Deleuze and Guattari’s ’What is Philosophy?’: A Reader’s Guide

222 Pages·2015·11.94 MB·English

by  Rex Butler

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Titles allai/able in this series
Aristotle's 'Politics': A Reader's Guide, Judith A. Swanson
Badiou's 'Being and Event': A Reader's Guide, Christopher Norris
Berkeley's 'Princip les of Human l<nowledge': A Reader's Guide,
Alasdair Richmond
Deleuze's 'Difference and Repetition': A Reader's Guide, Joe Hughes
Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus': A Reader's Guide,
Eugene W. Holland
Descartes' 'Meditations': A Reader's Guide, Richard Francks
Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit': A Reader's Guide, Stephen
Houlgate
Heidegger's 'Being and Time': A Reader's Guide, William Blattner
Hobbes's 'Leviathan': A Reader's Guide, Laurie M. Johnson Bagby
Kant's 'Critique of Aesthetic Iudgement': A Reader's Guide, Fiona
Hughes
Kier/œgaard's 'Feal' and Trembling': A Reader's Guide, Clare Carlisle
Levinas' 'Totality and Infinity': A Reader's Guide, William Large
Loche's 'Second Treatise of Government': A Reader's Guide, Paul
Kelly
IVlarx and Engels' 'Communist Manifesto': A Reader's Guide, Peter
Lamb
Nietzsche's 'Beyond Good and Evil': A Reader's Guide, Christa Davis
Acampora and Keith Ansell Pearson
Nietzsche's 'Thus Spo/?e Zarathustra'; A Reader's Guide, Clancy
Martin
Rousseau's 'The Social Contract': A Reader's Guide, Christopher
Wraight
Spinoza's 'Ethics': A Reader's Guide, J. Thomas Cook
Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations': A Reader's Guide, Arif
Ahmed
Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus': A Reader's Guide,
Roger M. White
Bloomsbury
Kant's 'Critique of Practical Reason': A Reader's Guide, Courtney D.
Fugate
Marx's 'Grundrisse': A Reader's Guide, Simon Choat
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Abbreviations vii
1 Context 1
2 Overview of Themes 15
3 Art 33
4 Philosophy 69
5 Science and Logic 107
6 The Brain and Geophilosophy 153
7 Reception 171
Notes 189
Index of Names 207
Index of Concepts 211

The following abbreviations are used in this boole
B Bergsonism, Zone Books: New York, 1988
'D' 'The Method of Dramatization', in Desert Islands and
Other Texts, 1953-74
DI Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-74, Semiotext(e):
New York, 2004
DR Difference and Repetition, Columbia University Press:
New York, 1994
EP Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Zone Books: New
York, 1990
F The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, University of
Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1993
FB Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, University of
Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2003
'G' 'The Idea of Genesis in Kant's Philosophy', Angelaki 5 (3)
(2000): 57-70
H Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's The01'y
of Human Nature, Columbia University Press: New York,
1991
KCP Kant's Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties,
Athlone Press: London, 1984
viii
LS The Logic ol Sense, Columbia University Press: New
York, 1990
MI Cinema I: The MOllement-Image, Athlone Press: London,
1986
NP Nietzsche and Philosophy, Athlone Press: London, 1983
PS Proust and Signs, BrazilIer: New York, 1972
TI Cinema 2: The Time-Image, University of Minnesota
Press: Minneapolis, 1989
AO Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Viking
Press: New York, 1977
TP A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1987
WP? What is Philosophy?, Verso: London, 1994
text
In some ways, the conditions for philosophy have never been
better. Walk into any relatively serious books hop and there are
philosophy books everywhere. There are works by philosophers,
such as Hegel's Logic. There are selections of works by philoso
phers, such as Five Dialogues by Plato. There are academic
monographs on philosophers, such as Wittgenstein's Priva te
Language. There are introductory guides on philosophers, such
as How to Read Heidegger. There is a whole variety of books
introducing philosophy altogether, such as Classics of Western
Philosophy. There are practical manuals, teaching philosophy as a
technique like any other, such as 50 Philosophical Ideas You Need
to Know. There are books that treat philosophy in terms of popular
cultural objects, such as The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to
the Desert of the Real. There are books that apply philosophy to
everyday situations or seek to show how philosophy might help
us function better, such as What's It Ail About?: Philosophy and
the Meaning of Life. FinaIly, there are aIl those books that fuse
philosophy with religion, often of a New Age kind, and that read
like a combination of Eastern mysticism, self-help and the Harvard
Business School, such as This l Believe: The Personal Philosophies
of Remarkable Men and Women.
Then there are aU those activities that daim to do what
philosophy does. We have marketers and br and designers in the
advertising industry who seek to create 'awareness'. We have
artists and writers who daim - or are daimed by others - to be
challenging the norms of society. (And for them there are lots of
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books with titles like Nietzsche for Artists or Leibniz for Authors.)
There are theologians who maintain they are doing what philoso
phers should be doing by proposing higher values by which to
live. In blogs and on the internet, there are millions of people who
hold themselves up as opinion-makers, forcing people - if this is
what philosophy does - to think again. There is a general coming
together of creativity and critical thinking in the so-called 'creative
industries'. Indeed, philosophy is found everywhere today, in
television shows, newspaper columns, radio programmes, public
forums and ideas festivals, with a plethora of issues discussed from
a philosophical perspective. There are public debates from a philo
sophical point of view on aIl kinds of subjects - from the ethics
of daily life to the justification of war, from the existence of God
to medical euthanasia - with the opposing sides challenging each
other in order to produce a final consensus.
And yet, in other ways, things have never been worse for
philosophy. In those serious bookshops, the shelf-space devoted
to philosophy shrinks every year, or actual philosophy books
are increasingly mixed in with books that pass themselves off as
philosophy: guides, introductions, applications, self-help, spiritu
ality. Indeed, those bookshops that once stocked philosophy are
themselves now disappearing to online retailing. Philosophy, if
it still exists at aIl, does so more and more only as a marketing
niche, a brand, a product, a lifestyle option, a sign of status or
social distinction. And this applies to the discipline of philosophy
itself, which has lost its cri tic al edge, its ability to propose alter
native values or to tell us how to live. Now philosophy is not truly
negative or challenging to the status quo, but rather contents itself
with teaching us how to live better within the existing order, in fact,
how to succeed within it. It is reduced to a kind of therapy. And
it is surrounded by pretenders, aIl of those other disciplines that
daim to be doing philosophy. Philosophy is reduced to carrying
out innumerable surveys or summaries of itself. Or to endless
debates of the relevant issues, which do not change anything or
think anything different, and whose only aim is to keep the debate
going endlessly in order to justify itself.
It is precisely in these 'new' conditions for philosophy that
philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst and political activist
Félix Guattari wrote their What is Philosophy?, which was
published in French in 1991 and translated into English in 1994.