Deleuze and Guatari

Ronald Bogue’s Deleuze and Guatari attempts to map those swirls and disruptions. Bogue’aim is in part to clarify the extent to which their tactics illustrate rather than obscure their strategy, which may be defined as a radical transvaluation of conventional models of human consciousness, language and culture, as they are applied in philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis and politics.

Deleuze and Guattari is an ambitious project, especially when one condiers the danger of reduction common to introductory texts, a reduction apparent in other recent introductions that explain continental philosophy while following the perhaps necessary Anglo-American analytic bias toward simplicity and clarity that is not shared by the works being described.

Happily, Ronald Bogue succeeds in this exposition of the works of Deleuze and Guattari because he makes good on two claims.

First, Bogue insists on the continuity and coherence of Deleuze’s early studies of “marginal” Western philosophers and on “minor” literary figures. Bogue then demonstrates that continuity by tracing the genealogy of key terms and concepts from Deleuze’s early works to Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, as if his philosophy were systematic. In fact, hald the book is devoted to Deleuze’s early work, and anything that might get lost in Bogue’reconstruction is more than balanced by his accessible exposition of the evolution of concepts addressed in these works, concepts that are often arcane (e.g. Plato’s simulacrum; the Stoics’ incorporeals and bodies; Nietzsche’s Eternal Return), and subtle (e.g. nomad; rhizome; body without organs; desiring machines). At the same time, Bogue is careful to emphasize that Deleuze’s series of studies, including the collaborative works, must be construed as “works of art. … a creative and collaborative works, must be construed as “works of art. … a creative and ongoing production of interconnections, not the revelation of a prevenient whole.”

Second, Bogue refuses to underestimate Guattari’s contribution to Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Specifically, Bogue finds prominent in these volumes Guattari’s clinically as well as theoretically informed theory of group subjectivity, a subjectivity that has “its own laws … forms of resistance, transference, fantacy.” In other words, Guattari’s theory of group subjectivity is a macroscopic formulation, a political unconscious thay may be analyzed through an exploded model of “desiring-production” thay draws on Marxist and Freudian models and terminology.