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A provocative guide to Deleuze by Deleuze, this collection traces the intellectual journey of one of the most important French philosophers and clarifies the key critical concepts in the work of this vital figure who has had an impact on aesthetics, film theory, psychoanalysis and cultural studies. ... Read more

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

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Deleuze and the Political provides the firstfull-length overview of Deleuze's relation to political thought, aswell as an accessible and fascinating introduction to some of thekey themes in his work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A useful short intro to Deleuze's thought (political and otherwise)
It's interesting to see such a short and (relatively) accessible account of Deleuze's philosophy as a whole, focused on his unique take on politics. Though the book can be inscrutable at times when it rattles of a list of concepts (Derrida's this, Foucault's that, Kant's this-and-that), overall this book is a good introduction to Deleuze even for those who are hostile to Continental philosophy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (24)

Blue Kool-Aid
There's enough postmodern nonsense in this book to start a cult.Which, sadly, has happened.

D & G's credibility in the universities has been established by ideologues interested in tickling their fantasies of being Continental philosophers and their zealous quest to make of the raw material of the world a carnival of language games.

Exhibiting almost no understanding (or research) of what rhizomes, plateaus, wolves, or the fundamental laws of nature are, Deleuze and Guattari simply pretend, for hundreds of pages, that they Are Not.Spin in the name of jouissance, religious doctrine in the name of a critique of reason, and frankly ridiculous, nonsensical phrases (A plateau is an animal, a wolf is a "nondecomposable variable distance") pepper this work with sophomoric euphoria.

And the academic humanities crowd bought it hook, line, and sinker.

If you want to drink the Kool-Aid, then that's your path.Worship the god of your language game.But don't offer it up as sound, anymore than declaring that a black labrador retriever is telling you what needs to be done next in a language that only you can understand.Obfuscation is not wisdom.Masturbation is not sex.Intelligent design does not refute random configuration and evolution.Ideology is not scholarship.

The emperors wear no clothes.

We're a little lost now
Best line in the book, as it sums it up for me and was just about the only part I understood. In Plateau 3, "The Geology of Morals," the authors write, first line of 14th paragraph: "We're a little lost now."

Exactly. Lost.

Worth one's time
To those who attack this for not being philosophy, fair enough, it may not be philosophy. I quote now from Shelley's Defence of Poetry:

"In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry.
But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not."

Yes, this book may be delusional in its conclusions at times, it may make unfounded claims, it may lack philosophical rigor as it were but that does not mean it is not instructive or inspiring or a most productive use of one's time. Say we stop calling it philosophy; would you read it if we called it a poem, and called Deleuze and Guattari poets?

You blew it off in grad school, now go back and read it....
Why? Because your critical theory seminar was probably oversimplifying, and you're missing out on a radical piece of performance in book form. Thousand Plateaus is not 400 pages about rhizomes or nomads.That's just the vocabulary. And, I disagree with some of the other reviews here.It's not a torture to read; it's just not talking down to you.It's put together like a large circular sentence.You start somewhere in middle, or maybe at the beginning or end, not sure.You have to play catchup at first, but you will get the hang of it.
If it sounds like the structure of certain recent films (say, by David Lynch, Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson) or works of fiction (like by Samuel Delaney, Haruki Murakami, or Thomas Pynchon) or minimal techno, or most museum biennials these days, then good, it should.Thousand Plateaus help to establish a framework for all of those things.
The book tries to establish a system of political, psychological and semiotic descriptions, always as a mode of resistance to all kinds of fascism, and D & G take the conflation of those levels as a given. Not just in the world of theory but also in how you think, and that's why it's written in such a particularly dense way. It tries very hard to be nonoppressive, and generous too, but for lots of people it can be a frustrating adjustment, accustomed as we are to writing that tries to be as flat and simple as possible. This book reads the way it thinks, and these two definitely prefer finesse to simplicity. Once you get into it, you may find that it's the best thing you've read for as long as you can remember. Or, at least that it makes you think in ways you don't while reading other books.
Being brainy continentals, these guys make reference to a store of intellectual history you won't be able to relate to.They namedrop like MCs, and use a highly layered prose that refers to about a dozen things at once. It probably helps if you've heard of Hjelmslev, Bergson, Liebniz and the rest of the counter-canon of Western thought, but don't let it stop you if you haven't.
If you tackle this thick, thorny thing, here's some advice: Don't read this as an assignment, but approach it like a weird painting. Go slowly and enjoy the twists and turns.Read each section twice before proceeding to the next. Enjoy the poetry that D & G employ.Take notes.When you get to the end, go back and reread the first (and maybe second) section.

