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

Book 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

Book Description

-- Alistair Welchman,Philosophy in Review

Customer Reviews (3)

I'm a bit biased, but...
As my Ph.D is on Deleuze, perhaps I am not the most objective reviewer, but this is an excellent supplement to the ideas of Deleuze. It is in his interviews and short pieces between his major works that Deleuze's most striking ideas come out, and anything he says without Guattari is on incredible value.

The French Heidegger
These interviews are for the most part accessible to anyone (excepting the one with Negri who is a special case). They describe what Deleuze was trying to do with his books better than most commentators. Though they remain mere introductions to his thought, if you're trying to wrap your skull around postmodernism, there are worse places to start.

We learn pretty valuable things about Deleuze from Deleuze. His attitude towards the sciences and mathematics was plainly not anti-science. Deleuze saw the creative arts and the sciences as distinct domains. And they usually are, in geography at minimum. He figured philosophy's job was to mediate between these two forms of life. (Much like how the blacksmith is the mediator between civilization and primitive societies in A Thousand Plateaus.) So he enjoyed taking theorems of math and showing how they mapped onto movies and showing how paintings illustrated physics. He probably would have succeeded if he hadn't written in his infamously opaque stream-of-consciousness style. As it is the scientists got all hostile because they couldn't understand him like an article in Scientific American. (And you know who you are.) Since the scientists were hostile, the artists produced "science studies," wherein they study rheotric designed to cover up that they don't know science.

Even thought the arts and sciences are perhaps in greater disagreement today than ever, the twentieth century does remain, as Foucault said, "Deleuzian."

Good introduction to Deleuze's thought; informative for fans
In the intervening years since Deleuze's death, Columbia University Presshas turned out translations of the all the material Deleuze had publishedduring his lifetime.Negotiations is a translation of Pourparles,published by Minuit at the beginning of this decade, shortly beforeQu'est-ce que c'est la philosophie, and the death of his collaborator FelixGuattari.Like the latter work, Negotiations appears to be a kind ofsummation of Deleuze's work and also an introduction for the uninitiated. Why does Deleuze need introducing, then?It may be useful to drawa parallel between Foucault and Deleuze, contemporaries often consideredtogether in the discussion of poststructuralist theory.The differencesbetween them are largely matters of style, if one takes Deleuze at hisword: in this collection he asserts that like Foucault and Lyotard, his aimwith Anti-Oedipus was to turn over the despot of the signifier (21).Butunlike Foucault and Lyotard, Deleuze's implicit rejection of structuralismscuttled his chances of winning as wide an American audience as Derrida andespecially Foucault, whose work depends heavily of Saussurean distinctionbetween signifier and signified. More to the point, Deleuze's relativeobscurity in the Anglophone world is due mainly to two things: first, tothe alien diffuseness of his project particularly in A Thousand Plateaus,advertised in other writings as "transcendental empiricism,"which dismantles ontology, subjectivity, and any constructed conception ofthe human subject in favor of analyzing insects, wolves, and lobsters forclues to a picture of reality: second, to the mind-bending style Deleuzeand Guattari employed in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, preventing all butthe hardiest readers from getting a grasp on their thought.(In theinterviews, one relievedly finds that Deleuze's speaking voice is prettymuch like his writing, making his oracular pronouncements seem almostnecessary.)

