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Published in English only by Semiotexte, On the Line is the first presentation of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of the "rhizome," an early template for the understanding of the internet, which the two would later go on to elaborate in A Thousand Plateaus. On the Line is a guide to their later work, in which they devise ways of superceding the Marxist concept of class while maintaining a radical vision of capitalism, in all its complexity and effects. By envisaging the social macrocosm as a series of lines, they reinvent politics as a process of flux whose outcome will always be unpredictable. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

On The Rhizome
You may be like I once was, wanting to read some Deleuze & Guattari, and for cheaper than the price of Anti-Oedipus or A Thousand Plateaus. Then you happen to notice that On The Line is both 1) out of print & 2) for the cheap.

Take note though that On The Line consists of two portions that are reprinted elsewhere. The first, Rhizome, is the introductory chapter in A Thousand Plateaus. The version appearing in ATP is a bit of a re-working of it, and I find the translation preferable. The same goes with the translation of the second article in On The Line, Politics. Politics is printed as 'Many Politics' in the Claire Parnet & Gilles Deleuze book, Dialogues.

Oh, and if you're thinking of purchasing Nomadology: The War Machine, that's in ATP, too. ... Read more

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At last available in paperback, this book anticipates and explains the post-structuralist turn to empiricism. Presenting a challenging reading of David Hume´s philosophy, the work is invaluable for understanding the progress of Deleuze´s thought. ... Read more

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super duper
an excellent intro to deleuze. the book speaks of motivation, subjectivity, and habit, praising hume's empiricism and theory of mind. latter deleuze texts are oft' full of fanciful prose, but this one is clear and concise. the thesis: the blank slate, nothing is innate, except habit. the habit of habit. ... Read more

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A major paradigm shift in debates on sexuality,Deleuze and Queer Theory marks a shift away from discourse on identity and signification and a move toward a radical new conception of bodily materialism. For too long queer theory has been dominated by the work of Judith Butler and a focus on performativity. In these essays, a critical engagement with the work of Deleuze and Guattari shape a new queer theory, one that revisits the very term of "queer," rethinks the sex-gender distinction as implied in queer theory, explores queer temporalities, and considers the non/rereading of the homosexual body/desire and the becoming-queer of the Deleuze Guattari philosophy.

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Time is not normally visible. While we often sense the events in time, we overlook what Marcel Proust calls _time in a pure state._ That's why, in The Force of Time, Keith W. Faulkner shows how Gilles Deleuze extracts his _ontology of the virtual_ from Proust's psychological time. To prove this, he examines the ways these writers say we occupy time without counting it. In the end, he reveals not only how Proust influences Deleuze, but how we sense time as a force as well. ... Read more

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Deleuze and Philosophy is an enticing exploration of the continuing philosophical relevance of Gilles Deleuze. New essays from acclaimed international contributors place Deleuze within a broad philosophical context that includes Plato, Aristotle, Husserl, Hume, Locke, Kant, Foucault, Badiou, and Agamden.

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Germinal Life embarks on a fascinating tour of ethology, biology, ethics, literature and cyborgs. Opening with a linking of Richard Dawkin's theory of the extended phenotype and Deleuzian thought, Ansell Pearson introduces the idea of germinal life to challenge traditional notions of ethology and philosophy.

By revisiting nineteenth century Darwinism and the origins of germ science, Keith Ansell Pearson develops a stunning reading of Deleuze's key texts. He also introduces highly original interpretations of classic modern literature, including Thomas Hardy's Tess and D.H.Lawrence's Kangaroo before connecting these themes with cyborgism and the work of the performance artist Stelarc.

As a companion to Ansell Pearson's Viroid Life, which explored Nietzsche's philosophy of the human, Germinal Life provides a highly original study of the biophilosophical aspectsof Deleuze's thought. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Toward a new biophilosophy
This is a collection of challenging and insightful essays bringing the still as yet relatively overlooked philosophical work of Deleuze & Guattari to bear on questions raised by contemporary biology, especially as it intersects so-called complexity theory. Besides a focus on population rather than individual (one of the meanings of their notorious call for "pop" philosophy), D/G also propose a "machinic" biology, one not centered on the organism as a whole in its putative connection to a similarly static environment, but one that follows multiple flows of energy and matter through the "rhizome" or interactive field that traverses what used to be seen as the whole organism, now inscribed as a mere node in that heterogenous field. Following these leads, Ansell Pearson's concern with "life" also includes questions of art, literature, and politics, endeavors which, to speak Aristotelian for a moment, were always considered the artificial from which the natural could be safely distinguished.

As itself a heterogenous "assemblage" of the type it investigates, Germinal Life sparkles with new connections and fresh insights. Few have read as widely and as well as KAP, and it shows. The author demonstrates, in addition to an easy familiarity with Deleuze and Deleuze/Guattari, a firm grasp ofthe classic work of Darwin and Bergson, as well as wide reading in the voluminous recent University Press literature documenting the contemporary life sciences and so-called complexity theory. For a reader with some familiarity with the basic themes ofits components, plugging into the machine of Germinal Life will be a productive experience indeed.

