Thanks very much Chris. I will save your email for future reference. I think
the most interesting thing for me is the concept of 'nomad' on which I
downloaded a fascinating essay by Pierre Joris some years ago.
Douglas Clark, Bath, Somerset, England ....
Lynx: Poetry from Bath ......
... http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com/lynx.html
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Jones" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2003 4:52 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: Routledge Critical Texts
> Doug,
> Great to have you back as I missed your comments which I remember
> fondly. You ask about Deleuze. Sorry for the delay, would have replied
> sooner but not always possible given uncertain health and looming
> deadlines. I don't know the book and generally don't read many secondary
> texts (bit of snob that way...)
>
> Gilles Deleuze, 1925--1995. One of the giants in the history of monist
> materialist philosophy that can stand in his own right in the line with
> Spinoza, Leibniz and Nietzsche. It is not possible to cover his thought
> in an email. That would take a half dozen books. He is extremely well
> and widely read and the scope of his thought as a monist materialist can
> be staggering. _A Thousand Plateaus_ written with Felix Guattari
> contains what is described as a promiscuous creation of concepts rarely
> matched by any other philosopher in history.
>
> Some background by way of introduction: He studied philosophy at high
> school and later at university before teaching philosophy first at
> secondary school level and wrote several books on the great philosophers
> before completing a doctorate in his forties and going on to be a
> professor of philosophy at the University of Paris. While defending his
> doctoral dissertation students in Paris were rising in rebellion and he
> also took part in the events of May--June 1968 in Paris. Important
> influences, aside from Spinoza and Nietzsche also include getting deeply
> inside Kant, at a very raw level, and also the materialist thinkers Marx
> and Freud. He also considered Henri Bergson to be important to his
> thought. Hume and the rationalist line of Alfred North whitehead are
> also important. (As I said, he is very widely read, so this is just a
> selection of thinkers which he considered important to his philosophy.)
>
> Like Marx, he considered thought to be a material event and thought is
> an event in things. His notion of abstraction comes from Marx (see:
> German Ideology) where thought is abstracted from the real concrete in
> the imagination. When Deleuze says; not abstract enough, he means not
> enough imaginative thought. He is a very conventional philosopher and a
> bit of a stickler for the conventions and technical skills of philosophy
> which he uses with the sort of creativity and imagination which
> indicates a great thinker. The notion of schizophrenia developed with
> Guattarri is not a clinical diagnosis but comes from Freud who wrote
> something like; schizophrenics treat the concrete as abstract.
>
> Deleuze thinks in abstract images, not words or language. This is why
> his technical language can be strange at first as it involves an
> etymological twisting of language to make it fit the thought images of
> his philosophy. He took the raw forces in Kant's sublime, the
> oscillation of repulsive and attractive forces, and attached it to
> Leibniz's Monadology which produced one of D&G's most famous concepts,
> nomad thought or the Nomadology. This led onto to an intricate
> philosophical reversal of Leibniz's Monadology which displaced the
> traditional atomistic reading of the Monad with a reading which
> understands the Monad as a micro-folding event. This also reversed
> Epicurean thought and instead of the atom presupposing the clinamen, the
> event of deviation supposes the atom as matter. (Einstein has of course
> already done this in theoretical physics and Einstein's mathematical
> proofs can be understood as a folding logic which displaces the
> segmented logic of the Hegelian dialectic.) He also produced some
> astounding reversals of Kant and allows one to understand that Kant has
> laid out a false problem with the sublime, displacing the problem onto
> to sense. Not only has Deleuze astounding technical skills in reading
> philosophy at a raw level, he is able to extract and use Kant's
> repulsive and active forces in the sublime and Nietzsche's active and
> reactive forces in a complex logic which also draws on Kant's passive
> synthesis and static ontological genesis to produce a logic of sense
> which is further developed and sharpened in _Anti-Oedipus_ and _A
> thousand Plateaus_, written with Guattarri, which is a feast of logic
> which is difficult to match in any 20th Century philosophy. He skips
> over Heidegger, although his research assistant was a Heideggerian,
> except for the line of flight concept which is a solution to Heidegger's
> problem of the double impossibility.
>
> Deleuze is perhaps well known for his dislike of Hegel and the dialectic
> and this perhaps needs some explanation as it is poorly understood.
> Deleuze considers Hegel a great philosopher and credits him with
> reversing Plato, which Nietzsche claims he set out to do. Instead, he
> credits Nietzsche with breaking Aristotle's logic and producing a new
> logic which Deleuze uses extensively in _Logic of sense_. When Deleuze
> refers to Hegel as despicable he is referring to the Hegelian dialectic
> as a never ending story which can no longer be spoken, following or
> echoing Maurice Blanchot.
