Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text (review)

This collection of essays, selected from over sixty papers given at a 2007 Deleuze conference at the University of South Carolina, must have presented an organizational challenge. The designated fields were upscaled prairies: literary, artistic, and philosophical production viewed from a Deleuzian perspective, as well as analyses of Deleuze's explorations of ontological and epistemological concepts. The resulting volume does its best to recognize this rhizomatic complexity. Its three unequal sections — 'Text/Literature', 'Image/Art', 'Philosophy' — do orient the discussion but also allow for multiple transversal connections. In the first group, two essays on Beckett (by Ronald Bogue and Colin Gardner) present, on the one hand, the figure of the 'landscape' as a recurrent participant in key Deleuzian concepts such as faciality, percepts, and affects, and, on the other, a discussion of Deleuze's L'Épuisé, the text devoted to Beckett's television plays. (The latter contributor unfortunately cites the former in calling Dream of Fair to Middling Women a 'fragment', whereas it is a full-length novel — Beckett's first). The section also includes a fascinating essay by Sarah Posman that uses Deleuze as a go-between in an encounter between Gertrude Stein and Henri Bergson, by means of their attachment to (especially cinematic) movement. The second section comprises a rich diversity of engagements with the artistic image. These include Nadine Boljkovac's analysis of the Deleuzo-Guattarian 'desiring-machine' as suggested by Chris Marker's compelling and beautiful 1962 film La Jetée. A practising artist, Jondi Keane, examines the notion of embodiment in relation to conceptualization, perception, and action. Most impressive of all is the careful essay by Elizabeth Grosz, which forges a connection between the vibrancy of affect and the intensity of artistic production, arguing that 'art is where intensity is most at home' (p. 86). In her essay 'Why is Deleuze an Artist-Philosopher?', Julie Kuhlkens rescues the term from its pejorative usage, arguing convincingly that Deleuze (like Nietzsche) is an artist-philosopher (rather than a 'philosophers' philosopher') in the sense that his relation with art is not historical or mythical but future-oriented and creative. Her characterization of Deleuze's mode of philosophizing is structurally underlined by the fact that, while seven essays tumble out of the middle section on 'Image/Art', only two feature in the last section, on 'Philosophy'. Constantin Boundas's essay posits Deleuze as a philosopher of freedom, though one that is productive of a series of paradoxes. The final contribution in the volume, by Hélène Frichot, uses Deleuze's commentary on Spinoza to set out three steps towards the refuge of beatitude, understood as a mode where the active power of existing is most fully expressed in its milieu. This attractively written essay is exemplary in terms of its imaginative presentation and its proficiency in drawing together many of the volume's threads. In a pluriform collection such as this, one would not expect all essays to be as scintillating as those of Grosz and Frichot — one entitled '(Giving) Saving Accounts', for all its commitment, should have received much sterner editing — but all in all this is a valuable addition to Deleuzian scholarship, and one that will (as Deleuze would have celebrated) attract a multidisciplinary readership.