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This chapter examines the exchange of insults between Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze during 1976, when the former was still a young lecturer at the philosophy department of the University of Vincennes in Paris and the latter was already a full professor. Badiou called Deleuze a fascist, and in return Deleuze called him a bolshevik. The chapter explains that Badiou's insult was provoked by the success of Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus and the recent publication of Rhizome, which was later included as the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus. It also analyses Badiou and Deleuze's conception of the term disjunctive synthesis.

In her book, Marcel Proust: Théories pour une esthétique, Anne Henry places Proust in the context of the whole tradition of 19th-century German idealist aesthetics and its French adherents. This chapter argues that the novel itself goes beyond the explicit philosophical statements contained within it, although this movement away from received philosophical ideas is also at the same time a movement in Friedrich Nietzsche's direction. Henry herself later surreptitiously fills in what she had earlier analysed as a theoretical ‘confusion’ or aporia in Arthur Schopenhauer with the Nietzschean concept of the ‘eternal return’. This chapter shows that the complicated temporality of involuntary memory does indeed map the eternal return. Aside from Henry, the works of Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze comparing Nietzsche and Proust are examined.

This book tries to understand something like the necessity of Gilles Deleuze's thought, something like that which, at the most fundamental level, motivates that thought, sets it in motion. It also determines something like the original impetus or the driving force behind his philosophy as a whole, behind, that is, even its most abrupt and radical changes, and its boldest innovations. The aim is to return to the source of Deleuze's thought. The source in question does not concur with Deleuze's philosophical beginnings, with his first attempts at writing philosophy. The source in question is determined in the later work, and used as a guiding thread through Deleuze's thought as a whole, illuminating it only retrospectively. The source of a thought indicates the virtual place from which it flows.

This chapter investigates how Albert Lautman and Gilbert Simondon influenced Gilles Deleuze's development of his philosophical concept of the problem or problematic Idea and his philosophy of event. It explains that Deleuze outlined a highly abstract concept of the problematic Idea using differential calculus and some of the meta-mathematical theses of Lautman. He also followed the work of Simondon to develop a general theory of intensive individuation which relates this problematic Idea to actual things in so far as it is necessary to posit it as an ideal pre-individual field.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the relevance of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy to the performing arts or performance. It discusses the theatrical aspects of Deleuze's oeuvre examines the implications of Deleuze's work for performance. The chapters in this volume are divided into three parts. The first part those practitioners about whom Deleuze wrote the most, the second deals with live performance, and the third explores new media and digital practices in performance.

This chapter examines the philosophical styles of Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze. It suggests that although Badiou and Deleuze share a passionate, all-pervasive and persistent interest in literary texts, this is not necessarily relevant to a confrontation of their philosophical styles. The chapter analyses Badiou's conception of passion for literature in his book The Century, and highlights Badiou and Deleuze's shared belief that there is no philosophy which is not intimately linked to art in general and the art of language in particular. Deleuze believed that literature is one of the practices which forces us to think, while Badiou considered it to be one of the conditions for philosophy.

This chapter introduces the different definitions of time that are found in Gilles Deleuze's cinema texts, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, and looks at the debate surrounding how the movement-image and the time-image interact. In spite of the increasing manipulation of narrative time in recent cinema, the reterritorialising strength of the movement-image ensures its continued dominance. This conclusion is reached via an examination of the way history and identity are explored through narrative time, and the implications of this for the construction of national identity. In particular, the chapter makes reference to Homi K. Bhabha's ‘DissemiNation’ for the insights it offers concerning narrative, time and the narration of national identity.

This chapter examines Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of difference. It explains that only a process philosophy where process and product are the same can hope to prevent the subordination of difference to identity and suggests that Deleuze's philosophy meets all these requirements and represents the most consistent difference philosophy of all. It also discusses Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and his view on the history of philosophy.

This chapter explores the process of becoming across such hybrids as becoming-animal, becoming-woman and becoming-monster. A radical re-working of the subject/object binary is central to Deleuzian aesthetics. Sensation and affect subsume the subject and connect it to the external world in a molecular meld. In the analysis of horror films, the processual condition of becomings or ‘desubjectified affects’ is used to explore fantasies of transmutation such as the shape-shifting of the feline woman in Cat People. Becomings are incongruous, bizarre and repulsive, like the genetic hybrid of man and insect, ‘Brundlefly’, in David Cronenberg's The Fly, produced when a housefly is accidentally trapped in a teleporter. Gilles Deleuze's work with the fiction of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch reconsiders subjective loss and the potential for becoming it unleashes. As a context and justification for such a move, the chapter briefly recaps some of the key uses to which psychoanalysis has been put in studies of body horror. It then locates becoming via the body-without-organs, which mobilises a new interpretation of body horror.

This chapter examines Gilles Deleuze's thoughts about the aesthetics of sensation. It suggests that Deleuze's ideas on art and the aesthetic, particularly his concept of sensation, are a significant development in thinking about the cinematic impact through affect. The chapter explains that the Deluzian argument on sensation exists outside any form of recognition or common sense, and that his definition is one which removes sensation from any presupposition of common sense or recognition, where subjectivity transcends. Images in movement constitute what Deleuze refers to as a plane of consistence or immanence and it is on this plane of immanence that perception can be described as either liquid or objection perception.

The acceptance of multiplicity as the precondition of political action is central to the new generation of theorists and activists that the author designates as ‘critical pluralists’. In political and social theory, a range of authors has finally begun to respond to a lament broached by Mary Parker Follett in 1918: pluralists early in the century had acknowledged difference, she noted, but they had not arrived at the heart of the question – what is to be done with this diversity? This chapter examines some of the contemporary responses to Follett’s question and constructs a list of practices necessary to build political relations across difference. These get at issues of justice beyond the material, concerning both recognition and participatory process, and it is argued that agonistic respect (William Connolly 1991), attempts at intersubjective understanding (Seyla Benhabib 1992; Jurgen Habermas 1970; Axel Honneth 1992), inclusive, open discourse free from domination and the possibility of reprisals (John Dryzek 1990; John Forester 1989; Habermas 1984, 1987), and the development of a particular form of solidarity are all crucial to the practices suggested by a new generation of pluralist theory. Solidarity (unity without uniformity) is complex in that it centres on the process of reconciling difference with the need for concerted political action. The author focuses on how the notion of unity suggested by Follett was discarded by the second generation of pluralism, but is now mirrored by numerous contemporary theorists, including Richard Rorty (1989), Donna Haraway (1991), and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987).

This chapter examines the metaphysics and semiotics of Deleuze in relation to the formal structures of category theory. It begins by situating Deleuze’s thought relative to the Erlangen Program in geometry and considering the role of the concepts of topological singularity and the Kantian schematism in Deleuze’s thought. It then turns to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza and his triadic interpretation of the Ethics in terms of the notion of expression. This concept is linked to Deleuze’s work in Logic of Sense and developed as an ethics of signs that is applicable to the philosophical tradition as such, independently of any reference to individual subjectivity.

This chapter considers the cinematic medium as a confederate to the impasse of history. Gilles Deleuze develops two semiotics that explore a vast taxonomy of movement-images and time-images. He provides two theses for the transformation of the movement-image to the time-image. In the transformation of the movement-image into the time-image, it is not that the movement-image is replaced, rather it is as if it has been overcome, becoming a ‘first dimension’. Deleuze's images and signs of the cinema are ahistorical. It is mentioned that the movement-image is time as Chronos, the time-image is time as Aion. The reason why there are no films of the Japanese New Wave that investigate the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is then dealt. It is apparent that the movement-image presents no simple, single form of history. The beauty of the time-image is reflected by a beauty of the movement-image.

The word ‘immanence’ is one of the terminological constants in Gilles Deleuze's philosophical work. Deleuze's views on immanence emerge from problems internal to the Kantian philosophical tradition. This book tries to put in question the view that Deleuze's philosophy is a direct return to pre-critical metaphysics, whether in the forms of Spinozist or Scholastic metaphysics, or in the more contemporary form of Whiteheadian process-philosophy. It seems that Deleuze is claiming that philosophical grounding takes place in the existential, the logico-rationalist, and the critical kinds of questioning that is important for the acquisition of autonomous thought and for reason to be realised. Deleuze fluctuates over the course of his work about the status of Baruch Spinoza's philosophy of immanence and expression. Immanence for Deleuze must involve more than an unproblematic sealing of a circle between de facto experience and metacritique.

This introductory chapter sets out the theoretical underpinnings of the present volume. It draws on the analyses of Deleuze and Guattari to address the question of whether scientific thought, like philosophical thought, takes place in the gap between worlds and sustains the force of the virtual. It considers a polemic that has emerged from discussions regarding Deleuze’s “scienticity”; and discusses ontological versus epistemological realism, how science lacks the metaphysics it needs, nature as creative process, and the processes of subjectivation. The book aims to examine the possibilities of a science that engages (or is engaged by) the force of the virtual, and how this influences our understanding of Deleuze’s process-oriented ontology. The question is not only whether science withstands, confirms, or refutes the role that Deleuze attributes to it, but how this challenges contemporary literary and social criticism to “play by new rules”.

This chapter suggests that phenomenologist Edmund Husserl hold a place of honour in Gilles Deleuze's dramaturgy. It explains that Deleuze was interested in Husserl and in phenomenology because it was essential for Deleuze to maintain a detached relationship with a friend/enemy capable of keeping him in suspense up to the end. The chapter argues that Deleuze was not a simple follower of Husserl, but that he took from the latter a certain orientation of thought which gives a new twist to the major themes of Cartesian Meditations.