For the most part, Deleuze has been relegated totop-shelf status: his work is meant to be more appreciated than read, andis the province ofphilosophy or theology or French Studies rather thanliterary theory. It is doubtful that Deleuze will ever reach the influenceof Foucault or Bataille, given the infinitely portable structuralistconcepts of the former and the lurid sexiness of the latter. With thepublication of Brian Massumi's guide to the work of Deleuze and Guattari (AUser's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, MIT Press, 1992), it seemedthat Deleuze was due for coming-out party, but it appears that his timehasn't arrive.The principal problem is that his work speaks to preciselynone of the categories used in cultural or literary criticism. Deleuzehas nothing to say about race, relies on impenetrable anthropological textsfor his critique of Marx (see the third section of Anti-Oedipus), andobscures structured questions of gender with the pansexual dismantling ofFreudian symbology -- his discourse is of the polymorphous perverse, andhis philosophical purposes to the contrary, it is not meant to beaccessible.That said, Negotiations may be just the thing to introduceDeleuze to a slightly wider audience.Composed mostly of interviews, withsome incidental journal articles, the collection serves as primarily anexplanation (if not justification) for the bulk of his highly abstractwork.If compared to the other English-language collection readilyavailable of Foucault's work, the excellent Language, Counter-memory,Practice (Cornell UP, 1977), Negotiations is rather more an introduction tothe major themes and works of Deleuze, a distillation and clarification,rather than a valuable addition.As such, that volume served as a kind ofexpansion of Foucault's theoretical concern and vocabulary, in the serviceof Saussurean concerns.This is not the case with this collection, whichis cannily constructed to cover all phases of Deleuze's career.Neatlysubdivided into subsections on his film work, Capitalism and Schizophrenia,Foucault, and politics and philosophy (the latter with excerpts on Leibnizand Spinoza, two favorite topics), the articles as a whole compose anaccurate picture of Deleuze in general, with somesimplification, althoughnothing Deleuze ever said was simple by any estimation. Yet Deleuze'swork is best "understood" by immersion, rather thancomprehension.If one doesn't "get" or appreciate such conceptsas "deterritorialization," "smooth/striated space,""war machine," "code," "flow,""desiring-machine," or"body without organs,"Negotiations is not likely to clear up any confusion because, at bottom,the ideas advocated by Deleuze's work only take root within the areasmapped out by his discursive universe.Deleuze's work can best beexplained as a kind of phenomenology, which simply describes rather thanprovides a kind of ethical directive or pragmatic imperative.Nocoincidence then, that his favorite subjects -- Leibniz, Spinoza, Bergson-- specialize in the same mode of philosophy: an elaborately stylized viewof the world that reflects a private obsession with the model itself ratherthan clearheaded analysis.Deleuze probably would have liked nothingmore than to be viewed as the master of a discourse that was the subject ofadmiration rather than appropriation. Ultimately, Deleuze retreats withinthe self-contained modernist aspect of the work of art: complaints ofincomprehensibilty are met with claims of artistic license.The problemDeleuze's work faces in America is precisely of this nature: without theconvenient structuralist Foucauldian hooks, Deleuze and Guattari'spotentially monolithic opus remains on untold bookshelves, maintaining afelt presence, not necessarily intelligible.Like Bergson, it is possiblethat Deleuze may be forgotten and then one day rediscovered, to knowinghosannas, by an equally naive writer concerned with contemporaryphilosophical problems, or diagnosing the character of the century's lastquarter.Until then, Negotiations serves as a yet another introduction toDeleuze's work (whether the individual reader needs it or not), and theinsights Deleuze provides into his work, and the conditions under whichthey came into the world, cannot be had elsewhere. ... Read more

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

Book Description
Deleuze's concepts - such as assemblage, the fold, difference and repetition, cinema and desire - are key to understanding his philosophical approach: they work to unsettle particular bodies of knowledge, to open them up and link them to other concepts within and outside that body of knowledge. The short and accessible chapters in this book each focus on a single concept, offering a definition and showing what the concept does. The contributors also consider how the concepts are engaged, intersect, link, and how they may deviate from other areas of postmodern thought.Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts is aimed at a readership new to Deleuze both from within philosphy and outside the discipline.Contributors include Christa Albrecht-Crane, Ronald Bogue, Felicity Colman, Tom Conley, Eugene Holland, Karen Houle, Gregg Lambert, Melissa McMahon, Judith Poxon, Gregory Seigworth, Jennifer Daryl Slack, Daniel W. Smith, Patty Sotirin, Kenneth Surin, and J. MacGregor Wise. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Rigorous and filled with insights
All the essays in this book are rigorous and filled with insights. Indeed, the entire book was one of the most satisfying, engrossing, and insightful reading experiences I ever had.In this review, I'll briefly touch upon just a few of the most memorable essays.

Charles Stivale's excellent introduction, "A life in friendship" brings the reader an up-close look at Deleuze the man. Deleuze's evolution as philosopher is traced through the various encounters he made with others throughout his life, both in personal friendships and in the written word.The author gives a humorous and detailed account of Martin tom Diek and Jens Balzer's "Salut Deleuze!", "a fictional account of Delueze's final voyage across the river Acheron to meet his friends on the other side." One comes away with the realization that there is as much interest in the man himself as in his philosophy.