A Renewed Philosophy of Nature
Keith Ansell-Pearson's "Germinal Life" situates itself at the nexus of three sets of concerns: Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of "difference," Bergson's philosophy of "life," and contemporary neo-evolutionary theories.Between these three themes, Ansell-Pearson weaves an intruiging web of interrelated questions and problems.Deleuze is partly responsible for the revival of interest in Bergson's writings, which had fallen into semi-obscurity in the early part of the twentieth-century.(Lévi-Strauss once commented that Bergson reduced everything to a state of mush in order to bring out its inherent ineffability.) But what is the nature of Deleuze's own "Bergsonism"? How and why does he appropriate the three primary concepts of Bergson's thought, intuition, memory, and élan vital?Most difficultly, how and in what sense can Bergson's "vitalism" be taken seriously given the developments in modern biology?Ansell-Pearson brings a wide range of resources to bear on these complex issues, all of which lie at the intersection of philosophy and biology.The book investigates the relation of Deleuze's thought to Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche, and along the way provides helpful discussions of figures in the history of biology (Weismann, Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire), contemporary writers in the field (Gould, Dawkins, Goodwin, Margulis), as well as a number of lesser-known known figures that Deleuze himself championed (Simondon, Uexküll).

The thread that guides Ansell-Pearson throughout his research is the idea of a contemporary "bio-philosophy" or philosophy of life.This idea has far-reaching relevance.Kant is often said to have inaugurated modern philosophy with his "Copernican revolution": the conditions of the objects of knowledge must be the _same_ as the subjective conditions of knowledge itself.Against the ancient conception of wisdom, which defined the wise man by his submission to and accord with Nature, Kant set up an entirely new image of thought: humans are now the legislators of Nature.The subject, in other words, became constitutive.Ansell-Pearson's work is situated within a broader contemporary reaction against this Kantian heritage.His aim, he states, is to examine the possibility and implications of "thinking _beyond_ the human condition" (p. 2)."Germinal Life" thus continues the project of Ansell-Pearson's earlier book, "Viroid life."The latter analyzed Nietzsche's attempt to think the "transhuman" condition; the former pursues the same theme in the context of the "life sciences" (the subhuman and the superhuman).Both books, however, are framed by a fundamental ethical question:Does a biophilosophy entail a simple "disavowal" of the finitude and historicity of the human condition (p. 214)?Or on the contrary, as Ansell-Pearson argues, is it possible that a radically _ethical_ philosophy "must necessarily think trans- or overhumanly" (p. 3)?This question is all the more urgent given current developments in of informational and genetic technologies, which have already transformed our concept of the "human." In this sense, Ansell-Pearson's has opened a line of philosophical inquiry that will no doubt be of increasing importance in the future. It points to the possibility, and indeed the need, for something that largely disappeared from philosophy after Schelling, namely, a renewed philosophy of Nature.

Highly recommended.

An Excellent book on Deleuze, Bergson and Biophilosophy
Germinal Life is the sequel to Keith Ansell Pearson's well-received book on Nietzsche and biophilosophy, Viroid Life, which appeared in 1997. It is also the middle-entry in what is unfolding as a series of three books examining the work of Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Bergson, the third of which will focus on the ontological concept of the `virtual' commonly found in both Bergson and Deleuze.Like any middle-child, one might expect such a volume as this to be somewhat troublesome, possessing neither the seniority of the first in the series (and the respect that goes with that) nor the relative youth and indulgence enjoyed by the latest arrival. To switch the analogy to one with literature, the novelty of the first book in any trilogy is seldom surpassed by what follows it, while the kudos of being the final entry where everything is brought to a climax is likewise unparalleled. This usually leaves the second book an intermediary role in the most anodyne sense, that of pushing the plot forward (normally by complication) and deepening the characterisation. What is uniquely philosophical about a trilogy of philosophy books may well thwart such a structural characterisation as this (especially if it is a trilogy in name only), but there is, nonetheless, evidence for this homology in Ansell Pearson's latest work: it builds on the main them of Viroid Life, namely contemporary biophilosophy and its significance for the `transhuman condition', by intensifying its interpretation of Deleuze's vitalist metaphysics (through reading Bergson in particular), while also anticipating future research into the various political implications of such a philosophy.In other words, the characterisation of Deleuze's philosophy (already a central component in Viroid Life) is deepened and the philosophical problematic of what going beyond `the human condition' truly entails is complicated. However, where Viroid Life played with themes that are fairly intoxicating (techno-theory, nihilism, viruses), used theorists who have always had a wide appeal (Nietzsche, Lyotard, Baudrillard), and did all this in a politically engaged manner, Germinal Life is temperate and measured in its progress: it provides more of the arguments necessary to support the points introduced so spectacularly in the earlier book.This is not to say that Germinal Life is dull by comparison, but rather that it is eminently philosophical (in this sense, all genuine philosophy would have to be called dull). Indeed, what is true of Ansell Pearson's work in general is also the hallmark of Deleuze's own oeuvre: beneath the apparently `flashy' surface (as Foucault once put it) there is a well thought-out metaphysics at work (for Ansell Pearson, the end of philosophy, which is to say, the end of metaphysics, is far from being upon us). It is only that the balance has shifted in this latest work: names like Baudrillard are still there (no less than Bergson and Deleuze were present in Viroid Life), only more as a background to the hard task of philosophising. Consequently, while Germinal Life may have less appeal amongst non-philosophers in cultural studies and sociology, it cannot fail to impress philosophers interested in biology, the history of Twentieth-century French thought, and the fundamentals of Deleuze's philosophy of immanence. This type of serious, philosophical engagement with Deleuze is all the more necessary now that the reception of his work in the English-speaking world is entering its second phase and moving away from basic introductions and commentaries to the appraisal of its actual value for contemporary debates.What Germinal Life admirably demonstrates is that, firstly, Deleuze's vitalist philosophy belongs to a tradition of non-mechanistic, non-teleological, and non-reductionist thought about evolution running from Bergson to Gilbert Simonden through Jacob Von Uexküll and Raymond Ruyer: but Ansell Pearson also argues for the tenability of this oft-derided approach by examining in great detail the latest research in favour of the creativity of evolution, evidence that shows us the non-hierarchical, relatively chaotic, and molecular phenomenon which is life, far removed from the unilinear, organicist, and perfectionist model normally drawn. These ideas are articulated through three chapters (bordered by an introduction and conclusion), on the theoretical relationship between Bergson and Deleuze (Chapter One), Deleuze and Darwin(ism) (Chapter Two), and creative evolution and Deleuze's `creative ethology' (Chapter Three). Clearly, the presence of Bergson looms large in these pages, and Ansell Pearson is as scholarly and expert as ever in his exposition of his thought and its influence on Deleuze.But this book is not only about the history of thought. As the title would suggest, its primary text is Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (1968), which is both the most biological and ontological of his works: as such, it is the text that constitutes - if any one book can - the bedrock of the Deleuzian philosophy. The method of transcendental empiricism was announced in Difference and Repetition and its delineation of this method brings together most of Deleuze's central ideas, be they ontological (the univocity of being, difference as the groundless ground of repetition, etc.) empirical (Deleuze's biophilosophy itself) or metaphilosophical (the shock of the new, the image of thought, and so on). Other texts from the Deleuzian corpus are invoked by Ansell Pearson when necessary, of course, especially the Logic of Sense (1969) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) (the latter is particularly important for the third chapter). Overall, however, this focus on one text and one theme (biophilosophy) gives Germinal Life a continuous organisation: where Viroid Life was composed of a loosely integrated set of articles that, quite fittingly, dispersed its argument through the space of its chapters, Germinal Life, no less appropriately, fosters a continuity of argument over time, a germ-line of thought rather than a zig-zag line-of-escape (to recycle some of the most popular Deleuzian jargon).I recommend it wholeheartly to all those seriously interested in Deleuze, Bergson and the Philosophy of biology.

