Book Description

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."

Customer Reviews (1)

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

Book Description
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From the early 1960s until his death, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) wrote many influential works on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art.One of Deleuze's main philosophical projects was a systematic inversion of the traditional relationship between identity and difference. This Deleuzian philosophy of difference is the subject of Jeffrey A. Bell's Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos.

Bell argues that Deleuze's efforts to develop a philosophy of difference are best understood by exploring both Deleuze's claim to be a Spinozist, and Nietzsche's claim to have found in Spinoza an important precursor. Beginning with an analysis of these claims, Bell shows how Deleuze extends and transforms concepts at work in Spinoza and Nietzsche to produce a philosophy of difference that promotes and, in fact, exemplifies the notions of dynamic systems and complexity theory. With these concepts at work, Deleuze constructs a philosophical approach that avoids many of the difficulties that linger in other attempts to think about difference. Bell uses close readings of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Whitehead to illustrate how Deleuze's philosophy is successful in this regard and to demonstrate the importance of the historical tradition for Deleuze. Far from being a philosopher who turns his back on what is taken to be a mistaken metaphysical tradition, Bell argues that Deleuze is best understood as a thinker who endeavoured to continue the work of traditional metaphysics and philosophy.

Customer Reviews (1)

Strongly recommended as a core contribution to scholarship and academic library Philosophy Studies collections.
"Philosophy At The Edge Of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze And the Philosophy Of Difference" by Jeffrey A. Bell provides students of philosophy with fascinating insights and perspectives on the work of Spinoza, Aristotle, Whitehead, Derrida, and Deleuze. A work of impeccable scholarship, "Philosophy At The Edge Of Chaos" is divided into two major sections: `Thinking Difference' and `Rethinking System". Bell fundamentally addresses systematic thinking and what is described as the `Philosophy of difference". Of special interest is the chapter dedicated to `Thinking Difference: Heidegger and Deleuze on Aristotle', as well as Bell's thoughtful and compelling conclusions at the end of this extended treatise. Enhanced with extensive notations, an impressive bibliography, and a comprehensive index, "Philosophy At The Edge Of Chaos" is also available in a hardcover editionand is strongly recommended as a core contribution to scholarship and academic library Philosophy Studies collections. ... Read more

Book Description
Although Gilles Deleuze is one of France’s most celebrated twentieth-century philosophers, his theories of cinema have largely been ignored by American scholars. Film theorist D. N. Rodowick fills this gap by presenting the first comprehensive study, in any language, of Deleuze’s work on film and images. Placing Deleuze’s two books on cinema—The Movement-Image and The Time-Image—in the context of French cultural theory of the 1960s and 1970s, Rodowick examines the logic of Deleuze’s theories and the relationship of these theories to his influential philosophy of difference.
Rodowick illuminates the connections between Deleuze’s writings on visual and scientific texts and describes the formal logic of his theory of images and signs. Revealing how Deleuzian views on film speak to the broader network of philosophical problems addressed in Deleuze’s other books—including his influential work with Félix Guattari—Rodowick shows not only how Deleuze modifies the dominant traditions of film theory, but also how the study of cinema is central to the project of modern philosophy.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Description
Expressionism in Philosophy is both a pivotal reading of Spinoza's work and also a crucial text within the development of Deleuze's own thought. It was the culmination of a series of monographic studies by Deleuze (on Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, Proust, Kant, and Sacher-Masoch), and it prepared the transition from these abstract treatments of historical schemes of experience to the nomadology of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

In this extraordinary work, Deleuze reflects on one of the thinkers of the past who most influenced his own sweeping reconfiguration of the tasks of philosophy. For Deleuze, Spinoza, along with Nietzsche and Lucretius, conceived of philosophy as an enterprise of liberation and radical demystification.

Gilles Deleuze is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes/Saint Denis. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A REVIEW BY A REAL PHILOSOPHER
It is not without reason that Deleuze called Spinoza the "prince of the philosophers". The reason can be discerned from the very pages of this book. The importance of this work cannot be underestimated.