The essay "Assemblage" by J. Macgregor Wise, addresses one of the most fascinating Deleuzian concepts: "Assemblages create territories. Territories are more than just spaces; they are a stake, a claim, they express (my house, their ranch, his bench, her friends). . . Territories are not fixed for all time, but are always being made and unmade, reterritorializing and deterritorializing. This constant making and unmaking is the same with assemblages; they are always coming together and moving apart...." Wise's essay gives many pertinent examples of assemblages. I especially enjoyed the example of the young woman with her cell phone. Now that is an assemblage we are all familiar with!

Another truly memorable essay is "Micropolitics", by Karen Houle.In order to respond adequately to the state of affairs in which we find ourselves, Deleuze and Guattari delineated in `Thousand Plateaus' the distinction between micropolitics and macropolitics. In response to the question "How might I live?" there is the answer "There are two kinds of living to do or to be... One involves attending to the possibilities in the microfabric of a life, and the other attending to the possibilities in the macrofabric. What seems impossible on one register can have vital force on another." Houle is herself a poet, and her writing is stunningly honest and deep. Again, one comes away feeling overwhelmed by the originality of thought here. As Houle aptly observes, one strives to make a difference micropolitically in the hope that these differences will ultimately reverberate out to the macro scale.

Lastly, Gregory Seigworth's essay "From Affection to Soul" struck me as containing some of the most amazing prose I have ever encountered. Here is the opening of just one paragraph that left me spellbound: "From one (rather human) standpoint, the virtual can be understood, in part, as what has happened as subsistent past, in full affective-accumulation, on this side of forgetting. However, crucially, the virtual is also always in contact and actively-affectively participating with what is happening and about to happen contemporaneously (as becoming): in excess of consciousness, an affective-accumulation continually pressing toward its differentiated actualization in the future." This is not only beautiful prose, but also extraordinarily profound and insightful. True, it is not easily digested, but this book contains very little nursery food. As I said at the beginning, much of it is quite rigorous.

The book contains many other excellent essays, too many to mention in this brief review. Not only is Deleuze himself an interesting individual but these authors who have studied Deleuze's thought are themselves interesting in their own right. Deleuze scholarship is no doubt in its infancy, but this book shows that there are many brilliant academics who have taken the elucidation of Deleuze as their cause. Hopefully there will be many more books like this in the future.
... Read more

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Customer Reviews (3)

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

Customer Reviews (19)

more art than philosophy
however, is philosophy not an art? perhaps this question is the most illuminating one with regard to this book. I described it to a friend as "shamanism meets psychoanalysis in a 19th century drawing room." Of course this description is inadequate but it made me laugh. The "rigor" of this book takes place in a different form, in a different plane, from analytic thought. Where one might oversimplify analytic philosophy and call it linear with its pretensions of precision; this sort of philosophy has depth and shading, it has contours; it seems as though the mind of God has gone fractal in this book.Of course it is not perfect, but all philosophy necessarily must fall short of the mark if we are so ambitious as to set the "mark" as "truth." Deleuze and Guattari understand the shortcomings of language as a conveyance of truth, of its inherent incomprehensibility; in reaction to this insight they have decided to have fun, to play within the field of reference and see what comes out.One of the more interesting treatises you will ever read, even if you don't finish.I suppose you could say it is the lunar to the solar pretensions of reason and logic.

Abstractionist Exploitation
For all its cleverness, the kind of dodgy, edgy, self-important prose that lures wannabe philosophers into its trap, this book is one incorrect premise after another, one humanocentric argument posing as "ecological" thought on top of another.

Deleuze and Guattari refer to "wolves" that are not wolves, "rhizomes" that have nothing to do with rhizomes.They favor the symbolic half of a metaphor over its physically realizable counterpart to the point at which a rhizome could be anything vaguely multiplicitous and knotty and branchy--at which point it ceases to be a rhizome and becomes what the quasi-philosopher loves: a product to be sold.