A compelling reason for setting the Academy alight.
The wonderful thing about Sokal's original spoof was its demonstration that anything can be published regardless of content providing itundertakes to rehearse a series of recognisable scholastic gestures. Thiswould appear born out in its lukewarm reception among the more conservativecircles of academia -- one can only assume the precepts of caution thatinform academic life could be revealed in their cynicism by similarmeans.

Of course, spoofs needn't be witting, which brings me to `GerminalLife'. The prodigious awfulness of Ansell Pearson's writing can't beunderestimated, such as those times when its mode of presentation becomesinsanely imperious, every other word is forced into scare-quotes, andparagraphs (even sentences!) follow one another without apparentconnection.

I would urge you to buy it; passages such as

Deleuzehimself incisively notes that as a new thinking of the living body ethologyoffers "a new conception of the embodied individual, of species, and ofgenera" (1968: 236; 1992: 257). He argues that we should not neglect the"biological significance" of this new conception. Its chief importance,however, is said to be "juridical and ethical". He suggests that once wepose the problem of rights at the level of heterogeneous bodies then wenecessarily transform the whole philosophy of right(s). (p.199)

would beworth anyone's $75. The same could be said for the book's finalparagraph:

We must perform our critical engagement with Deleuze not interms of a simple condemnation or a mere repudiation, but in terms of theon-going battle we have with the problems, predicaments and pretensions ofphilosophy. It cannot simply be, however, a question of being for oragainst Deleuze; rather, the task should be one of implicating him in thecritical and clinical questions that constitute the very fold of our beingand our becoming those who we are. (p.224)

That Spinozan ethology is ofconsequence to rights and jurisprudence only to the extent that it servesto abolish them should be obvious to anyone, and if there's a programmebeneath these truisms, tautologies, non sequiturs and patentmisunderstandings (the final paragraph inexplicably alludes to Heidegger:`[Nietzsche,] in whose light and shadow everyone today thinks and reflectswith his "for him" or "against him", heard a command which demands apreparation of man for taking over a world domination', `The Question ofBeing' p.107) it's to forestall the replacement of ethics by ethology,albeit solely on the strength of a pained display of bogus scholarlydeliberation and diligence. For only thus will the world be made safe forthose factories of statist ideology known as universities and therefore forthis sort of ponderous garbage. ... Read more

Product Description
This book explores the work of art through Proust's masterpiece, "A La Recherche du Temps Purdu".Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VII. He is a key figure in poststructuralism and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. In "Proust and Signs", Deleuze explores the work of art. He approaches the narrative of Proust's masterpiece, "A La Recherche du Temps Purdu", as the apprenticeship of a man of letters. His concern is to come to a deeper understanding of the book and of art itself by tracing the network of signs laid in the text. Admired at its original appearance as an imaginative and innovative study of Proust and as one of Deleuze's most accessible works, this book stands as the writer's most sustained attempt to understand and explain the work of art."The Continuum Impacts" are seminal works by the finest minds in contemporary thought, including Adorno, Badiou, Derrida, Heidegger and Deleuze. They are works of such power that they changed the philosophical and cultural landscape when they were first published and continue to resonate today.They represent landmark texts in the fields of philosophy, popular culture, politics and theology. ... Read more

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Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity challenges the traditional use of Deleuze's philosophy to examine European art cinema. It explores how Deleuze can be used to analyse national identity across a range of different cinemas. Focusing on narrative time it combines a Deleuzean approach with a vast range of non-traditional material. The films discussed are contemporary and popular (either financial or cult successes), and includeEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,Terminator 3,Memento,Saving Private Ryan,Run Lola Run,Sliding Doors,Chaos andPeppermint Candy. Each film is examined in light of a major historical event - including 9/11, German reunification, and the Asian economic crisis - and the impact it has had on individual nations. This cross-cultural approach illustrates how Deleuze's work can enhance our understanding of the construction of national identity. It also enables a critique of Deleuze's conclusions by examining his work in a variety of national contexts.

