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  • Deleuze and the Meaning of Life
  • Scott Gottbreht
Claire Colebrook . Deleuze and the Meaning of Life. New York: Continuum, 2010. Print. 200 pp.

Deleuze and the Meaning of Life is Claire Colebrook's fourth book on the works of Gilles Deleuze. Moreover, this text is the sixth book devoted to Deleuze in the series Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy. The very fact that such [End Page 1170] a work emerges in the context of a blossoming of Deleuze-inspired scholarship has a direct bearing on the aspirations and structure of the book itself. Accordingly, Colebrook's work is synthetic in nature, aiming to summarize, evaluate, postulate, and take sides in a powerful struggle over the significance and legacy of Deleuze's reception.

Colebrook's book does not undertake to provide an exhaustive account of vitalism in the works of Deleuze, nor does she attempt to explain or redefine some of the most widely circulated Deleuzian vocabularies, such as deterritorialization, rhizomatics, schizoanalysis, and so forth. Instead, her text seeks to situate Deleuze in the broader context of contemporary debates concerning the established and emergent vitalist tradition. As such, she does not offer a chronology of Deleuze's writings, nor does she chronicle evolutions or transformations in Deleuzian thinking.

Instead, her work begins with and unfolds around a central insight: Deleuze stands out among the thinkers of vitalism insofar as his work uniquely articulates a passive vitalism, distinct from and oftentimes in direct contrast with the active vitalist cannon, one that on Colebrook's account includes the works of Bergson, Derrida, Foucault, and many others to whom Deleuze is in no doubt indebted but from whom he nonetheless departs. In Colebrook's own words: "The working hypothesis of this book is that the very idea of passive vitalism presents us with a new way of approaching what it is to think" (7).

Colebrook summarizes this active/passive distinction as follows:

Vitalism in its contemporary mode . . . works in two opposite directions. The tradition that Deleuze and Guattari invoke is opposed to the organism as subject or substance that would govern differential relations; their concept of "life" refers not to an ultimate principle of survival, self-maintenance and continuity but to a disrupting and destructive range of forces. The other tradition of vitalism posits "life" as a mystical and unifying principle. It is this second vitalism of meaning and the organism that, despite first appearances, dominates today. The turn to naturalism in philosophy, to bodies and affect in theory, to the embodied, emotional and extended mind in neuroscience: all of these manoeuvres begin the study of forces from the body and its world, and all understand "life" in a traditionally vitalist sense as oriented towards survival, self-maintenance, equilibrium, homeostasis, and autopoiesis.

(137)

This deluge of "turns" all turn towards conceptions of life with which Deleuze takes issue.

The key point in terms of the relation between life (and the meaning we make of it) is that for Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, one cannot begin from the bounded organism and then consider the sense that it makes of its world; such a point of view begins from a constituted body and does not explain how that body emerges from a potentiality for orientation—a sense—that enables both bodies and meaning systems.

(94)

Sense, that is, meaning, is not assigned to life retrospectively, as Descartes would have it and as Bergson cautions against (Bergson would argue that the very concepts that life develops for the sake of efficiency and expediency become [End Page 1171] alienating and life-negating when they are in turn applied to life itself). Rather, meaning/sense has a virtual relation to life that is nonetheless real.

The significance of this insight comes to fruition in Colebrook's Chapter 3, "Inorganic Art" (perhaps her most ambitious and profound chapter), where the very title of her work, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life, becomes functional. As Colebrook contends, Deleuze insists

that while sense or the virtual exists only as unfolded in bodies and actual time and space, it has an insistence and problematic being that exceeds the actual and makes it possible. This is probably the most difficult aspect...

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