a magnum opus of the late 20th century
There's so much to appreciate in this book, touching as it does on every subject you can think of. You won't be able to understand everything but for me at least, I don't feel a lot of pressure to try and understand everything, but I'm fine with just reading on and every page or so, something will click and open a new way of looking at things. I'm not an expert in Deleuze and Guattari, and this is my first book by any philospher in what people lump into the category of 'Postmodern'. So I can't compare it with others, but my sense is I've chosen the right book to read, or at least, place to start. ... Read more

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People tend to confuse winning freedom with conversion to capitalism. It is doubtful that the joys of capitalism are enough to free peoples.... The American "revolution" failed long ago, long before the Soviet one. Revolutionary situations and attempts are born of capitalism itself and will not soon disappear, alas. Philosophy remains tied to a revolutionary becoming that is not to be confused with the history of revolutions.
—from Two Regimes of Madness

Covering the last twenty years of Gilles Deleuze's life (1975-1995), the texts and interviews gathered in this volume complete those collected in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974) . This period saw the publication of his major works: A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Cinema I: Image-Movement (1983), Cinema II: Image-Time (1985), all leading through language, concept and art to What is Philosophy? (1991). Two Regimes of Madness also documents Deleuze's increasing involvement with politics (with Toni Negri, for example, the Italian philosopher and professor accused of associating with the Red Brigades). Both volumes were conceived by the author himself and will be his last. Michel Foucault famously wrote: "One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian." This book provides a prodigious entry into the work of the most important philosopher of our time. Unlike Foucault, Deleuze never stopped digging further into the same furrow. Concepts for him came from life. He was a vitalist and remained one to the last.

This edition restores the full text of the original French edition. ... Read more

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This marks the first critical study ofThe Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze's most important work on language and ethics and a vital source for his philosophy of the event. Deleuze's thought always promised a revolution in ethical theories and the relation between language, idea, and action. James William's critical reading conveys the potential and risks of Deleuze's response to the excitement and danger of events. His interpretation engages thoroughly withThe Logic of Sense, touching on phenomenology, an analytic philosophy of language, stoicism, literary theory, and psychoanalysis. His critique illuminates all areas of Deleuze's work in philosophy, politics, literature, linguistics, and sociology.

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Expressionism, Deleuze's philosophical commentary on Spinoza, is a critically important work because its conclusions provide the foundations for Deleuze's later metaphysical speculations on the nature of power, the body, difference and singularities. Deleuze and Spinoza is the first book to examine Deleuze's philosophical assessment of Spinoza and appraise his arguments concerning the Absolute, the philosophy of mind, epistemology and moral and political philosophy. The author respects and disagrees with Deleuze the philosopher and suggests that his arguments not only lead to eliminativism and an Hobbesian politics but that they also cast a mystifying spell.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Believe some pompous reviews
The major stylistic shortcoming of Howie's work is not really its dryness, but rather its unkind, often mocking tone, as the other bad review on this page points out.

Most of that review, actually, refers to Todd May's review of this book. May points out how mean and pointless Howie's attacks on Deleuze and on what she takes to be the wankiness of postmodern culture (see the noted reference to Gaia, etc.) are.

May's main purpose, though, is to unbind Deleuze from Spinoza and so defend him from Howie. May also discusses the absence of an equivalent concept to 'attribute' in Deleuze's later work. I don't agree; there are, for example, the 'schemata' in Deleuze's book on Foucault, as well as affirmation/negation, which mediates between the will to power and action/reaction in his book on Nietzsche. Both of those concepts are praised by Deleuze and either could be seen as versions of the 'attribute.' Speaking in his own voice, Deleuze's 'problems' in Difference and Repetition are sometimes spoken of as though they are 'attributes' constituting solutions as 'modes' to the problematic field as 'substance.' Other times, 'problems' sound more like 'modes'. But I'm not as sure as May is that Deleuze has thoroughly exorcised the 'attribute' from his thinking after his work on Spinoza.