Ecology is a science, and not as soft a science as its made out to be by those who haven't lately picked up an ecology textbook or read the history of its development.There's far more fashion to "science studies" than rigor, and D & G fall right into the mode of conflating ecology with other disciplines and methods.Interdisciplinary is fine; undisiciplined isn't.Like Andrew Ross, D & G are dilettanti.They dabble and play and get clever and, in this case, use fundamental natural facts as exploitively as any lab tester, hunter, or junk scientist that science studies likes to indict.

In the chapter on Freud's Wolf-Man, D & G save us from one projected and hyperbolic interpretation of a dream to their own worse one.In correcting Freud for his misuse of both dreams and wolves, they essentialize the species, make assumptions about wolf behavior, and provide a vague replacement for Freud's symbolism of lesser value.Lesser because they fail both to recognize the fairy tale images behind Freud's analysis (the goat/wolf conflation, the tree symbol) and to cite source work backing their declarations about wolves, the real animals they invoke several times in the chapter.This is an abstraction of convenience, and while dabblers in environmentalism from the sidewalk-bound perspective of Theory and Cultural Studies might find it enticing, they should also find it about as corroborated as a high school research paper with a bibliography gleaned from a couple of hours on the internet.

Likewise the "rhizome" chapter, foundational to the book.D & G make ridiculous statements about rivers being "without beginning or ending" about the rhizome being "always intermezzo," and other hyperbolic claims that serve their purpose of using the nonhuman world to fulfill entirely humanocentric claims and spins.A river has a source and a mouth, and the concept of interconnectedness so cherished by those who would use ecology to justify any cobbled amalgam of thoughts they have can, as it does here a thousand times, turn to mere rationalization and exploitation.

An analytical philosopher would indeed find this book to be nonsense, but not because Deleuze and Guattari are pressing the philosophical envelope with new ideas.They cite themselves (!) several times--and not just in references to prior pages that follow a thread of the text.They employ transparently circular logic, arguments spun off of premises that are only premises because D & G repeat them.Fundamental logic and argumentation work--not because they're patriarchally dominating forms of rhetoric that keep us from seeing the world as it is, but because they come from the world as it is.The very structure of argumentation demands corroboration ultimately from the basic laws of nature.

My one star rating of this act of charlatanism isn't because the book is poorly written.It's because the book gives us all the tools we need for an irresponsible, rationalized, finally damaging environmental thought--one posing as some new map of the world, some new ecology.There is no new ecology.There is only the gathering, the accrual of fact, that ensues from our increased understanding of the raw material out of which we hammer our civilizations.

Deleuze and Guattari only know our civilizations, and those not as well as their tremendous egos would assert. They paint nature in their own image, start the cult of Deleuzians, and profer a tempting "philosophy" that ends in the bait and switch typical of current cultural studies.In the end, what has any wolf, any rhizome, any river, gotten out of the grand Deleuzians?

The only reason to read this book is to find out what's happened to the brains of an unfortunately sizeable number of academics.It saddens me to know where the interdisciplinary work of philosophy and ecology could go if it weren't dragging around this dead weight.

Works Well with Techno Music

This is a fascinating work whose multidisciplinarity and complexity challenge any library taxonomy: once I saw it filed under psychiatry. All the same, classical analytical thinkers fail to understand "A Thousands Plateaus" in its own terms, irritating conventionally trained intellectuals (and those who vote this review "unhelpful").

In addition to criticizing master narratives (psychoanalysis, Marxism and structuralism), "A Thousand Plateaus" provides a radically different mindframe for conceptualizing the emerging realities of globalization and subjectivity formation. Nomadology and schizoanalysis are new styles for accessing and assessing mobile and metamorphic identities in an age of digital capital and semiotic flows. To wit, Foucault declared that this century is Deleuzian.

Certainly, it is much easier to read commentators. Yet, my favorite way to get into this book is by plugging loud techno trance music on my headphones, reading it as pure Power Poetry, "harnessing its forces" as Deleuze puts it: a war-machine that undermines monolithic thought, opening up multiple possibilities for the renewed experiencing of the self and reality. (Deleuze and Guattari claimed to have had hallucinations while writing the book).