Of profound significance is the idea that Being is explicative and does not become less in each of its expression. This affirms the sense of beings and gives voice to the power and beauty of "life".

Spinoza's/ Deleuze's philosophy is against everything that is life-negative, instead, it is life-affirmative and celebrates joy as a powerful and adequate response to the life that we are given.

A reading of Hegel's critique and Nietzsche's Zarathustra would be sufficient as background to this complex but powerful and rewarding text. If I may suggest a further reading: Badiou's "Clamour of Being" adds new dimensions to Deleuze's thinking.

For fans of either Deleuze or Spinoza
Though this book dates from the less well-known "academic" phase of Deleuze's career, and thus completely lacks the stylistic exuberance of his later works, you can immediately see how it pre-figures many of the concepts he was to create with Guattari.It is interesting, then, both from the perspective of studying Deleuze, as well as for its clear, almost dry, presentation of Spinoza's philosophy.In fact, the book can serve as a bridge between these philosophers irrespective of which of the two names drew you to the title: a Spinoza for the Deleuzians, and a Deleuze that even a Spinozist could love, the two tied together by a shared conception of pure immanence.

The plan of the book is based around the structure of the Ethics and outlines all the main points of Spinoza's masterpiece, starting with Substance and ending in Beatitude.Special care is taken to situate Spinoza with respect to his historical context, particularly next to the philosophies of Descartes and Leibniz.To this end, Deleuze develops his thesis that it is a shared philosophy of "expression" that, despite their differences, unites Leibniz and Spinoza in founding a post-cartesian philosophy.For readers of A Thousand Plateaus, the idea that Nature is expressive will come as no surprise, but seeing this in light of Spinoza adds a valuable depth to it.

el unico
Deleuze, el último filósofo.
Se encarno una vez - igual que Spinoza - para mostarnos que no hay otra preocupacion que el Ser y el Pensamiento.

A Post-Structuralist Reading of the Rationalists
Deleuze's interpretation of Spinoza's Ethics is lively and original; his description of the problem of attributes and modes as numerically distinctfrom substance but not ontologically so is helpful in understandingSpinoza's metaphysics.His discussion of power, as "pouvoir" and"puissance" and their relationship to active affections, is alsofascinating for what it suggests about the possibility of a rationalcommunity.A must read for Spinoza students and those interested in thehistory of philosophy. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

At last, a clear explanation!
I must confess, I've only read three of the essays so far in this book, but it's the introduction that I'm most grateful for.Daniel W. Smith does a magnificent job of explicating many of the concepts that have perplexed and confounded my poor artistic mind.I feel that Deleuze had a special understanding of literature, and I was interested to see what he has to say about some of the writers I also love (Beckett, Kafka, Melville).But I've mostly had this experience of wishing I could get what it was he was saying.I felt all along like I was just-this-close, until Smith cracked it open for me.Lots of "Aha" experiences.For people with an artistic bent and with an attraction to philosophy, Deleuze is perhaps a kindred spirit whose words and thoughts about literature, painting and music can give hope and faith to whatever projects we work on at the foot of the capitalist mountain.I've also read his book on Kafka, and I selected that one because I want to understand more, and based on a review here on Amazon where someone said "this was the one to start with."I would say, that Kafka is definitely the one to start with, but Smith's intro to this book gives a very helpful overview of what one can expect.So Start with the Intro, go to Kafka, then come back to the essays.My .02.

