Deleuze (Theory Out of Bounds) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Many of us in Continental philosophy have been deeply fascinated by Deleuze for years, but have never quite been able to define just what it is he's doing. It has been extremely difficult to integrate Deleuze with the stream of thinkers running from Husserl through Heidegger and beyond. Most Deleuzians have not been especially helpful in clarifying things, since they tend to be satisfied with a series of negative remarks about Plato, Hegel, et al., and hardly further the work of their hero except to propagate lame simulacra of his wonderful style.

With respect to this problem, Badiou's book is a bolt from the blue. He begins the book by frankly stating that 20th century philosophy was far more important for its focus on being than for its supposed linguistic turn. This would be a predictable statement from a dogmatic Heideggerian, but Badiou doesn't seem to be a champion of Heidegger at all, which makes the reader's ears refreshingly alert for the argument that follows.

What we receive from Badiou is: a) a very judicious account of what Heidegger's unique contribution to philosophy really is; b) a shocking but believable claim that Deleuze is Heidegger's most direct heir; and c) a masterful statement of those points on which in Badiou's opinion Deleuze goes far beyond Heidegger. This is not only the clearest statement I have ever heard of Deleuze's basic ideas, but one of the best such treatments of Heidegger as well. And all of it in just a handful of pages! Suddenly, Deleuze emerges as not just a lovable and hard-to-place flamethrower, but as the foreboding Crown Prince of a post-Heideggerian century. Wonderful and believable! I now want to go back and re-read all of Deleuze.

Badiou also hits upon an excellent idea in including as an appendix all of the key passages from Deleuze on which his interpretation is based. We all ought to do this in our commentaries from now on.

Finally, I would like to congratulate the Univ. of Minnesota Press on developing a striking new format for the Theory Out of Bounds series in which Badiou's book is published. With its floppy front cover and huge overhead margins, the book looks and feels more like an elementary school workbook than a dry academic tome. As a result, the reader cannot resist making Medieval-style commentaries along the top and side of every page. Talk about "the end of the book" all you like, but whoever designed this series has done far more to alter the genre of philosophical books than most would-be revolutionaries in academia.

In sum, this is an invigorating work that puts to shame the tedious wordplay of so much American Continental thought. I now look forward to ordering Badiou's major work, L'Etre et L'Evenement.

I also wish to suggest that there is a downside to it, namely that Badiou vastly underestimates the work Deleuze did with Guattari, and seems to underestimate the importance of this work for Deleuze himself. Insofar as there is a classical philosophical side to Gilles, there is also a thoroughly anarchistic, antiphilosophical, schitzophrenic side, which must not be underestimated, and which often leads him to talk about things he does not totally grasp. This side to Deleuze is underplayed by Badiou who largely attempts to sanitize Deleuze, to rehabilitate him into the core of continental philosophy and disregard, to a certain extent, that Deleuze himself would

Badiou's attempt is not misguided; on the contrary, it is largely correct. Deleuze occasionally becomes the most analytical French thinker of his generation (see his Nietzsche and Philosophy, for example), writing only too clearly and consistently. Badiou reads this way of thinking correctly, understanding it as indicative of Deleuze's relationship to his intellectual genealogy and environment.

Nonetheless, Badiou's attempt is insufficient and incomplete. So, unless you are trying to fit Deleuze into the straightjacket of the more classical philosophical tradition (as opposed to, perhaps, a more postmodern one), you should be advised against considering it your only guide to his work. On the other hand, if you are trying to erase any connections between Deleuze and his "predecessors," and insist on his "wacky" side as "cool," be advised to return to this book again and again, as well as to return to the traditions he emerged from, an emergence to which this is a fairly good guide.

In any case, read this book. You'll learn a lot. And you'll fight with it a lot, only to come out much improved, and not only insofar as reading Deleuze is concerned.

The clarity of the presentation, however, almost seems too obvious. That is, the way in which Badiou describes Deleuze's "philosophy of the One," and the quotes that he extracts to demonstrate this claim, make this thesis to be obvious to anybody who has read Deleuze. However, clearly this is not the case, as Badiou himself recognizes that this book should shock those who take pride in Deleuze's "schizophrenic" aspect. Thus, merely taking Badiou's interpretation of Deleuze, and the fact that so many thinkers have overlooked what he presents as information that should be clear to any reader, this gives me the uneasy feeling that he, and not these other thinkers, has missed something fundamental in Deleuze's thought. This, of course, necessitates a re-reading of Deleuze's own work, something that "Deleuze: The Clamor of Being" necessitates, i believe, for anybody who overlooked the first time around what Badiou reveals as self-evident to any acute reader.

As a previous reviewer pointed out, Badiou gives little interest to Deleuze's work with Guattari. However, although there definitely is a schizophrenic aspect to this work (especially in "A Thousand Plateaus"), it seems as if the fundamental concept of the Body Without Organs corresponds in most, if not all, ways to the concept of the virtual/ the One. Badiou does occasionally use ideas expressed in Deleuze's work with Guattari, especially "What is Philosophy" concerning the status of philosophy, however, he fails to cite these sources.

Additionally, it seems to me as if the interpretation that Badiou gives to Deleuze's work indicates more of a pantheistic vision that one that indicates transcendence. Of course, there is a bit of irony to write that Deleuze has "transposed transcendence beneath the simulacra of the world, in some sort of symmetrical relation to the `beyond' of classical transcendence," but regardless of the irony, the very idea of Being as univocal and as One chimes much more with eastern worldviews than western Platonic and Christian ideas of transcendence. This especially seems to be the case when we consider Deleuze's work with Guattari in which all strata (that is, all different properties of the world that surrounds us) are merely "coagulations, slowing-downs on the Body without Organs."

Finally, even if Deleuze's ontology indicates "heirarchical thought," this doesn't mean that Deleuze's task, therefore, is to "submit thought to a renewed concept of the One." In fact, it seems to me as if there is a crucial distinction in his work with Guattari between "methodological" claims and ontological claims. Rather than encouraging us to employ reductionist schemas in our analyses of any given system, the very title "a thousand plateas" indicates that we need to take into account as many different aspects at work as possible-- biological, economical, polotical, geological, etc. (this distinction between a methodology of multiple aspects of reality and an ontological expressing only One fundamental reality is continued in Manual Delanda's appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari's thought in "A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.")

Despite these further considerations that would have been made necessicary had Badiou taken into account Deleuze's work with Guattari, "Deleuze: The Clamor of Being" provides a tremendously useful, and strikingly clear, interpretation of Deleuze's independent work to the point that it necessitates a re-reading of this work.