My main point is that one shouldn't go overboard with May's defence of Deleuze, which operates by distinguishing his thinking from Spinoza's. Howie could certainly argue that the distinction is not as clear-cut as May says.

On the other hand, I think Spinoza himself can be defended from Howie. Her opening argument, against 'parallelism', upon which many of her further arguments depend, is not so good. It is based on Spinoza's inability to establish the univocity of substance and the reality of formal distinction at the same time. A much clearer defence of that thesis than Deleuze's can be found in Edwin Curley's "Behind the Geometric Method." Curley's defence is nothing like Deleuze's but if one looks closely, one sees that it has the same ingredients: the ontolgical argument for the single substance with infinite attributes, the impossibility of a substance having more than one but less than infinite attributes, and the bizarre tension between the absolute self-sufficiency of each attribute and the univocity of substance whose essence comprises all/infinite attributes--a tension which Curley also believes turns on the word "expression."

Howie claims at the end of her first chapter that Spinoza, far from proving the univocity of single substance, has not even proven that a substance exists. This is odd--Spinoza's proof of the single substance is his ontological argument; it has nothing to do with questions about formal distinction. In fact, the complex question of the distinction of attributes only arises in response to the necessary existence of a substance consisting of infinite attributes (otherwise one could simply say, with Descartes, that each attribute pertains to its own unique substance.) Howie could have a go at disputing the ontological argument, but I can't find anywhere in the book where she does.

Don't believe pompous reviews
The previous reviewer is mean spirited. Even if the book is not written in the most exhilirating style, it is one among many points of view. The reviewer's politics are obvious and interfering with his ability to appreciate. The bilge is all his.

Awful
First, pragmatic issues: this book is very expensive, and I bought it, and no one else has reviewed it, and I was shocked by what I bought, so you fair prospectives should be adequately forewarned.Second: this book is dry, dry, dry; the style would off-put Carnap and the interminable graduate school nitpicking is so endless that it winds up being more annoying than profound.
Let me slow down.This is a book that is supposed to be a kind of critique of Deleuze from an obviously Critical Theory-ish perspective (e.g. "Aura," Adorno you know, blah blah).It might be.I honestly have no idea because I have no idea what Howie is talking about.Deleuze is unrecognizeable here, a sort of statue of him remains with one arm, a fig leaf, and half his head cracked off.And Spinoza comes off much the same.Furthermore, if one is diligent enough to waft through the miles of tangled and confusing minutiae that no one is interested in except...Howie?...if one gets through all that, one realizes that this endeavor was futile, because Howie just flat-out dislikes Deleuze, and wants to crack his nut, so to speak, leaving the book one grand Thema Probandum not worth the lives of the trees that died to print it.I do think Howie, and Critical Theory in general, does and should have interesting ideas on and problems with Deleuze, but suggesting that his reading of Spinoza is the key to his whole philosophy borders on exegetical cruelty.Deleuze didn't simply make Spinoza the mouthpiece for his own views, nor did he do this with other dozen or so people he wrote on--as, e.g., can be seen in his utter disregard for the "Attributes" in his indpendent works, and almost exlusive focus on modes.I for one would love to hear a cogent critique od Deleuze that truly grappled with the complexity of his work--imagine Adorno on Deleuze, for instance.But you will not hear this here--and no, you do not get points for claiming "one viewpoint among many" (and Howie least of all would claim this, mind you) if the viewpoint is on a strawman--so, fine, I'll revise.If this is your sort of thing, go for it.But don't be surprised if you learn next to nothing about Deleuze, or, if you know Deleuze, you find the subject of attack in this book an alien figure.And furthermore (this is another revision of my earlier review), the mean-spiritedness I claim is evident in this book is not just a term I threw out casually.Howie claims in numerous places that Deleuze deliberately mystified people and enchanted them with this "aura," and also that he was knowingly distorting views and in general dishonest and disingenuous.Make of that what you will.Still bilge. ... Read more

