The Deleuze Connections (review)

This book was published 2 years ago, and this review is late indeed. There is no risk, however, that the book or its subject will lose its urgency very soon. It presents the work of Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher who is generally considered to be very difficult to read and understand. But maybe the difficulties are to a great extent related to some people's inability to grasp more than a few levels or trails of thought at the same time. Deleuze's thinking is, as Rajchman writes, "unlikely to work for those minds that are already settled, already classified." What it is all about is, essentially, an openness that permits connections to be made between fields of experience that are, on the whole, held apart in academic quarters. Deleuze always searched for connections between discursive and pre-discursive levels, between sensation and cognition. Thinking was, for him, to experience life in its sensual multitude and to connect it to the history of abstract thought.

Some of his and his friend Felix Guattari's fantastic metaphors, such as "bodies without organs," "rhizomatic activity" and "desiring machines," have commonly and easily been turned into popular and simplistic slogans of technological determinism. Therefore it is often necessary to point out that a body without organs is not necessarily a robot, that a rhizome is not necessarily an electronic network and that the notion of an "abstract machine" does not have to imply the presence of a machine in the literal, material sense. In Deleuze's thinking, there is indeed very little support for the notion of the brain as some kind of computer. And that is only one of the many reasons why Rajchman's book fulfills an urgent need for clarification and explanation.

Rajchman has chosen to divide the book into six chapters, each reflecting a central aspect of Deleuze's thought. In the first chapter, called "Connections," Rajchman briefly summarizes Deleuze's re-reading of the history of Western thought. He puts forward the notion of connective, experimental thought as being the essential trait of this re-reading. The arguments are further elaborated in the following chapters, called "Experimentation" and "Thought." In the chapter "Multiplicity," he successfully clarifies Deleuze's inquiry into levels of complexity in nature and in thought, i.e. into things that are not reducible to schemes or binary oppositions. The significance of this thinking in relation to the social and aesthetic spheres is exemplified in the concluding chapters, "Life" and "Sensation."

As an easily accessible introduction to a big and labyrinthine body of work, Rajchman's book is most useful. It is less rewarding if one looks for a more critical evaluation of Deleuze's work in epistemological, political and semiotic terms. Such evaluations would, however, be the task of a great number of large-scale, specialized studies.