The book significantly broadens the field of work on Deleuze and cinema. It places equal emphasis on understanding mainstream North American genre films, American independent and European art films. It also examines Asian thrillers, gangster and art films in the light of Deleuze's work on time. With Asian films increasingly crossing over into western markets, this is a timely addition to the expanding body of work on Deleuze and film.

Key Features

* The first sustained analysis of Deleuze and national identity, bringing together film theory and film history.

* Examines how narrative time is used to construct national identity across a range of different cinemas, including Britain, Germany, North America, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Italy and Poland.

* Uses Deleuze in conjunction with a number of different types of recent film, from Hollywood blockbusters to Asian gangster movies.

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This book provides a clear and concise introduction to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. It analyses his key theoretical concepts, such as difference and the body without organs, and covers all the different areas of his thought, including metaphysics, the history of philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, the philosophy of the social sciences and aesthetics. As the first book to offer a comprehensive analysis of Deleuze's writings, it reveals both the internal coherence of his philosophy and its development through a series of distinct phases.

Reidar Due offers an entirely new interpretation of Deleuze's philosophy, centred around the notion of thought as a capacity to form relations. These relations are embodied in nature, in language and in the unconscious; in art, science and social practice. With this concept of embodied thought, Deleuze challenges our most entrenched beliefs about the self and about signs whether linguistic or social. He develops an original theory of power and social systems and presents a method for understanding any signifying practice, from language and ritual to the unconscious, including cinema, literature and painting.

Due analyses the different strands in this theoretical edifice and shows its implications for a wide range of human sciences, from history and psychology to political theory and cultural studies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A sophisticated analysis of a challenging, original thinker
The "reviewer" David Birnbaum submitted a 1-star review despite having any real qualification to judge this book. He simply liked another book in this series, and apparently lacks any exposure to Deleuze or Deleuze & Guattari's actual writings. If he had any experience with their writings, then he would know that "obtuse" terminology is absolutely necessary for any book on Deleuze! Moreover, if Mr. Birnbaum believes this is a difficult text, then he should check out works actually written by Deleuze or Deleuze & Guattari. Had Mr. Birnbaum done that, and had he read some other secondary literature on Deleuze, or on the Capitalism and Schizophrenia texts, I believe he would conclude that Due's book on Deleuze is exceptionally readable, clear and illuminating. And judging from the expert reviews on the book, that seems to the consensus view among scholars of philosophy and critical theory. In short, 'Deleuze' by Due stands as one of the very best secondary sources on the most origiinal of all post-structuralist philosophers.

Obtuse
I ordered this book because I'm interested in Deleuze and thoroughly enjoyed the Key Contemporary Thinkers book on Wittgenstein. Unfortunately this one is written terribly--there are so many grammatical errors and unnecissarily complicated sentences that I found myself proofreading more than reading. Look elsewhere. ... Read more

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IIn the most important theory of time since Heidegger, Deleuze challenges Kant’s unity of apperception, as well as the phenomenological account of time. This book, using the principles of structuralism, exposes how Freud’s unconscious mechanisms synthesize time. It also gives a vibrant and original account of Deleuze’s theory of the pure Event using detailed examples from Hamlet and Oedipus, as well as Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return. This book is essential reading for students and scholars who wish to understand Deleuze’s dissolved subject as well as our modern sense of fragmented time. ... Read more

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IIn the most important theory of time since Heidegger, Deleuze challenges Kant’s unity of apperception, as well as the phenomenological account of time. This book, using the principles of structuralism, exposes how Freud’s unconscious mechanisms synthesize time. It also gives a vibrant and original account of Deleuze’s theory of the pure Event using detailed examples from Hamlet and Oedipus, as well as Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return. This book is essential reading for students and scholars who wish to understand Deleuze’s dissolved subject as well as our modern sense of fragmented time. ... Read more

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Deleuze was fascinated by the machine and the technological. In this collective and determined effort to explore not only the usefulness of Deleuze in thinking about our new digital and biotechnological future but also the innovative nature of his ideason the topic, contributors highlight Deleuze's unique negotiation between the realms of philosophy, science, and art and point to the increasing dominance of technology in our everyday lives. Essays authored by William Bogard, Abigail Bray, Ian Buchanan, Verena Conley, Ian Cook, Tauel Harper, Timothy Murray, Saul Newman, Luciana Parisi, Patricia Pisters, Mark Poster, Horst Ruthrof, David Savat, Bent Meier Sørensen, and Eugene Thacker.

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Secrets of Becoming brings into conversation modes of thought traditionally held apart: Whitehead's philosophy of the event, Deleuze's philosophy of multiplicity, and Judith Butler's philosophy of gender difference. Why should one try to connect these strains of thinking? What might make the work of these thinkersnegotiable with one another?

This volume finds that bridge in an emphasis on "becoming" that secretly defines the philosophies ofWhitehead, Deleuze, and Butler. Its three sections investigate their surprising confluence in a "philosophy of becoming" in relation to the question of the event, bodies and societies, and immanence and divinity. A substantial Introduction gives an extended comparison of the three thinkers.

