Understanding Deleuze (Cultural Studies)
Claire Colebrook
Language: English
Pages: 242
ISBN: B003RWT34C
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
'The best introduction to Deleuze, and to the collective writings of Deleuze and Guattari, available yet! Claire Colebrook has produced a truly accessible pathway into the labyrinthine enchantments offered for contemporary thought by Deleuzianism, making concepts clear, showing their political and theoretical complexity, elaborating their social and artistic relevance. A wonderful, lucid opening onto the new worlds of Deleuze.'
Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University
'A wonderfully clear introduction to key Deleuzian concepts and to their effectiveness in fields ranging from ethics and politics to cinema, literary and cultural studies. Claire Colebrook provides a series of effortless transitions from Deleuze's philosophical concerns (eg: difference, representation, desire and affect) to concrete problems in a variety of fields. This book is an excellent guide to an important body of critical thought.'
Paul Patton, Professor of Philosophy, University of NSW
A genuine attempt to think differently, Gilles Deleuze's work challenges, provokes and frustrates. Surprisingly practical as well as innovative, it is now being seen as a 'must read' for students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Claire Colebrook's Understanding Deleuze offers a comprehensive and very accessible introduction to his work. hink differently. It is built on the notion of an immanent ethics: how can we have a political and ethical theory without some external foundation such as the subject or morality? He argues that the only way we can do this is with a theory of the virtual, and he sees all life (not just cyberculture) as virtual. Deleuze goes further than Foucault or Derrida in questioning the boundaries of the subject and knowledge. For Deleuze perception extends beyond the human, to animals, machines and microorganisms.
Deleuze's writing is challenging and hard to read, and so far there is no introduction to his work. Claire Colebrook's primer offers an accessible introduction to the whole Deleuzian oeuvre, including the work he did with Guattari.
difference extended across all domains of culture and human life. Claude Lévi-Strauss was an anthropologist who argued that social structures could only be understood through systems of difference. He reversed the standard way in which we understand the formation of human societies, and it was this reversal that ultimately enabled an entirely new approach to political theory in structuralism and post-structuralism (Lévi-Strauss 1968). Deleuze and Guattari rely heavily on Lévi-Strauss precisely
the mother–child–father relation of filiation, and then explains how this supposedly natural relation enters into cultural alliance. For Deleuze only the relations of alliance—the social and political differences from one tribe to another—can produce the family (a group of individuals who recognise each other as the same). 37 Understanding Deleuze 12/3/02 3:30 pm Page 38 Understanding Deleuze Synthesis and the repression of difference For Deleuze, the world is the outcome of taking an
and father become exclusive positions ordering the flow of desire from without: either identify with your father or fall back into the pre-oedipal undifferentiated night of the maternal. In social–political terms, Deleuze and Guattari describe the illegitimate use of exclusive disjunction: one is either white or black, male or female. Immanent disjunction is inclusive: ‘I am male and female, white and black, all the sexes and all the races of the world.’ Exclusive disjunction is produced by a
that flows through bodies, so that genetic creations are neither bounded by organisms, nor can they be explained as adaptations or responses to some outside world.) There is a creative genesis that produces borders between insides and outsides through the formation of strata. The development of vision, for example, is a creation that can be affirmed in the becoming of a number of species in different ways; it is a tendency in life which can manifest itself or be actualised in different types of
think of a fixed and actual world which then goes through time and movement. We have also tended to think of time from movement (time as the hands of a clock, or the moving light on a sundial or the progress of the sun across the sky). It is as though there were a world with movement added on, and then as though time were the adding-up or measurement of those movements. Against this image of time is the linking-up of fixed points or moving things, Deleuze argues that cinema’s movement-image frees