Who's Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? (review)

Gregg Lambert's aim is not so much to show the errors of readings and critiques put forward by the academic establishment — although he does this — but rather to show that Deleuze and Guattari's work operates according to an element outside of 'the normal protocols of hermeneutic activity' (p. 6). As such, the 'who' of the title refers to those literary and political theorists who have engaged with Deleuze and Guattari, such as Žižek, Jameson, and Hardt and Negri, Lambert's intention being not simply to show the errors of these approaches, but to explore their strategies of appropriation and to diagnose the misreadings they lead to. Lambert takes up Deleuze and Guattari's claim that 'a book isn't produced in order to be understood' (p. 5). Who's Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? should not be read as an introductory or pedagogical guide, but rather as an attempt to reaffirm the possibility of a revolution of desire, and with it, the pragmatic agenda of Deleuze and Guattari's work. Several of the analyses are incisive, such as the critique of Jameson's reading of Kafka, and the recognition of the equivocation in Žižek's characterization of the virtual. The first two thirds of the book, showing the weaknesses of attempts to appropriate or critique Deleuze and Guattari, are well argued. Towards the end of the book, the analysis moves away from the work of Deleuze and Guattari and returns to Deleuze's sole-authored works, setting up a dialogue with Foucault. These sections are somewhat weaker, and Lambert does not address the question of the compatibility between Deleuze's own books and his collaborations with Guattari. One might question, for instance, whether the early Deleuze really is, as Lambert implies, free from the structuralist paradigm prior to the influence of Guattari. Lambert's claim that Deleuze's notion of the Idea 'cannot be located in the real' (p. 109: contrast with Deleuze's claim in Difference and Repetition (London: Athlone, 1994), p. 214), that 'the Idea is precisely real without being actual'), confusing it with Deleuze's characterization of false problems as a 'shadow' of an affirmation, provides a telling example of the consequences of this error. In fact, Deleuze's discussion of what he calls the social Idea (Difference and Repetition, p. 186) makes clear that this is (more or less) Althusser's structuralist conception of the means of production, and, as his note on Lenin shows (Difference and Repetition, p. 190), what is at issue is not a revolutionary Idea, but a revolutionary relationship to the (structuralist) social Idea itself. What Lambert takes to be a rejection of structuralism is, therefore, closer to an affirmation of it. Given Lambert's explicit affirmation of his use of polemic, some of these issues can be overlooked, particularly as, for the most part, they do not affect the book's central theme: Deleuze and Guattari's reception. The book will be of interest to those looking to avoid the interpretative pitfalls Lambert insightfully recognizes in the first wave of interpretations of Deleuze and Guattari.