{"id":1016,"date":"2009-01-13T14:03:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-13T19:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/01\/13\/why-deleuze\/"},"modified":"2009-01-13T14:03:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-13T19:03:00","slug":"why-deleuze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/01\/13\/why-deleuze\/","title":{"rendered":"why deleuze?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not because of his convoluted language, which entices and charms the converted but puts off others (though linguistic innovation is a way to provoke new thinking), nor the ways some of his (and Guattari’s) concepts get taken by their followers into a celebratory Mad Max style of desert anarchism (though desert anarchism sounds okay to me, at times & for a while, just not as a model for social and political life).<\/p>\n

But because of his willingness to think, to forge new, usable concepts in a space that’s free of presuppositions about what’s natural and what’s cultural, what can and what can’t be done, and in a way that makes the natural and the cultural, the political and the psychic\/spiritual, open, maximally porous, and non-predetermined. Deleuzian thinking urges a fluidity with concepts, with structures and systems, as it creates productive textural mash-ups of the political, the psychic, the spatial, and the bodily and biological.<\/p>\n

So while his books with Guattari are the best known, I would start with his work on images, cinema, thought, Bergson, Spinoza. In A Thousand Plateaus<\/a>, I would start with the ethology and geology, the refrain, the smooth and the striated. I would also dig into his sources (from Spinoza to Pierce and Bergson to complexity theory) and work from them. Of his interpreters, I would recommend Manuel DeLanda (especially A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History<\/a>), Bonta & Protevi, Clare Colebrook, Brain Massumi, and the applications to film, music, and the arts (Bogue, Buchanan, Grosz, et al).<\/p>\n

But I also like the way his thinking has rippled in so many directions, reviving Spinoza (among others) in productive ways, setting off eddies and flows around the notions of affect (which brings together feeling, thinking, embodiment, subjectivity, and the presocial), ethology (which brings together humans, animals, and environments), ontology, territoriality\/territorialization, production, etc. — into political theory (via William Connolly and Hardt\/Negri), cultural theory and art & film & music practice, science studies (via actor-network\/assemblage theory) and belatedly into environmental theory (via Jane Bennett, Stephen Muecke, Bonta\/Protevi, Connolly, Guattari’s ecological activism, and see rhizomes 15<\/a> for some other starting points).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not because of his convoluted language, which entices and charms the converted but puts off others (though linguistic innovation is a way to provoke new thinking), nor the ways some of his (and Guattari’s) concepts get taken by their followers into a celebratory Mad Max style of desert anarchism (though desert anarchism sounds okay to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688977],"tags":[228],"class_list":["post-1016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geo_philosophy","tag-deleuze"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-go","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1056,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/04\/12\/deleuze-whitehead-bergson\/","url_meta":{"origin":1016,"position":0},"title":"Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 12, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Keith Robinson's introduction to the collection Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections, just published by Palgrave Macmillan, provides an excellent and much needed overview of the reception histories of these three thinkers. Robinson's contextualization of them within the analytical and continental philosophical traditions makes clear why each has been marginalized or\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4879,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/07\/03\/groszs-postmodern-darwinism\/","url_meta":{"origin":1016,"position":1},"title":"Grosz’s postmodern Darwinism","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 3, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Among the books coming out in this fall's Duke University Press catalog (pdf) is one I'm particularly looking forward to: Elizabeth Grosz's Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Grosz is among the most exciting thinkers in the post-Deleuzian landscape -- a tremendous synthesist of the biological (especially\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1054,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/04\/11\/after-1968-the-blessedness-of-the-buddho-spinozan\/","url_meta":{"origin":1016,"position":2},"title":"‘After 1968’ & the blessedness of the Buddho-Spinozan","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"There's a wealth of material in post-marxist and poststructuralist political philosophy to be found at the After 1968 web site, which documents a series of seminars and lectures held in Maastricht over the last few years. You can find texts by Agamben, Deleuze, Badiou, Ranciere, Baudrillard, Negri, Derrida, Nancy, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1227,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/04\/02\/deleuzeguattari-and-ecology-review\/","url_meta":{"origin":1016,"position":3},"title":"Deleuze\/Guattari and Ecology (review)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"April 2, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Seems someone else beat me to reviewing Bernd Herzogenrath's anthology Deleuze\/Guattari and Ecology for Deleuze Studies, and the reviews editor failed to tell me that (which he must have known for a few months now; I hope that's not common practice for them). In any case, things like that happen,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-theory"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-theory","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecophilosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4151,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/05\/25\/the-beatnik-brotherhood\/","url_meta":{"origin":1016,"position":4},"title":"The beatnik brotherhood","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 25, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Graham Harman's note reiterating his position that Whitehead, Latour, Deleuze, Bergson, and Simondon (among others) do not make up a coherent philosophical \"lump\" -- \"pack\" or \"tribe\" might be more colorful terms here (if philosophers were cats, how herdable would they be?) -- makes me want to clarify my own\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2011\/05\/tumblr_ljsf0kvMnF1qgjltdo1_500-275x248.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8032,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/02\/16\/the-ecology-of-syriankurdish-freedom\/","url_meta":{"origin":1016,"position":5},"title":"The ecology of Syrian\/Kurdish freedom","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 16, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Eco-theorists may recognize the title of this post as a variation on the title of Murray Bookchin's audacious and\u00a0deeply\u00a0influential (for many, including myself) 1982 book The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (pdf here). What's little known to anyone following recent news about the war in Syria\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/politics_postpolitics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/_38eVyMfag0\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}