Book translator Brian Massumi suggests that "A Thousand Plateaus" may be better handled like a music album, freely and pragmatically. Deleuze himself continously entices us to create affect, and employ philosophy; not as the cultivation of dead closed concepts, but to foster multiple thinking...

Long live the barbarian nomads of reason!

October 17 2004 - a review
I don't normally bother reviewing books.However I had to respond to something another reviewer said:

"you can't read this while listening to music, trust me"

Actually you can but I recommend the music of anti-essentialists, Phoenicia's "Brownout" is an excellent soundtrack to the plateau on the refrain.The text of the book is the opsign of time-images, music, or, rather, sound, of deterritorialisation is the sonsign.Fittingly, the releases from Germany's Mille Plateaux label are really good for reading these works.

I can't recommend this book enough but I will give some advice in your approach:

1.Even though this might seem the most intimidating entry to D&G's thought I suggest it anyway.Compared to "Difference and Repetition" or "The Logic of Sense" this is a walk in the park when it comes to penetrating the prose.

2.Don't expect a book of philosophy where an argument is clearly defined and developed.This is nothing like that.It's a work of "nomad thought", just try and follow what's happening *before* you judge it.

3.Come back to it.Regularly.Your appreciation and engagement will deepen as your knowledge of Deleuze's oeuvre deepens.You won't 'get it' at first but you have to enter his work somewhere.Eventually you'll realise this is a challenge to develop new ontologies, you were never meant to get it.You were and are meant to think it in new directions.After all, that's the basic lesson of the return.

4.Read widely.I really recommend Rodowick's 1997 book "Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine".On the surface Rodowick is working with the cinema books but the cinema books themselves are philosophical works developing Bergson.If you grasp Rodowick's less dense (though just as challenging) argument for deterritorialised thought you'll be on your way.Another area: Nietzsche's concepts of return, the will to power and active/reactive force is crucial.Read Deleuze's Nietzsche book.

5.The geology stuff isn't a metaphor, it's an isomorphism.If nothing else read DeLanda's "Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Forms" in the 1999 book "A Deleuzian Century" (edited by Ian Buchanon).

And last but certainly not least, Deleuze & Guattari's work is playful, enjoy the challenges they set you.You'll never see the world the same way again.

Interesting read
Crunched for time on an English essay, and because ILL'ing the book would have taken too long, I had to buy this book. So I figured I would review it.

While overall it is very interesting, and the style matches the nature of the content (postmodernism discussed in fragmented chps, props to the authors), this book is dense as hell. This book is really helpful if you are studying global politics across post-modernism. I would recommend Slavoj Zizek's "Welcome to the Desert of the Real!" if considering this book. ... Read more

Book Description

This brilliant exposition of the critique of identity is a classic in contemporary philosophy and one of Deleuze's most important works. Of fundamental importance to literary critics and philosophers, Difference and Repetition develops two central concepts--pure difference and complex repetition--and shows how the two concepts are related. While difference implies divergence and decentering, repetition is associated with displacement and disguising. Central in initiating the shift in French thought away from Hegel and Marx toward Nietzsche and Freud,Difference and Repetition moves deftly to establish a fundamental critique of Western metaphysics.

Customer Reviews (8)

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.

The Crux of Thought
It took me reading Deleuze's books on Kant, Bergson, Nietzsche, Foucault and his collaborations with Guattari in Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus to finally get through this book . Difference and Repetion explains all the others, but is incredibly dense and in no way an introduction to his thinking. If you're familiar with his project, however, then this brings the rest of his readings into focus.
It's in this book that Deleuze gets as close as he ever comes to replying to Hegel, and in that sense it's here that he contends with the master and the dialectic--a battle or contest characteristic of his French compatriots (see Vincent Descombes' fantastic book: Modern French Philosophy; and Michael Hardt's summary of the early Deleuzian projects: Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy). Difference and repetition are such an alternative to the dialectic that they're difficult to grasp without a serious grounding in metaphysics (see his books on Kant and Hume especially), Spinoza, and Bergson.
Deleuze wants to show that there is a materiality of expression that is also a movement within time, an unfolding that is also a becoming ( and in this sense in contrast to Being). This movement image (which founds his analysis in the Cinema books) grounds for Deleuze a transcendental empiricism, which is to say a non-conceptual and material, positive and affirmative idea of thought. Read his books on Kant and Hume first for an overview of his critique of representation.
I think this book is stunning, and i hope to read it over and over. The first three chapters are incredible, and amount to nothing short of a complete undoing of representational thought, or what he characterizes as a logic of the same.

