Ronald Bogue - Thinking - With - Deleuze - Preface
Ronald Bogue - Thinking - With - Deleuze - Preface
Ronald Bogue - Thinking - With - Deleuze - Preface
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Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xx
Abbreviations xxii
I. Thinking Otherwise
1. The Master Apprentice 1
VI. Nature
16. A Thousand Ecologies 327
17. Nature, Law and Chaosmopolitanism 347
18. The Companion Cyborg: Technics and Domestication 372
19. Vitalism and the Force That Is But Does Not Act:
Ruyer, Leibniz and Deleuze 391
20. Plateau Three: Who the Earth Thinks It Is 413
Bibliography 436
Index 450
preface vii
Preface
lectivity that does not yet exist. The essays of this section address
various aspects of this general goal. Chapter 2 focuses on the
ethics of ‘choosing to choose’, which Deleuze finds exemplified in
the philosophy of Kierkegaard and the cinema of Robert Bresson.
Deleuze argues that the way of living involved in choosing to
choose, that of committing oneself to the perpetual responsibility
of choosing, affords a means of restoring belief in this world and its
power to open alternatives to the clichéd thought of the present.
Chapter 3 looks at the theme of the possible in Deleuze’s essay
on Michel Tournier’s novel Friday, and Chapter 4 expands on
this notion of the possible, tracing its development throughout
Deleuze’s career. Chapter 5 directly addresses the topic of the
people to come, its relation to utopian thought, and the practical
methods that might guide the invention of such a people. Chapter
6 elaborates on these methods of fostering a new people by teasing
out the implications of Deleuze’s concept of ‘protocols of experi-
ence’ for creative aesthetic and political experimentation.
III. Music and Philosophy. Thinking otherwise for Deleuze
often involves a dialogue between philosophy and the arts.
Though philosophy and the arts occupy different domains, they
share the goal of inventing possibilities for life, and they enrich
one another when their differing modes of thought are juxtaposed.
The essays of this section detail three encounters between music
and philosophy. Chapter 7 fleshes out Deleuze’s discussion in The
Fold of Renaissance and Baroque music and what he sees as their
philosophical corollaries – the occasionalism of Malebranche and
the monadology of Leibniz. Leibniz’s philosophy, Deleuze argues,
provides a philosophical counterpart to the Baroque’s ‘new har-
mony’, while also serving as a means for contemporary thought to
go beyond Leibniz in the creation of a ‘new new harmony’, the har-
mony of a pluriverse of co-existing incompossible worlds. Chapter
8 takes as its starting point a passing reference in A Thousand
Plateaus to Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, perhaps the
greatest literary work ever written about music. Mann describes
at length two fictional musical compositions and treats them as
symptoms of the failures of modernity and the rise of fascism, but
when placed in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, the
compositions signal a different conception not only of modernity
xvi Thinking with Deleuze
and fascism but also of the powers of music to promote new modes
of existence. Chapter 9 is dedicated to the opening image of A
Thousand Plateaus, the score of Piece Four of Sylvano Bussotti’s
Five Piano Pieces for David Tudor (1959). Although Deleuze and
Guattari say nothing about this image, I argue that the concep-
tion of music inherent in Bussotti’s composition reinforces several
themes of A Thousand Plateaus, and that the score provides guide-
lines for the reader’s performance of the text.
IV. Literature and Philosophy. The first essay in this section
concerns Kafka, a writer to whom Deleuze and Guattari devote an
entire book and whom Deleuze cites frequently in various works. In
this study, I examine the relationship Deleuze establishes between
Kafka and Heinrich von Kleist, each of whom is a practitioner
of ‘minor literature’, the one engaging a bureaucratic machine,
the other a war machine, in an effort to invent a people to come.
Kafka’s object is to disclose in his fiction both the ‘diabolical
powers of the future’ and the revolutionary possibilities inherent
in his world, whereas Kleist’s project is to invent a war machine
that does not self-destruct but offers creative means for aesthetic
and social transformation. The section’s last two essays attempt
to extend Deleuze’s thought on literature by incorporating it into
a discussion of two Chinese-American writers and three forms of
Asian drama. In Dialogues, Deleuze speaks of the ‘superiority of
Anglo-American literature’, citing that body of literature as one
that engages a creative line of flight. In Chapter 11 I first deter-
mine the specificity of American as opposed to English literature
and then show how the works of Maxine Hong Kingston and Tao
Lin fulfil the promise of American literature as a minor literature
that generates possibilities for a people to come. In Chapter 12, I
review Deleuze’s remarks on thought as theatre in Difference and
Repetition and his thought about theatre in ‘One Manifesto Less’,
and then reflect on the affinities his conceptions of theatre and
thought have with the theories and practices of Beijing opera,
Kathakali dance drama and Nō drama, concluding that the Asian
theatrical traditions hold great promise for expanding the uses to
which Deleuze’s theory of affect may be put in our understanding
of drama and the arts as a whole.
V. Sight, Sound and Language. For Deleuze, thinking oth-
preface xvii