Contributors: Jeff Bell, Roland Faber, Sigridur Gudmarsdottir, Michael Halewood, Luke Higgins, Catherine Keller, Isabella Palin, Keith Robinson, Steven Shaviro, Andrea Stephenson, Alan R. Van Wyk ... Read more

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The latest book by the Slovenian critic Slavoj Zizek takes the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as the beginning of a dazzling inquiry into the realms of politics, philosophy, film, and psychoanalysis. This is a polemical and surprising work. Deleuze, famous for his Anti-Oedipus (written with Felix Guattari), emerges here as someone much closer to the Oedipus he would disavow. Similarly, Zizek argues for Deleuze's proximity to Hegel, from whom the French philosopher distanced himself. Zizek turns some Deleuzian concepts around in order to explore the "organs without bodies" in such films as Fight Club and the works of Hitchcock. Finally, he attacks what he sees as the "radical chic" Deleuzians (he names, among them,Hardt and Negri's Empire), arguing that such projects turn Deleuze into an ideologist of today's "digital capitalism." Admired for its brilliant energy and fearless argumentation, Zizek sets out to restore a truer, more radical Deleuze than the one we thought we knew. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

Another Deleuze Is Possible
"In the past decade, notes Zizek in his introduction to Organs Without Bodies, Deleuze emerged as the central reference of contemporary philosophy: notions like 'resisting multitude,' 'nomadic subjectivity,' the 'anti-Oedipal' critique of psychoanalysis, and so on are the common currency of today's academia--not to mention the fact that Deleuze more and more serves as the theoretical foundation of today's anti-globalist Left and its resistance to capitalism." The paradoxical result of such Deleuzianism is that "while masquerading as radical chic, [it] effectively transforms Deleuze into an ideologist of today's 'digital capitalism'."

For Zizek, "there is another Deleuze, much closer to psychoanalysis and Hegel, a Deleuze whose consequences are much more shattering." The proper Deleuze is that of the great early monographs, the key ones being Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, as well as his later two-volume study on cinema. This series of works is to be distinguished from the books Deleuze and Guattari cowrote, A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus and What Is Philosophy?, which dominate Deleuze's reception in English-speaking academe and present a sanitized, politically correct version of his philosophy. For Zizek, this political Deleuze is a fake, not least because of his rejection of Freud and Lacan: "What Deleuze presents as 'Oedipus' is a rather ridiculous simplification, if not an outright falsification, of Lacan's position." Deleuze and Guattari's criticism of fascism also "indulge in a true interpretive delirium of hasty generalizations". In denouncing "the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior", to quote Foucault's famous preface to Anti-Oedipus, they "distract us from the positivity of fascism's actual ideological functioning, which is one of superego obscene enjoyment".

For Zizek, saving Deleuze from himself involves distancing Deleuze from the pernicious influence of Felix Guattari, and emphasizing what, in himself, is more than himself: "What we are reproaching Deleuze is that he is not Deleuzian enough." Paradoxically, while the "guattarized" Deleuze immediately lends himself to political interpretations, the "true" Deleuze is indifferent to politics.Whereas the ontology of productive Becoming that characterize the first Deleuze "clearly leads to the Leftist topic of the self-organization of the multitude of molecular groups that resist and undermine the molar, totalizing system of power," the other ontology, that of the sterility of the Sense-Event, appears "apolitical"."However, asks Zizek, what if this other ontology also involves a political logic and practice of its own, of which Deleuze himself was unaware? What if there is another Deleuzian politics to be discovered here?" And "What if the domain of politics is inherently `sterile', the domain of pseudo causes, a theater of shadows, but nonetheless crucial in transforming reality?"

There are basically two ways to uncover this Deleuzian Deleuze and to bring to the fore the radical potential of his (non-)politics. The first is to repeat Deleuze, following the paradox that "something truly new can only emerge through repetition". What is to be repeated is not the letter of Deleuze, remaining within the horizon of his conceptual field, but his 'spirit', the creative impulse that he himself betrayed by not being "Deleuzian enough". For Zizek, "It is not only that one can remain really faithful to an author by way of betraying him (the actual letter of his thought); at a more radical level, the inverse statement holds even more, namely, one can only truly betray an author by way of repeating him, by way of remaining faithful to the core of his thought".

The second way to remain faithful to Deleuze through betraying him is to read Deleuze through Hegel and Lacan. No matter that Deleuze explicitly rejected Hegel and found many things to criticize in Freud's legacy as revived by Lacan. For Zizek, Deleuze's injunction to "forget Hegel" conceals a disavowed affinity. Deleuze perceives Hegel as the philosopher who `filled in' the gaps of the Kantian system and passed from Kant's openness and indeterminacy to the notion's complete actualization. "What, however, if Hegel does not add any positive content to Kant, does not fill in the gaps--what if he just accomplishes a shift of perspective in and through which the problem already appears as its own solution?" This is, according to Zizek, the true meaning of the Hegelian reconciliation: "It is not that the tension is magically resolved and the opposites are reconciled. The only shift that effectively occurs is subjective, the shift of our perspective (i.e., all of a sudden, we become aware that what previously appeared as conflict already is reconciliation)."

I have only a faint acquaintance with Deleuze, and politically I find myself at great odds with Zizek's forays into social critique. There are statements in the book which are meant to shock or provoke the reader and which I found unnecessarily distasteful and outrageous. But reading Organs Without Body was an instructive experience on how to interpret an author through the lenses of another. I hope to be able to come to Deleuze with a fresh angle.

