Fellow philosopher Michel Foucault once opined that ``maybe one day we'll see the century as Deleuzian.'' This awkward collection of interviews, letters, and the occasional essay does its best to prove him wrong. Like many modern French intellectuals, Deleuze (Masochism, 1971, etc.) formed his ideas and ideology largely in the crucible of France's May '68 protests. But more than a quarter century later, he has yet to move on; even his most recent work has a tattered, time-capsule quality to it. His Marxist concern with modes and means of production, for example, seems hopelessly quaint. And while his emphasis on power and control might currently enjoy a fading vogue on American campuses, in Parisian intellectual circles such ideas fell from favor long ago. Deleuze is habitually difficult, and though this volume is presented by his publisher as a ``point of entry'' into his work, those not familiar with his substantial oeuvre will find it barely comprehensible here. Book- length arguments are alluded to in a sentence, vital concepts and terms go unexplained except for the occasional footnote. Deleuze himself seems to know everything and understand nothing. His style is high French academician—pompous and full of hair-splitting categorizations and incessant abstractions: ``All processes take place on the plane of immanence, and within a given multiplicity: unifications, subjectifications, rationalizations, centralizations have no special status.'' In many of his recent interviews, Deleuze has expressed worries about modern life—the decline of the academy, the ubiquity of media culture and its possibilities for social control. It never occurs to him that his own convoluted, gnomic pensÇes might be part of the problem. After all, it is so much easier to turn on a television set than to wade through outdated, obscure, and unexceptional philosophy from a B-side thinker.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1995
ISBN: 0-231-07580-4
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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