Deleuze guattari biography

Philosophy invites and repels biography in lika measure. On the one hand, it is identified with its most famous names in a way that would seem anachronistic in other disciplines; on the other, the lives of philosophers most often seem beside the point when it comes to understanding the individuality of their thought. If social histories of philosophy tend towards over-generalizing abstractions, personalizing ones are in danger of failing to illuminate the work at all. Hence the somewhat perverse character of the fascination with the lives of philosophers: the banality of the everyday acquires an added poignancy when the narrated life so consistently disappoints the search for the secret of the thought. This applies as much to ‘engaged’ philosophers (Heidegger, for example—a subject of intense biographical scrutiny, for obvious political reasons) as it does to less engagerad ones (Kant, whose life’s charm resides, famously, in its metronomic uneventfulness). It is hard,

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Deleuze and Guattari

Collaboration between two French intellectuals (–)

Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher, and Félix Guattari, a French psychoanalyst and political activist, wrote a number of works together (besides both having distinguished independent careers).

Their conjoint works were Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, and What Is Philosophy?

Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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A two volume work, consisting of Anti-Oedipus () and A Thousand Plateaus (), Capitalism and Schizophrenia was an influential success; and, with its critique of psychoanalytic conformity,^[1] marked a significant step in the evolution of post-structuralism.^[2] Its emphasis on the nomadic nature of knowledge and identity, as seen for example in the authors' stress on the continuities between the human and the animal,^[3][4] also places it among the formative texts of postmodernism. Stark and Laurie argue that Anti-

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Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives

May 20,

This is a disappointing book. Ostensibly a biography of Anti-Oedipus authors Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, François Dosse spends interminable chapters summarizing both authors individual and collaborative works at the expense of examining their lives, the conditions of their work, the relationship between intellectual activity and the institutions which it takes place in, for, and against. The summaries of their works that I have read did not give me any new or interesting insights. The summaries of the books that I have not read left me confused and perplexed. In both cases, I got nothing out of these chapters.

The biographical material, when it appears, is fascinating and frustrating. The sections covering Guattari's psychoanalytic work at the radical La Borde Clinic is based on interviews and research conducted by Virgine Linhart, not Dosse's own work. I wanted to know more about how this psychotherapy ins