Critique et Clinique. . .Real Horrorshow
Deleuze follows Nietzsche in asserting that literature, at its strongest, plays a *clinical* role in our lives, providing us with a technology to discharge blockages, to liberate the penal colonies of our overcodedneuroses. Literature is a vector of disease, the writer a physician of thespirit, the world a dissoluted Body without Organs shimmering between theescape-routes of Life and the leprous snares of a doctrinaljudge-mentality. Sickness and disequilibrium on a world-historical scale, adelirium far beyond the personal and the individual, the great authors (inthis anthology: Melville, Whitman, Carroll, Lawrence, Jarry, Masoch,Beckett) struggling to plot the epidemiology of these terrors, groping foran escape-hatch that may redeem the years of incarceration, both psychicaland political. Illness is defined as the *stopping* or interruption of thewriting process, the exhaustion of the literary machine, when theschizo-author feels abandoned by the world's epic Traverse and wills herown destruction. Where once the literary agent had all her powers engagedin the machinic exploration of her own narrative Immanence, there nowremains only an outmoded cyborg husk, having lost "the spontaneity orthe innate feeling for the fragmentary, and the reflection on livingrelations that must constantly be acquired and created. Spontaneousfragments constitute the element through which, or in the intervals ofwhich, we attain the great and carefully considered visions and sounds ofboth Nature and history"(60). These essays show how every great writeris also a master aetiologist, a "holistic pathologist" trying toidentify and dissolve the negative forces which separate Life from what itcan do, that keep Immanence from exploding against its world-historicaltargets. As a supplement to *Capitalism and Schizophrenia* (that immaculatePublic Health textbook), these discourses are outstanding. ... Read more

Book Description
"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

Customer Reviews (2)

The Final Kantian Reversal, or: Nuncle Lear Cometh
Deleuze has long apprehended the *Critique of Judgement* as that rarest of philosophical achievements, a work of hoary old age whose radical and "deeply romantic"(xi) precepts are somberly misunderstood by students, most of whom pass it off as a clunky, fossilized curio of old-school aesthetic theory.As argued in this text, however, Kant's project is sensible (one might even say consummated) only in the light of this penultimate work, the keys to which are well worth questing for: "What is in question is how certain phenomena which come to define the Beautiful give an autonomous supplementary dimension to the inner sense of time, a power of free reflection to the imagination, an infinite conceptual power to the understanding....It is a terrible struggle between imagination and reason, and also between understanding and the inner sense, a struggle whose episodes are the two forms of the Sublime, and then Genius.It is a tempest in the depths of a chasm opened up in the subject.The faculties confront one another, each stretched to its own limit, and find their accord in a fundamental discord: a discordant accord is the great discovery of the *Critique of Judgement*, the final Kantian reversal...the source of time"(xii-xiii).

Radically, Deleuze follows De Quincey's *The Last days of Emmanuel Kant* by casting the later Kant as a grizzly King Lear of sorts, exiled from his "reasonable" philosophical kingdom and stepping precariously to a mad song of Romantic apperception.Hamlet's "time out of joint" becomes the unhinged temporality of movement subordinated and conditioned by time, or the Borgesian "labyrinth which is composed of a single straight line, and which is indivisible, incessant."While Rimbaud's "I is another" becomes the form under which the I affects the ego, or the mind affecting itself, an interiorized temporality that constantly divides us from ourselves, "a giddiness, an oscillation which constitutes time"(ix).Kafka's "The Good is what the Law says" reminds us that there is nothing to "know" in the law, simply that it *is*, and that we only come across this "ism" through action and execution, by which we must deduce the Good.Finally, Rimbaud's "disorder of all the senses" becomes that autopoetic civil war of the faculties pushing themselves to act and cooperate in unique and unprecedented ways, leading one faculty to an achievement or realization it would never have had on its own, pushing the known boundaries of genius and creativity, onward to mutation.

This is a "brief" treatise whose length should not be underestimated.As always, Deleuze's exegetical style is diamond-sharp, tracing an analytical razorline through the architectontic reversals of Kant's ever-burgeoning spiritual maturity, from the brilliant technician and moral demiurge of the first two critiques, to the wild, discordant Kant of old age.

For those uncomfortable with Deleuze's controversial approach to Nietzsche and Spinoza, this volume is much more Kantian than Deleuzian.But its originalities are impossible to deny, its exegetical precision a godsend.Deleuze's extraordinary personality is stamped on every page, while the unchained spirit of the later Kant shines provocatively through.This treatise should be special-ordered for all university courses on Kant's philosophy.It is an outstanding 20th-century reaction to a now misappropriated philosophical visionary, the grandeur of whose final work is too often obscured by the first two Critiques, which are merely its prologue or conceptual training-ground.

