Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life - Hardcover

Deleuze, Gilles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1890951242 ISBN 13: 9781890951245

Publisher: Zone Books, 2001

Synopsis

Pure Immanence collects the essays of Gilles Deleuze on a complex theme at the heart of his philosophy. In his last piece of writing, included here, Deleuze gives a simple name to this problem: “a life.” Newly translated and gathered in one volume for the first time, the essays in Pure Immanence capture Deleuze’s persistent search throughout his philosophical work for a new and superior form of empiricism that rethinks the relation of thought to life. “I have always felt,” writes Deleuze, “that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist.”

Announced in his very first book on David Hume, then pursued in his early studies of Nietzsche and Bergson and in his later “clinical” essays, the issue of an “empiricist conversion” was central to Deleuze’s thinking, in particular to his aesthetics and his conception of the art of cinema. For Deleuze, such a conversion, such an empiricism, such a new art and will-to-art were, in fact, what was most needed in the new regime of communication and information-machines.

The last, seemingly minor question of “a life” is thus inseparable from Deleuze’s striking image of philosophy not as a wisdom we already possess, but as a pure immanence of what is yet to come. Pure Immanence exposes the new and urgent problems such a philosophy confronts today, one whose most difficult task, the invention of “a life,” has yet to be achieved.

About this title

About the Author

Nuriye Nalan Sahin-Hodoglugil, M.D., M.P.H., M.A., is affiliated with the Hacettepe University School of Medicine, Public Health Department, Ankara, Turkey, and also with the Bay Area International Group, at the University of California, School of Public Health. She is the author of recent articles in Contraception and Sexually Transmitted Infections.

Reviews

Scholars and dabblers in philosophy will appreciate this brief posthumous collection of Gilles Deleuze's writings, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Deleuze (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza), a noted and controversial professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, here variously writes on "a transcendental empiricism in contrast to everything that makes up the world of the subject and the object"; Dickens, Wagner and other artists; aesthetics, particularly cinema; and communication and information-machines. There are essays on Hume and Nietzsche, a discussion of the "plane of immanence," his final work before his death in 1995. Trans. by Anne Boyman; intro. by John Rajchman. ( May

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Deleuze (1925-95) worked through his career as a philosopher by exploring what he identified as a connection, rather than a disconnection, between phenomenology and analytical philosophy. Brought together in this small volume are three essays "Immanence: A Life," "Hume," and "Nietzsche" that illustrate his work well. Boyman's translation gives English readers the opportunity to understand how Deleuze demonstrated the validity of the connection both ably and engagingly. The first essay serves as a kind of coda against which any of Deleuze's other work can be read: here he limns the empirical differences between a life and this (one's) life. The following two essays are his reports on the relevance of how earlier philosophers conceptualized this kind of logic, allowing us to understand both their philosophies and our contemporary world. In "Hume," he concentrates on the idea of identity, while in "Nietzsche" he concerns himself and his reader with the move from identity to evaluation. Scholars and graduate students will welcome this volume, while some informed lay readers will find these tastes of the philosopher tantalizing. Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., CA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1890951242
• ISBN 13: 9781890951245
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 100