The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze takes up Deleuze's most powerful argument on the task of contemporary philosophy in the West. Deleuze argues that it is only through a creative engagement with the forms of non-philosophy--notably modern art, literature and cinema--that philosophy can hope to attain the conceptual resources to restore the broken links of perception, language and emotion. In short, this is the only future for philosophy if it is to repair its fragile relationship to immanence to the world as it is.A sequence of dazzling essays analyze Deleuze's investigations into the modern arts. Particular attention is paid to Deleuze's exploration of Liebniz in relation to modern painting and of Borges to an understanding of the relationship between philosophy, literature and language. By illustrating Deleuze's own approach to the arts, and to modern literature in particular, the book demonstrates the critical significance of Deleuze's call for a future philosophy defined as an "art of inventing concepts."

A guide to the work of Gilles Deleuze

The first collection of critical essays on the work of this most original thinker. Francois Laruelle is one of the most important French philosophers of the last 20 years, and as his texts have become available in English there has been a rising tide of interest in his work, particularly on the concept of 'Non-Philosophy'. Non-philosophy radically rethinks many of the most cutting-edge concepts such as immanence, pluralism, resistance, science, democracy, decisionism, Marxism, theology and materialism. It also expands our view of what counts as philosophical thought, through art, science and politics, and beyond to fields as varied as film, animality and material objects.

Laruelle is one of the first books in English to undertake in an extended critical survey of the work of the idiosyncratic French thinker François Laruelle, the promulgator of non-standard philosophy. Laruelle, who was born in 1937, has recently gained widespread recognition, and Alexander R. Galloway suggests that readers may benefit from colliding Laruelle’s concept of the One with its binary counterpart, the Zero, to explore more fully the relationship between philosophy and the digital. In Laruelle, Galloway argues that the digital is a philosophical concept and not simply a technical one, employing a detailed analysis of Laruelle to build this case while referencing other thinkers in the French and Continental traditions, including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant. In order to explain clearly Laruelle’s concepts such as the philosophical decision and the principle of sufficient philosophy, Galloway lays a broad foundation with his discussions of “the One” as it has developed in continental philosophy, the standard model of philosophy, and how philosophers view “the digital.” Digital machines dominate today’s world, while so-called digital thinking—that is, binary thinking such as presence and absence or self and world—is often synonymous with what it means to think at all. In examining Laruelle and digitality together, Galloway shows how Laruelle remains a profoundly non-digital thinker—perhaps the only non-digital thinker today—and engages in an extensive discussion on the interconnections between media, philosophy, and technology.

"In this book, author Philip Goodchild tries to uncover the image of thought used by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. He does so by focusing on the question, "What is philosophy?" posed implicitly throughout Deleuze's publications. Goodchild traces the development of a highly sophisticated, coherent, and rigorous practice of thought that underlies Deleuze's apparently flamboyant and anarchic discourse." "This question of philosophy is posed in the context of an awareness of the historical, social, and cultural conditioning of a plurality of rationalities that bring into question the value of the philosophical enterprise as a whole. Deleuze meets this problem by identifying something "unthought" and "unthinkable" that conditions the way in which people do in fact think, and by directing philosophy toward this as its transcendental field. Philosophy is no longer seen as an attempt to ascertain, evaluate, criticize, or interpret knowledge or meaning, but is seen as an exercise in creating concepts for use in the practical problems of life." "Ultimately, Deleuze's philosophy constructs an affirmative and interactive kind of social relation, which was embodied in his own intellectional relationship with Felix Guattari and which can form the basis for the organization of a new kind of society." "In conclusion, this book examines Deleuze's deepest metaphysical presuppositions and finds that, while a certain kind of materialism pervades Deleuze's thought, the practice of that thought also presupposes a kind of metaphysics of creative awareness, where planes, lines, and crystals are folded onto each other into a "fractal of philosophy." By rethinking the question of philosophy in Deleuze's thought, one can be led to open up a new meaning of life in terms of the "Transcendence" of this awareness to that which it conditions. The result is an escape from the dead ends of postmodern thought."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In this book, William Egginton argues for the centrality of a psychoanalytic notion of interpretation for philosophy and literary theory.

Are your students baffled by Baudrillard? Dazed by Deleuze? Confused by Kristeva? Other beginners' guides can feel as impenetrable as the original texts to students who 'think in images'. "Contemporary Thinkers Reframed" instead uses the language of the arts to explore the usefulness in practice of complex ideas.Short, contemporary and accessible, these lively books utilise actual examples of artworks, films, television shows, works of architecture, fashion and even computer games to explain and explore the work of the most commonly taught thinkers. Conceived specifically for the visually minded, the series will prove invaluable to students right across the visual arts. Deleuze disdains easy answers. Yet easy answers to Deleuze are what students need. Without reducing Deleuze's complex body of thought to simplistic solutions, this very contemporary guide leads the reader into the world of Deleuze's spiralling thought through concrete examples from art, film, TV and even computer games. From 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' and 'The Cell' to 'Pac Man' and 'Doom' and from the work of Matthew Barney and Helen Chadwick to 'Lost' and 'Doctor Who', this easily digestible introduction looks at the key ideas promoted by Deleuze, both in his own work and in his notoriously difficult collaborations with Felix Guattari, to make them both fresh and relevant to the visual arts today.

A volume in the Contemporary Theory Series edited by Frances Restuccia An interdisciplinary collection of essays that critically reflect on the value and limits of psychoanalysis for conceptualizing traumatic affect. A page-turner for anyone even remotely drawn to the subject of trauma, Traumatizing Theory includes essays that go beyond psychoanalysis in rethinking the cultural significance of traumatic anxiety, melancholy, and the representation of suffering in testimony, self-narration, and politics. Traumatizing Theory is unmistakably on the cutting edge and moves trauma theory into a new postmodern phase. Karyn Ball's introduction reframes debates about psychoanalysis within trauma studies. Bettina Bergo's essay revisits the historical development of hysteria as Freud's model for traumatic anxiety in both men and women. Dorothea Olkowski also focuses on traumatic anxiety, but problematizes Freud’s masculinist and scientistic premises. Sarah Murphy and Susannah Radstone examine the disciplinary effects of public confession and testimony while Ball and Kligerman critique Deleuze's post-psychoanalytic Cinema books and Gerhard Richter's haunted October 18, 1977 Cycle, respectively, as testimonies to the latent impact of traumatic history. For Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, philosophy serves ineluctably as a medium of testimony in Sarah Kofman's autobiographical writings about ambivalence toward her biological Jewish mother and guilty love for the French woman who adopted Sarah during the Nazi occupation. Drucilla Cornell also explores conflicted self-narrations among transnationally adopted children and their parents. The collection concludes with essays by Juliet Flower-MacCannell, Lauren Berlant, and John Mowitt on the politics of traumatic identification in the public sphere.

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