A masterly focus
This is a slim volume, unusual because it operates at a very general level across all three of Kant's Critiques instead of the more usual focus on asingle Critique. Deleuze's aim is architectonic: to show how the threeCritiques fit together to form a coherent whole. This is a valuableundertaking since it's very easy to get lost in the Kantian thickets, whichare arguably the densest in all of Western philosophy.

Deleuzeorganizes the three Critiques around the core notion of faculties and theobjects over which they legislate. For example, understanding legislates inthe faculty of knowledge, while reason operates over the faculty of desire;taken individually, the study of each makes up the content of the first twoof Kant's celebrated Critiques. Their respective functions are shown byDeleuze to culminate in the third Critique (i.e. *Critique of PureJudgement*), wherein the notion of "ends", both moral and cognitive, reachsynthetic fulfillment. Hence, it is in the third Critique, instead of thefirst two, in which the capstone of Kant's Copernican revolution isreached. Here in the arena of art and aesthetics, no faculty legislates,nor are generic objects present. Rather aesthetic judgement involves thefaculties and imagination in a kind of free play aimed at some type ofoverall harmony.Rather than knowledge, which can only be phenomenal,culture represents humankind's highest achievement and its measurement; andthe highway into 19th century Romanticism opens.

Kant is a giant ofWestern philosophy. This book aids in an understanding of his overallundertaking. ... Read more

Book Description
Dorothea Olkowski's exploration of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze clarifies the gifted French thinker's writings for specialists and nonspecialists alike. Deleuze, she says, accomplished the "ruin of representation," the complete overthrow of hierarchic, organic thought in philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and ethics, as well as in society at large. In Deleuze's philosophy of difference, she discovers the source of a new ontology of change, which in turn opens up the creation of new modes of life and thought, not only in philosophy and feminism but wherever creation is at stake.
The work of contemporary artist Mary Kelly has been central to Olkowski's thinking. In Kelly she finds an artist at work whose creative acts are in themselves the ruin of representation as a whole, and the text is illustrated with Kelly's art. This original and provocative account of Deleuze contributes significantly to a critical feminist politics and philosophy, as well as to an understanding of feminist art. ... Read more

Book Description
Gilles Deleuze has produced some of the most important--and most formidable--theory on cinema to appear in the last half-century. Deleuze on Cinema provides a thorough and reliable guide to Deleuze's thought on the art of film, elucidating in clear language the shape and thrust of Deleuze's arguments found in his influential books on cinema. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Not a Deleuze for Dumbies book, but insightful and well written
Bogue's three-volume series on Deleuze and the arts is a welcome addition to Deleuze's daunting body of work. Although I haven't finished the book, I've read enough to offer a few comments that may help you decided if "Deleuze on Cinema" is right for you.

First of all, as the previous reviewer notes, this is not "Deleuze-made-easy" or anything close. Bogue assumes a small amount of background knowledge that most will have if they're at all familiar with Deleuze. The difficulty comes in Bogue's compact summations of philosophies (other than Deleuze, Bergson is the big one). You may be familiar with some Deleuzian concepts, but Bergson will present a whole new challenge.

I found Bogue's explanations of Bergson and Deleuze's reading of Bergson to be more difficult than I would like. The topic is, of course, complex, but I have seen authors greatly increase the level of approachability in thinkers from Lacan to Adorno. The book is ostensibly a resource for introducing Deleuze's concepts of cinema, but it is more like a condensed version - fewer words and more direct, but difficult all the same.

The best parts come at the end of the long theoretical sections where Bogue puts Deleuze and Bergson into more intuitive examples. If you can make it through the theory, the examples tie the ideas together sufficiently, but understanding will not arrive without considerable work on the part of the reader.

My main comment is, this is not significantly easier than reading Deleuze directly. It's a high quality, detailed study of Deleuze and the cinema and accordingly, it is not going to reveal its secrets easily.

