Deleuze: The Clamor of Being

Rating:
Summary: Never in my life!
Review: I have NEVER, in my entie life read a critique by a "respected" or "respectable" scholar that was as shallow and simply rediculous in its approach to another philosopher!

For someone who had such a "close" relationship with Deleuze, to do such a narrow-minded a job in writing about him is simply mind-boggling. Every other sentence uttered out of his mans lips reduced the complexity and care with which Deleuze explicated his thought to unidimensional, reductionistic "truths" about what Deleuze "really" said or meant. How ridiculous! You'd think that the man would approach Deleuze with the same openness that he expounded for the writing on others.

2 things were immediately clear to me after treading through this mess: 1) that Badiou is completely a political animal, realizing that people might actually pay attention to his banal thought and mediocre intellectual abilities should he play up his relationship to a real thinker; 2) that other mediocre thinkers will believe he has something revolutionary to say if he adopts Zizek's highly effective method of being 'more' revolutionary than the revolutionaries to buy himself some controversy and by masking it all in set-theory so people unfamiliar with mathematics will be blinded by the sophistry.

Badiou has already got what he wanted from this book, Deleuze's audience in the English speaking world. It's always very sad to see people hanging on to the coat-tails of dead men...

Rating:
Summary: The single best book on the subject
Review: Postmodernism. What are we supposed to make of the stuff? It's all written in a stream of consciousness style by obsessive compulsives. And most of their arguments are circular and utterly unconcerned with facts. Well, here's the best start. Badiou explains everything Deleuze wrote on his own simply and coherently, which many of Deleuze's disciples do not. And best of all, he doesn't do it in a superior, combative tone. He even explains why Deleuze's disciples are all so combative and superior. (Something to do with cynicism on Deleuze's part.)

Though I will say, if you're a science studies type and you're rigorous in your thought, you'd best do to steer clear of this book. Because your rigor usually comes from willfull blindess.

Caveat to any scientific types: Badiou is an unabashed vitalist. I don't know what his defense here is. The way they usually defend themselves sounds a lot like that line "If I have a choice between the state and my friend, I hope I have the good sense to choose my friend." That is, he appeals to raw uninterpretable first-person experience over third person points of view. With the fact that the Flynn effect remains unexplained and preformationism has turned out right (all life is, literally, is just the result of folds in DNA), this may not be such a bad thing.

Now for fun, once you've read this book, you can read Derrida's Postcard and see why it's one of the most compulsively amusing books ever written. (The difference between Deleuze and Derrida? Derrida is flat-out hilarious and provides the raw uninterpretable experience that he describes.)

Rating:
Summary: reccomended for anybody interested in Deleuze
Review: To begin, i should note that prior to reading Badiou's book, much of Deleuze's earlier work had remained mysterious to myself. Thus, i am not in much of a position to offer any real challenge to Badiou's interpretation of "Difference and Repetition" and "The Logic of Sense." Regardless, if nothing else, the interpretation that Badiou gives is clearly presented. Although this sounds trivial, the clarity in this book is appreciated in a genre where clarity if usually disregarded, and unfortunately, often for mere stylistic (and not philosophical) reasons. Thus, because of this "Deleuze: The Clamor of Being," although dealing with difficult topics, can be understood by anybody with some knowledge of Deleuze, even if this knowledge is not extensive.

The clarity of the presentation, however, almost seems too obvious. That is, the way in which Badiou describes Deleuze's "philosophy of the One," and the quotes that he extracts to demonstrate this claim, make this thesis to be obvious to anybody who has read Deleuze. However, clearly this is not the case, as Badiou himself recognizes that this book should shock those who take pride in Deleuze's "schizophrenic" aspect. Thus, merely taking Badiou's interpretation of Deleuze, and the fact that so many thinkers have overlooked what he presents as information that should be clear to any reader, this gives me the uneasy feeling that he, and not these other thinkers, has missed something fundamental in Deleuze's thought. This, of course, necessitates a re-reading of Deleuze's own work, something that "Deleuze: The Clamor of Being" necessitates, i believe, for anybody who overlooked the first time around what Badiou reveals as self-evident to any acute reader.

As a previous reviewer pointed out, Badiou gives little interest to Deleuze's work with Guattari. However, although there definitely is a schizophrenic aspect to this work (especially in "A Thousand Plateaus"), it seems as if the fundamental concept of the Body Without Organs corresponds in most, if not all, ways to the concept of the virtual/ the One. Badiou does occasionally use ideas expressed in Deleuze's work with Guattari, especially "What is Philosophy" concerning the status of philosophy, however, he fails to cite these sources.

Additionally, it seems to me as if the interpretation that Badiou gives to Deleuze's work indicates more of a pantheistic vision that one that indicates transcendence. Of course, there is a bit of irony to write that Deleuze has "transposed transcendence beneath the simulacra of the world, in some sort of symmetrical relation to the 'beyond' of classical transcendence," but regardless of the irony, the very idea of Being as univocal and as One chimes much more with eastern worldviews than western Platonic and Christian ideas of transcendence. This especially seems to be the case when we consider Deleuze's work with Guattari in which all strata (that is, all different properties of the world that surrounds us) are merely "coagulations, slowing-downs on the Body without Organs."

Finally, even if Deleuze's ontology indicates "heirarchical thought," this doesn't mean that Deleuze's task, therefore, is to "submit thought to a renewed concept of the One." In fact, it seems to me as if there is a crucial distinction in his work with Guattari between "methodological" claims and ontological claims. Rather than encouraging us to employ reductionist schemas in our analyses of any given system, the very title "a thousand plateas" indicates that we need to take into account as many different aspects at work as possible-- biological, economical, polotical, geological, etc. (this distinction between a methodology of multiple aspects of reality and an ontological expressing only One fundamental reality is continued in Manual Delanda's appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari's thought in "A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.")

Despite these further considerations that would have been made necessicary had Badiou taken into account Deleuze's work with Guattari, "Deleuze: The Clamor of Being" provides a tremendously useful, and strikingly clear, interpretation of Deleuze's independent work to the point that it necessitates a re-reading of this work.