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Leibniz is a constant, but often overlooked, presence in Deleuze’s philosophy. This book explains three key moments in Deleuze’s philosophical development through the lens of his engagement with Leibniz. In doing so it hopes to offer a focused framework for understanding some of the most difficult aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy. Part One examines Deleuze’s account of the “anti-Cartesian reaction” of Spinoza and Leibniz which culminates in their two competing theories of expression. It argues that in some key respects Deleuze favours Leibniz’s interpretation of this key concept over Spinoza’s. Part Two looks at Deleuze’s critique of representation and his attempt to create a theory of difference that will underlie, rather than rely upon, conceptual opposition. It examines the crucial role played by the Leibnizian concepts of incompossibility and divergence in Deleuze’s theory of ‘vice-diction’, created in order to offer a sub-representational, or pre-individual, substitute for Hegelian contradiction. Part Three looks in detail at one of Deleuze’s last major works, The Fold. It argues for Leibniz’s central place in this text, and shows how Deleuze uses concepts from across Leibniz’s philosophy and mathematics as a framework to articulate a systematic account of his own mature philosophy.

Reading contemporary fiction and philosophy alongside each other, Animal Writingproposes a thinking of and with animals which brings together critical and affective approaches. Aspiring to a critical distancing from the sometimes claustrophobic proximity of empathy – currently the prevailing mode in Animal Studies – this book interrogates the claims made of empathy without exchanging it for the kind of abstract, disembodied reason which has long disavowed the ethical status of nonhuman life. This book is particularly interested in the stories that we tell, and are told, by beings at the edges of animal life, insects, and the possibility that the indifference, even disgust, that these creatures evoke might form the basis for an ethics which is not bounded by empathy. Across five interdisciplinary chapters, it asks: is it possible to read, write and think non-anthropocentrically? How might we develop approaches to nonhuman life which are affectively and critically informed? It contends that reframing the human in relation to the elements of itself which it denounces as inhuman can inform a renewed attentiveness to nonhuman life.

This book offers an in-depth examination of cinema and its philosophical significance. It employs the philosophy of Alain Badiou to answer the question central to all serious film scholarship – namely, ‘can cinema be thought?’ Treating this question on three levels, the author first asks if we can really think what cinema is, at an ontological level. Second, he investigates whether cinema can actually think for itself; that is, whether or not it is truly ‘artistic’. Finally, the author explores in what ways we can rethink the consequences of the fact that cinema thinks. In answering these questions, he uses well-known films ranging from Hiroshima mon amour to Vertigo to The Matrix to illustrate Badiou's philosophy, as well as to consider the ways in which his work can be extended, critiqued and reframed with respect to the medium of cinema.

Why do philosophers read literature? How do they read it? And to what extent does their philosophy derive from their reading of literature? Anyone who has read contemporary European philosophers has had to ask such questions. This book is an attempt to answer them, by considering the ‘strong readings’ Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze impose on the texts they read. The author demonstrates that philosophers need literature as much as literary critics need philosophy: it is an exercise not in the philosophy of literature (where literature is a mere object of analysis), but in philosophy and literature, a heady and unusual mix.

This book is an interrogation of Plato's entire work using the concepts and categories of Alain Badiou. It critically addresses and draw consequences from Badiou's claim that his work is a ‘Platonism of the multiple’ and that philosophy today requires a ‘platonic gesture’. Examining the relationship between Badiou and Plato, the book transforms our perception of Plato's philosophy and rethinks the central philosophical question: ‘what is education?’ The book corrects many errors in the existing commentary on Badiou's work and extracts a key Platonic theme crucial at every level of culture today: education.

Mapping both historical and contemporary configurations of the sexual body along with its functions and sensations, this book identifies disabling conceptions and constructions of pleasure while also searching for the possibility of claiming sexual pleasure as a constructive and politically enabling notion today. In the face of the way in which Deleuze’s theory of desire builds on a rejection of the usefulness of pleasure, this book works to construct a Deleuzian theory of sexuality that is inclusive of pleasure. Intervening into contemporary fields of research including posthumanist-, disability-, animal-, and feminist studies as well as into current critiques of capitalism and consumerism, Between Desire and Pleasure works to contribute to cultural, conceptual, and political debates about sexuality.