If you're already familiar with Deleuze or have a strong interest in his work, this is a great find. If you're new to Deleuze or film theory in general, this is not the best place to start, in my opinion. There are a number of resources that will give the necessary background before committing to this text such as the Deleuze Dictionary. Bogue's style is very clear and precise and my understanding has increased significantly since beginning. Just be aware that he doesn't make Deleuze "easy".

learn it....love it....LIVE IT!
My friends all think I hate movies. This isn't true, but I admit that I'm often reluctant to see them--like most important artistic media (contemporary poetry and the plastic arts, to say nothing of ubiquitous pop music), there is too much worthless drivel to wade through.

I've always held that cimema can be a powerful artistic medium, but until recently I was much too ignorant of classic films. A life-long student of literature, I decided to educate myself in 'reading' films. This book is where I started--correction: this book, my local dvd rental store, and a friend to watch some great movies with.

I'd known of Bogue's three-volume study of Deleuze and the Arts (see my review of Bogue's _Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts_), so after my cinema-knowledgeable friend drew up a list of the 50 most important classic films I needed to know, I ordered a copy of _Deleuze on Cinema_.

This book, like the others in the series, is not a "Deleuze for Dummies." Bogue--like Deleuze--assumes quite a bit of knowledge on the reader's part. This is refreshing. It's a supplement--something to read in preparation for watching the movies as well as for making sense of them after the show's over. Just paging through the ample index will offer a taste of what's offered: directors include Hitchcock, Resnais, Eisenstein, Robbe-Grillet, Bunuel, Godard, Bresson, Kurosawa, and Antonioni, among others.

Take this insightful passage on Orson Welles as one example of the clarity and brilliance of Bogue on Deleuze: "In each of Welles' films, sheets of the past coexist within a transpersonal memory, but Deleuze argues as well that in individual shorts one can actually see characters inhabiting a region of time....Deleuze observes that others before Welles had used deep focus shots, but usually with the planes of the image remaining relatively isolated from one another. What Welles achieves by contrast is a communication and interpenetration of foreground, middle ground, and background, each shot a dynamic space-in-depth" (pgs 142-43).

This book will be of essential interest to students and lovers of Deleuze, film, literature--and especially to those who, like me, need a little extra meat and potatoes with their buttered popcorn. ... Read more

Book Description
In his stunning essay, Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of the late 19th-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze's essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch's "peculiar way of 'desexualizing' love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity." He shows that masochism is something far more subtle and complex than the enjoyment of pain, that masochism has nothing to do with sadism; their worlds do not communicate, just as the genius of those who created them - Masoch and Sade - lie stylistically, philosophically, and politically poles a part.

Venus in Furs, the most famous of all of Masoch's novels was written in 1870 and belongs to an unfinished cycle of works that Masoch entitled The Heritage of Cain. The cycle was to treat a series of themes including love, war, and death. The present work is about love. Although the entire constellation of symbols that has come to characterize the masochistic syndrome can be found here - fetishes, whips, disguises, fur-clad women, contracts, humiliations, punishment, and always the volatile presence of a terrible coldness - these do not eclipse the singular power of Masoch's eroticism. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

A lot to learn
For those who want to become acquainted with the deepest mysteries of mind and their relationship to behavior, not only sexual, this book is indispensable.

Not So Painful
For those who have tried their hand at Deleuze's other works--notably _A Thousand Pleateus_ and _Anti-Oedipus_--the title of my review will completely make sense. In this essay, Deleuze presents an engaging arguement about the development of the Oedipal complex and its relation to masochism. Basically, in the final stage of Freud's Oedipus the son is meant to internalize an identification with the father. In revolt he engages in the masochistic drama--a desperate attempt to re-enter the early stage of identification with the mother. By engaging in Masoch's drama, the woman becomes the subject's mother, and she proceeds to ritualistically beat the father out of the son. After all, dad is the one guilty of forcing the two apart in the first place. But this woman, this actress playing the mother, is certainly not a "sadist"; she herself is a masochist, because masochism has by this point proven to be an entire setting--an entire life--all of the characters, tools, words, rituals and scripted parts involved therein.

