Deleuze, Gilles

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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Abstractionist Exploitation
The Crowning Achievement Of (Post)Modern French Philosophy
Works Well with Techno Music
October 17 2004 - a review
Interesting read

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Gilles Deleuze , Felix Guattari , and Brian Massumi
Manufacturer: University of Minnesota Press
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ASIN: 0816614024

Customer Reviews:

Abstractionist Exploitation.......2005-09-28

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Crowning Achievement Of (Post)Modern French Philosophy.......2005-05-20

That this book is receiving one star, given the title of my review, should surprise no one.

Look, say what you will; I am a classically trained, analytic, Anglophone philosopher with a penchant for clarity and rigor. That is where I stand. If you are looking for a text which purports to be theoretical, and yet is obviously densely literary and aphoristic, perhaps I don't understand what you're on about, and perhaps you don't either.

This book is neither clear nor rigorous. Where it doesn't mutate truly elementary understandings of science (not to say that either Deleuze understands what the difference between science and pseudoscience is), psychology, and economics to suit its incoherent purposes, it avoids any understanding whatsoever.

The philosophical work contained herein is non-starting. That is, it is not philosophy, as it is neither argumentative, interpretive, nor logical. There are no discernible conclusions (which is not to say that there are none in this pig latin dog's dinner, but they probably aren't deduced from premisses ) where there is anything like 'argument' at all.

To say that I'm missing the point, you'd first have to show that such work can have a point. That it violates hard-won conventions of philosophical discourse, which are taken as primitive (I can't tell you how many times the Law of Excluded Middle was violated), is not a victory for this work. It is a setback. That it has not been translated into English, but rather some retarded cousin of English, is perhaps partly to blame for my lack of understanding. I tend only to be able to read natural languages.

But then, again, perhaps my rhizomatic foreshortening (to wit: to SHORTEN is also to LENGTHEN) is in part quasiculpable (that is, retrodogmatically) as a blamematic(viz. contraposto) which tends inter alia to produce (and re-produce, as Malreaux reads Sartre in referential milieus of Darwinian technologies of traffic control) my congnitive disfunctionabilities.

I recommend the work of W.V.O. Quine if you're looking for a 'philosophy of our time,' as one reviewer suggested we must.

Works Well with Techno Music.......2005-01-03

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

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

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

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

Long live the barbarian nomads of reason!

October 17 2004 - a review.......2004-10-17

I don't normally bother reviewing books. However I had to respond to something another reviewer said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting read.......2004-05-13

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

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

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Deleuze's most misunderstood and second most important book
Post structuralist, post linguistic, post semiotic...
Carroll is the focus, but Stoics are the mainframe.
Deceptively playful
the only being is the being of becoming as such

The Logic of Sense
Gilles Deleuze
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0231059833

Book Description

Considered one of the most important works of one of France's foremost philosophers, and long-awaited in English, The Logic of Sense begins with an extended exegesis of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Considering stoicism, language, games, sexuality, schizophrenia, and literature, Deleuze determines the status of meaning and meaninglessness, and seeks the 'place' where sense and nonsense collide.

Written in an innovative form and witty style, The Logic of Sense is an essay in literary and psychoanalytic theory as well as philosophy, and helps to illuminate such works as Anti-Oedipus.

Customer Reviews:

Deleuze's most misunderstood and second most important book.......2007-05-09

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post structuralist, post linguistic, post semiotic..........2003-05-16

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

Carroll is the focus, but Stoics are the mainframe........2003-03-15

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

Deceptively playful.......2001-02-16

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

the only being is the being of becoming as such.......1999-06-26

this century will be known as Deleuzian..................

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One of the best books on cinema

Cinema 2: The Time-Image
Gilles Deleuze
Manufacturer: University of Minnesota Press
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0816616779

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One of the best books on cinema.......2000-06-05

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

If you had ÂgCinema 1: The Movement-ImageÂh, this book would be more interesting for you because you could compare the two books. Moreover, this book treats so many films that you must find ones you have ever seen, which makes this book more fascinating.

