Books in the Plateaus - New Directions in Deleuze Studies series

Considers the 'strong readings' that Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze imposed on the texts they read. Why do philosophers read literature? How do they read it? Does their philosophy derive from their reading of literature? If so, to what extent? Anyone who reads contemporary European philosophers has to ask such questions. Lecercle demonstrates that philosophers need literature, as much as literary critics need philosophy: it is an exercise not in the philosophy of literature, where literature is a mere object of analysis, but in philosophy and literature, a heady and unusual mix.

Deleuze turns to the cinema because its formal resources enable it to 'think' the relation between movement and duration in ways that philosophy cannot. Discover the nature of the philosophical problems that Deleuze turns to the cinema to resolve and how resources of the cinema enable him to do what philosophy alone cannot.

The first study of Deleuze's critical and clinical projectAidan Tynan addresses Deleuze's assertion, that 'literature is an enterprise of health', and shows how a concern of health and illness was a characteristic of his philosophy as a whole, from his earliest works to his groundbreaking collaborations with Guattari, to his final, enigmatic statements on 'life'.He explains why alcoholism, anorexia, manic depression and schizophrenia are key concepts in Deleuze's literary theory, and shows how, with the turn to schizoanalysis, literature takes on a crucial political and ethical role in helping us to diagnose our present pathologies and articulate the possibilities of a health to come.Key Features * The first book length study of Deleuze's critical and clinical project and the conceptualisations of health and illness he developed over the course of his career * Uses the idea of the literary clinic to unify Deleuze's literary theory with the political critique he developed with Guattari, and argues in this way for a distinctively Deleuzian critical practice * Draws on Deleuze conceptualisations of health and illness to reassess his relationship to key thinkers such as Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Melanie Klein and literary figures such as Melville F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kafka, Beckett and Artaud

Explores the nature and relation of history and becoming in the work of Gilles Deleuze.How are we to understand the process of transformation, the creation of the new, and its relation to what has come before? In History and Becoming, Craig Lundy puts forward a series of fresh and provocative responses to this enduring problematic. Through an analysis of Gilles Deleuze's major solo works and his collaborations with Felix Guattari, he demonstrates how history and becoming work together in driving novelty, transmutation and experimentation. What emerges from this exploration is a new way of thinking about history and the vital role it plays in bringing forth the future.Key features* Provides a novel approach to and appreciation of Deleuze's philosophy of creativity * Demonstrates the importance of history to Deleuze's conception of becoming * Charts the relation of history and becoming throughout Deleuze's corpus * Shows how history can be creative, virtual and nonlinear

F. LeRon Shults explores Deleuze's fascination with theological themes and shows how his entire corpus can be understood as a creative atheist machine that liberates thinking, acting and feeling. Shults also demonstrates how the flow of a productive atheism can be increased by bringing Deleuzian concepts into dialogue with insights derived from the bio-cultural sciences of religion.

Engaging with questions of representation, Ideas and the transcendental, Daniela Voss offers a sophisticated treatment of the Kantian aspects of Deleuze's thought, taking account of Leibniz, Maimon, Lautman and Nietzsche.

Intervening into fields including posthumanist, disability, animal and feminist studies, and current critiques of capitalism and consumerism, Frida Beckman recovers a theory of sexuality from Deleuze's work.

A new translation of two essential works on Deleuze, written by one of his contemporaries. From the publication of Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event to his untimely death in 2006, Franois Zourabichvili was regarded as one of the most important new voices of contemporary philosophy in France. His work continues to make an essential contribution to Deleuze scholarship today. This edition makes two of Zourabichvili's most important writings on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze available in a single volume. A Philosophy of the Event (1994) is an exposition of Deleuze's philosophy as a whole, while the complementary Deleuze's Vocabulary (2003) approaches Deleuze's work through an analysis of key concepts in a dictionary form.This new translation is set to become an event within Deleuze Studies for many years to come.Key Features: Distinguishes Deleuze's notion of the event from the phenomenological, ontological and voluntarist conceptions that continue to lay claim to it todayWith an introduction by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith, two of the world's leading commentators on Deleuze, explaining the key themes and arguments of Zourabichvili's work

An original interpretation of Deleuze's philosophy What gives us the right to speak of a Deleuzian philosophy, a philosophy at first sight concerned solely with interpreting other philosophers and writers? Koichiro Kokubun focuses on Deleuze's method of 'free indirect discourse' to locate and explicate Deleuze's philosophy of transcendental empiricism and its constitutive limits. Working through Deleuze's confrontations with Hume, Kant, Bergson, Freud, Lacan, Foucault and Guattari, Kokubun uncovers a philosophy strongly influenced by structuralism and psychoanalysis, which had to overtake these movements because of its practical ambitions. Kokubun concludes with a radical revitalisation of the political potential of this philosophy. Koichiro Kokubun is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. This is his first book to be published in English. Wren Nishina is studying for an MPhil in Ethics at the University of Tohoku.

This collection of essays charts the intellectual trajectory of Barbara Glowczewski, an anthropologist who has worked with the Warlpiri people of Australia since 1979. She shows that the ways Aboriginal people actualise virtualities of their Dreaming space-time into collective networks of ritualised places resonate with Guattarian and Deleuzian concepts. Inspired by the art and struggles of different Indigenous people and other discriminated groups, especially women, Glowczewski draws on her own conversations with Guattari, and her debates with various scholars to deliver an innovative agenda for radical anthropology.