Contract, ritual, drama and fear combine to show us complexities of human expressions of violence, care, sexuality and the inter-relation between these three. I do not understand why this book has not recieved as much attention as some of Deleuze's others; its brilliance and accessibility--packaged of course with the eloquent and important _Venus in Furs_--make it well worth your time and money.

man oh man!!!
this is HOT stuff!!!do yourself a favor and get yer mitts on this one!!!

More than meets the eye
This refers to the book, Venus in Furs, not the essay by Deleuze. I loved this book. Not because I'm some psycho who enjoys pain, but because it tastefully deals with an issue that is too often either misrepresented as some libertine taboo or dealt with in a clinical way. Instead you have a story that deals with love in a different way than a typical Danielle Steele romance novel or a "boy meets girl," sappy drugstore paperback. And while it deals with passionate cruelty it, unlike books by Sade, captures unbridled desire and an inflamed heart. It is truly a great work of literature, easily comparable to "The Sorrows of Young Werther" by Goethe.
If you like sappy romance stories, buy something else. If you want an intriguing love story full of the passion of life and the strumming of the stings of emotion, read away.

More than meets the eye
This refers to the book, Venus in Furs, not the essay by Deleuze.I loved this book.Not because I'm some psycho who enjoys pain, but because it tastefully deals with an issue that is too often either misrepresented as some libertine taboo or dealt with in a clinical way.Instead you have a story that deals with love in a different way than a typical Danielle Steele romance novel or a "boy meets girl," sappy drugstore paperback.And while it deals with passionate cruelty it, unlike books by Sade, captures unbridled desire and an inflamed heart.It is truly a great work of literature, easily comparable to "The Sorrows of Young Werther" by Goethe.

If you like sappy romance stories, buy something else.If you want an intriguing love story full of the passion of life and the strumming of the stings of emotion, read away. ... Read more

Book Description

Called by many France's foremost philosopher, Gilles Deleuze is one of the leading thinkers in the Western World. His acclaimed works and celebrated collaborations with Félix Guattari have established him as a seminal figure in the fields of literary criticism and philosophy. The long-awaited publication ofWhat is Philosophy? in English marks the culmination of Deleuze's career.

Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between philosophy, science, and the arts, seeing as means of confronting chaos, and challenge the common view that philosophy is an extension of logic. The authors also discuss the similarities and distinctions between creative and philosophical writing. Fresh anecdotes from the history of philosophy illuminate the book, along with engaging discussions of composers, painters, writers, and architects.

A milestone in Deleuze's collaboration with Guattari,What is Philosophy? brings a new perspective to Deleuze's studies of cinema, painting, and music, while setting a brilliant capstone upon his work.

Customer Reviews (7)

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

Deleuze is difficult but not whimsical
For a grad class "Recent French Philosophy" I am reading Deleuze and Guattari's "What is Philosophy?". I certainly don't have a review ready for it. Nor can I claim to have concrete and clear thoughts about it yet. But I do have questions and rough ideas which I will endeavor to set down simply for the practice of articulating these thoughts.

Regarding style: Many have and will complain that Deleuze obfuscates what he ought to want to make clear. The meaning of a sentence or paragraph, I will admit, is not always clear if only because Deleuze refers often to ideas outside philosophy without providing clear meaning. He alludes or make explicit reference to art works, history, his previous work, film, and political concerns without pausing to describe more completely each of these.

Deleuze however is completely serious in his task; I would deny anyone who wished to claim Deleuze was trying to evoke a mind-fudge which would somehow disrupt the knowledge-seeking mind the same way knowledge-seeking has been disrupted by poststructuralist insights. He may do this in Mille Plateau but so far in "What is Philosophy?" he is not being artful with his style. His style is dictated not by a desire to have commensurability between "gist" and mode of expression. His style is dense and difficult because he has a lot to say, is at the end of a career with much ground work done; and feels he must talk to his schoolmates (to use a phrase of Spivak's concerning Derrida). The issues dealt with in "What is Philosophy?" exist at a high level of abstraction which Deleuze has arrived at the end of his career. Let his earlier work, a familiarity with art and culture, and a close dedicated slow reading fill in the gaps in his style.

