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Deleuze and Geophilosophy: A Guide and Glossary

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An absolutely splendid reference for understanding the collaborative work of Deleuze and Guattari. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which is a quick and exhilirating exploration of the link between Deleuze's philosophy and politically informed complexity theory. For this, Bonta and Protevi draw particularly upon the pioneering work of Manuel DeLanda and Brian Massumi. They also, however, synthesize together a whole host of novel thought into an amalgamation they refer to as geophilosophy, a philosophy which looks to the structural and functional similarities between different forms (animal/vegetable/mineral) of matter, on the macro and the micro scales.

The second part of this book is the glossary which will be of the most use to those reading A Thousand Plateaus, although Anti-Oedipus is represented as well. This glossary is rigorous and concise, and will greatly ease the difficulty of reading A Thousand Plateaus. It is worth buying this book for the glossary alone even if you are not initially interested in the other work of Bonta and Protevi.

The third section is titled, fittingly, "Case Study," and is actually an appendix to the book. There the authors demonstrate the practicality of the theoretical tools they have developed by mapping the interactions of complex systems in a particular region (namely, Olancho). The authors will, in their own words, "produce the elements of a Deleuzoguattarian cartography of Olancho."

I'll end this review on that cliffhanger.

Bonta and Protevi manage to do what Deleuze and Guattari couldn't--make their important--but often difficult--philosophy understandable. This post-post-structural approach offers a glimpse at a new heaven and new earth--new ways of understanding the world and everything around us--including the physical and the social, in ways that avoid cenuries of philosophical pitfalls and moves beyond debates on post-structuralism and recent Science Wars.

The first section of the book offers a review of Deleuze and Guattari's work, relating it to Deleuze's earlier philosophical writings and an understanding of complexity theory. The second section, the bulk of the book, is a glossary of Deleuzoguattarian terms, helping the reader make sense of their neologisms and better understand the nuances of their rich texts.

This book can help academic geographers and other social and physical scientists come to terms with Deleuze and Guattari,
and could be used in teaching geophilosophy to advanced undergraduates or graduate students. While geophilosophy is still in its early stages of formulation, this is the best book to introduce this exciting field to those seeking a better understanding of the world--a new heaven and a new earth.

Since I'm a philosopher by trade and not a geographer, I can't assess how useful this book might be to geographers. But the fact remains that Deleuze (and arguably Guattari) wrote explicitly as philosophers. From that perspective, this book is modestly helpful, at best, as offering a novel "angle" on certain parts of their work that one might wish to integrate into a broader philosophical view.

The opening essay attempts to relate work in "complexity theory" to certain Deleuzoguattarian ideas mostly drawn from "A Thousand Plateaus." Unfortunately, neither its presentation of CP nor its explanation of some of the DG concepts is especially lucid or penetrating, settling more for deriving a few "general correspondences" than actually tracing their ("rhizomic"?) interconnections. The glossary, which occupies the lion's share of the work, continues the project of attempting to "translate" DG concepts into the rather different (as they often admit) terminology of contemporary complexity theory. The concluding "application" may, by standards prevailing in the field of geography, be illuminating, but it is often difficult to "remap" the procedures there back onto the texts of DG or even the author's own earlier discussions.

The main flaw in the overall project is that the authors fail to explain why DG chose to use basic terminology (and presumably concepts) that differed almost across the board from the already available terms of complexity theory and its extensions. I do not dispute that DG were, in some general ways, influenced by complexity (and 'chaos') theory, but, as philosophers involved in "constructing concepts," the "mapping" (mainly onto CP-inspired geography) proposed by Bonta and Protevi can be neither as direct nor as transparent as they seem to suggest. Indeed, despite the fact that Deleuze wrote extensively on historical philosophical figures, there is, surprisingly, almost no mention of his engagement with the philosophical tradition in this work. One comes away with the impression that DG had almost exclusively been reading complexity theory, somehow perversely translated its concepts into their own idiom, and then required a "retranslation" in order for their ideas to be useful in geography.

However things may be with geography, this work will be of little help to philosophers grappling with DG (or even just ATP), is misleading in important ways, and is not especially lucid in what it does attempt. I would suggest that the reader interested in these aspects of DG's work go directly to DeLanda, whom the authors seem, at times, to be summarizing.