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"One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian," Michel Foucault once wrote. This book anthologizes 40 texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who died in 1995. The early texts, from 1953-1966 (on Rousseau, Kafka, Jarry, etc.), belong to literary criticism and announce Deleuze?s last book, Critique and Clinic (1993). But philosophy clearly predominates in the rest of the book, with sharp appraisals of the thinkers he always felt indebted to: Spinoza, Bergson. More surprising is his acknowledgement of Jean-Paul Sartre as his master. "The new themes, a certain new style, a new aggressive and polemical way of raising questions," he wrote, "come from Sartre." But the figure of Nietzsche remains by far the most seminal, and the presence throughout of his friends and close collaborators, Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault. The book stops shortly after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, and presents a kind of genealogy of Deleuze?s thought as well as his attempt to leave philosophy and connect it to the outside--but, he cautions, as a philosopher. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Deleuze's Early Genius
It is always fascinating to see the development of a philosopher's thought.By the age of 28 Deleuze had already formulated the main ideas of what he would develop in Difference and Repetition, his most rigorous work.No understanding of Deleuze can truly take place without this work, since it is here for the first time that you see Deleuze most clearly articulating his ideas since they are also the time when he created them.The interviews are especially insightful and include an incredible short encounter between him and Merleau-Ponty.

Deleuze had an enormous amount of influences and drew on many things that he only mentions in his later works.You can see some of those influences in full form here.I wish Deleuze had permitted his works earlier than age 28 to be published, but most likely he was not clear in his style or concepts.But this is the earliest we have, and it is with the same rigor and genius that he writes and speaks in this work.Absolutely essential to any study of Deleuze.

The other two most important books by Deleuze:
1) Difference and Repetition (the masterwork)
2) The Logic of Sense

great collection!
This book is a collection of short texts, book reviews, and interviews by and with Deleuze, many of which I've never seen in print before.There are some tremendously interesting pieces, for example, where Deleuze is presenting his ideas in Difference and Repetition to a group that includes Canguilhem and Jacques Merleau-Ponty (yes, Jacques), followed by a Q&A session in which Deleuze is grilled for clarification and pressed by objections.Furthermore, it is just nice to have all in one volume the early essays on Bergson ("The Conception of Difference in Bergson") and other central essays, like "How do we recognize structuralism," all of which are collected here.There are reviews of works by Lyotard and Hyppolite, essays on Nietzsche, Hume, Crime Novels, and Color in painting--- and finally, a string of interviews concerning Anti-Oedipus circa 1972.
There won't be any revelations for the Deleuze scholar here, as most of this material has seen print elsewhere and been commented upon extensively.But, it is nevertheless invaluable, I think, to have all of these pieces under one cover.And, for beginners, this might very well be as good a place to start as any, as you get Deleuze's earliest work progressing up to his work with Guattari, ordered chronologically by the editors.
Well done!! ... Read more

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Eugene W. Holland provides the first accessible and comprehensive introduction to this vastly complicated work. He explores how Deleuze and Guattari negotiate the interactions between the

three main materialist thinkers of modernity, Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, and examines the role of schizoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari's radical materialist psychiatry. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

use wikipedia instead.
This is a pretty good book, but its purport and aim, as well as how its being used, perhaps misses the point.Anti-Oedipus is not an interpretive work, and it needs no interpretation.It was not written to provide a narrative to one's prior education in psychoanalysis or to show how various schools of thought might interact in some kind of critical comparison.This kind of scholarly approach to the book will be of little practical use, even if one' happens to master the terminology.Maybe it could provide much grist for the mill of university's vanity press, but there's already an infinite supply already.

Anti-Oedipus does mention a lot of other thinkers and it tells us some of what they've been up to.Its got plenty of quotations.But these serve as rhizomatic exits/entrances to/from psychoanalysis and the nascent schizoanalysis, rather than serving as a representation of a prior tradition that the book can be superimposed on.I'd go so far as to say that, ideally, you'd go and read Freud after reading Anti-Oedipus.Or Lacan, or Laing, or Reich.It would be better if you'd never even heard of psychoanalysis, and we're using it as an introduction to what would no doubt seem a curious and alien technique for mystification and control.

The point of Anti-Oedipus is that psychoanalysis is a swamp.Its a bog and a mire.It is priestly--and pious after all--by completing the Hegelian negation of the negation of the body: the determinant negation in God.The future of an illusion indeed.The point of the book is that you don't need Freud to tell you who Oedipus is.Freud doesn't know who Oedipus is, so how could he tell you?You say Anti-Oedipus is difficult?Its nothing compared to the obfuscation and esotericism of psychoanalysis itself.Reading Anti-Oedipus will take umpteen months to read and reread; psychoanalysis, conversely, is the science where the more you study the less you know.