Deleuze begins with an introduction in which he suggests that the question of what is philosophy, is a question proper for old age. Indeed, this book was written not long before Guattari died and after many of their great collaborative works. Deleuze wrote at the beginning of his career detailed histories of particular individual philosophers that he felt to be in line with his and his generations project to do without Hegelian dialectics (this according to Hardt's reading). Deleuze wrote on Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza in this fashion. Deleuze then partnered with Guattari, a psychoanalyst and activist, to write "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" as well as the sequel, "Thousand Plateaus."

"What is Philosophy?" is very much a work in which Deleuze and Gauttari step back to survey as only an older person can do what it is they've been doing all along. The book does actually provide definitions of what philosophy is and is rigorous in explaining what the definitions mean.

Philosophy is the creation of concepts. It is not an extension of logic, nor an inquiry into the textual nature of everything. Nor is philosophy reflection, contemplation or communication although philosophy creates concepts of each of those three eventually.

So, what is it to create concepts? It seems to me that the easiest way to understand what Deleuze says about concepts is to think about it all with the aid of a 3D Cartesian graph like in a CAD program.

There is no simple or originary concept as every concept consists in more than two components and every concept is situated in relation to a philosophical problem (such as free will or perception) and is situated in relation to other concepts on the same plane and on other planes.

"For, according to the Nietzsching verdict, you will know nothing through concepts unless you have first created them -- that is, constructed them in an intuition specific to them: a field, a plane, and a ground that must not be confused with them but that shelters their seeds..."

What the concept is named, who is it's creator, and the components involved in its relation to its philosophical problem are all the idiosyncratic components of a concept each existing in our Cartesian 3D space...the concept being the "Fragmentary whole" connecting all the components.

In light of their definition of a concept, Deleuze and Guattari are able to say something to those who are often found arguing about subjectivity and objectivity or relativism and absolutes. A concept belies this dichotomy as a concept is both relative and absolute. In that a concept consists roughly speaking of relations between its components and other concepts, then a concept is relative. But to attack a concept as not-absolute is only to bring another component into our range and thereby change the concept we are dealing with.

"The concept is therefore both absolute and relative: it is relative to its own components, to other concepts, to the plane on which it is defined, and to the problems it is supposed to resolve; but it is absolute through the condensation it carries out, the site it occupies on the plane, and the conditions it assigns to the problem" [p.21].

D and G explain themselves in concrete examples which is wonderfully helpful. The examples include "the Other" and the Cartesian Ego which includes a drawing.

I am still trying to figure out if neighborhood zones, bridges, planes, and history of a concept, refer to the concepts endoconsistency and endorelations or its exorelations. I think zone is endo and plane is endo.

More later.

The last try
The book is what one could call the image-thought of Deleuze himself. What is explained in chapter two is the book itself. If one wants the answer to the question: "¿what is then the image of thought of Deleuze and Guattari?" then this book is the answer. Now, one cannot simply answer: "Creation". After reading the book and some other parts of their philosophy, one understands that that is just the external form of the answer, not worng, but not whole. A new system of philosophy "is finished" with this book. Not a hegelian system, but as Hegel did.

What indeed?
Nietzsche, who started all this, may or may not have been the deepest thinker since Socrates, but he was a stylistic virtuoso. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, were founder members of a postmodern cult whose watchword is: obscurity = profundity. But while some profound things may be ineluctably obscure, by no means all obscure things are profound.

This book, which runs to 250 pages scarcely burdened by a coherently expressed thought, is in line for the prestigious prize, the Golden Merde de Taureau. It contains, along with much else, the authors' mature lucubrations on the foundations of calculus, which have greatly impressed readers who flunked high-school math. Others maintain that these passages are not about mathematics at all, just as the passages about science are not about science, and they may be right. What, if anything, it is about is anyone's guess, and many have speculated, some to their own satisfaction. One thing we can be sure of, because the authors tell us: they are creating concepts. This important work should not be undertaken by those in whom unfortunate defects of education have left a residual respect for language and joined-up thought.

The book was a bestseller in France - possibly the most unread bestseller since a 'A Brief History of Time', but for different reasons.