Zizek is right about Organs rather than Bodies.
A problematic book from an invigorating yet also uneven thinker.Zizek of course must have eventually criticized Deleuze and Guattari, since they profoundly reject Lacanians and also idealist ontology - viz., Zizek.Conforming to a dubious trend, Zizek ignores Guattari completely, despite G's enormous contribution (see Gary Genosko's very scholarly book on Guattari and also the new _Anti-Oedipus Papers_)
Zizek criticizes Deleuze, appreciates how close he is to Hegel in spite of everything, and attempts to turn him back into a crypto-Lacanian/Hegelian idealist.This is a perverse reading and Zizek was the first to say so. He calls it sodomy of sorts.
But for myself, the one Zizekian observation that I find usefully accurate is in the book's title (and briefly argued within).That is, the famous "BwO" or "body without organs" motif that recurs so often throughout both volumes of _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_, is very weirdly a misnomer, or moreso, it is precisely backwards.Is it really only Zizek who has seen that they should have been calling it "Organs without Bodies" the whole time, since this is actually what their theory entails?Check it out again and see if Zizek isn't right about that.

Meanwhile, a chapter or so in which Z takes up the Anglo-american philosophy of consciousness, cognitive science, and so forth is an interesting and needed intersection between these usually mutually separated discourses of continental Theory and empirical brain/mind philosophy.Whether Zizek has any genuine contribution there is still an open question for me however.The writing is so uneven and eager to entertain, that it becomes difficult to decide whether even he is serious about this.

A sloppy critique, One of Zizek's Worst
Zizek's failed encounter with Deleuze will prove to haunt him since Deleuze and Guattari provded a framework to get outside of Lacan which Zizek still remains embedded in completely.I should say from the start, Zizek is absolutely brilliant, but his slip ups are all too numerous and his hasty publication of books have created an unendurable repetition of content. There are content problems with the book and style problems, as many of the previous reviewers have truthfully attested to.But even the 100 or so pages on Deleuze are wrought with references to movies and books (and sometimes the occasional refreshing joke), but all in all, the book probably amounts to 30-40 real pages of thorough critique.The problem is that Zizek prepares books by writing books, and in reading the most recent big work - "The Parallax View" (which Zizek calls his most important work), one sees that the books of the previous 4 years were a type of movement towards this.

First I how those interested in Zizek might go about critiquing Deleuze which is coupled with recommendations for Zizek's other works.After that I will recommend an alternative route to people interested in a crtique of Deleuze (outside of those made in other reviews - such as "Deleuze: A Critical Reader")

If you want to get an idea of how to critique Deleuze through Zizek, I recommend reading Lacan very closely, and critiquing Deleuze through Lacan.But if Lacan is intractable for you, Zizek is a helpful guide to realize Lacan's contributions.I would even hasten to add that if one is unfamiliar with Lacan, one cannot account for the weaknesses and strengths of a text like anti-oedipus (which has the capacity to perform the same reduction on lacan).If one were to buy a book on Zizek, I think the least scatterbrained and most theoretical (Hegelian) is "For they know not what they do" but be sure to get the second edition with the very long preface (80 pgs) which reconfigures his position now with regard to his previous work.Organs without bodies is important to see how Zizek directly comprehends Deleuze's work (and at times, he reposes problems in interesting directions), but it will probably piss alot of Deleuzians off, andnot because his critiques are right on, but because he has hardly payed attention to the unique elements of Deleuze's philosophy (which is to say, he critiques Deleuze as if he would critique any positive thinker, without exploring in depth, the complexity of his system).

Zizek is most interesting for his Lacanian reading of Hegel, which is quite good, and very interesting.His main (hegelian) idea is that the ontological or the transcendental is created from the failure to fully represent the real.In Deleuzian terms, Zizek would say that the virtual is created from the inconsistency of the actual, which we then generalize into the virtual.Therefore, Deleuze's claims to "think without an image" are undoubtedly a way to make the reader forget Deleuze's own positioning (which is mainly from Nietzsche).And yes, for those of you who bash Hegel without ever having even read him, Deleuze is extremely close to Hegel in many ways, and if you don't understand how they are alike and different you don't really understand the problems either of them face.But Zizek treats this proximity as if it was an attack (which merely just calls into question Deleuze's own aversion to Hegel which does betray a proximity).This is immature, but perhaps is only as immature as Deleuze's aversion to Hegel.[But Deleuze never wrote a critique of Hegel in this fashion! As Zizek ahs done with Deleuze].

But Zizek did make me pay attention to key passages that I did not before, which accent the transcendental nature of Deleuze's empiricism.Zizek's own failure to critique Deleuze made me question my own (as other readers have) deification of Deleuze. I began to ask why Does Deleuze call his system "Transcendental Empiricism" if he destroys transcendence at every turn in favor of immanence?The answer is that Deleuze is situated in the transcendental turn in philosophy which reconcieves as the transcendental not the noumenal thing in itself (as in Kant), but rather the situation in which the noumenal and the phenomenal are limits [as in Heiddeger, Husserl, Lacan, and Merleu-Ponty](recall the passage in A thousand Plateaus that the body without organs is a limit).What this means is that Deleuze's concept of Difference cannot be concieved as something apart from the situation of the human being which does not have access to all of reality (recall Deleuze's claim that "Difference is not diversity, diversity is given, Difference is by which the given is given")This "by which" as Difference (and Derrida's Differance) makes Deleuze's immanence very problematic since this "middle" area is still human.The real problem is whether the structure of consciousness (expressionism) can be extended to the world "Everything is consciousness because it possesses a double" (Difference and Repetition, 220).This question is always the question they come back to, and it is the shakiest component of Deleuze's system.It is also the component that needs to be confronted via lacan, which unfortunately Zizek fails to do in a systematic way.Plus he writes the book After Deleuze dies, when Zizek had active engagement with his ideas very early on.

