Product Description
This is an important collection of essays providing a comprehensive overview of the thought of Gilles Deleuze, one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century."Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction" brings together eighteen essays written by an internationally acclaimed team of scholars to provide a comprehensive overview of the work of Gilles Deleuze, one of the most important and influential European thinkers of the twentieth century. Each essay addresses a central issue in Deleuze's philosophy (and that of his regular co-author, Felix Guattari) that remains to this day controversial and unsettled.Since Deleuze's death in 1994, the technical aspects of his philosophy have been largely neglected. These essays address that gap in the existing scholarship by focusing on his contribution to philosophy. Each contributor advances the discussion of a contested point in the philosophy of Deleuze to shed new light on as yet poorly-understood problems and to stimulate new and vigorous exchanges regarding his relationship to philosophy, schizoanlysis, his aesthetic, ethical and political thought.Together, the essays in this volume make an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Deleuze's philosophy. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Ever since Deleuze and Guattari provocatively declared that all becoming must go by way of a 'becoming-woman', their work has been the subject of intense feminist interrogation. This book highlights the key points of this ongoing inquiry, focusing particularly on the implications of Deleuze's work for a specifically feminist philosophy. It brings together the work of some of Deleuze's finest commentators and today's most important feminist thinkers, including new work by Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti, and Dorothea Olkowski. With chapters on film, the colonial imaginary, desire and embodiment, this book is the first sustained examination of the impact of Deleuze on feminist thought. ... Read more

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

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

Product Description
This book is a map of the work of Gilles Deleuze--the man Michel Foucault would call the "only real philosophical intelligence in France." It is not only for professional philosophers, but for those engaged in what Deleuze called the "nonphilosophical understanding of philosophy" in other domains, such as the arts, architecture, design, urbanism, new technologies, and politics. For Deleuze's philosophy is meant to go off in many directions at once, opening up zones of unforeseen connections between disciplines.Rajchman isolates the logic at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy and the "image of thought" that it supposes. He then works out its implications for social and cultural thought, as well as for art and design--for how to do critical theory today. In this way he clarifies the aims and assumptions of a philosophy that looks constantly to invent new ways to affirm the "free differences" and the "complex repetitions" in the histories and spaces in which we find ourselves. He looks at the particular realism and empiricism that this affirmation implies and how they might be used to diagnose new forces confronting us today. In the process, he explores the many connections that Deleuze himself constructs in working out his philosophy, with the arts, political movements, even the neurosciences and artificial intelligence. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Hishyhash and hellfire stew
I found this "introduction" to be incredibly unhelpful, for many of the reasons stated previously, but particularly the fact that as one scans just about any page in the book, you find each literally packed with references to other difficult works, literary, cinematic, mathematical, philisophical. One nearly needs an encylopedic understanding of every trend in western thought for the last 500 years to grasp what the author is putting across.For example, I've just randomly opened the book to page 64 and there is reference to Frege, Foucault, Lewis Carroll, and Saussure, and this page contains a SINGLE PARAGRAPH!

I am not a philosophy student, but rather an autodidact trying to study poststructuralist trends in relation to certain strains of libertarian Marxist thought. I'm pretty well read and yet I wasn't really able to parse out much that was helpful from this little book, it was like listening to some narcissistic professor bludgeoning undergrads with the breadth of his knowledge. Ugh, can I have my $20 back?

another piece of the puzzle
It's true that this book is missing the kind of rich examples that make Deleuze such a pleasure to read, but Rajchman is doing something else here.Unlike those who carefully police "what deleuze means," and pounce on "mis-interpretations" of his work, Rajchman opens up Deleuze rather than closing him off.This is a little book--to be read over a week on the subway--that expands our idea of what Deleuze can mean, rather than attempting to nail down what he DOES mean. I would respectfully disagree with the reader who suggests Massumi's book as an intro instead.BM's best work--and it's truly lovely--is his brief intro to "1000 Plateaus."His "Users Guide" is, alas, a mess.It falls into the same trap that the (formerly light-hearted) Delanda seems to have ensnared himself in.Why can't we take Deleuze as lightly as Deleuze took himself?Delanda used to drive the getaway car for Joe Coleman; what happened?

A Superficial [mis]Reading
Screw this chump, read Brian Massumi's book instead (Capitalism & Scizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari). Massumi translated 1000plateaus and is so much more than a preeminent French translator: He is a righteous theorist himself and seems to be just about the only person who understands Deleuze's thought well enough to treat it in this capacity.