From his early work in ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ to ‘Difference and Repetition’, Deleuze develops a unique notion of transcendental philosophy. It comprises a radical critique of the illusions of representation and a genetic model of thought. Engaging with questions of representation, Ideas and the transcendental, this book offers a sophisticated treatment of the Kantian aspects of Deleuze’s thought, taking account of Leibniz, Maimon, Lautman and Nietzsche along the way.

Despite what its title might suggest, this book is a meditation on life. Using the texts of Hegel, Heidegger, and Deleuze, it argues that philosophy has been dominated by a form of thought which focuses exclusively on death. The importance of this text lies in its refusal of the morbidity of much contemporary philosophy; its uniqueness lies in placing Hegel, Heidegger, and Deleuze in conversation; and its usefulness lies in the clarity with which it articulates and compares these very diverse thinkers.

Karl Jaspers is one of the least understood and most neglected major philosophers of the twentieth century, and yet his ideas, particularly those concerned with death, have immense contemporary relevance. This book provides an explanation of Jaspers' philosophy of existence, clarifying and reassessing the concept of death that is central to his thought. For Jaspers, a human being is not merely a physical entity but a being with a transcendent aspect, and so is, in some sense ‘deathless’. The book explores this transcendent aspect of humanity and what it is to be ‘deathless’ in Jaspersian terms.

What is at stake for contemporary art in the take up of Deleuze and Guattari's thought? What are the limits and possibilities of this take up? To address these questions, this book presents a series of inflections that explore the connection between these two fields. The topics studied range from the political and the expanded ‘aesthetic paradigm’ of art practice today, to specific scenes and encounters and the question of technology in relation to art. These essays have been written by philosophers and artists working at the cutting edge of this new area, including writers from outside the Anglo-American tradition.

This book presents a detailed study of contemporary forms of public remembrance. It considers the different character traumatic memory takes throughout the sphere of cultural production and argues that contemporary memorial culture has the power to put traumatic memory to work in a positive way. Drawing on the conceptual apparatus of Gilles Deleuze, the book outlines the relevance of his thought to cultural studies and the wider phenomenon of traumatic theory and public remembrance. This approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on media criticism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, urbanism, continental philosophy and political economy. A number of case studies are examined including the holocaust, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, 9/11, the Amish shootings in Pennsylvania USA, the documentation and dissemination of US military abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, as well as the consumption and reification of trauma. The book offers a revision of trauma theory that presents trauma not simply as a definitive experience and implicitly negative, but an experience that can foster a sense of hope and optimism for the future.

In a world where our lives are increasingly mediated by technologies, it is surprising that more attention is not paid to the work of Gilles Deleuze. This is especially strange given Deleuze's often explicit focus and reliance on the machine and the technological. This book offers readers a collective and determined effort to explore not only the usefulness of key ideas of Deleuze in thinking about our new digital and biotechnological future, but also aims to take seriously a style of thinking that negotiates between philosophy, science and art. It will be of relevance not only to scholars and students interested in the work of Deleuze, but also to those interested in coming to terms with what might seem an increasing dominance of technology in day-to-day living.

Was performance important to Deleuze? Is Deleuze important to performance; to its practical, as well as theoretical, research? What are the implications of Deleuze's philosophy of difference, process and becoming, for Performance Studies, a field in which many continue to privilege the notion of performance as representation, as anchored by its imitation of an identity: ‘the world’, ‘the play’, ‘the self’? This book is a collection of chapters dedicated to Deleuze's writing on theatre and to the productivity of his philosophy for (re)thinking performance. It provides analyses of Deleuze's writings on theatre practitioners such as Artaud, Beckett, and Carmelo Bene, as well as offering readings of historical and contemporary performance including performance art, dance, new-media performance, theatre, and opera, which use Deleuze's concepts in exciting new ways. Can philosophy follow Deleuze in overcoming the antitheatrical tradition embedded in its history, perhaps even reconsidering what it means to think in the light of the embodied insights of performance's practitioners?

This book provides an exploration of the continuing philosophical relevance of Gilles Deleuze. This collection of chapters uses Deleuze to move between thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Husserl, Hume, Locke, Kant, Foucault, Badiou and Agamben. As such the reader is left with a comprehensive understanding not just of the philosophy of Deleuze but how he can be situated within a much broader philosophical trajectory. The book includes recent scholarship on Deleuze's philosophy by an acclaimed line-up of international contributors, all of whom seek to provide new and previously unexplored theoretical terrains. Three of the chapters are by key French Deleuzians whose work is not widely available in translation.

