Synopses & Reviews
This timely volume animates key concepts and terminology by applying them to provocative readings of literary texts, films, and cultural phenomena which elucidates Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical contributions, including their two-fold thought.
Review
"Stivale has written a most useful introduction to the work of Deleuze and Guattari. And he has produced one of the most interesting demonstrations of its power and importance in contemporary thinking. Hopefully, it will be impossible for people in cultural studies to ignore Deleuze and Guattari's contributions in the future. This is a book for the novice and the expert, the philosopher and the critic." --Lawrence Grossberg, Morris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"Part commentary, part archive, part memoir, part extension and elaboration of key concepts, Stivale's book provides an exhilarating conceptual journey through Deleuze and Guattari's 'two-fold' thought. In the spirit of these authors' own writing, this book is a textual rhizome which combines analysis and commentary with fragments of net discussion, interviews, reports of conferences and personal reminiscences. It offers a wealth of scholarly information and a translation of Deleuze's 1967 article 'How do we recognize structuralism?'. Above all, it animates central concepts of schizo analysis and rhizomatics by reading Deleuze and Guattari's texts alongside the script of Apocalypse Now, the cyberpunk novels of William Gibson, Michel Tournier's Gilles and Jean and the spaces of affect found in Cajun music. These textual encounters provide the occasion for helpful exegesis of such Dailies-Guattarian concepts as assemblage, body without organs, becoming-woman, becoming-cyborg, nomad war machine, ritournello and hecceit, but they also take the reader on a roller coaster ride across the contemporary cultural landscape seen through Deleuzian spectacles. The result is an effortless and entertaining introduction to key concepts of Deleuze and Guattari's collaborative work." --Paul Patton, Department of General Philosophy, University of Sydney
Synopsis
French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari worked together extensively from the 1960s into the 1990s, and the resulting "intersections" of their different sensibilities and modes of knowing fueled powerful alternatives to Marxian and psychoanalytic orthodoxies. Yet readers approaching Deleuze and Guattari's works are often frustrated by the paucity or unfamiliarity of specific examples that might clarify their complex arguments. This timely volume "animates" key concepts and terminology by applying them to provocative readings of literary texts, films, and cultural phenomena--from
Apocalypse Now to Cajun music and dance. Drawing extensively from primary and critical sources to elucidate Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical contributions, Stivale reinvigorates their "two-fold thought" for use as an analytical tool in the humanities and social sciences. The book also offers a clear introduction to the precollaborative phase of each thinker's work, an interview Stivale conducted with Guattari, and the first-time English translation of a 1967 essay by Deleuze.
Winner--Board of Governors Faculty Recognition Award, Wayne State University
About the Author
Charles J. Stivale is Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He has served as guest editor for two special issues of
SubStance on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and has published extensively on literary and cultural topics in nineteenth and twentieth-century French studies.
The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari is his fourth book.
Table of Contents
Preface
1. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Situating a "Two-Fold Thought"
I. From Schizoanalysis to Rhizomatics
2. "Apocalypse...When?: 1972/1979, One or Several Willards?
3. The Rhizomatics of Cyberspace
II. Machines, Plateaus, Becomings
4. New Cartographies of the Literary: From Kafka to A Thousand Plateaus
5. Mille/Punks/Cyber/Plateaus: Becomings-x
6. Nomad Love and the War Machine: Michel Tournier's Gilles and Jeanne
7. Of Heccéités and Ritournelles: "Spaces of Affect" and the Cajun Dance Arena
III. Post-Texts
8. Pragmatic/Machinic: Discussion with Félix Guattari (19 March 1985)
9. Comments on a Meeting with Gilles Deleuze (18 March 1985)
10. Comment peut-on 'être deleuzien'?: The Gift of Pedagogy
Appendix: Gilles Deleuze, How Do We Recognize Structuralism?, translated by Melissa McMahon and Charles J. Stivale