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  • Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics
  • Darren Jorgensen
Ronald Bogue. Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. xi + 173 pp.

Ronald Bogue established himself as a kind of transcoder of Deleuze’s ideas with Deleuze and Guattari (1989), the first book on the philosopher in English. More recently, Bogue has joined a growing chorus of commentary on the philosopher with a trilogy that wants to work through his ideas on art. Deleuze and Cinema (2003), Deleuze on Literature (2003), and Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (2003) make up the trilogy proper, and were quickly joined by Deleuze’s Wake: Tributes and Tributaries (2004), a collection of essays wanting to clarify this or that aspect of art within the philosopher’s oeuvre. Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics is also a collection of essays on art, many of which were published previously, and which distinguish the Deleuzian aspects of the cinematic, literary, and musical from each other. Bogue works to translate the Deleuzian corpus into terms that function in discourses around this or that media. Yet it is not this interest in the arts that makes Bogue worth reading. It is the way he renders Deleuzian ideas transparent while maintaining their complexity and open-endedness. Transparency has been a persistent problem for readers of Deleuze, who, in coming across such concepts as the plane of immanence or the body without organs, find themselves bewildered or mystified. The idiom is all too often an isolated one, not easily rendered functional [End Page 360] to even an academic readership. Bogue not only successfully translates such terms for the layperson, but explains them with regard to Deleuze’s oeuvre as a whole. It is this difficult shift, from micro to macro, from the conceptual innovations to the corpus as a whole, that Bogue manages so well. In Deleuze’s Way, we find concise descriptions of such Deleuzisms as minority and the minor; the refrain and the milieu; territory, difference, and multiplicity.

These descriptions are buried in a series of three kinds of readings, and three kinds of essay. These are philosophical, interpretive, and, in the late chapters of the book, are concerned with nomadology. The most successful of these are philosophical, which remain close to Deleuze and his sources. There is a seamless and brilliant description of the transition between Deleuze’s Difference et repetition (1968) and Proust et les Signs (1976), including an original account of Deleuze’s ideas on symbology and learning. Also innovative is a treatment of the philosopher’s adaptation of Henri Bergson’s fabulation. Here, Bogue takes Deleuze’s comment on Bergson’s notion of a people to come in order to make sense of the political place of art. That art is made for someone else, for an eye or ear that is not of this time, is the proposition here, and that Deleuze’s fabulation offers a way of fostering new modes of human and inhuman relation. Strangely, Bogue resists the utopianism that is implicit in this kind of thinking about art, distancing himself from this term. Yet here is a reading of Deleuze that brings him into closer proximity to this Marxist form of imagination, if not to science fiction itself.

A second class of essays wants to bring Deleuze into the practice of interpretation, and conjoin the philosopher’s concepts with the methods of cultural studies or aesthetics. An attempt to think through the violence of heavy-metal culture as a minority phenomena constitutes one such chapter, while another performs a detailed reading of Jean-Luc Godard’s Prenon Carmen (1983). These are less successful arguments as they make points that could just as easily have been made by other versions of critical theory. It is surely not necessary to invoke the milieu to argue that heavy-metal cultures are not always violent. A third group of chapters, toward the end of the book, are interested in defending nomadology from its detractors. Bogue argues with fellow Deleuzians and anti-Deleuze positions alike to valorize nomadology’s relevance to cultural theory and globalism. These final moments in the book read...

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