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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.
thank you mr. holland for this great gift.
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Guattari's work as exemplified and analyzed in some detail in this book covered significant ground during his life. Everything from psychiatry to social phenomena was covered and he misses very few points in between. This book is good in relating that to a reader, providing context to Guattari's work. The one place I would ask for more is in dealing specifically with Guattari's political economic perspective. While Genesko does explain and diagram the systematic though of Guattari's psycho-social-aesthetico-political models, and the explainations of transversals, etc. are significant works in themselves, I find that without the tie to integrated world capitalism some things are lost.
However, even without that, this book manages to bring Guattari back to the fore in social theory and political theory, so buy it, read it, and find out more about one of the most interesting minds of the last century.
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The opening sequence of essays illustrate Dr. Guattari's travails as one of the spearheads behind France's notorious "anti-psychiatry" movement. His profound and unsettling career in the clinical matrices of institutions more deranged than their denizens provides a much-needed analogical narrative for those uncomfortable with D & G's scorching brand of C-Theory. The dangers and vicissitudes of the French psycho-pharmaceutical complex are engaged by Guattari's unrepentant desire to make the mental hospital a true community-culture, where "the real relations of force between the personnel and the patients"(42) are restored to the schizo-subject.
Parts II and III escape momentarily from the psychiatric compound to schizo-analyze the mechanosphere of our transglobal Technocracy, disseminating the "postmodern impasse" of ethical abdication, sounding the alarm for new and more complex forms of political resistance. "It is necessary to reinvent the body, to reinvent the mind and to reinvent language. Perhaps the new telematic, informational, and audio-visual technologies can help us to progress in this direction"(115). Rejecting the paranoid neo-Luddism of the Heideggerians, Guattari sees infinite possibilities for forming alliances with the engineering sciences, coeval with perpetual danger, caution, a selectively informed resistance.
Part IV, "Polysemiosis," showcases Guattari's stunning agon with Hjelmslev and Peirce, a crucial body of text for anyone who needs the anti-Saussurean translinguistics of D & G further enlarged upon and clarified. Here, the order of elements is secondary in relation to the axiomatic of flows and figures (i.e. creativity in languages may be eternally binded to dominant syntactic and grammatical machines, yet there's always an engine of creation pushing these laws beyond their prescribed ends). Twenty pages later, Guattari steers this apparatus onto the political stage with a pair of essays raging through the microphysics of Foucaultian power.
Part V traverses the uncompromising byways of Red and Green eco-revolutionary constructs, queer politics, a delightful and surprising exegesis of Jean Genet's classic autopoetic *Prisoner of Love*, along with more powerful satellite-imagery and theoretical fine-tunings of Guattari's always-developing theories of machinic subjectivity.
Part VI proves once and for all that the pomo abdication of life-critical issues is anathema to our world community and its institutions. Intellectualism which forsakes political aptitude and activism can only put us further in the hole. "Our problem is to reconquer the communitarian spaces of liberty, dialogue, and desire"(255). The meaning of social life, for Guattari, is to engineer institutions and practices that provide open channels for the exploration of our own subjectivity, supplemented by clinical pathways ready to disinfect those persons who've been wounded by this unrepentant promethean drive.
All in all, a required body of texts for those in need of paradigmata to orienteer D & G's more byzantine theoretical forays, without having to reread (yet again) your spine-rolled volumes of M. Foucault.
Although the reader may need a passing familiarity with D & G before beginning, even those who have only a passing knowledge will find the applications and strategies a helpful reminder of the transformative powers of philosophy and thought.
Philosophically, D & G seem to be proponants of a dynamic, highly charged, pre-conventional world, in which even individual identity is not yet a given. They do not suppose that we can live in this world and function normally, but we can tap into it, so to speak, and thereby harness energy for more creative living in the "normal" world, the world of conventional ideas, personal identities, etc. (and to some extent transform the "normal" world). But to paraphrase their ideas in this way is to lose the excitement they generate as they dive into specific topics--the musical refrain, schizophrenia, rhizomes, laws, and so on and so on--ever coming up with new and surpising interpretations. This book has endless riches for the reader to discover.
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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.
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Anti-Oedipus is important for political activists, otherwise it becomes just another piece of "knowledge-capital"...
Anti Oedipus is really a book of anthropology. It shows how "primitive," "despotic," and finally "capitalist" regimes differ in their organization of production, recording (inscription, representation), and consumption. It's also a history insofar as it covers the process by which capitalism ultimately commands all the flows and chains of production, submitting them to a form of organization that is abstract (money is abstract) rather than local and physical.
The oedipal part of it is a critique of the Oedipal complex insofar as the complex articulates a model of society based on the family triangle. They want to show that the family is a kind of organization that must colonize its members, repress their desires, and give them complexes if it is to function as an organizing principle of contemporary society.
Their alternative, to be taken literally, is schizoid: subvertive, resistance, and always escaping capture by slipping in between the categories that organize capitalist society and its way of thinking.
After this, the secondary works I would recommend are Michael Hardt's "Apprenticeship in Philosophy," Claire Colebrook's "Gilles Deleuze," Eugene Holland's invaluable explication of Anti-Oedipus (he has written many outstanding little articles as well, which you'll find in the anthologies), and finally, the more difficult but singularly rewarding "Clamor of Being" by Alain Badiou. Also, as far as the "applications" of D&G go, the little book by a guy named James Brusseau, "Isolated Experiences," is by far the best, however much one wants to disagree with his making a solipsist of Deleuze (more or less).
All in all, this book will punch a hole in your mindzone without messing up your pathways. For once...a book that allows you to MAKE connections rather than preventing them with the standard proxy of "DeleuzoGuattarian." As a final note, unrelated to Bogue's book, everyone who's interested should be aware that there is a slew of Deleuze's lectures from his time at Vincennes available in translation at WebDeleuze, I believe. They range in subject from Kant, Leibniz, Spinoza, to cinema, AO and ATP, and one shouldn't miss the opportunity to see what incredible pedagogic gifts Deleuze possessed. These lectures are superb, clear, and, contrary to what most uninformed people seem to think of Deleuze's work, extremely rigorous and invigorating. Such was the man's gift...