I cannot overemphasize what a despicable, disappointing, and reductive book this is. It was a waste of my money and time.

The Superficial Deleuze
There will always be a need for good readings of Deleuze, but not for one that glosses his philosophy with as many commonplaces, cliches, and indifferent remarks as this text. The key to explaining Deleuze, like the key to Deleuze's philosophy itself, remains in the examples, which are utterly lacking here. Readers can, and should, do better than this.

Awkward Introduction
When writing a critical introduction to a philosopher's work--especially work that advances a system of thought that avoids systemization and courts confusion--one is faced with a choice: either one attempts to court the admiration of one's colleagues by being anti- or non-reductive in her account, pitching the introduction to the initiated and actively avoiding what is looked upon as unfaithful simplification, or one shuffs-off the "reductionist" charge and writes an introduction that is meant for the truly uninitiated.Rajchman's book attempts to avoid this choice, and consequently, the book is a muddled: At times clear "connections" are made between Deleuze's thought and common standards of clarity, but more often than not the book presumes a knowledge of philosophical ideas that even a philosophy student (such as myself) finds difficult.Rajchman assumes the reader is familar with Frege, Turing, and Russell.He assumes a passing knowledge of Quine (in particular *The Ways of Paradox*, although this is never expressed), and more than a passing knowledge of cinema studies.While elegantly organized, Rajchman's book too often courts the admiration of philosophers at the expense of the non-philosopher; flights of clarity are enjoyed only to come to a screeching halt with some obscure reference to the art of Man Ray.Finally, although Deleuze's "experimentalism" and "pragmatism" has much in common with the views of Richard Rorty, Rajchman too easily dismisses Rorty as "mired" in rhetoric.Had he a better grasp of the history of rhetoric, sentences like the following would not be necessary: "One might then say there is a sense in which the image of thought, and of what thought is called on to combat, is prior to "argument" in a philosophy, such that one might analyze styles of argument in relation to the orientations they receive trhough such images" (guess what Rorty does?!). Overall, a quick read of how Rachman makes sense of Deleuze, but not necessarily one that will make sense to you. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Truly New Philosophical Theology
This is an extraorindarily important book, written by a master scholar who is a pure thinker, who here gives us a reenactment of the transformation of post-Classical Western metaphysical and theological thinking culminating inthe purely abstract time of our own world.Primary here are Aristotle,Marx, Plotinus, Augustine, and Scotus, but so, too, are drawn forth themetaphysical and theological ground of modern science, modern philosophy,and modern society, with an apocalyptic culmination in the dark night ofour nihilism.This is truly new philosophical and theological thinking,and one with deep consequences for all of us. ... Read more

Product Description

Deleuze was intensely aware of the need for philosophy to take an active part in shaping and critiquing the world. Philosophy, as Deleuze saw it, engages in politics by inventing new concepts and using them as weapons against opinion, the ultimate barrier to thought. He did not specify a particular political program, nor espouse a particular political dogma. Politics for Deleuze was always a matter of experiment and invention in the search for the revolutionary path that would finally deliver us from the baleful enchantments of capitalism.Deleuze and Politics brings together some of the most important Deleuze scholars in the field today to explore and explain Deleuze's political philosophy.

The essays in this volume focus on three key issues:
*The ontology of Deleuze's political philosophy
*The philosophical debate between Deleuze and contemporary critical theory
*The application of Deleuze's political philosophy to real-world events

Deleuze and Politics will be of interest to cultural studies, philosophy and politics students.

Contributors include: Ian Buchanan, Claire Colebrook, Manuel DeLanda, Isabelle Garo, Eugene W. Holland, Ralf Krause, Gregg Lambert, Philippe Mengue, Paul Patton, Jason Read, Marc Rölli, Nicholas Thoburn and Janell Watson.

