Philosophy after Deleuze: Deleuze and the Genesis of Representation II by Joe Hughes (review)

Joe Hughes does an excellent job not only of introducing the reader to what Deleuze thought but, more importantly, why he thought and expressed himself as he did. The main argument is clear from the outset: 'Deleuze's philosophy is best understood as a reconfiguration of Kant's' (p. 1) in so far as Deleuze's ontology sets out to complete Kant's Copernican revolution, his ethics inverts the categorical imperative, and his aesthetics reworks the basic concepts of the Critique of Judgment. In addition to the importance of Kant, the second feature that structures Hughes's approach is his insistence that there is a certain 'monotony' to Deleuze's work: particular invariant 'functional relationships' migrate across Deleuze's œuvre, allowing us to build 'significantly more coherent readings' of the whole of his corpus (p. 25), even when these functional relationships adopt varying and sometimes contradictory motifs across different texts. Given this focus, the book's title is potentially misleading, for Hughes does not offer a survey of late twentieth- or twenty-first-century philosophy in so far as it bears Deleuzian fingerprints, but rather a very fine introduction to Deleuze's own thought. It is a gamble, in such an introduction, to begin with the idea that 'Deleuze's prose style is designed to engineer the basic failure of our reading habits' (p. 4), but the wager pays off in allowing Hughes to shoot the sceptical reader's fox before any hackles can be raised, and the clear and persuasive way in which he deals with the complexities of Deleuze's style sets the tone for the rest of the book. After dipping a toe in Deleuzian waters in the opening discussion of style, the reader takes the plunge in the second chapter on Deleuze's ontology. The latter is the densest chapter in the book, but even here Hughes is effective in synthesizing and presenting complex ideas in an uncluttered and precise way. There follow chapters on Deleuze's ethics (the purpose of which is to produce an active and free subject), aesthetics (which invents new ways of existing to make this subject possible), and politics (which draws the two together), with each chapter relating back to the ontology. What may be particularly valuable for readers is that Hughes takes care to give us not just an introduction to what Deleuze thinks — which will necessarily be partial in a volume of this length — but an initiation into how he thinks. There is a real desire not just to explain but to understand Deleuze's thought, not just to summarize what he says but to justify the moves he makes. The book announces its intended audience as 'people committed to reading Deleuze carefully' (p. 4). Although there are indeed morsels here for the seasoned Deleuze scholar to masticate, the volume comes into its own as a first-rate introduction for those who, from advanced undergraduate level up, are approaching Deleuze's thought and style for the first time.