Difference and Repetition
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The brilliance of Deleuze

Grounding a Philosophy of Difference

Deleuze is a monster

The Crux of Thought

Deleuze wasn't messing around here, seriously.

Difference and Repetition
Gilles Deleuze
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
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Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide

ASIN: 0231081596

Book Description

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

Customer Reviews:

The brilliance of Deleuze.......2006-01-14

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

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

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

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

Grounding a Philosophy of Difference.......2003-12-30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deleuze is a monster.......2003-06-20

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

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

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

The Crux of Thought.......2003-02-12

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

Deleuze wasn't messing around here, seriously........2002-11-14

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

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Definitely a Classic! a must read!!!
A must film and media theorists.
The finest reflection on cinema.

Cinema 1: Movement-Image
Gilles Deleuze
Manufacturer: University of Minnesota Press
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Binding: Paperback

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Customer Reviews:

Definitely a Classic! a must read!!!.......2007-06-20

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

A must film and media theorists........2003-05-31

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

The finest reflection on cinema........1996-12-12

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

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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guide to an anti-fascist life
Amazing Stories
Oh god
Original, brilliant... insightful, but distorted in perspective.
Good Book

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Gilles Deleuze , and Felix Guattari
Manufacturer: University of Minnesota Press
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Customer Reviews:

guide to an anti-fascist life.......2007-05-10

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

Amazing Stories.......2007-01-08

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

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

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

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

Oh god.......2006-07-03

What a dialectical post-modern absurdity that is the meaning of the life of some random people, clumped together in a multiplicity of neo-Neitzschean thought-waves.

Get what you will from this book, it is wordy--on purpose--and was written to try to piss you off. You may or may not get pissed off, but you will certainly take away something from this book: either a) it is stupid and so is D+G, or b) it is a solid critique of Freud and all those globe-controlling institutions that subliminally followed in his footsteps.

Original, brilliant... insightful, but distorted in perspective........2006-02-04

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Book.......2005-11-29

This one is classic. I read it first, a long time ago, before I read A Thousand Plateaus. ATP is a lot more accessible. I recommend that you read Eugene Holland's commentary on Anti-Oedipus while you read D&G. And, by the way, there is a new Deleuze Dictionary out that is very useful. On the other hand, it is fun to read D&G when you have no idea what the hell they are going on about. If you do then you have to work hard and be more creative, really making the book your own. I think that was D&G's intention. They make themselves almost impossible to use (in a name-dropping way) superficially. If one does that, then one just ends up sounding like an idiot.

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Deleuze is difficult but not whimsical
The last try
What indeed?
Culmination of D-G
It let me know all conponets should be put into my thinking

What Is Philosophy?
Gilles Deleuze , and Félix Guattari
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
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Binding: Paperback

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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 of What 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:

Deleuze is difficult but not whimsical.......2002-09-29

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.......2002-01-13

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?.......2001-12-07

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.......2001-06-13

Deleuze and Guattari present their perspective on philosophy, science and art. According to them, philosophy is to create concepts. The writing is quite dense but you will find the D-G's final spark in this book.

It let me know all conponets should be put into my thinking.......1999-06-06

It's different from Aristotle's (or tranditional) idea. It let me know that we should put all of conponets into my thinking.

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 30)

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Unabashed Apologia For the Postmodern Literary Bureaucracy
In Machina Res
Kafka and Deleuze hand-in-hand.

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 30)
Gilles Deleuze , and Felix Guattari
Manufacturer: University of Minnesota Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Unabashed Apologia For the Postmodern Literary Bureaucracy.......2005-09-22

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.......2001-01-06

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........1999-11-24

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

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Cerebral Bacon
new dimension about the will to knowledge

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation
Gilles Deleuze
Manufacturer: Univ Of Minnesota Press
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Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

Translated and with an Introduction by Daniel W. Smith
Afterword by Tom Conley

Gilles Deleuze had several paintings by Francis Bacon hanging in his Paris apartment, and the painter’s method and style as well as his motifs of seriality, difference, and repetition influenced Deleuze’s work. This first English translation shows us one of the most original and important French philosophers of the twentieth century in intimate confrontation with one of that century’s most original and important painters.