>
> Although I do have some small quibbles, concerned with a misreading of
> Marx by Guattarri in his "Balance sheet for desiring machines" article
> where he says the dialectic in Marx presupposes production which is
> wrong, production supposes the dialectic in Marx's historical
> materialism, and Deleuze's reading of Rimbaud, which fails to understand
> the way Rimbaud anticipates the eternal return with a hammer and
> Rimbaud's break with Aristotle, which Nietzsche later develops in his
> philosophy, Deleuze's philosophy is almost impossible to fault.
>
> Deleuze's thought and philosophy is one of the inspirations that the
> Nobel Prize winning theoretical chemist and physicist, Illya Prigonine
> draws on for his solution to entropy, along with Bergson's _Creative
> Evolution_ which also influenced and gave Norbert Weiner the ideas for
> his invention of cybernetics. Deleuze is a philosopher of cybernetic
> logic and I consider him the philosopher of Modernism. His writings are
> sprinkled with Modernist poetics and a very rich source of ideas which I
> use. Deleuze said ideas do not become obsolete but are recycled for new
> uses.
>
> If you do a google, for either Charles Stivale, who has a
> Deleuze website, or Deleuze on the Web, you should be able to find
> transcripts of his seminars on Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz and other
> seminars. Also, an article called "I have nothing to admit" by Deleuze
> should be available on the web (see Stivale's web site) and this is well
> worth reading as an introduction. The easiest introductions to Deleuze,
> are probably; Gilles Deleuze, _Negotiations_ (Columbia University Press)
> and a very pedagogical introduction to his thought which is fairly easy
> to read; Deleuze and Guattari _What is Philosophy_, the last book
> Guattari and Deleuze wrote together.
>
> Hope that helps.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Chris Jones.
>
> PS... it helps to think in abstract mathematical images some times when
> reading Deleuze, I find. I studied pure mathematics at university for a
> while when a teenager (sometimes called higher mathematics or advance
> differential calculus) and I find myself trying to remember the logic
> involved. I forget most if not nearly all of it, but things like
> rational, irrational and complex number planes and n dimensions as
> multi-dimensional phase space calculations.... just to get a foot in the
> door.
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, 2003-04-22 at 16:19, Douglas Clark wrote:
> > I was hoping somebody on poetryetc would comment on this but they are
having
> > a scrap so I am re-posting it because I would appreciate some feedback.
> > Apologies for cross-posting.
> >
> >
> >
> > Douglas Clark, Bath, Somerset, England ....
> > Lynx: Poetry from Bath ......
> > ... http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com/lynx.html
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Douglas Clark" <[log in to unmask]>
> > To: <[log in to unmask]>
> > Sent: Monday, April 21, 2003 10:38 PM
> > Subject: Routledge Critical Texts
> >
> >
> > > Perhaps I should have posted this on British-poets but... FRom a
review in
> > > Acumen I found this series and walked down the hill to order 'Martin
> > > Heidegger' by Timothy Clark from Durham University. THe series is
> > subtitled
> > > 'essential guides for literary studies' and are monographs of less
than
> > 200
> > > pages. I must reread the Heidegger as it is three months since I got
it
> > and
> > > my memory is notoriously poor nowadays but I remember it as a
stimulating
> > > read, although it glossed over Heidegger's notorious interpretation of
> > > Holderlin as the opposite of Holderlin's actual meaning. It doesnt
shirk
> > the
> > > politics. I must reread it soon.
> > >
> > > Books in the series listed are 'Deleuze', 'Jameson', 'Baudrillard',
'de
> > > Man', 'Freud', 'Edward Said', 'Blanchot'.
> > >
> > > I looked at the thousand pages of DEleuze and Guattari's (sp?) volume
2 in
> > > Bath Waterstones several times before deciding that I have better ways
of
> > > spending my remaining years, so Claire Colebrook's 'Gilles Deleuze' in
> > this
> > > series will be my order tomorrow from my Irish bookseller at the
bottom of
> > > the hill (He is brilliant at ordering books cos he knows all the
telephone
> > > numbers and can get them the next day). I need a brief explanation of
D&G.
> > >
> > > I thought I would mention this series because I feel so lucky to have
> > found
> > > it. I dont know if Routledge publish in the US.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Douglas Clark, Bath, Somerset, England ....
> > > Lynx: Poetry from Bath ......
> > > ... http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com/lynx.html
> > >
> > >
> >
>
>
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