You also don't need to have gone to graduate school to master the book's scholarly apparatus either.the scholarly apparatus is meant to be absurd and impossible; it is meant to take it to such an extreme that its roles is transformed from interpretation to rhizomatic connection.Just like a Thousand Plateaus, the book doesn't need the index to back it up and support the arguments.It opens up to the index, and you follow the tracks from there.Its true that you need to be able to connect up to an impressive general background in the whole of western thought, and you have to be prepared to reintepret the intepretations; however, this function is infinitely better served by the tremendously powerful intepretative structure that one can operate by fusing the internet, via Wikipedia, with a good college research library.If you've learned how to read and use the internet, you can follow up ad hoc all the leads you don't understand, and this is much better than having someone teach you the controversies.

I give them an A++
The book arrived prior to the date in perfect shape. Also the price was right.

There are only one way to understend Anti Oedipus
Hi friends, may you think: I can't read the Anti Oedipos!!! Am I right??? I tell you: not are wrong. The book of Deluze and Guattari almost made me crazy. But searching in Amazon I found this wonder: the book of E. Holland. So, when I read this book the things fastly, but very fastly, were clear.
Holland trough his help book gave me the insight necessary to understend Anti Oedipus. If you are in trouble with Deluze and Guattari's work I have to you a little advice: take this Introduction to Schizoanalysis and you can tell me what happened after. If you still can't read the Anti Oedipus call me a lier!!!

This book saved my life...
...well not really, but it did help make the hours and hours and hours I spent reading Anti-Oedipus a much more fullfilling, meaningful experience, and for that, I am extremely grateful.



Listen, swallow your pride, even if you do make it all the way through Anti-Oedipus without any help, you are in all likelyhood doing yourself a disservice; there are so many elements at work, that unless you are a genius, and read multitudes of books, you are a not going to get everything you could out of the book.



For instance, have you read Difference and Repeition by Guattari? How about Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty also by Guattari? Because the themes and points made in those books are used in Anti-Oedipus, and, as the author Eugene W. Holland says, it is taken for granted you already know that stuff.



I read a lot to prepare for Anti-Oedipus, but it is practically impossible to have read and comprehended everything that is used by Deleuze and Guattari. For instance you must know Freud cold (especially Oedipus, the death instinct, and stuff on the drives), Lacan, the anti psychiatrists likeR.D. Laing, you must know Bataille, you must have read Schreber "Memoirs of my Nervous Illness", Willhelm Reich (such books as The Function of the Orgasm, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism), Herbert Marcuse (such as One Dimensional Man, and Eros and Civilization), you should have read Levi Strauss, I would recommend reading Gad Horowitz's Repression: Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud, Reich, Marcuse, you should also be very aware of the themes of post structuralism, such as the de-centered subject, and you must know Marx, I mean really know Marx (if you consider yourself a Marxist, this book is a treat), plus innumerable other books and texts and poets and philosophers.



I just had to admit, although I have read all of what I listed about, I was still not prepared for Anti-Oedipus (though I certainly knew enough to make Anti-Oedipus a real thrill once I got it), which occured somewhere around page 160.



This book brings it all together, in clear exposition, and it is like a breath of fresh air, my friends. It is no replacement for reading the actual book, but it is a necessary supplement. If you finish the chapters in Anti-Oedipus on the Connective Synthesis of Production, the Disjunctive Synthesis of Recording, and the Conjunctive Synthesis of Cunsumption-consummation and still are not so dure what the **** they are talking about, stop right there, cause you need to read this book. It will all be so much clearer afterwards.



I would recommend that you read as much of Anti-Oedipus as you can get through, if you get through the whole thing right off the bat, Bravo! But then get this book and consume it. Then, finish up the book, or just reflect, and you efforts will be greatly rewarded.



I am very thankful to Mr. Holland, and if I weren't an atheist, I'd say, GOD BLESS YOU SIR! I salute you and thank you for making my journey that much more of a victory...



...cause Anti-Oedipus is a real trip, but like the Tibetans after death, you need your guide and guide book (Like the Book of the Dead), and you now have it, to help make sure you don't get lost in the light (because it is so very bright).