Explores the potential for an original ethics based on Deleuze's unique interpretation and use of Kantian critique

Ridvan Askin brings together aesthetics, contemporary North American fiction, Gilles Deleuze, narrative theory and the recent speculative turn to answer the question, 'what is narrative?'

Untimely Affects offers an ethical and aesthetic interweaving of Deleuzian philosophy and close film analysis to discern how thought persists productively after the horrors of World War II. In this first extensive analysis of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais' films, Nadine Boljkovac draws on concepts and images that interrogate 'what we are now living through', in the words of Klossowski's Nietzsche. Mindful of the seen and unseen 'that quicken the heart' (Marker), this book of film-philosophy discerns new and deeply ethical life-affirming possibilities through its weave of cine-philosophy. As such, this book speaks directly to essences of cinema, thought and life through creative untimeliness and the idea of the 'ever new'.

We are witnessing the return of political revolution. However, this is not a return to the classical forms of revolution: the capture of the state, the political representation of the party, the centrality of the proletariat or the leadership of the vanguard. After the failure of such tactics over the last century, revolutionary strategy is now headed in an entirely new direction. Thomas Nail argues that Deleuze, Guattari and the Zapatistas are at the theoretical and practical heart of this new direction. 'Returning to Revolution' is the first full-length book devoted to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of revolution and to their connection with Zapatismo.

The Invention of a People explores the residual relation between Heidegger's thought and Deleuze's novelty. Contextualising the problematic of a people-to-come within a larger political and philosophical context, Janae Sholtz casts Deleuze's project is cast as both an extension and radicalization of the Heideggerian themes of immanence, ontological difference and the transformative potential of art. Sholtz invents creative encounters which act as provocations from the outside, opening new lines of flight and previously unthought terrain. Ultimately she develops a diagrammatic image of a people-to-come that is constantly in flux and can answer the demands of the untimely future.

Marco Altamirano critiques the modern concept of nature to chart a new trajectory for the philosophy of nature. He goes on to deploy conceptual resources excavated from Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault and Leroi-Gourhan to show how technology, which bypasses the nature-artifice distinction, is an essential dimension of the philosophy of nature.

Deleuze's philosophy of immanence, with its vigorous rejection of every appeal to the beyond, is often presumed to be indifferent to the concerns of religion. Daniel Barber shows that this is not the case. Addressing the intersection between Deleuze's thought and the notion of religion, he proposes an alliance between immanence and the act of naming God. In doing so, he gives us a way out of the paralysing debate between religion and the secular. What matters is not to take one side or the other, but to create the new in this world.

Theoretically sophisticated and meticulously situated at the fraught scene of reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in contemporary Australia, Postcolonial Agency is an inspiring manifesto for non-imperial mutuality. Bignall's advocacy of an ethics of joy opens up a new direction for postcolonial studies.Professor Leela Ghandi, Department of English, University of ChicagoA sustained piece of theorisation about the postcolonial to rival Peter Hallward's 'Absolutely Postcolonial'.Simone Bignall argues that a non-imperial concept of ethical and political agency and a materialist philosophy of transformation are embedded within a minor tradition of Western philosophy. Postcolonial Agency provides a significantly new understanding of the processes of social transformation faced by many societies as they struggle with the aftermath of empire. It also offers a valuable new way of conceptualising practices of postcolonial sociability. It will be of interest to students and researchers in political and postcolonial studies, cultural studies, critical theory and Continental philosophy.

The Universal (In the realm of the sensible): Beyond Continental Philosophy proposes a radical, new philosophical system that moves from ontology to ethics. Dorothea Olkowski develops the concept of an ontological unconscious, a connection arising from our sensible relation to the world that conditions encounters with the environment and with others. This fundamental ontology rethinks the space-time relations opened by Irigaray's notion of the 'interval,' Bergson's 'recollection,' Merleau-Ponty's idea of the 'flesh' and Deleuze's 'plane of immanence'. Writing in an original style, inspired by literature and the arts, Olkowski locates a 'realm of the senses', a field of vulnerability, felt as pleasures and pains. This presents an aesthetic sense of something universal to all human kind, as well as to the organic and inorganic world. In addition to this proposal for a wider ontology, the relation between traditional ontologies and politics is examined as a means of opening politics beyond a no exit or limit cycle. Instead a multiplicity of self-organized, emergent perspectives emerges, eliminating the need for the connections, conjunctions, and disjunctions of the Kantian paradigm at work in contemporary continental philosophy.This is a timely, controversial and important book that will contribute enormously to the study of Deleuze and Continental Philosophy.

Deleuze turns to the cinema because its formal resources enable it to 'think' the relation between movement and duration in ways that philosophy cannot. Discover the nature of the philosophical problems that Deleuze turns to the cinema to resolve and how resources of the cinema enable him to do what philosophy alone cannot.

An account of Leibniz's influence on Deleuze's philosophy

Scholarship has ignored one of the more formative influences on Deleuze: Lucretian atomism. Filling a significant gap in Deleuze Studies, Ryan J. Johnson tells the story of the Deleuze-Lucretius encounter that begins and ends with a powerful claim: Lucretian atomism produced Deleuzianism.

The Psychoanalysis of Sense' shows that Deleuze was not merely aware of the debates animating the Lacanian School during the 1960s: he sought to contribute to them. He offers a new, integrated reading of Deleuze's 'The Logic of Sense' (1969) by understanding it as a 'psychoanalysis of sense'.

Marc Rolli offers us a detailed examination of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of transcendental empiricism. He demonstrates that Deleuze takes up and radicalises the empiricist school of thought developing a systematic alternative to the mainstreams of modern continental philosophy.