Deleuze and Cinema in the Digital

Abstract

Deleuze and Cinema in the Digital Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), Pages 448. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] My ideal, when I write about an author, Deleuze once said, be to write nothing would cause him sadness. Perhaps the highest praise I can offer Essays on Deleuze is my sense Daniel Smith has written nothing would cause Deleuze sadness or him weep in his grave, as thorough and careful a treatment of his thought as Deleuze's own dealing with the history of philosophy. Versus the majority of secondary works refer to and employ Deleuzian terminology without ever explaining it-as though the meaning of univocity, difference, flow, etc. were self-evident-Smith takes nothing for granted. His painstaking enquiries into the sources of Deleuze's thought and lucid explanations cast light on these stubbornly opaque concepts. Both the breadth of material covered and its close treatment make this work a milestone in Deleuze studies. True to its title, Essays on Deleuze is a collection of 20 essays. These are divided into four sections, dealing with 1. Deleuze and the history of philosophy 2. his philosophical system 3. Deleuze's concepts and 4. contemporary philosophy. This organizational schema is itself helpful: Smith begins with Deleuze's thought in relation to the history of philosophy, putting the reader in a position to understand the systematic nature of Deleuze's thought, which in turn allows one to better comprehend his concepts and their relation to contemporary figures. He starts with Deleuze and Plato, explaining Deleuze's inversion of Platonism through a thorough analysis of the concept of the simulacrum. From there Smith explores Deleuze's relation to Scotus and Spinoza in terms of univocity, and in essay three turns to Leibniz, tracing the development of the concept of difference from the calculus. Contra widespread claims Deleuze's thought is anti-Hegelian, in essay four Smith suggests Deleuze's own project consists in the recasting of a non-Hegelian dialectics. In essay five he returns to difference in relation to Leibniz, as well as Hegel and existentialism. Section two uses the architectonic structure of Kantian philosophy as a heuristic device, explaining Deleuze's philosophical system in terms of aesthetics (theory of sensation), dialectics (theory of Idea), analytics (theory of the concept), ethics (theory of affectivity), and politics (socio-political theory) (xiii). Based on his engagements with Proust, Maimon, and Bacon, essay six shows how Deleuze's theory of sensation reconciles the Kantian dualism sensibility (as a form of possible experience) and art (as reflection on real experience). In a similar vein, essay seven shows from the perspective of an immanent and differential theory of ideas, Difference and Repetition can be read as Deleuze's Critique of Pure Reason, while Anti-Oedipus can be understood as his Critique of Practical Reason (107). Smith addresses the relation between concepts, time, and in essay eight, specifically, he asks what the nature of concepts consists in if no longer conceived as eternal-as well as exploring its implications for a concept of truth (122). Versus morality consists in prescriptive, constraining rules refer to universal, transcendent values, in essay nine Smith explains the nature of Deleuzian ethics as a set of facilitative rules that evaluate what we do, say, and think according to the immanent mode of existence it implies (147). …