Nietzsche & Philosophy - Gilles Deleuze

At long last, my winter teaching is over.  I've just sat done at my favorite bar in the neighborhood to read the one book that, odd is at may seem, will forever be my 'Korea book'--the book that will put me back in to this phase of my life.

I will be drinking Kronenbourg, a beer that is hard to find even in the US. That's the beauty of this bar. But never mind that--on to more important things.

This book is the proper introduction to Deleuze. It was to his disservice (I can't say the same for Guattari) that the D-G collaboration was the thing that really brought Deleuze to English-speaking academia.

Comp Lit professors, and to a lesser extent English Lit theory buffs, saw Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature and said "Oh man! Finally a French theorist speaks right to the heart of the form and function of contemporary literature for theory-minded people."  Or something more elegant to that same effect.

I won't comment on the laundry list of ways that Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault had disappointed in this department; at any rate they were certainly in use. Derrida is still a useful case for contrast, however.

With their work on Kafka and the more complex project of Capitalisim and Schizophrenia that the Kafka so easily opens into, Deleuze and Guattari gave major authors the 'French Touch' in a way that still left the authors in question as the most important thing in the inquiry--(whether as subject, object, final or sufficient cause) the most useful thing, the most admirable thing, even the most admirably and usefully detestable thing (as would be the case with Freud in C&S). With Derrida, many feel that it was that writer's own erudition that was the center of attention.  Charmed as I have often been by his style, I just as often think this about dear departed Jacques.

The point is this: the Deleuze-Guattari moment is a notably intense moment of thought, but it is not the apex of Deleuze's non-linear thought trajectory. To follow this latter line-of-flight in all its light-speed meandering, one must start with the Nietzsche book.

It is the Nietzsche book (to be coupled in a useful paradox not with Hedeigger's book on the same mustachioed malcontent, but rather with his Hegel book) that we see the published and polished result of Deleuze's own apprenticeship in reading and thinking. The Nietzsche book is essential reading for understanding Deleuze because our reading of the book becomes our learning how to read Deleuze learning how to read.

Laughter, tears, utter coldness, vomiting, contempt, or supreme inspiration--any of these could be the result of a thorough struggle with this book. But whatever the specific reaction may be, this is a must read for its deceptively simple tactic: to desperately take the author (Nietzsche) at his word.  The first of many of Deleuze's explorations in conceptual mechanics.