If anything, it is good to convince oneself that one is questioning one's own idols.If you want a breath of fresh air in philosophy, I recommend the books: "Contingency, Hegemony, Universality" which contains a dialog between Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zizek (he doesn't make stupid references every 5 seconds in this book).I also Recommend any book by Renaud Barbaras ("Desire and Distance" might be an extremely interesting counterpoint to Deleuze).Another book - "Naturalizing Phenomenology" is an essential book that deals with what Zizek does badly, how consciousness studies and cognitive studies contribute to these contemporary thinkers.

Whatever you decide, it is true that Zizek's critique is essential to understand in order to truly understand Deleuze's strengths and weaknesses, whether you get it from this book or others.If you can remain Deleuzian and take Lacanians seriously, you can only then call yourself Deleuzian.

The view from page 74
Title says how far I am so far.I have to say I'm glad to see that the only person who really liked this book was a unabashed Lacanian.I was starting to get afraid that I had been inventing all the genius of Deleuze and Guattari, and that they may really be as circuitous and unoriginal as Zizek was making them out to be.
However, he (so typically) doesn't even discuss Guattari other than as an "alibi" for Deleuze (hardly a nice term for a very good if perhaps not-quite-so-published as some of our other philosophical friends).And, the only books by Deleuze that Zizek apparently deems worth citing directly are "Logic of Sense" and "Difference & Repetition".And, I have doubts about his readings of Deleuze that he actually does cite.But this is all been said in other reviews.
What I do find useful about this text (again, from the vantage point of pg. 74) is that it is a perfect example of the most common mis-reading of Deleuze that I have seen, and I think the easiest pitfall in reading him, or his collaborations with Guattari.Deleuze is not easy, and Guattari does not make him easier (although, perhaps, more effective; but this is another argument.I think that most people, at least those that I have read Deleuze with, think that he is merely redefining our notions of the real/virtual, material/ideal, world/spirit, consciousness/unconsciousness, duality/monism, etc.But what he is doing has little to do with dialectics.I think his contribution to philosophy both by himself and with the work of Guattari is to begin us thinking undialectically, as hard as this is at the start.Deleuze is by no means perfect, and it could be argued that he doesn't succeed in this task.But to take him in a caricature of dialecticism is to make the first mistake we all must make, and in this Zizek highlights that misstep.In this sense, I would agree with Eric Santner's statement on the back of the book, that all who consider themselves critics or passionate supporters of Deleuze should read this book.But most importantly, should see the strength of dialecticism in our thought, as Deleuze himself points out, and see how no arena or concept of thought is free from this mechanism, and that ESPECIALLY in reading Deleuze we should acknowledge the ease of an all too convenient return to the very thing that is so crucially critiqued in his work.

Not to rely on deconstruction but...
I think there may be a hint of jealousy in this book.I've often thought of Zizek as the kind of guy who strives to be the rock star of philosophy. Of course, more than ten years after his death, Deleuze is packing more philosophical arenas than Zizek ever will.This is because, in my humble opinion, Zizek is and always will be a second rate philosopher.He is the Douglas Coupland of academic philosophy in that, while he is often an interesting read, one always walks away from the book feeling like they've gained nothing but a few perverse ways of stating the obvious.I will admit, Zizek has a flare for writing, notably, I think in the Ticklish Subject and Welcome to the Desert of the Real.But this book not only failed to accomplish it's goals but it did so rather uninterestingly.Somewhere around the end of the first third of the book he quotes Deleuze's famous passage about buggering other philosophers in the behind.I've always loved the passage and til that point I thought the book was heating up so I had hopes of engaging in an eye-opening debate about Deleuze with both the text and my own preconceptions.But what I got from that point on was a stream of endless, pretentious comparisions between what most people assume Hegel meant and what Zizek somehow interprets Deleuze to mean.

Basically, it seemed to me like Zizek's project was misguided in that it relied too heavily on a limited interpretation of Deleuze based on Zizek's slight admiration for the Logic of Sense and his disdain for Deleuze's work with Guattari.Zizek almost comes off as a crying child who wanted ice cream when everyone else wanted cake and couldn't have his way.He passes over without even the slightest mention the idea that perhaps A Thousand Plateau's truly is a revolutionary text (or radical series of texts - whatever).He does this because he likes better the ideas he has developed out of the Logic of Sense.

In other words, Zizek is fatalistically attached to the offspring that emerged when Deleuze's logic of sense poked him in the butt.The joke's on you, Slavoj! ... Read more

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With twelve new essays, this volume applies the pragmatic philosophy of Deleuze to current affairs involving military activity in the Middle East, refugees, terrorism, information and communication, and the state. Topics include political theory and philosophy, cultural studies, sociology, international studies, and Middle Eastern studies.

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In 1971, Deleuze and Guattaris collaborative work, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia caused an international sensation by fusing Marx with a radically rewritten Freud to produce a new approach to critical thinking they provocatively called schizoanalysis. Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema explores the possibilities of using this concept to interrogate cinematic works in both the Hollywood and non-Hollywood tradition. It attempts to define what a schizoanalysis of cinema might be and interrogates a variety of ways in which a schizoanalysis might be applied. This collection opens up a fresh field of inquiry for Deleuze scholars and poses an exciting challenge to cinema studies in general. Featuring some of the most important cinema studies scholars working on Deleuze and Guattari today, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema is a cutting edge collection that will set the agenda for future work in this area. ... Read more

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The work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari has been inspirational for architects and architectural theorists in recent years. It has influenced the design work of architects as diverse as Greg Lynn and David Chipperfield, and is regularly cited by avant-gardist architects and by students, but usually without being well understood.