In considering Bacon, Deleuze offers implicit and explicit insights into the origins and development of his own philosophical and aesthetic ideas, ideas that represent a turning point in his intellectual trajectory. First published in French in 1981, Francis Bacon has come to be recognized as one of Deleuze’s most significant texts in aesthetics. Anticipating his work on cinema, the baroque, and literary criticism, the book can be read not only as a study of Bacon’s paintings but also as a crucial text within Deleuze’s broader philosophy of art.

In it, Deleuze creates a series of philosophical concepts, each of which relates to a particular aspect of Bacon’s paintings but at the same time finds a place in the “general logic of sensation.” Illuminating Bacon’s paintings, the nonrational logic of sensation, and the act of painting itself, this work—presented in lucid and nuanced translation—also points beyond painting toward connections with other arts such as music, cinema, and literature. Francis Bacon is an indispensable entry point into the conceptual proliferation of Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole.

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris, Vincennes–St. Denis. He coauthored Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus with Félix Guattari. These works, as well as Cinema 1, Cinema 2, The Fold, Proust and Signs, and others, are published in English by Minnesota.

Daniel W. Smith teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University.

Customer Reviews:

Cerebral Bacon.......2006-07-19

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

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

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

new dimension about the will to knowledge.......2000-06-24

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

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The single best book on the subject
reccomended for anybody interested in Deleuze
Monstrous offspring
Excellent, but...
read this book immediately

Deleuze: The Clamor of Being
Alain Badiou
Manufacturer: University of Minnesota Press
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The single best book on the subject.......2003-05-31

Postmodernism. What are we supposed to make of the stuff? It's all written in a stream of consciousness style by obsessive compulsives. And most of their arguments are circular and utterly unconcerned with facts. Well, here's the best start. Badiou explains everything Deleuze wrote on his own simply and coherently, which many of Deleuze's disciples do not. And best of all, he doesn't do it in a superior, combative tone. He even explains why Deleuze's disciples are all so combative and superior. (Something to do with cynicism on Deleuze's part.)

Though I will say, if you're a science studies type and you're rigorous in your thought, you'd best do to steer clear of this book. Because your rigor usually comes from willfull blindess.

Caveat to any scientific types: Badiou is an unabashed vitalist. I don't know what his defense here is. The way they usually defend themselves sounds a lot like that line "If I have a choice between the state and my friend, I hope I have the good sense to choose my friend." That is, he appeals to raw uninterpretable first-person experience over third person points of view. With the fact that the Flynn effect remains unexplained and preformationism has turned out right (all life is, literally, is just the result of folds in DNA), this may not be such a bad thing.

Now for fun, once you've read this book, you can read Derrida's Postcard and see why it's one of the most compulsively amusing books ever written. (The difference between Deleuze and Derrida? Derrida is flat-out hilarious and provides the raw uninterpretable experience that he describes.)

reccomended for anybody interested in Deleuze.......2001-04-24

To begin, i should note that prior to reading Badiou's book, much of Deleuze's earlier work had remained mysterious to myself. Thus, i am not in much of a position to offer any real challenge to Badiou's interpretation of "Difference and Repetition" and "The Logic of Sense." Regardless, if nothing else, the interpretation that Badiou gives is clearly presented. Although this sounds trivial, the clarity in this book is appreciated in a genre where clarity if usually disregarded, and unfortunately, often for mere stylistic (and not philosophical) reasons. Thus, because of this "Deleuze: The Clamor of Being," although dealing with difficult topics, can be understood by anybody with some knowledge of Deleuze, even if this knowledge is not extensive.

