Deleuze and Guattari Explained (ePub)

This book gives us an introduction to the work of these two French writers, which Professor Dalvi acknowledges can be baffling as well as exciting on first acquaintance. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are critics, diagnosticians of culture, humorists, and at other times they are sociologists, philosophers, and historians, but they never seek to be mere theorists. They do not construct systems nor do they offer us merely intellectual solace. Their texts tear through the sterile abstractions that have haunted philosophy and invite us to connect with the world around us, with animals and plants, people and places, words and ideas, to find our voice in the face of conditions, which would have us remain silent or speak only pre-approved lines from a script.

Along with various radical writers such as Marx, the Situationists, Foucault, and others, Deleuze and Guattari stress the need to see how what are taken to be natural relations in the family, in the labor process, in the classroom, on the psychoanalyst's couch, or on the street, are ultimately and fundamentally tied up with capitalism and its demands. These relations have to be denatured, that is, they have to be shown as historically contingent, arising through specific circumstances. They are a product of a particular way of thinking and are tied up in networks of power and control, held in place by one kind of order.
Deleuze and Guattari offer us a new vocabulary and a new conceptual apparatus to rethink the world and our place in it. Their concepts allow us to imagine entirely different ways of relating to the world and to others. This is not just new verbiage or the recycling of hackneyed concepts, but a creation of concepts that allows us to see the fault lines and pitfalls in philosophical thinking. While this disengagement from the limitations of traditional philosophical concepts is at work, at another level, we rediscover concepts that were stagnating or remaining concealed in works of art, poetry and literature; these concepts are freed up, not to service philosophy but to help us conceive of our own liberation from capitalism's clutches.
Even as Deleuze and Guattari try to free themselves from the limitations of the philosophical tradition, they remain committed to its most basic project: self-transformation. The philosophical legacy of Platonism, Cartesianism, Hegel, Existentialism and Phenomenology, and Psychoanalysis is subjected to close scrutiny and critique, while the empowering thought of Spinoza and Nietzsche, as well as Antonin Artaud, Henry Miller, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Laozi, and Zen is distilled and deployed to outline a program for individual and collective transformations. Self-transformation for Deleuze and Guattari is not predicated on the knowledge and discovery of the self, but on disentangling oneself from the web of the self.
Deleuze and Guattari present their arguments in a style that does not resemble the sedate tone and professional jargon of analytic philosophy. Though their prose may be daunting at first, Professor Dalvi maintains that it is not a serious hurdle. Understanding Deleuze and Guattari involves familiarizing ourselves with their verbal tricks, their humor, their conceptual idiom, and learning to enjoy the ride as they draw on ethnology, sociology, music, aesthetics, history of art, mathematics, and the sciences to make their case, and to make it more vividly than any stolid academic work could. However, we should keep in mind that despite all this, their work remains, in Deleuze's words, “plain old philosophy." Reading their books is a challenge and it demands work from the student of their thought, as it required an enormous amount of work...