Anti-Oedipus is a guide book to non fascist living. In these times, it is greatly needed. Get help, NOW! And then get some Schizoanalysis...

This guy is good
Back in the early 90s when I wrote an MA thesis and wanted to use concepts like "deterritorialization" there were absolutely NO good commentaries on D&G in English (Massumi's "users guide" is great, but it is no users guide).Things have changed, and Holland's book is one of the best commentaries around.And it is specifically on their least accessible of the "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" series.

Oh yeah, and great cover too! ... Read more

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tr Robert Hurley ... Read more

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Book is not for everyone
If you are familiar with philosophy, and if you are interested in Sponiza, than this book is a must.But it is not easy or light reading.What is amazing is how this book let's you into the philosopher's soul.Spinoza is the voice of reason and logic.Of course, he paid a horrible price for his belief that God can be sought out through reason and logic, as opposed to emotion and gut level feelings.

We are born with the fear of death.I wonder how Spinoza ever found the inner strength to keep on searching for God without the dual crutches of myth and the belief that there is a reward in the afterlife.

One last thing, and that is that most of the great and fearless men who signed the Constitution were diests.Without Spinoza's insights, the underlying belief in democracy, which is than men can discover TRUTH through reasoning and logic, would have never happened. ... Read more

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Gilles Deleuze is now regarded as one of the most radical philosophers of the twentieth century. His work has become hugely influential across a range of subjects, from philosophy and literature to art, architecture and cultural studies. Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts brings together leading specialists from a variety of disciplines to introduce the central concepts in the work of Deleuze. The short and accessible chapters in this book each focus on a single concept and show not only what the concept is but what it does. The contributors consider how the concepts are engaged, intersect, link and how they may deviate from other areas of postmodern thought. The concepts Deleuze employs in his writings are key to understanding his philosophical approach: they work to unsettle particular bodies of knowledge, to open them up and to link them to other concepts within and outside that body of knowledge. Aimed at a readership new to Deleuze and from disciplines outside philosophy, Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts offers an easy to access primer to reading Deleuze. ... Read more

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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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Learn about Deleuze the right way, not the easy way
Many, many silly things have been written by and about Gilles Deleuze; by comparison Bryant's book stands out as a beacon of sense, clarity, youth truth beauty and all the other great things there are. Just buy it.

If you need to be further convinced: he reads Deleuze in the light of Kant, rather than as a Nietzschean 'everything-is-power-and-we-must- fight-the-forces-of-ressentiment' type. He takes the philosophy of difference given in 'Difference and Repetition' and 'The Logic of Sense' to be an answer to the problem of the Kantian passivity of reception. For Deleuze, Kant gives up on the critical project by not asking what makes the given of receptivity possible. Although Kant shows the transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience (being the conceptual determination of intuitions) he doesn't show the transcendental conditions for *real* experience: to do so would be to give the conditions for intuitions, or receptivity. Deleuze's answer to this question, what allows the given to be given, is Difference, which is located in a constellation of terms: Idea, structure, problems and so on.

Bryant reads 'experience' primarily in terms of the individuation of objects, it is individuation that difference explains (that is, how object x can be said to differ from object y). Deleuze takes previous philosophies to be incoherent with regard to individuation, because they take the individuation of an object to be dependent upon something external to it. Empiricists can only say 'this x is this red because it isn't that slightly different red;' Kantians can only say 'we can say this is this because our concept and intuition match up here.' Both are cases of 'representation,' according to which individuation is an effect of the subject rather than the object. But both types of philosophy are unable to link subject and object after accounting for individuation in this way, and so fail in their task.

So all philosophies which are tied to the Image of Thought have internal difficulties. But this isn't merely a moral flaw, as some Deleuzians claim. Rather, it is an error immanent to the very possibility of thought. The process of individuation covers over the conditions for the given, and makes it seem a priori. Due to the success of cognitive thought - the application of concepts to material - we mistakenly assume that cognition is the only form of thought we have.

