The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze edited by Daniel W. Smith and Henry Somers–Hall (review)

This volume is very far from being another ‘companion’ or ‘introduction’ to the work of Gilles Deleuze in which his thought and style are more or less paraphrased or parroted. Indeed, it is easily the most detailed, structurally creative, and intellectually motivating introduction to Deleuze’s thought currently available. As the back cover blurb says, the volume will serve both as a ‘reference work for students and non–specialists’ and as a vital stimulus for more experienced readers of Deleuze’s work. The essays, by some of Deleuze’s most influential and innovative interpreters, contain lucid and compelling examinations of an impressive range of interlocking topics. These include Deleuze’s relation to biology, cinema, Heidegger, Hegel, Kant, literature, mathematics, painting, phenomenology, Platonism, politics, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and the history of philosophy (by which, according to Deleuze, a generation of young thinkers in France was ‘more or less bludgeoned to death’ (p. 14)). A number of the essays supply fresh insights into well–established areas of Deleuze scholarship. Eugene W. Holland’s essay on ‘Deleuze and Psychoanalysis’, for example, provides a remarkably clear exegesis of Deleuze and Guattari’s work on ‘oedipal psychoanalysis’ in L’Anti–Œdipe, exploring affinities between the authors’ conception of desiring–production, Nietzsche’s will to power, and (most strikingly, perhaps) Kant’s syntheses of apprehension, reproduction, and recognition. Other essays take on themes that have received less critical attention (at least in the English–speaking world). Beth Lord’s excellent essay on ‘Deleuze and Kant’ demonstrates that Deleuze upholds ‘Kant’s recognition of the difference of being and thought as an internally determining and ontologically productive difference’ (p. 83) — a recognition that, for various reasons, Kant wanted to conceal — and thus that Kant is to be understood not as a rival to Deleuze but as a ‘co–apostle’ who is committed to the ‘“unthought” that generates thought’ (p. 99). Similarly, in ‘The Deleuzian Reversal of Platonism’, Miguel de Beistegui explores Deleuze’s attempt to overturn and overcome Platonism — its ‘image of thought’ — with a thinking of the image that he nevertheless ‘finds already at work in Greek philosophy itself’ (p. 55). Both Paul Patton and Rosi Braidotti provide powerful rejoinders to what Braidotti calls ˇ ‘the new theorists of the negative’ (Žižek and Badiou, among others), for whom Deleuze’s ethical (Spinozist) thought either lacks a theory of negativity or is quite simply ‘out of this world’ and indifferent to politics. Gary Genosko explains how Deleuze and Guattari ‘create figures of their collaboration that deflect all efforts to push them toward the conjugal pole’ (p. 157) — an important consideration for any reader who remains ‘bewitched’ by the question of how to distribute ‘the weight of authorial input and authority’ (p. 158). While distinctive, the volume’s contributions are mutually illuminating: they are connected by what Ronald Bogue, in his essay on ‘Deleuze and Literature’, calls ‘mutual interference and intercession’ (p. 304). Their transversal links are a vivid reflection both of the care and creativity of the volume’s editors and contributors, and of the staggering variety and variations of Deleuze’s own critical production.