Product Description

Product Description
Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to fathom, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material. Gilles Deleuze is undoubtedly one of the seminal figures in modern Continental thought. However, his philosophy makes considerable demands on the student; his major works make for challenging reading and require engagement with some difficult concepts and complex systems of thought. Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed is the ideal text for anyone who needs to get to grips with Deleuzian thought, offering a thorough, yet approachable account of the central themes in his work: sense; univocity; intuition; singularity; difference. His ideas related to language, politics, ethics and consciousness are explored in detail and - most importantly - clarified. The book also locates Deleuze in the context of his philosophical influences and antecedents and highlights the implications of his ideas for a range of disciplines from politics to film theory. Throughout, close attention is paid to Deleuze's most influential publications, including the landmark texts The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

An excellent introduction to Deleuze
It is always worthwhile to read whatever Claire Colebrook has to say. This book is no exception. It is true that Colebrook focuses on Deleuze's books on cinema, but the reader will undoubtedly have a better understanding of Deleuze's 'time' and 'movement' images that are essential to his thought. The book also presents an excellent approach to forming connections in the political field while eschewing strictly identity politics.

More about cinema than ATP or A-O
Warning: this book is almost exclusively about Deleuze's works on film.Well written and definitely covering an oft-neglected area of his thought and work.Sometimes the text is steered a little bit more towards his roots with Bergson and sort of disconnected from ATP and A-O but overall a very good read and change of pace from the other critical readers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

The assassination of Deleuze?
Published in the original French merely two years after Deleuze's death, Badiou, in his scathing, nigh malicious, introduction to Deleuze: The Clamor of Being goes so far as to identify himself as a `Bolshevik' and Deleuze as a `Fascist', before challenging, disseminating & dismissing Deleuze's key concepts throughout the book, by persuasively exposing their contradictions, mocking their valor & confuting their foundation, leaving them solely to implode on their own absurdities.
Consequentially, both philosophers come out on top in this strategic conflux of discourse, once more challenging the parameters of philosophy itself and its intellection of being.
Badiou's is a seasoned stage, certainly not for a novice to dialectics, but well worth the bother for anyone enticed by the controversy of rational thought.

An important text but not about Deleuze
In the 1970s Harold Bloom focused on poetic misprision. This is the intentional or unconscious misunderstanding of a master, poetic or philosophical, who has occupied so much ground that s/he must be distorted in order to create a space for the follower. This distortion, named in the most basic form (after Lucretius) clinamen -- the swerve -- misrepresents the parent text, allowing the subsequent to proclaim a mastery over the parodic picture presented as the original. While Badiou is very important, smart, and interesting in his own right, this re-packaging of Deleuze is a projection of his own program's need for "Lebensraum." While Badiou does not give us Deleuze's own letters to him (perhaps out of "respect"?), he usually quotes D out of context and by leaping from work to work to create a pastiche of the Deleuze he wishes to construct. Even the bit used for his title -- the clamor of being - is only part of the sentence without its modification and ripped from a two page paragraph. All this is interesting but not high fidelity: read it like an Oedipal assault or like Griswold's treatment of Poe. However, I do not think it is a fair, accurate, or even valid treatment of Deleuze.

The single best book on the subject
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
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
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. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
This text takes up Deleuze's most powerful argument on the task of contemporary philosophy in the West. Deleuze argues that it is only through a creative engagement with the forms of non-philosophy - notably modern art, literature and cinema - that philosophy can hope to restore the broken links of perception, language and emotion. In a sequence of essays, Gregg Lambert analyses Deleuze's investigations into the modern arts. Particular attention is paid to Deleuze's exploration of Liebniz in relation to modern painting and to Borges with regard to an understanding of the relationship between philosophy, literature and language. By illustrating Deleuze's own approach to the arts, and to modern literature in particular, the book demonstrates the critical significance of Deleuze's call for a future philosophy defined as an "art of inventing concepts". ... Read more

Product Description
This collection of critical essays from renowned scholars around the world provides the best contemporary criticism and analyses available of Deleuze's work, and includes a previously unpublished essay by Deleuze himself. ... Read more

Product Description
Gilles Deleuze has been labelled the "post-x" thinker: post-structuralist, post-modern, post-Spinozist, post-Nietzschean, and even post-utopian. This book explodes such categorizations and places Deleuze and Deleuzian method at the heart of contemporary thought. Whether analyzing the work of key philosophers, or key concepts such as time, difference and subjectivity, or the nature of creation (film, painting, literature), Deleuze's concern is always the same. From under the layers of history, criticism and interpretation, he aims to reveal the problem itself in its own life, as it develops in a particular thought or activity. This book focuses on the key processes and concepts essential to the understanding of the totality of the work, setting these within their intellectual background and context. It is designed for students across the humanities and social sciences. ... Read more