How to avoid this? Well, in the 'encounter,' we are able to pierce the Image of Thought; Bryant goes into great depth to show how this is possible. This is followed by a chapter relating Deleuze's thought to pre-critical dogmatism. Bryant argues that Deleuze seeks a thought which avoids the problems associated with both philosophies of immediacy and philosophies of conceptual mediation. He does so by appealing to the possibility of a manifold without a transcendental apperceiver, and insisting on the necessity of *some* given within thought in order to set limits to thinking. By contrast, a thinking without object or given is necessarily identity thinking, or subjective idealism. Finally, the book closes with a chapter on the processes of individuation Deleuze's philosophy provides: the actual is merely one among many possibilities of the virtual structure of the world, one 'answer' to a given problem. This view requires neither an opposition between nor an identity of, subject and object.

Bryant's book is difficult, but worthwhile. I have barely scratched the surface here. He gives readers of Deleuze an important vocabulary, one which enables us to situate Deleuze in many 20th century philosophical debates, both continental (particularly with regard to Adorno's thought on the non-identical and the rights of the object) and anglophone (the Sellarsian debates about givenness, and the new Aristotelianisms). Most importantly, he's adequately nasty to 'Deleuzians' who need to be set straight, and has no time for deliberate obfuscation and self-righteousness. Really, you should buy this book. ... Read more

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Other books have tried to explain Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), one of the twentieth century's most important and elusive thinkers, in general terms. However, Todd May organizes his introduction around a central question at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy: How might we live?He demonstrates how Deleuze offers a view of the cosmos as a living entity that provides ways of conducting our lives that we may not have even dreamed of. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Nicely explains Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze seems to write in a "stream of consciousness" fashion.Someone described his writing as akin to driving around a city with signless, winding streets full of dead ends and cul de sacs.May does an excellent job of teasing out and summarizing the key themes of Deleuze's work.Reading May in conjunction with select Deleuzian works will give you a much greater appreciation for Deleuze and may even influence how you view life.I cannot give May the fifth star because I found he does not always set the right level of explanation - sometimes too cursory, sometimes too much.

Excellent
As someone who is well-versed in Foucault, less so in Deleuze (and not at all in Derrida), I found the first chapter of this book to be a lovely simple yet fruitful little exposition situating these three titans of contemporary French philosophy as three distinctive responses to the Nietzschean legacy.Further, May helpfully distinguishes Deleuze in a way that separates him from Foucault/Derrida on the question of ontology.Now, these may be obvious/broad distinctions, but since this is an introduction, it is appropriate, and the text is written in a way that is very useful/accessible for english-speaking philosophers who may be unfamiliar (or worse) with Deleuze and other French philosophers.

I really enjoyed and highly recommend some of May's other works (e.g. the one on poststructuralist anarchism and between genealogy and epistemology on foucault), but I think this is perhaps his best; an elegant and powerful contribution that fills an important need--making Deleuze more readily accessible to students and anglophone philosophers.

A lucid introduction to Deleuze--that might change your life
This is a great, beautiful and timely book. It introduces Deleuze's philosophy by first of all having us think about a problem central to Deleuze's philosophy, the question "How might one live?" From this question, May unfolds Deleuze's ontology of difference and his views of life, thinking, science, language, teaching and politics. The book is compelling and highly accessible-and does something no other book on Deleuze that I know of does-precisely because it gets us to see Deleuze's point not simply through Deleuze's difficult writing and novel concepts, but through a familiar question that each one of us might live. And so May takes us into an enormous and rich field of life, from Prigogine's and Monod's science of chaos and chance, to the Palestinian intifada, to the life of John Coltrane, to life in urban America, to erotics.

Gille Deleuze: An Introduction is a book not simply for the scholar or the student, but for the one who might want to live differently, who might want to see how thinking differently about the world and life can open a different way of living.It might change your life. It might not. It should be read. ... Read more

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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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Friendship, in its nature, purpose, and effects, has been an important concern of philosophy since antiquity. It was of particular significance in the life of Gilles Deleuze, one of the most original and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. Taking L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze -- an eight-hour video interview that was intended to be aired only after Deleuze's death -- as a key source, Charles J. Stivale examines the role of friendship as it appears in Deleuze's work and life.

Stivale develops a zigzag methodology practiced by Deleuze himself to explore several concepts as they relate to friendship and to discern how friendship shifts, slips, and creates movement between Deleuze and specific friends. The first section of this study discusses the elements of creativity, pedagogy, and literature that appear implicitly and explicitly in his work. The second section focuses on Deleuze's friendships with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Claire Parnet, and Félix Guattari and reveals his conception of friendship as an ultimately impersonal form of intensity that goes beyond personal relationships.