The first collaboration between Deleuze and Guattari was Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which was taken up as a manifesto for the post-structuralist life, and was associated with the spirit of the student revolts of 1968. Their ideas promote creativity and innovation, and their work is wide-ranging, complex and endlessly stimulating. They range across politics, psychoanalysis, physics, art and literature, changing preconceptions along the way.

Deleuze & Guattari for Architects is a perfect introduction for students of architecture in design studio at all levels, students of architecture pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate courses in architectural theory, academics and interested architectural practitioners.

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A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a playful and emphatically practical elaboration of the major collaborative work of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. When read along with its rigorous textual notes, the book also becomes the richest scholarly treatment of Deleuze's entire philosophical oeuvre available in any language. Finally, the dozens of explicit examples that Brian Massumi furnishes from contemporary artistic, scientific, and popular urban culture make the book an important, perhaps even central text within current debates on postmodern culture and politics.Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the general title for two books published a decade apart. The first, Anti-Oedipus, was a reaction to the events of May/June 1968; it is a critique of "state-happy" Marxism and "school-building" strains of psychoanalysis. The second, A Thousand Plateaus, is an attempt at a positive statement of the sort of nomad philosophy Deleuze and Guattari propose as an alternative to state philosophy.Brian Massumi is Professor of Comparative Literature at McGill University. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

A Necessary Companion to Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Massumi saunters purposefully through the landscape created by Deleuze and Guattari while simultaneously staying true to the two authors' signature style.If you have read ANTI-OEDIPUS and/or A THOUSAND PLATEAUS, this book is an excellent supplement.Massumi seems to target young scholars or readers who are struggling with Deleuze and Guattari's vocabulary and concepts.Advanced scholars will probably not find anything new or extremely helpful in this book, but students will find it extremely helpful.

read this book
Still the best book on Deleuze and Guattari out there. Extremely creative on its own right, but also great for situating Deleuze and Guattari in relation to other currents in intellectual thought (like psychoanalysis, marxism). And it provides a helpful jumping-off point for thinking aspects of Deleuze's thought that often go unmentioned in introductory works on D+G. (I would say "other" introductory works, but calling this work introductory would be wrong.) Highly recommended.

Great book, but not about Deleuze and Guattari
Massumi's user's guide is a wonderful little book, but unfortunately is not a book about Deleuze and Guattari.At the outset, one initially thinks that Massumi will be giving a close reading of _A Thousand Plateaus_, but quickly finds that the text is a patchwork pieced together out of Deleuze'svarious writings. For instance, the first part of Massumi's book, entitled"Force" discusses D&G in the context of the Plateau in ATPentitled the "Geology of Morals", but greatly broadens thisdiscussion by interpreting D&G's appropriation of Hjelmslev's semioticsin the context of the reading of force Deleuze gives in _Nietzsche andPhilosophy_.Now, not only does Massumi severely simply D&G'sappropriation of Hjelmslev, but he does the same with Deleuze's account offorce in Nietzsche.Moreover, in Deleuze's own independent philosophicalworks and in the context of his work with Guattari, Deleuze never makes useof the concept of force.Now, in and of itself this is not a bad thing andMassumi ends up producing a very useful model of analysis, but it'squestionable as to whether such a reading really helps the reader penetratewhat D&G are up to in ATP.

It seems to me that this sort ofstrategy is symptomatic of a lot of works on both Deleuze and Deleuze'swork with Guattari.No one would deny that the works with Guattari andDeleuze's works "written in his own name" are exceedinglydifficult and require a lot of work to unlock, and that as a rule hiswritings in the history of philosophy are remarkably clear.As a result,there seems to be a refusal to read the independent works on their ownterms and a tendency to attempt to reduce them to the historical writings. While I would be the last to claim that the histories are to be ignored, itis nonetheless the case that the use of them ought to center arounddemonstrating how they converge with the independent works, how Deleuzerethinks their problematics, and where Deleuze diverges from them.

Itis also likely that much of this textual practice comes from the latentimperative in Deleuze's philosophy to create.This has to do withDeleuze's textual strategy of "getting behind the author and creatinga monsterous offspring."As a result, those that write on Deleuzesimultaneously experience the necessity of merely doing commentary on whathe said in order to show how it belongs to a philosophical tradition andproblematic, while nonetheless being forced to remain silent on what hesaid.What seems to be forgotten are Deleuze's words immediately followinghis pronouncement of getting behind the author, where he claims that theonly rule is that the author himself must be shown to have said it. Moreover, much of the "creating" that goes on in the name ofDeleuze and Guattari comes to look like an arbitrary activity based on thewill of the author, rather than an expression of the impersonal andnecessary that D&G were always quick to emphasize.In other words,sometimes the greatest usefulness in writing about a text consists ingetting clear on what that text actually says in its own terms.

Massumi'sbook can be highly illuminating and is a great and exciting read, but isnot necessarily the best source for coming to understand Deleuze andGuattari's difficult texts. One would do much better to first readsomething like Eugine Holland's book if their seeking to get an accuratepicture of what's going on in Deleuze and Guattari.

A postmodern self-help manual
Ten minutes out of the box and I had made my very own desiring machine

a practical survival manual
Finally!...a user's guide to Deleuze and Guattari's opus magnum. The rough guide to the skull-splitting mazes of AntiOedipus. Step by step instructions! Maps! Illustrations! The works! ... Read more