Customer Reviews

Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great, beautiful and timely book. It introduces Deleuze's philosophy by first of all having us think about a problem central to Deleuze's philosophy, the question "How might one live?" From this question, May unfolds Deleuze's ontology of difference and his views of life, thinking, science, language, teaching and politics. The book is compelling and highly accessible-and does something no other book on Deleuze that I know of does-precisely because it gets us to see Deleuze's point not simply through Deleuze's difficult writing and novel concepts, but through a familiar question that each one of us might live. And so May takes us into an enormous and rich field of life, from Prigogine's and Monod's science of chaos and chance, to the Palestinian intifada, to the life of John Coltrane, to life in urban America, to erotics.

Gille Deleuze: An Introduction is a book not simply for the scholar or the student, but for the one who might want to live differently, who might want to see how thinking differently about the world and life can open a different way of living. It might change your life. It might not. It should be read.

As someone who is well-versed in Foucault, less so in Deleuze (and not at all in Derrida), I found the first chapter of this book to be a lovely simple yet fruitful little exposition situating these three titans of contemporary French philosophy as three distinctive responses to the Nietzschean legacy. Further, May helpfully distinguishes Deleuze in a way that separates him from Foucault/Derrida on the question of ontology. Now, these may be obvious/broad distinctions, but since this is an introduction, it is appropriate, and the text is written in a way that is very useful/accessible for english-speaking philosophers who may be unfamiliar (or worse) with Deleuze and other French philosophers.

I really enjoyed and highly recommend some of May's other works (e.g. the one on poststructuralist anarchism and between genealogy and epistemology on foucault), but I think this is perhaps his best; an elegant and powerful contribution that fills an important need--making Deleuze more readily accessible to students and anglophone philosophers.

Gilles Deleuze seems to write in a "stream of consciousness" fashion. Someone described his writing as akin to driving around a city with signless, winding streets full of dead ends and cul de sacs. May does an excellent job of teasing out and summarizing the key themes of Deleuze's work. Reading May in conjunction with select Deleuzian works will give you a much greater appreciation for Deleuze and may even influence how you view life. I cannot give May the fifth star because I found he does not always set the right level of explanation - sometimes too cursory, sometimes too much.