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Title: Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life by Gilles Deleuze ISBN: 1-890951-24-2 Publisher: Zone Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: I thought it explained something
Comment: This book might be too *stigid* for you. The introduction quotes Deleuze on the nature of his philosophy, "... We will speak of a transcendental empiricism in contrast to everything that makes up the world of the subject and object." (p. 8, quoting Chapter One, Immanence: A Life, p. 25). For those who consider philosophy too confining to escape the metaphysics suggested by Kant, this might seem like a welcome suggestion, but the uniqueness of such a broad approach, as it might apply to changes in any particular life, is largely nebulous. Even Chapter Two, Hume, in which "A parallel conversion of science or theory follows: theory becomes an inquiry (the origin of this conception is in Francis Bacon; Immanuel Kant will recall it while transforming and rationalising it when he conceives of theory as a court or tribunal)" (pp. 35-36) is beyond my usual contemplation and "its attempt to reduce the paradox of relations;" (p. 37). The final chapter, on Nietzsche, strikes notes which I know well enough to become critical, and I find an assertion which must make this book more unique than most:
"Dialectics itself perpetuates this prestigiditation. Dialectics is the art that invites us to recuperate alienated properties." (p. 70).
Surely the right word for dialectics is prestidigitation, the sleight of hand that quickly moves things about to produce one thing where another was expected, but this book is produced in a world which is far more used to typing `prestige' when it has just been considering Kant, even if the paragraph preceding this unique assertion about dialectics ended with the kind of questions that Nietzsche was always throwing in Kant's direction:
"Who can really think that Kant reinstated critique or rediscovered the idea of the philosopher as legislator? Kant denounces false claims to knowledge, but he doesn't question the ideal of knowing; he denounces false morality, but he doesn't question the claims of morality or the nature and origin of its value. He blames us for having confused domains and interests; but the domains remain intact, and the interests of reason, sacred (true knowledge, true morals, true religion)." (p. 70).
Thorough knowledge of Nietzsche is indicated by the ability to make his philosophy illustrate the grand theme of "the symptoms of a decomposition." (p. 72). A key to this understanding is:
"Nietzsche is the first to tell us that killing God is not enough to set about the transmutation of values. In his work, there are at least fifteen versions of the death of God, all of them very beautiful." (pp. 71-72).
Going back to dialectics as prestigiditation, most people seem to be lost in the efforts to stigmatize, or hoping for stigmatism as a vision not subject to astigmatism, particularly "As long as the will to power is interpreted in terms of a `desire to dominate,' we inevitably make it depend on establish values, the only ones able to determine, in any case or conflict, who must be `recognized' as the most powerful. We then cannot recognize the nature of the will to power as an elastic principle of all of our evaluations, as a hidden principle for the creation of new values not yet recognized." (p. 73).
It might be possible to explain everything in this book by creating and giving value to words like *stigid* which unintentionally crept into the middle of a word in a complicated thought on the limits of the nature of philosophy. The complexity of transcendental empiricism might even relate to the explanation that Deleuze offers for "The will to power is the differential element from which derive the forces at work, as well as their respective quality in a complex whole." (p. 73). People who find this kind of thought too *stigid* for real mathematics, in which differential elements are usually determined easily if we know the formula from elementary calculus, but we rarely think about them otherwise, might not enjoy reading this book. People who already know a lot of Nietzsche will not be surprised to find, "Everywhere we see the victory of No over Yes, of reaction over action. Life becomes adaptive and regulative, reduced to its secondary forms; we no longer know what it means to act. Even the forces of the earth become exhausted on this desolate face." (p. 75). Perhaps the book has far more explanations than examples, and tends to emphasize the worst view of things overall, but it moves on, after "Zarathustra cries out his great disgust, his great contempt," (p. 90).
Rating: 4
Summary: Eclectic Collection
Comment: This is the strangest assemblage of Deleuze's writings I have seen to date, though I am glad to have my hands on the Nietzsche article from '65, which nicely complements the Nietzsche monograph. It is very fine and extremely accessible introduction to Deleuze's idiosyncractic approach. The Hume piece is less strong; it is not Empiricism and Subjectivity. The first essay is trenchant, beautiful, and moving, penetrating what I had taken to be the heart of Deleuze's thought. A strong if uneven collection.
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Title: Empiricism and Subjectivity by Gilles Deleuze, Constantin V. Boundas ISBN: 0231068131 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $18.50 |
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Title: Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences by Slavoj Zizek ISBN: 0415969212 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: December, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation by Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, Daniel W. Smith, Tom Conley ISBN: 0816643415 Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: The Logic of Sense by Gilles Deleuze, Constantin V. Boundas, Mark Lester, Charles Stivale, Charles Stivale ISBN: 0231059833 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 April, 1990 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: What Is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Hugh Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III ISBN: 0231079893 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 April, 1996 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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