Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life [Hardcover]

Gilles Deleuze (Author), Anne Boyman (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1890951242 | ISBN-13: 978-1890951245 | Publication Date: June 1, 2001 | Edition: 1St Edition

The essays in this book present a complex theme at the heart of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, what in his last writing he called simply "a life." They capture a problem that runs throughout his work--his long search for a new and superior empiricism. Announced in his first book, on David Hume, then taking off with his early studies of Nietzsche and Bergson, the problem of an "empiricist conversion" became central to Deleuze's work, in particular to his aesthetics and his conception of the art of cinema. In the new regime of communication and information-machines with which he thought we are confronted today, he came to believe that such a conversion, such an empiricism, such a new art and will-to-art, was what we need most. The last, seemingly minor question of "a life" is thus inseparable from Deleuze's striking image of philosophy not as a wisdom we already possess, but as a pure immanence of what is yet to come. Perhaps the full exploitation of that image, from one of the most original trajectories in contemporary philosophy, is also yet to come.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Scholars and dabblers in philosophy will appreciate this brief posthumous collection of Gilles Deleuze's writings, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Deleuze (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza), a noted and controversial professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, here variously writes on "a transcendental empiricism in contrast to everything that makes up the world of the subject and the object"; Dickens, Wagner and other artists; aesthetics, particularly cinema; and communication and information-machines. There are essays on Hume and Nietzsche, a discussion of the "plane of immanence," his final work before his death in 1995. Trans. by Anne Boyman; intro. by John Rajchman. ( May

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Deleuze (1925-95) worked through his career as a philosopher by exploring what he identified as a connection, rather than a disconnection, between phenomenology and analytical philosophy. Brought together in this small volume are three essays "Immanence: A Life," "Hume," and "Nietzsche" that illustrate his work well. Boyman's translation gives English readers the opportunity to understand how Deleuze demonstrated the validity of the connection both ably and engagingly. The first essay serves as a kind of coda against which any of Deleuze's other work can be read: here he limns the empirical differences between a life and this (one's) life. The following two essays are his reports on the relevance of how earlier philosophers conceptualized this kind of logic, allowing us to understand both their philosophies and our contemporary world. In "Hume," he concentrates on the idea of identity, while in "Nietzsche" he concerns himself and his reader with the move from identity to evaluation. Scholars and graduate students will welcome this volume, while some informed lay readers will find these tastes of the philosopher tantalizing. Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., CA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 100 pages
• Publisher: Zone; 1St Edition edition (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1890951242
• ISBN-13: 978-1890951245
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #534,662 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Eclectic Collection, November 1, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life (Hardcover)

This is the strangest assemblage of Deleuze's writings I have seen to date, though I am glad to have my hands on the Nietzsche article from '65, which nicely complements the Nietzsche monograph. It is very fine and extremely accessible introduction to Deleuze's idiosyncractic approach. The Hume piece is less strong; it is not Empiricism and Subjectivity. The first essay is trenchant, beautiful, and moving, penetrating what I had taken to be the heart of Deleuze's thought. A strong if uneven collection.

20 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I thought it explained something, September 10, 2003

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life (Hardcover)

This book might be too *stigid* for you. The introduction quotes Deleuze on the nature of his philosophy, "... We will speak of a transcendental empiricism in contrast to everything that makes up the world of the subject and object." (p. 8, quoting Chapter One, Immanence: A Life, p. 25). For those who consider philosophy too confining to escape the metaphysics suggested by Kant, this might seem like a welcome suggestion, but the uniqueness of such a broad approach, as it might apply to changes in any particular life, is largely nebulous. Even Chapter Two, Hume, in which "A parallel conversion of science or theory follows: theory becomes an inquiry (the origin of this conception is in Francis Bacon; Immanuel Kant will recall it while transforming and rationalising it when he conceives of theory as a court or tribunal)" (pp. 35-36) is beyond my usual contemplation and "its attempt to reduce the paradox of relations;" (p. 37). The final chapter, on Nietzsche, strikes notes which I know well enough to become critical, and I find an assertion which must make this book more unique than most:

"Dialectics itself perpetuates this prestigiditation. Dialectics is the art that invites us to recuperate alienated properties." (p. 70).

Surely the right word for dialectics is prestidigitation, the sleight of hand that quickly moves things about to produce one thing where another was expected, but this book is produced in a world which is far more used to typing `prestige' when it has just been considering Kant, even if the paragraph preceding this unique assertion about dialectics ended with the kind of questions that Nietzsche was always throwing in Kant's direction:

"Who can really think that Kant reinstated critique or rediscovered the idea of the philosopher as legislator? Kant denounces false claims to knowledge, but he doesn't question the ideal of knowing; he denounces false morality, but he doesn't question the claims of morality or the nature and origin of its value. He blames us for having confused domains and interests; but the domains remain intact, and the interests of reason, sacred (true knowledge, true morals, true religion)." (p. 70).

Thorough knowledge of Nietzsche is indicated by the ability to make his philosophy illustrate the grand theme of "the symptoms of a decomposition." (p. 72). A key to this understanding is:

"Nietzsche is the first to tell us that killing God is not enough to set about the transmutation of values. In his work, there are at least fifteen versions of the death of God, all of them very beautiful." (pp. 71-72).

Going back to dialectics as prestigiditation, most people seem to be lost in the efforts to stigmatize, or hoping for stigmatism as a vision not subject to astigmatism, particularly "As long as the will to power is interpreted in terms of a `desire to dominate,' we inevitably make it depend on establish values, the only ones able to determine, in any case or conflict, who must be `recognized' as the most powerful. We then cannot recognize the nature of the will to power as an elastic principle of all of our evaluations, as a hidden principle for the creation of new values not yet recognized." (p. 73).

It might be possible to explain everything in this book by creating and giving value to words like *stigid* which unintentionally crept into the middle of a word in a complicated thought on the limits of the nature of philosophy. The complexity of transcendental empiricism might even relate to the explanation that Deleuze offers for "The will to power is the differential element from which derive the forces at work, as well as their respective quality in a complex whole." (p. 73). People who find this kind of thought too *stigid* for real mathematics, in which differential elements are usually determined easily if we know the formula from elementary calculus, but we rarely think about them otherwise, might not enjoy reading this book. People who already know a lot of Nietzsche will not be surprised to find, "Everywhere we see the victory of No over Yes, of reaction over action. Life becomes adaptive and regulative, reduced to its secondary forms; we no longer know what it means to act. Even the forces of the earth become exhausted on this desolate face." (p. 75). Perhaps the book has far more explanations than examples, and tends to emphasize the worst view of things overall, but it moves on, after "Zarathustra cries out his great disgust, his great contempt," (p. 90).