Culmination of D-G
Deleuze and Guattari present their perspective onphilosophy, science and art. According to them,philosophy is to create concepts.The writing is quite dense but you willfindthe D-G's final spark in this book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The Paradox of Enemies
Hardt's book on Deleuze can be applauded for two reasons:its carefulreading of Deleuze's texts and its attempt to situate them critically amongcontinental philosophy.Hardt is a clear writer, and his insights areoften quite powerful and suggestive.However, like most writer on Deleuzehis "deleuzian" reading seeks too much to reconfigure the texts(Bergson, Nietzsche,and Spinoza). Beyond Hardt's text stands the imposingshadow of Hegel -- perhaps my only hesitation with its analysis.There isa desire to find unity in difference however radical this difference mightbe. The key problem of scholarship on Deleuze seem to be precisely how toread him -- is the project Deleuze has laid out to reread his texts as hehas reread others? How is one to be Deluezian?This said, Hardt's work isexceptional in most areas.

Hardt's Deleuze shows us how one can break whith Hegel
In Gilles Deleuze, Michael Hardt analyzes the development of Deleuze's thought focussing on his works in the history of philosophy. From this historical perspective, Hardt renders possible to see the very intensive forcing bettwen Hegel's dialectics and this new afirmative thougth. Theoriginal reference to Scholastic's philosophy, for example, open thehorizont to a new comprenhension of the arguments used by Deleuze, no sooften explained. It would be very interesting to read this book in pararelwhith Vicent Descombes' La même et l'autre, a totaly oposite interpretationof Deleuze, where the battle whith Hegel is mised from the very begining. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description
Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida are the two leading philosophers of French post-structuralism. Both theorists have been widely studied but very little has been done to examine the relation between them. Between Deleuze and Derrida is the first book to explore and compares their work. This is done via a number of key themes, including the philosophy of difference, language, memory, time, event, and love, as well as relating these themes to their respective approaches to Philosophy, Literature, Politics and Mathematics.

Contributors:
Eric Alliez, Branka Arsic, Gregg Lambert, Leonard Lawlor,Alphonso Lingis, Tamsin Lorraine, Jeff Nealon, Paul Patton, Arkady Plotnitsky, John Protevi, Daniel W. Smith ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Derrida, Deleuze and their Difference
Paul Patton and John Protevi have provided us with a collection of studies which not only constitutes a promising starting point for comparing and contrasting the thought of Derrida and Deleuze, but also with fertile ground for further (re)search on the issues raised.

If Derrida and Deleuze appear to be strangers - despite having lived in Paris, it is because, as Agamben has claimed, they seem to be following two unlike intellectual trajectories, namely, that of "transcendence" with Derrida - and Levinas, and that of "immanence" with Deleuze - and Nietzsche, a tradition going back to Spinoza. Despite their differences, they both seem concerned with developing a non-Hegelian philosophy of difference, that is, a non-dialectical difference.

It is around such discussions that the collection is organized. In particular, Patton explores the ethico-political orientation with respect of the future with emphasis on the open construction of "future"; Lorraine further explores conceptualizations of "time" in Derrida and Deleuze. Smith follows Agamben's thesis and provides additional evidence, a claim that Lawlor skillfully counters. Alliez explores ways Plato has been understood by Derrida in 'Plato's Pharmacy' and Deleuze in 'Plato and the Simulacrum'. Plotnitsky identifies a common mathematical reference and inspiration although Derrida's approach is algebraic and Deleuze's is primarily geometric. With Lambert the concern is literature and re-presentation, a theme equally discussed by Arsic with reference to Melville. Nealon exposes the developments and inspirations found in cultural studies with an emphasis on the non-coincidence between language and that which it signifies, which Lingis sees as an opportunity to escape from interpretation. The closing paper by Protevi explores the notion "experience" in relation to "love": 'love as experience of aporia for Derrida' v. 'love as exercise in depersonalization for Deleuze' (p. 13).

Overall, a very important contribution to discussions surrounding Derrida and Deleuze, that is well edited and accessible. ... Read more