Stivale's analysis offers an intimate view into the thought of one of the greatest thinkers of our time.

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In the most accessible and personal of his works, Deleuze examines, through a series of discussions with Claire Parnet, such revealing topics as his own philosophical background and development, the central themes of his work, and some of his relationships, in particular with the philosopher Félix Guattari. This new edition contains a new essay, "The Actual and the Virtual." ... Read more

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Pre-Thousand Plateaus, Insightful Indeed!
Here, Deleuze and Parnet give very illuminating and interesting form to many of the ideas that will later be expressed w/Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Excellently translated and insightful-- as though one werelistening to Deleuze with an acquaintance speaking of the direction of histheory in the 80's. Highly recommended. ... Read more

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This is the first critical introduction to Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze's most important work of philosophy and one of the most significant texts of contemporary philosophy.
In offering a critical analysis of Deleuze's methods, principles and arguments, the book enables readers to engage with the revolutionary core of Deleuze's philosophy and take up favourable or critical positions with respect to its most innovative and controversial ideas. The book will also help to extend Deleuze's work to philosophers working in the analytic tradition. ... Read more

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Deleuze from a english point of view
This book is good. But, if you want something more complex, more historical, this is not the book you need. The quotes of other philosopher are zero. The confrontation with other works of Deleuze is nule.

Anyway, in so far as this book is introductory for the reading of DR is a decent book.

I spent this dollars, and I don't have any regrets about that.

It could be better...
To be perfectly honest, this book helped to reinvigorate an interest in Difference and Repetition, a book that I had formerly passed over because on first read I found the contents inaccessible, at least at the time. And - in all fairness - Williams' book offers a number of hints that helped me to understand Deleuze's magnum opus. But that is really all this book has to offer: hints. As one reviewer pointed out, it can work to Williams' detriment that he insists on keeping a constant dialogue with analytical philosophy. I would go one step further and say that Williams' habit of repeating the same complaints which would-be analytical philosophers might raise, and always deferring any lucid answer to these questions, borders on tedium. This is not the only thing that is tedious about this work, as one quickly becomes aware after sampling just a bit of the prose. For instance, Williams often interrupts his train of thought with bizarre and unhelpful remarks (e.g. "Who are you stranger? What reasons brought you here?").

If you're looking for a clarification of Deleuze's chef d'oeuvre, this book will help to some degree. If you don't feel like weeding through the tedium of "Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition" I recommend looking elsewhere - Manuel Delanda's "Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy" is a nice alternative.

Probably as good as it's going to get
For everyone frustrated and defeated by Deleuze's masterwork, you now have before you a way to tame the beast in the form of this strange little book.Williams is pretty good on most points, and he does his darnedest to clarify D&R without caricaturing it.I think he succeeds, and this despite the fact that I would never read, or recommend that someone read, Deleuze's work as he has done.By which I mean: more or less in constant dialogue with the so-called analytic tradition.Williams not only develops Deleuze's ideas along those lines, but builds a more or less perpetual opposition to Deleuze by posing the most likely objections from the analytic camp.In the end, Deleuze wins--as well he should in a book on a book containing all the reasons why Deleuze thought he won--but, I just kept feeling the question pressing...at what cost?Might it not be more encumbent upon us left the task of making good on Deleuze's legacy to resist fusing that legacy and judging it in tandem with a tradition that he always sought to distance himself from?I think so, but as I am not master of all things, I'll go ahead and recommend this book on the strength of what it does quite capably: give a clear and sustained account of the principles underlying D&R; approach the work in a critical spirit that never reverts into blind attack or adulation; and, most importantly for me, keeps it concise, not getting lost in the infinite texture and detail of the work, and sticking to the "big" points.After all, this is an introduction to a great work of philosophy and not a key to scripture, and Williams does us all a great service by leaving most of the work up to us---he just ensures that we can begin to read the thing!!!
Pretty dang good. ... Read more

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This is the first comprehensive introduction to Deleuze's work on literature. It provides thorough treatments of Deleuze's early book on Proust and his seminal volume on Kafka and minor literature. Deleuze on Literature situates those studies and many other scattered writings within a general project that extends throughout Deleuze's career-that of conceiving of literature as a form of health and the writer as a cultural physician. ... Read more