The clarity of the presentation, however, almost seems too obvious. That is, the way in which Badiou describes Deleuze's "philosophy of the One," and the quotes that he extracts to demonstrate this claim, make this thesis to be obvious to anybody who has read Deleuze. However, clearly this is not the case, as Badiou himself recognizes that this book should shock those who take pride in Deleuze's "schizophrenic" aspect. Thus, merely taking Badiou's interpretation of Deleuze, and the fact that so many thinkers have overlooked what he presents as information that should be clear to any reader, this gives me the uneasy feeling that he, and not these other thinkers, has missed something fundamental in Deleuze's thought. This, of course, necessitates a re-reading of Deleuze's own work, something that "Deleuze: The Clamor of Being" necessitates, i believe, for anybody who overlooked the first time around what Badiou reveals as self-evident to any acute reader.

As a previous reviewer pointed out, Badiou gives little interest to Deleuze's work with Guattari. However, although there definitely is a schizophrenic aspect to this work (especially in "A Thousand Plateaus"), it seems as if the fundamental concept of the Body Without Organs corresponds in most, if not all, ways to the concept of the virtual/ the One. Badiou does occasionally use ideas expressed in Deleuze's work with Guattari, especially "What is Philosophy" concerning the status of philosophy, however, he fails to cite these sources.

Additionally, it seems to me as if the interpretation that Badiou gives to Deleuze's work indicates more of a pantheistic vision that one that indicates transcendence. Of course, there is a bit of irony to write that Deleuze has "transposed transcendence beneath the simulacra of the world, in some sort of symmetrical relation to the `beyond' of classical transcendence," but regardless of the irony, the very idea of Being as univocal and as One chimes much more with eastern worldviews than western Platonic and Christian ideas of transcendence. This especially seems to be the case when we consider Deleuze's work with Guattari in which all strata (that is, all different properties of the world that surrounds us) are merely "coagulations, slowing-downs on the Body without Organs."

Finally, even if Deleuze's ontology indicates "heirarchical thought," this doesn't mean that Deleuze's task, therefore, is to "submit thought to a renewed concept of the One." In fact, it seems to me as if there is a crucial distinction in his work with Guattari between "methodological" claims and ontological claims. Rather than encouraging us to employ reductionist schemas in our analyses of any given system, the very title "a thousand plateas" indicates that we need to take into account as many different aspects at work as possible-- biological, economical, polotical, geological, etc. (this distinction between a methodology of multiple aspects of reality and an ontological expressing only One fundamental reality is continued in Manual Delanda's appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari's thought in "A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.")

Despite these further considerations that would have been made necessicary had Badiou taken into account Deleuze's work with Guattari, "Deleuze: The Clamor of Being" provides a tremendously useful, and strikingly clear, interpretation of Deleuze's independent work to the point that it necessitates a re-reading of this work.

Monstrous offspring.......2001-04-21

I urge anyone interested in Deleuze to read this book, which is a interesting critical assessment of G.D.'s thought. Deleuze would be flattered and irritated to see his work read as he has read other thinkers. Badiou transforms Deleuze's work into that which it was not, while ever maintaining the singularity of Badiou's own project. Suggestive but polemical Alain Badiou struggles to step from out of the shadow of his only true precusor -- he admits as much in the introduction. In a move that should make Harold Bloom proud, Badiou produces a "strong misprison" of Deleuze's work, casting him in the ranks of a crypto-theo-philosopher. Taking a great many cues from Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn" by Dominique Janicaud, who compared Badiou's L'etre et l'evenement to Being and Time, Badiou is more interested in reducing Deleuze and his work to a form ascesis. A reduction that shifts the points of engagement between Badiou and his most formidable precusor away from mathematics and the idea of the multiple to nothing more -- and little else -- than a kindly father confessor is a strategic move that may render "his" Anti-Oedipus blind and pious, but defies the logic of sense.

Excellent, but..........2000-12-09

I wish to concur with the first reviewer on the intelligence and importance of this volume.

