This volume addresses the issue of freedom in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. This is all the more challenging in that Deleuze-Guattari almost never use the term freedom, preferring instead, the concept of the refrain. The essays collected in the volume show that freedom has been understood in a remarkably narrow sense and that in fact freedom operates as the refrain in every realm of thought and creation. The motivating approach in these essays is Deleuze-Guattari’s emphasis on the irreality of media and capitalistic sign regimes, which they perceive to have taken over even the practices of philosophy, the arts, and science. By offering a clear and engaging treatment of the underexplored issue of freedom, this volume moves the discussion of Deleuze-Guattari’s philosophy forward in ways that will appeal to researchers in Continental philosophy and a wide range of other disciplines.

This volume addresses the issue of freedom in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. This is all the more challenging in that Deleuze-Guattari almost never use the term freedom, preferring instead, the concept of the refrain. The essays collected in the volume show that freedom has been understood in a remarkably narrow sense and that in fact freedom operates as the refrain in every realm of thought and creation. The motivating approach in these essays is Deleuze-Guattari's emphasis on the irreality of media and capitalistic sign regimes, which they perceive to have taken over even the practices of philosophy, the arts, and science. By offering a clear and engaging treatment of the underexplored issue of freedom, this volume moves the discussion of Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy forward in ways that will appeal to researchers in Continental philosophy and a wide range of other disciplines.

During their lives, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari were two of France's most prominent thinkers, and their work continues to be a vital and influential part of critical theory. The essays in this collection, written by prominent scholars, offer a new approach to their work. Unique in its emphasis on Guattari, both in conjunction with Deleuze and independently, this volume features an essay by Deleuze himself and includes a comprehensive bibliography of Guattari's and Deleuze's work. The body of work explored here spans three decades and cuts across the lines of philosophy, political theory, geography, literature, aesthetics, and even the applied sciences. Readers unfamiliar with Deleuze and Guattari will gain a broad sense of their work from these pages; specialists will discover new and different methods of understanding the contributions of these writers. The essays map out a set of applications that, rather than explain Deleuze and Guattari, aim to extend and reinvent their thought in new and "real life" domains, from cinema to the Gulf War, from quantum mechanics to the L.A. riots, and from Israel's deportation of Palestinians to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's masochism. Overall, the collection demonstrates the wide range of potential applications of Deleuze's and Guattari's theories and expands current readings of their work.

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.

Representing a sustained engagement with the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, covering more than two decades and on a wide range of topics, from aesthetics and literature to capitalism and Marxism, Kenneth Surin takes politics as the thematic thread to this collection. Deleuze and Guattari: Selected Writings tackles both central political issues, such as the State, globalization, and the citizen, as well as the political qualities of topics generally considered outside this realm, such as the animal, the image, and the literary. Surins pursues theoretical interventions inspired by Deleuze and Guattari's scholarship in relation to Marxism and specifically materialism and notions of political solidarity, which they did not engage with extensively or explicitly themselves, but which extend their critique along new lines of flight. This book demonstrates the breadth and lasting relevance of Deleuze's and Guattari's legacy by tracing the affinities between Deleuze and both Marxist sociologist, Antonio Negri, and Raymond Williams, one of the founders of cultural studies as a discipline.

This accessible book examines critically the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, clarifying the ideas of these two notoriously difficult thinkers without over-simplifying them. Divided into three sections - Knowledge, Power, and Liberation of Desire - the book provides a systematic account of the intellectual context as well as an exhaustive analysis of the key themes informing Deleuze and Guattari′s work. It provides the framework for reading the important and influential study Capitalism and Schizophrenia and, with the needs of students in mind, explains the key concepts in Deleuze and Guattari′s discussion of philosophy, art and politics. Definitive and incisive, the book will be invaluable in situating the philosophy of these two major figures within the perspective of the social and human sciences.

The first book to present Gilles Deleuze's philosophy in language the nonphilosopher can understand. 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.

An important collection of essays examining the intersections between Deleuzian philosophy and the arts.

In recent years the humanities, social sciences and neuroscience have witnessed an 'affective turn, ' especially in discourses around post-Fordist labor, economic and ecological crises, populism and identity politics, mental health, and political struggle. This new awareness would be unthinkable without the pioneering work of Gilles Deleuze, who replaced judgment with affect as the very material movement of thought: every concept is an affective experience, a becoming. Besides entirely active affects, the highest practice of thought, there is no thought without passive affects or passions. Instead of a calm and rational philosophy of passions, Deleuzian thought is therefore inseparable from "isolated and passionate cries" that deny what everybody knows and what nobody can deny: "every true thought is an aggression." This inseparability of reason and passion is by no means an anti-intellectualist or irrationalist stance. Rather, it is critical, since it protects reason from its self-imposed stupidity (bêtise) by relating it to the unthought forces that condition it. And it is clinical, because thought becomes possessed by a power of selection. The purely active, i.e. free-floating, unrecorded desire, is never enough to produce a consistent relation to the future, which is why we need the passions to give us an initial orientation, to force and enable us to think. Passions are the beliefs, perceptions, representations, and opinions that attach us to the world; they make up the very material of which our lives and thoughts are composed. Instead of truth as the ultimate criterion of judgment, the only principle according to which affective becomings can be selected and evaluated is the extent to which they proliferate joy. Spinoza and Marx show how the recruitment of desire traditionally takes place through the tyrants and priests who inspire sad passions in us. Similarly, the work of Deleuze and Guattari on capitalism and schizophrenia can be read as an encyclopedia of the passions that constitute the affective infrastructure of the socius of contemporary capitalism. If it takes a lot of inventiveness or imagination to be able to diagnose our present becomings, this is because becomings are always composites of joyful and sad passions. Capitalism could not exist if it did not also inspire happiness, love, courage, and perhaps even beatitude. That is why, today, we witness "the spectacle of the happily dominated" (Frédéric Lordon) of the self-entrepreneur, the managerial class, the flex worker, the citizen-consumer, the bean-roasting hipster, and the self-managed team. It is within this field of contradictory and heterogeneous passions that the authors of this volume pursue the diagnosis of our past and present becomings. Their contributions add up to a systematic taxonomy of the passions and indicate their importance for a thinking that reaches beyond itself. TABLE OF CONTENTS // IntroductionCeciel Meiborg & Sjoerd van Tuinen "Everywhere There Are Sad Passions" Gilles Deleuze and the Unhappy ConsciousnessMoritz Gansen To Have Done with the Judgment of 'Reason': Deleuze's Aesthetic OntologySamantha Bankston Closed Vessels and Signs: Jealousy as a Passion for RealityArjen Kleinherenbrink The Drama of Ressentiment: the Philosopher versus the PriestSjoerd van Tuinen The Affective Economy: Producing and Consuming Affects in Deleuze and GuattariJason Read Deleuze's Transformation of the Ideology-Critique Project: Noology CritiqueBenoît Dillet Passion, Cinema and the Old MaterialismLouis-Georges Schwartz Death of Deleuze, Birth of PassionDavid U.B. Liu