Gilles Deleuze

An accessible introduction to the work of this influential and challenging French thinker.

Michel Foucault's suggestion that this century would become known as "Deleuzian" was considered by Gilles Deleuze himself to be a joke "meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid." Whether serious or not, Foucault's prediction has had enough of an impact to raise concern about the potential "deification" of this enormously influential French philosopher. Seeking to counter such tendencies toward hagiography -- not unknown, particularly since Deleuze's death -- Ian Buchanan has assembled a collection of essays that constitute a critical and focused engagement with Deleuze and his work.

Originally published as a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (Summer 1997), this volume includes essays from some of the most prominent American, Australian, British, and French scholars and translators of Deleuze's writing. These essays, ranging from film, television, art, and literature to philosophy, psychoanalysis, geology, and cultural studies, reflect the broad interests of Deleuze himself. Providing both an introduction and critique of Deleuze, this volume will engage those readers interested in literary and cultural theory, philosophy, and the future of those areas of study in which Deleuze worked.

French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari worked together extensively from the 1960s into the 1990s, and the resulting "intersections" of their different sensibilities and modes of knowing fueled powerful alternatives to Marxian and psychoanalytic orthodoxies.Yet readers approaching Deleuze and Guattari's works are often frustrated by the paucity or unfamiliarity of specific examples that might clarify their complex arguments. This timely volume "animates" key concepts and terminology by applying them to provocative readings of literary texts, films, and cultural phenomena--from APOCALYPSE NOW to Cajun music and dance. Drawing extensively from primary and critical sources to elucidate Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical contributions, Stivale reinvigorates their "two-fold thought" for use as an analytical tool in the humanities and social sciences. The book also offers a clear introduction to the precollaborative phase of each thinker's work, an interview Stivale conducted with Guattari, and the first-time English translation of a 1967 essay by Deleuze.

With clarity, precision and economy, Paul Patton synthesizes the full range of Deleuze's work. He interweaves with great dexterity motifs that extend from his early works, such as Nietzsche and Philosophy , to the more recent What is Philosophy? and his key works such as Anti-Oedipus and Difference and Repetition . Throughout, Deleuze and the Political demonstrates Deleuze's relevance to theoretical and practical concerns in a number of disciplines including philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and cultural studies.Paul Patton also presents an outstandingly clear treatment of fundamental concepts in Deleuze's work, such as difference, power, desire, multiplicities, nomadism and the war machine and sets out the importance of Deleuze to poststructuralist political thought.It will be essential reading for anyone studying Deleuze and students of philosophy, politics, sociology, literature and cultural studies.

Germinal Life is the sequel to the highly successful Viroid Life . Where Viroid Life provided a compelling reading of Nietzsche's philosophy of the human, Germinal Life is an original and groundbreaking analysis of little known and difficult theoretical aspects of the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.In particular, Keith Ansell Pearson provides fresh and insightful readings of Deleuze's work on Bergson and Deleuze's most famous texts Difference and Repetition and A Thousand Plateaus . Germinal Life also provides new insights into Deleuze's relation to some of the most original thinkers of modernity, from Darwin to Freud and Nietzsche, and explores the connections between Deleuze and more recent thinkers such as Adorno and Merleau-Ponty.

A critical and provocative exploration of the political, conceptual and cultural points of resonance between Deleuze's minor politics and Marx's critique of capitalist dynamics, engaging with Deleuze's missing work, The Grandeur of Marx . This book explores the core categories of communism and capital in conjunction with a wealth of contemporary and historical political concepts and movements - from the lumpenproletariat and anarchism, to Italian autonomia and Antonio Negri, immaterial labour and the refusal of work. This book will serve as an introduction to Deleuze's politics and the contemporary vitality of Marx for students and will challenge scholars in the fields of social and political theory, sociology and cultural studies.

Poststructuralism--as a name for a mode of thinking, a style of philosophizing, a kind of writing--has exercised a profound influence upon contemporary Western thought and the institution of the university. As a French and predominantly Parisian affair, poststructuralism is inseparable from the intellectual milieu of postwar France, a world dominated by Alexandre Kojeve's and Jean Hyppolite's interpretations of Hegel, Jacques Lacan's reading of Freud, Gaston Bachelard's epistemology, George Canguilhem's studies of science, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism. It is also inseparable from the "structuralist" tradition of linguistics based upon the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jacobson, and the structuralist interpretations of Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and the early Michel Foucault. Poststructuralism, considered in terms of contemporary cultural history, can be understood as belonging to the broad movement of European formalism, with explicit historical linksto both Formalist and Futurist linguistics and poetics, and with aspects of the European avant-garde, especially Andre Breton's surrealism. Each essay in this unique collection by and for educators is devoted to the work and educational significance of one of ten major poststructuralist philosophers.

This book brings together some of the newest work in curriculum studies to explore central questions that swirl inside (and out) of the field: What counts as curriculum research? What procedures are considered legitimate for the production of knowledge? What forms shape the making of explanations? What constitutes proof? It forefronts work by curriculum theorists who are interested in looking at educational problems from a vantage point that questions current models of research--one that suggests adopting "lines of flight" or multiplicities that offer promise to disentangle curriculum theory from traditional research hierarchies and methods-driven dependence on formalities. In Expanding Curriculum Theory: Dis/positions and Lines of Flight: *The essays are connected by their shared concern for combining alternative methodologies, such as textual analysis, discourse theory, hermeneutics, and post-structuralism with perspectives on race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. *Disciplinary boundaries are blurred as curriculum theory is interwoven with cultural studies, political theory, psychoanalysis, dance, technology, and other fields. *To assist readers in understanding the various essays, as well as comparing, contrasting, and connecting them with each other, each chapter opens with a "Thinking Beyond" section. The questions posed are designed to make the text engaging and pedagogically friendly. By doing all this within an overall poststructural framework that encourages and demonstrates creativity, multidisciplinarity, and new lines of flight, this volume makes a unique contribution to expanding curriculum theory. It is a stimulating text for students, faculty, and researchers in the field.

French philosophy since World War II has been preoccupied with the issue of difference. For some thinkers, especially Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gilles Deleuze, this preoccupation has led to a mode of philosophizing that privileges difference as a philosophical category. Reconsidering Difference has a twofold task, the primary one critical and the secondary one reconstructive. The critical task is to show that these various privilegings are philosophical failures. They wind up, for reasons unique to each position, endorsing positions that are either incoherent or implausible. Todd May considers the incoherencies of each position and offers an alternative approach. His reconstructive task, which he calls "contingent holism", takes the phenomena under investigationcommunity, language, ethics, and ontology - and sketches a way of reconceiving them that preserves the motivations of the rejected positions without falling into the problems that beset them.