L'ile deserte et autres textes (review)

With the new volume edited by David Lapoujade entitled L'île déserte et autres textes, Deleuze studies now has a major new work to discover. The volume contains previously unedited texts from Deleuze's first twenty years (1953-1973); a second volume was just published by Minuit (2003), covering the next two decades, entitled Deux régimes de fous. Textes et entretiens 1975-1995. As if to consecrate the first volume's publication, the French literary review Magazine littéraire published a special dossier on Deleuze, entitled "L'effet Deleuze" [the Deleuze effect] (no. 406, February 2002; selected translations available at http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/D-G/EffetD/Effet-TOC.html). The volume contains texts that correspond to approximately five genres or sub-genres of Deleuze's writings and activity: colloquia presentations, book reviews, introductions to books by other authors, interviews, and occasional essays focusing on literary texts, the history of philosophy, and specific philosophical concepts, from the early 1950s into the period of the early 1970s contemporary with the publication of L'Anti-Oedipe (1972) and its aftermath.

From the 1950s (the slimmest selection, only five texts), one finds early examples of Deleuze's philosophical reflections (on Bergson; on instinct and institutions), literary conceptualizing (on the theme of the desert island), and a book review and homage to a former professor, Jean Hyppolite. In texts from the 1960s, the book review genre is dominant, with Deleuze extolling the virtues of a broad range of works - the série noire (police mysteries), works by Michel Foucault (Raymond Roussel, Les Mots et les choses) and Gilbert Simondon (L'individu et sa genèse physico-biologique). One occasional essay has a literary bent (on Rousseau as precursor to Kafka, Céline and Ponge), but these essays also include an homage to Sartre (on the occasion of his rejecting the Nobel Prize) and an essay on Kant's concept of genesis. There are several interventions at colloquia (to the Société Française de Philosophie, 28 January,1967, followed by the text of questions and answers; Deleuze's summary address at the Abbaye de Royaumont colloquium in 1964) and interviews (on the French translation of Nietzsche's complete works to which Deleuze contributed, and on his books, Présentation de Sacher Masoch and Différence et répétition).

Although texts from the 1970s will continue in the second volume, those already included here constitute fully one half of this volume, from all the genres I have identified: among the occasional essays is the important "A quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?" composed in 1967 but not published until 1972 (hence, significantly out of synch with Deleuze's evolution between Différence et répétition and L'Anti-Oedipe, but still of considerable interest). Other texts include essays on Hume, on painting, an intervention on behalf of the Groupe d'informations sur les prisons, and Deleuze's contribution to a group statement on behalf of Hugo Santiago's film "Les Autres." The colloquia interventions are significant ones: "Pensée nomade," delivered at the July, 1972 Cerisy colloquium on Nietzsche; and "Cinq propositions sur la psychanalyse," originally available only in Italian. Though less numerous than in the previous decade, Deleuze's three book reviews address works by Kostas Axelos (Le Jeu du monde, 1969), Jean-François Lyotard (Discours, figure, 1971), and Hélène Cixous (Neutre, 1972), and he also provides introductions to books by Félix Guattari (Psychanalyse et transversalité, 1972) and Guy Hocquenghem (L'Après-Mai des Faunes, 1974). Finally, the interviews constitute a crucial genre, especially the much-cited discussion with Foucault, "Les intellectuels et le pouvoir," but also several with Guattari about L'Anti-Oedipe.

Reading through a volume with so many essays that I had already studied, but others that were brand new, I was struck, rather impressionistically, by the particular importance of certain texts...