Rhizome
Place on List:
I. Literary Theory and
Criticism
2. Post-Structuralism
G.
Deleuze and F. Guattari. “Rhizome” in A
Thousand Plateaus.
Supporting References:
- “Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001. 1593-7. Print.
- Smith, Daniel and John Protevi. "Gilles Deleuze." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Spring Edition. 2013. Web. 15 Aug 2013.
The article with
URL( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/
) offers an overview of Deleuze and less a discussion on the
above-cited text.
“Gilles Deleuze
(January 18, 1925–November 4, 1995) was one of the most influential
and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth
century. Deleuze conceived of philosophy as the production of
concepts, and he characterized himself as a “pure metaphysician.”
In his magnum opus Difference and Repetition, he tries to
develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and
science—a metaphysics in which the concept of multiplicity replaces
that of substance, event replaces essence and virtuality replaces
possibility. Deleuze also produced studies in the history of
philosophy (on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Foucault, and
Leibniz), and on the arts (a two- volume study of the cinema, books
on Proust and Sacher-Masoch, a work on the painter Francis Bacon, and
a collection of essays on literature.) Deleuze considered these
latter works as pure philosophy, and not criticism, since he sought
to create the concepts that correspond to the artistic practices of
painters, filmmakers, and writers. In 1968, he met Félix Guattari, a
political activist and radical psychoanalyst, with whom he wrote
several works, among them the two-volume Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, comprised of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A
Thousand Plateaus (1980). Their final collaboration was What
is Philosophy? (1991).
“Deleuze is noteworthy for his
rejection of the Heideggerian notion of the “end of metaphysics.”
In an interview, he once offered this self-assessment: “I feel
myself to be a pure metaphysician.... Bergson says that modern
science hasn't found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it would need.
It is this metaphysics that interests me.” [Villani 1999: 130.]) We
should also point to the extent of his non-philosophical references
(inter alia, differential calculus, thermodynamics, geology,
molecular biology, population genetics, ethology, embryology,
anthropology, psychoanalysis, economics, linguistics, and even
esoteric thought); his colleague Jean-François Lyotard spoke of him
as a “library of Babel.” Although it remains to be seen whether
the 20th century will be “Deleuzean,” as his friend Michel
Foucault once quipped, Deleuze's influence reaches beyond philosophy;
his work is approvingly cited by, and his concepts put to use by,
researchers in architecture, urban studies, geography, film studies,
musicology, anthropology, gender studies, literary studies and other
fields.
“One of the barriers to Deleuze's
being better read among mainstream philosophers is the difficulty of
his writing style in his original works (as opposed to his historical
works, which are often models of clarity and concision). Deleuze's
prose can be highly allusive, as well as peppered with neologisms; to
make matters even more complex, these terminological innovations
shift from one work to the other. While claims of intentional
obscurantism are not warranted, Deleuze did mean for his style to
keep readers on their toes, or even to “force” them to rethink
their philosophical assumptions. (We will discuss this notion of
being “forced” to think below in 3.1.) As befits an encyclopedia
entry, we will concentrate on the conceptual architecture of his
thought, though readers should be aware that, perhaps more than with
most philosophers, such a treatment of Deleuze's work removes much of
the performative effect of reading the original.”
Comments