Logic of Sense not too difficult to grasp, but the inner workings are indeed elusive.

the only being is the being of becoming as such
this century will be known as Deleuzian.................. ... Read more

Product Description
This text continues the major reassessment of cinema begun in Deleuze's "Cinema I: The Movement Image". In this volume, Deleuze is concerned with the representation of time in film and with the cinematic treatment of memory, thought and speech. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

One of the best books on cinema
Although Deleuze mentions that this bookfs aim is to make a typology on cinema, for readers, it will be the object of thought more than that. In this book, Deleuze considers many films in which time is not subordinate tomovement any longer (the time-image). His way of developing theory is likeBergsonfs one on time and memory, but his theory of time has variationsthat are reflected in various films and becomes a profound notion of theworld with dynamic extension. Deleuze proposes us not only new conceptsthrough films but also the question: What is the world? Deleuze creates asystem on cinema as same as he analyzes clearly what is new and what isdifferent from the past films in films of neo-realism or the new wave.While many people have mentioned to genres in films, Deleuzefs analysis ofthe border between the genres is one of the most precise.

If youhad gCinema 1: The Movement-Imageh, this book would be more interestingfor you because you could compare the two books. Moreover, this book treatsso many films that you must find ones you have ever seen, which makes thisbook more fascinating. ... Read more