Eugene Holland, Daniel Smith, and Charles Stivale, three leading Deleuze scholars, have collaborated to produce a much needed and excellent book that focuses on Deleuze’s work on art, film, image, text and literature as well as philosophy.1 The book is comprised of thirteen essays and includes an introduction by Holland. This collection stems from a conference originally held at the University of South Carolina from April 5-8, 2007, sponsored by the Program in Comparative Literature, the English Department and College of Arts and Sciences, and organized by Professor Paul Allen Miller. Featured in the text are essays by major Deleuze and Guattari scholars, including Constantin Boundas, Elizabeth Grosz, and Éric Alliez. Holland notes,
Deleuze was intensely interested in the medium of thought — interested in both individual styles of thought and in the various genres in which thought is conducted. For thought is by no means limited to philosophy alone: it also takes place — can also take place, in the right hands and under the right circumstances — in science, mathematics, literature, painting and cinema, to mention some of the genres or media of thought to which Deleuze most often refers. (1)
Faithful to Deleuze’s vision, the editors bring together scholars and artists to think about and extend Deleuze and Guattari’s specific philosophical legacy concerning the arts and philosophy. But this collection is more than expository, as the editors have arranged the essays so that they assist readers in seeing how key concepts in Deleuze can actualize themselves through different frameworks. Holland comments,
In this volume, we have grouped essays according to genre categories — literature, art, philosophy
- but as we and the contributors understand Deleuze’s work, these categories intersect in an ongoing circulation of conceptual exchange… . We wish to introduce this volume by highlighting some of the transverse connections linking the essays via issues of representation, temporality, affect, sensation and counter-actualization. (2)
- but as we and the contributors understand Deleuze’s work, these categories intersect in an ongoing circulation of conceptual exchange… . We wish to introduce this volume by highlighting some of the transverse connections linking the essays via issues of representation, temporality, affect, sensation and counter-actualization. (2)
Part I, “Text and Literature,” opens with an essay by Ronald Bogue titled “The Landscape of Sensation.” Here, the author asks, “What is the relationship between texts and images in Deleuze’s conception of the arts?” (9) Bogue’s response consists of a conceptual (also a “physical, literal”) model where he grafts various arts onto Deleuzian concepts. He remarks:
We may thus construct the final composite model: (1) landscape, melodic landscape, respiration-space and skeleton-space, universe, cosmos, monochromatic field, deterritorialization; (2) House, structure, territory and (3) face, rhythmic characters, non-human becomings, figure. How might the various arts be situated in regard to this model? (19)
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