I also wish to suggest that there is a downside to it, namely that Badiou vastly underestimates the work Deleuze did with Guattari, and seems to underestimate the importance of this work for Deleuze himself. Insofar as there is a classical philosophical side to Gilles, there is also a thoroughly anarchistic, antiphilosophical, schitzophrenic side, which must not be underestimated, and which often leads him to talk about things he does not totally grasp. This side to Deleuze is underplayed by Badiou who largely attempts to sanitize Deleuze, to rehabilitate him into the core of continental philosophy and disregard, to a certain extent, that Deleuze himself would

Badiou's attempt is not misguided; on the contrary, it is largely correct. Deleuze occasionally becomes the most analytical French thinker of his generation (see his Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example), writing only too clearly and consistently. Badiou reads this way of thinking correctly, understanding it as indicative of Deleuze's relationship to his intellectual genealogy and environment.

Nonetheless, Badiou's attempt is insufficient and incomplete. So, unless you are trying to fit Deleuze into the straightjacket of the more classical philosophical tradition (as opposed to, perhaps, a more postmodern one), you should be advised against considering it your only guide to his work. On the other hand, if you are trying to erase any connections between Deleuze and his "predecessors," and insist on his "wacky" side as "cool," be advised to return to this book again and again, as well as to return to the traditions he emerged from, an emergence to which this is a fairly good guide.

In any case, read this book. You'll learn a lot. And you'll fight with it a lot, only to come out much improved, and not only insofar as reading Deleuze is concerned.

read this book immediately.......2000-02-20

Amazingly enough, I was unaware of this book until Slavoj Zizek recommended it during a public lecture several days ago. Zizek was right to recommend it, but there's actually far more to the book than he let on.

Many of us in Continental philosophy have been deeply fascinated by Deleuze for years, but have never quite been able to define just what it is he's doing. It has been extremely difficult to integrate Deleuze with the stream of thinkers running from Husserl through Heidegger and beyond. Most Deleuzians have not been especially helpful in clarifying things, since they tend to be satisfied with a series of negative remarks about Plato, Hegel, et al., and hardly further the work of their hero except to propagate lame simulacra of his wonderful style.

With respect to this problem, Badiou's book is a bolt from the blue. He begins the book by frankly stating that 20th century philosophy was far more important for its focus on being than for its supposed linguistic turn. This would be a predictable statement from a dogmatic Heideggerian, but Badiou doesn't seem to be a champion of Heidegger at all, which makes the reader's ears refreshingly alert for the argument that follows.

What we receive from Badiou is: a) a very judicious account of what Heidegger's unique contribution to philosophy really is; b) a shocking but believable claim that Deleuze is Heidegger's most direct heir; and c) a masterful statement of those points on which in Badiou's opinion Deleuze goes far beyond Heidegger. This is not only the clearest statement I have ever heard of Deleuze's basic ideas, but one of the best such treatments of Heidegger as well. And all of it in just a handful of pages! Suddenly, Deleuze emerges as not just a lovable and hard-to-place flamethrower, but as the foreboding Crown Prince of a post-Heideggerian century. Wonderful and believable! I now want to go back and re-read all of Deleuze.

Badiou also hits upon an excellent idea in including as an appendix all of the key passages from Deleuze on which his interpretation is based. We all ought to do this in our commentaries from now on.

Finally, I would like to congratulate the Univ. of Minnesota Press on developing a striking new format for the Theory Out of Bounds series in which Badiou's book is published. With its floppy front cover and huge overhead margins, the book looks and feels more like an elementary school workbook than a dry academic tome. As a result, the reader cannot resist making Medieval-style commentaries along the top and side of every page. Talk about "the end of the book" all you like, but whoever designed this series has done far more to alter the genre of philosophical books than most would-be revolutionaries in academia.

In sum, this is an invigorating work that puts to shame the tedious wordplay of so much American Continental thought. I now look forward to ordering Badiou's major work, L'Etre et L'Evenement.

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