This collection of work introduces a major shift in debates on sexuality: a shift away from discourse, identity, and signification, to a radical new conception of bodily materialism. Moving away from the established path known as queer theory, it suggests an alternative to Judith Butler's matter/representation binary. The book thus dares to ask how to think sexuality and sex outside the discursive and linguistic context that has come to dominate contemporary research in the social sciences and humanities. It is a provocative and often militant collection that explores a diverse range of themes including: the revisiting of the term ‘queer’; a rethinking of the sex–gender distinction as being implied in Queer Theory; an exploration of queer temporalities; the non/re-reading of the homosexual body/desire; and the becoming queer of the Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari philosophy. The book will be essential reading for anyone interested not only in Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, but also in the fields of sexuality, gender, and feminist theory.

This book is a collection of chapters on the approaches and applications of Deleuze's philosophy to the body. Using a variety of contemporary cultural, scientific, and philosophical lines of enquiry, the contributors produce a multidisciplinary view of the Deleuzian body, inviting us to look afresh at art, movement, and literature. The Deleuzian body is not necessarily a human body, but the lines of enquiry here all illuminate the idea of the human body and thinking about formation, origins, and becoming in relation to power, creativity, and affect. The book brings a new perspective to Spinozan and Nietzschean ideas of the body.

This book joins the pragmatic philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to current affairs. The twelve new essays in the volume use a contemporary context to think through and with Deleuze. Engaging the here and now, the contributors use the Deleuzian theoretical apparatus to think about issues such as military activity in the Middle East, refugees, terrorism, information and communication, and the State. The book is aimed both at specialists of Deleuze, and those who are unfamiliar with his work but who are interested in current affairs. Incorporating political theory and philosophy, culture studies, sociology, international studies, and Middle Eastern studies, it is designed to appeal to a wide audience.

This book focuses on the implications of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's thinking on the social sciences and organisation. It is concerned with the most basic notions of ‘the social’. It seeks both to comprehend the ‘multiplicity’ of the social — in Deleuzian terms, the ‘becoming’ of the social itself; and it seeks to develop a new social analytical practice. Each of the chapters aims to show the strength of as well as practice the radicalism of a Deleuzian and Guattarian approach to social science and organisation studies. This book is about order, subjectivity, art, capitalism and the construction of a social ontology. It avoids scholasticism by foregrounding its authors' shared concern for practical issues. How is social order constituted? How is resistance possible between the rush of capitalism and the overcoding of the State? How are thinking and living possible? This book raises these questions and many more.

This book offers an extended comparison of the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and David Hume. The book argues that Deleuze's early work on Hume was instrumental to Deleuze's formulation of the problems and concepts that would remain a focus of his entire corpus. Reading Deleuze's work in light of Hume's influence, along with a comparison of Deleuze's work with William James, Henri Bergson and others set the stage for a vigorous defence of his philosophy against a number of recent criticisms and extend the field of Deleuze studies by showing how Deleuze's thought can clarify and contribute to the work being done in political theory, cultural studies, and history, particularly the history of the Scottish Enlightenment. By engaging Deleuze's thought with the work of Hume, this book clarifies and supports the work of Deleuze and exemplifies the continuing relevance of Hume's thought to a number of contemporary debates.

Deleuze’s Kantian Ethos explores the potential Deleuze’s reformulation of Kantian critique has for developing a transformative ethical practice. The starting point is the idea that ontology implies an actual practical attitude that is not a theory but a choice about oneself. This ethical choice must be made today in relation to the myriad ways that what we are capable of doing and becoming have been limited, most troublingly by our desire for our own repression. Deleuze’s energetic, critical ontology leads him to seek to resist all forms of fascism within the self. This ethical orientation towards the self within Deleuze’s ontology allows for the extrapolation of an ethos built on new habits of deterritorializing sedimented ways of thinking and behaving. The idea of critique as a way of life – Deleuze’s critical ethos – expresses the mode of living an ontology of becoming through a critique of subjectivity. Practically, this is lived as a form of self-directed moral pedagogy, the goal of which is developing in our selves the wisdom to perceive unanticipated features of moral salience, evaluate the principles we presuppose, affirm the limits those presuppositions impose, and create concepts that capture new ways of thinking about moral problems.