Gilles Deleuze stands as a pivotal figure in postmodern French philosophy, identifying as both an empiricist and a vitalist. His extensive body of work, built upon concepts like multiplicity, constructivism, difference, and desire, diverges significantly from the mainstream traditions of 20th-century Continental thought. Within his metaphysical framework, he embraced a Spinozian notion of a plane of immanence, positing all existence as modes of a single substance on the same ontological level. This perspective led him to argue for the absence of inherent good and evil, instead proposing a focus on relationships beneficial or detrimental to particular individuals, an ethical stance that deeply informed his engagement with social and political struggles for rights and freedoms. Deleuze often pursued philosophical 'encounters' with other thinkers and artists, viewing philosophy not as commentary but as a creative act that generates new concepts, emphasizing a reality characterized by constant becoming rather than static being.
A Thousand Plateaus is the second part of Deleuze and Guattari's landmark philosophical project, Capitalism and Schizophrenia - a project that still sets the terms of contemporary philosophical debate. Written over a seven year period, A Thousand Plateaus provides a compelling analysis of social phenomena and offers fresh alternatives for thinking about philosophy and culture. Its radical perspective provides a toolbox for 'nomadic thought' and has had a galvanizing influence on today's anti-capitalist movement.
The final work of this essential thinker. Essays Critical and Clinical is the final work of the late Gilles Deleuze, one of the most important and vital figures in contemporary philosophy. It includes essays, all newly revised or published here for the first time, on such diverse literary figures as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Alfred Jarry, and Lewis Carroll, as well as philosophers such as Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. For Deleuze, every literary work implies a way of living, a form of life, and must be evaluated not only critically but also clinically. As Proust said, great writers invent a new language within language, but in such a way that language in its entirety is pushed to its limit or its own “outside.” This outside of language is made up of affects and precepts that are not linguistic, but which language alone nonetheless makes possible. In Essays Critical and Clinical , Deleuze is concerned with the delirium-the process of Life-that lies behind this invention, as well as the loss that occurs, the silence that follows, when this delirium becomes a clinical state. Taken together, these eighteen essays present a profoundly new approach to literature by one of the greatest twentieth-century philosophers.
Logic of Sense is one of Deleuze's seminal works. First published in 1969, shortly after Difference and Repetition, it prefigures the hybrid style and methods he would use in his later writing with Felix Guattari. In an early review Michel Foucault wrote that Logic of Sense 'should be read as the boldest and most insolent of metaphysical treatises'. The book is divided into 34 'series' and five appendices covering a diverse range of topics including, sense, nonsense, event, sexuality, psychoanalysis, paradoxes, schizophrenia, literature and becoming and includes fascinating close textual readings of works by Lewis Carroll, Sigmund Freud, Seneca, Pierre Klossowski, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Émile Zola. Logic of Sense is essential reading for anyone interested in post-war continental thought.
"The first volume of Gilles Deleuze's landmark philosophical study of the art of film, now available in the Bloomsbury Revelations series"-- Provided by publisher
A provocative guide to Deleuze by Deleuze, this collection traces the
intellectual journey of one of the most important French philosophers and
clarifies the key critical concepts in the work of this vital figure who has
had an impact on aesthetics, film theory, psychoanalysis and cultural studies.
Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology with a single infinite substance. This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical and ontological propositions. His ethics is an ethology, rather than a moral science. Attention has been drawn to Spinoza by deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher; and this reading of Spinoza by Deleuze lends itself to a radical ecological ethic. As Robert Hurley says in his introduction, "Deleuze opens us to the idea that the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us. One wonders, finally, whether Man might be defined as a territory, a set of boundaries, a limit on existence." Gilles Deleuze, known for his inquiries into desire, language, politics, and power, finds a kinship between Spinoza and Nietzsche. He writes, ""Spinoza did not believe in hope or even in courage; he believed only in joy and in vision . . . he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time I read him, of a witch's broom that he makes one mount. Gilles Deleuze was a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris at Vincennes. Robert Hurley is the translator of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari redefine the relation between the state and
its war machine. Far from being a part of the state, warriers (the army) are
nomads who always come from the outside and keep threatening the authority of
the state.
