Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy

The key to understanding Deleuze's complete body of work. "A coherent and systematic reading of a philosopher who has consistently courted the incoherent and systematic. What we must avoid are encounters with those who cultivate sad passions (the men of ressentiment in the Nietzschean formulation); and we must increase our power to compose new relationships with compatible bodies with whom we share a common notion. Hardt's exceptional book is one such joyful encounter." -Times Literary Supplement "An excellent book. The project of Gilles Deleuze is to situate Deleuze squarely in the camp of those who seek to deepen and transform our philsophical understanding and political situation. Hardt seems to me to be directly on target." -Substance "Both for its object and its method of study, here is a work that will mark the future of the field of Deleuzian studies." -Eric Alliez, Critique "Hardt's reading of Deleuze is complex and precise. He follows the intricacies of the argument and of the shifting positions with considerable skill, thus providing us with a study not only of the Deleuzian way of doing philosophy, but of Deleuzian reading-of the selectivity of its targets, of its agonistic approach to philosophy, through indirect attack on one main opponent. Reading Hardt reading Deleuze reading, we can understand, for instance, why Deleuze's exposition usually takes the form not of a dialectic but of a correlation, of a system of differences." -Radical Philosophy "How can we forget the dialectic? How an we affirm a constitutive ontology? Through its efforts to respond to these questions, Gilles Deleuze's philosophical apprenticeship presents the Bildungsroman of any contemporary philosophy that wants to break away from the destiny of modernity. Michael Hardt unravels the guiding thread of this philosophy of the future." -Antonio Negri "Hardt's interpretations are exceptionally well-grounded in the history of philosophical discourse, a discourse he exercises with discipline and rare insight. As the only major work on Deleuze in English, this book will undoubtedly set the standard for any future study of one of France's most important thinkers-and it is a very high standard, indeed." -Peggy Kamuf