Deleuze, The Dark Precursor ─ Dialectic, Structure, Being

Kaufman (comparative literature, UCLA) presents a study of Gilles Deleuze that, against the tendency to see him as a philosopher of becoming, focuses on his unappreciated thought about stasis. She situates Deleuze's early single-authored work at the heart of his oeuvre and argues that his concern with structural-ontological questions in this period abides as a "dark precursor" to his later political and aesthetic work. The text is organized into three sections on dialectic, structure and being. She considers Deleuze as "an unlikely thinker of the dialectic" with an affinity for Plato's "dialectic of division." She responds to Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou's critical monographs about Deleuze, arguing for the compatibility the Spinozist Deleuze and the structuralist Deleuze of the 1960s, as well as makes the case for his affirmation of abstraction. In the last section she turns to questions of being and how Deleuzian themes dialectic and structure actualize. She considers "how dialectic and structure serve as points of genesis for something at once static and full of ontological plenitude." To this end she teases out the Deleuzian implications in a number of works of fiction: the dialectic of movement and stasis in the "road-trip" novels of Kerouac, Nabokov and Paul Aster; repetative passion in Bartleby, the Scrivner; and unworking in Blanchot. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Eleanor Kaufman is a professor of comparative literature, English, and French and Francophone studies, as well as an affiliate in Jewish studies and the Center for the Study of Religion at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski and coeditor of Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture.