The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze - Softcover

"A smart, fast, witty book which surveys Deleuze's philosophy with an intellectual agility, a sparkling intelligence, and an effortless command of film, post-Cartesian philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature in several languages. Students of film, visual culture, theory and anyone who wants to know a little more about continental philosophy will find this book invaluable. This is a book that breathes, that braces, that empowers, that makes you 'see' sudden and startling new associations and then want to play along with Deleuze's concepts so as to apply them to new films, books, or theoretical issues."--Jean Michel Rabate, University of Pennsylvania
Immanence

"This is the first book in English to provide a sustained account of the relationship between art and philosophy in Deleuze's work--it is full of thoughtful, at times brilliant reflections on the current state of theory and its relation to the world."--Dorothea Olkowski, University of Colorado

"...It is the most detailed and extensive investigation of the non-philosophy of Deleuze to have been published in English to date...Lambert largely forgoes a didactic approach, opting instead for a more embodied account of the relation between philosophy and 'non-philosophy' that draws on a variety of different media-architecture, painting, literature, film and theater-to illustrate the indebtedness of Deleuze's philosophical oeuvre to such non-philosophical modes of creative and artistic practice...Lambert sets out some of the implications of the aforementioned crises: the problem of judgment in an age that has witnessed the overturning of rationalist principles regarding the ordering of the world...one of the remarkable achievements of The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is the way in which, contra many other commentaries on Deleuze, it remains faithful to the pragmatism of Deleuze's work in a way that actually develops and deepens this dimension of the latter's thinking, never losing sight of the initial point of departure: the crisis of the Baroque and  what it can teach us about the crisis of our contemporary age...Nevertheless, Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze contributes substantially to the current debates around the political and ethical  status of his work (brought so profoundly into relief by Badiou) and, hopefully, it will inspire others to start taking his work along new lines and trajectories without losing sight of the impasses and shortcomings that continue to affect the reception of Deleuze's work in the English speaking  world." -Marcel Swiboda, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, Vol. 12 Â

The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze takes up Deleuze's most powerful argument on the task of contemporary philosophy in the West. Deleuze argues that it is only through a creative engagement with the forms of non-philosophy--notably modern art, literature and cinema--that philosophy can hope to attain the conceptual resources to restore the broken links of perception, language and emotion. In short, this is the only future for philosophy if it is to repair its fragile relationship to immanence to the world as it is.A sequence of dazzling essays analyze Deleuze's investigations into the modern arts. Particular attention is paid to Deleuze's exploration of Liebniz in relation to modern painting and of Borges to an understanding of the relationship between philosophy, literature and language. By illustrating Deleuze's own approach to the arts, and to modern literature in particular, the book demonstrates the critical significance of Deleuze's call for a future philosophy defined as an "art of inventing concepts."