Deleuze and Space (review)

The two editors of this volume are highly experienced commentators on Deleuze, with Buchanan also a serial editor of critical collections on him, responsible for several of the Edinburgh series of 'Deleuze and&hellip.' books. The essays go in two directions, essentially — either working through Deleuze's theories, or applying them to architecture, spatial situations, art, literature and philosophy. As in the series as a whole, Deleuze emerges as an eminently usable philosopher, in tune with the critical thinking of his generation but also offering what Richard Rorty termed 'theory hope' — now we have dismantled all the 'bad truths', we can go free; the new liberating truth has been revealed. Whilst there is nothing wrong in taking a positive approach to your subject, Deleuzians are more prone to it than many other followers of specific thinkers, and this uncritical position is striking, even for Deleuzians, in this volume. There is barely a critical murmur, just exegesis and extrapolation. There is something in Deleuze that encourages such positivistic reading, but it is oddly out of step with his own thought. The result is that the thirteen essays lack perspective (in a way that is neither faithful to Deleuze, nor ironic), and instead congeal into an uninteresting flatness of tone. It has been suggested to me (by art critic Fergal Gaynor) that Deleuze is so difficult that people are driven to description, but this collection is stacked up with masses of affirmation and assertion. The direct investigations of Greg Lynn and contemporary architecture in essays by Paul A. Harris and Hé lè ne Frichot are effective. Genosko and Bryx foray interestingly into codification and avoidance of same among 'eskimos', but two essays stand out: Branka Arsic's take on Thoreau and Deleuze is to think about space as thought and vice-versa, and to work through Thoreau's construction work and movement in and around Walden, and is excellent. Gregory Flaxman is the only contributor to really address space as a question, and to question space itself, through Deleuze's reading of Kant. Other essays offer useful if dry summaries of Deleuze's ideas. Refreshingly little of the book is taken up with what some imagine to be 'Deleuzian' writing, and Buchanan and Lambert bookend effectively with the former addressing space in general, and Lambert taking on 'what the Earth thinks'. My overall impression is that more reference to the world and thinkers outside of the Deleuze universe would really have helped many contributors, who seem keen to attribute the ideas of others to Deleuze — so the whole universe becomes a product of the Deleuzian imagination. A similar criticism has to be made with regard to references to thinkers like Bergson or Leibniz, where the primary texts are not evident enough.