Deleuze wasn't messing around here, seriously.
Many people consider this to be the cornerstone of Deleuze's body of work, and in many ways it is.In many ways it is also invaluable, and perhaps the most significant piece of philosophy to emerge in the last half-century (though I don't think so, but I also don't think we're ready for this book yet, so I await Deleuze's Kojeve eagerly).Difference and Repetition is a front to back masterpiece, and on every page Deleuze's colossal creative genius is on full display.But, that doesn't mean you'll like it--in fact, I bet you (in your heart of hearts) won't.And I'm not challenging anyone--I don't even like it.Even stronger: I can't really fathom how it is POSSIBLE to like it.Let me tell you why, if you haven't already tried the beast a few times (in which case you know already).
D&R runs at a pace and a level of sophistication that perhaps no one in the world besides Deleuze himself could completely follow.It is assumed that not only are you familiar with the ins and outs of some of the most obscure aspects of people like Kant, Leibniz, and Bergson--but that you also be familiar with Deleuze's take on those aspects (which I just dont see how you could grasp in any way but superficially from this book).It's also assumed that you have experience in differential calculus and its theoretical underpinnings (granted mostly from Leibniz and Structuralism, but come on, who can really explain what a "singular point" is without it?).And to top all of that off, it is, very apparently (I won't say really) unwieldy and circulates between all of the above mentioned and more and much more in the snap of a finger.No doubt part of the book's affect and greatness, but, no doubt, more than part of the reason why no one can (under)stand it.
I'm not kidding when I say this: D&R is indisputably the most difficult piece of philosophy I've ever read.It will run off 15-20 dense pages at a time that are not just prolix and turgid, but sometimes senselessly so.Yeah, you wrestle with it about three or four times, you have your moments of lucidity, little chunks here and there that are admittedly shining examples of what sort of a writer Deleuze was and would become.But I repeat: you think Kant, Heidegger, Whitehead, Derrida, Jameson, and Hegel are difficult?I swear before everything holy and unholy this book that you might buy today is infinitely more difficult than anything any of them ever wrote.
But don't take my word for it.Try it, and be honest with yourself.Don't just get it so you can say "oh, come on, it's not that bad."Try and explain it, try and give accounts for your explanations, try and tie it all together, or not.Until I see a lucid exposition of this book (like Holland's for AO), I refuse to believe that anyone really likes it or understands its SPIRIT (not of course the letter, which anyone can get, and parrot).Yet--undoubtedly worth every minute of your time.Such is the enigma of Deleuze... ... Read more

Book Description
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

Book Description

Considered one of the most important works of one of France's foremost philosophers, and long-awaited in English,The Logic of Sense begins with an extended exegesis of Lewis Carroll'sAlice in Wonderland. 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,The Logic of Sense is an essay in literary and psychoanalytic theory as well as philosophy, and helps to illuminate such works asAnti-Oedipus.

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

Book Description
Why think? Not, according to Gilles Deleuze, in order to be clever, but because thinking transforms life. Why read literature? Not for pure entertainment, Deleuze tells us, but because literature can recreate the boundaries of life. With his emphasis on creation, the future and the enhancement of life, along with his crusade against 'common sense', Deleuze offers some of the most liberating, exhilarating ideas in twentieth-century thought. This book offers a way in to Deleuzean thought through such topics as:

Customer Reviews (4)

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

Book Description

Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology with a single infinite substance. This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical and ontological propositions. His ethics is an ethology, rather than a moral science. Attention has been drawn to Spinoza by deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher; and this reading of Spinoza by Deleuze lends itself to a radical ecological ethic. As Robert Hurley says in his introduction,"Deleuze opens us to the idea that the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us. One wonders, finally, whether Man might be defined as a territory, a set of boundaries, a limit on existence."

Gilles Deleuze, known for his inquiries into desire, language, politics, and power, finds a kinship between Spinoza and Nietzsche. He writes, ""Spinoza did