Grant Maxwell

If you’re interested in reading it, the easiest option right now is to request a copy from your library.

Thank you!

I’m happy to share that my new book, The Philosophy of Isabelle Stengers, is out today. A paperback edition will follow.

edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-phi...

Isabelle Stengers’ Hypnosis Between Science and Magic is a short text that condenses and prolongs her work with Chertok in A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason and presages her collaboration with Pignarre in Capitalist Sorcery. It’s an excellent entry point into her work.

My book The Philosophy of Isabelle Stengers is now available for pre-order from @EdinburghUP.
30% off with code NEW30.
(This edition is priced for libraries and institutions. A more accessible paperback will follow.)
edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-phi...

“My favorite text in all of psychoanalysis is a comment of Jung’s.” Deleuze, 1986 seminar

However, despite his paradoxical contradictions, I think that there’s far more continuity than discontinuity in his work, though it’s the continuity of a constantly transforming mode of thought rather than any particular set of fixed propositions that one might attack or defend.

With relatively few exceptions, you can find something in his texts that seems to at least partially contradict a statement he makes elsewhere. He refuses to be pinned down to static, isolated positions. He’s far more interested in what a concept renders thought capable of.

It seems to me that attempting to express Deleuze’s “view” on any particular subject misses the point. He doesn’t generally hold views on subjects. Rather, he creates concepts that allow novel modes of thought and becoming.

“What poisons life is hatred, including the hatred that is turned back against oneself in the form of guilt.” Deleuze

I just finished writing about A Thousand Plateaus for Deleuze and Polytheism. It’s the longest chapter so far, exploring the implications of the concept of “cosmic forces” in light of the equation of forces and gods in Nietzsche and Philosophy, as well as Varuna-Mitra-Indra, etc.

I agree!

I love it that Deleuze, in a 1981 seminar, describes philosophers who mediate transitions between historical eras as “hinge-guys,” like Nicholas of Cusa at the border between medieval and modern. Deleuze and Guattari are hinge-guys between the modern and “a people to come.”

“Logic is always defeated by itself, that is to say, by the insignificance of the cases on which it thrives.” Deleuze and Guattari

What’s the most enjoyable book you’ve read about Deleuze?

What’s the most enjoyable book you’ve read by Deleuze?

Yes, I think he similarly reads Bergson more carefully and creatively than the conventional, reductive image of him as a vitalist who simply privileged intuition over intellect. CE is my favorite, but Deleuze especially loved Matter and Memory. The Creative Mind is probably my second favorite.

Are you trying to be annoying, or does it just come naturally?

Not exactly, no.

To my mind, a primary task of all great philosophers, including the Stoics, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuze, is to create novel concepts in the interstices of conventional conceptions, rendering those conceptions more subtle and profound by means of problematization and paradox.

It’s funny that Deleuze’s readings of the Stoics, Spinoza, and Nietzsche are often considered “radical” when, it seems to me, he’s actually just reading what they wrote in all its paradoxical complexity rather than reducing them to doctrines conforming to conventional categories.

Ok, maybe one more.

Of course you can have some good interactions here, but there’s several orders of magnitude more interaction going on for me over there. I gave this place a solid chance, but it’s just not worth my time right now, though maybe that will change at some point. Bon chance!

I honestly just get a lot more engagement over there.

I keep forgetting to repost the things I post on Twitter over here. I’ll be over there if you need me.

The key to this reading, rendering the disparate systems of these texts pervasively resonant, is that the pure Aionic surface of LoS paradoxically corresponds, by means of an inversion envisageable as a Mobius strip or mirror, to the intensive depths of the eternal return in DR.

I’m writing about The Logic of Sense for my next book, Deleuze and Polytheism, and I’m realizing that, whereas I had thought that there was an insuperable disjunction between this text and Difference and Repetition, they’re actually profoundly coherent.

“Whatever totalizations knowledge may perform, they remain asymptotic to the virtual totality of langue or language.” Deleuze

Schelling on Spinoza: “He alone of all modern thinkers had a feeling for the primordial age we are trying to understand in this book.” (The Ages of the World)