What do you think?
Rate this book
Dialogues II
Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris Viii. He is a key figure in poststructuralism, and one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. In Dialogues Ii Deleuze examines his philosophical pluralism in a series of discussions with Claire Parnet. Conversational in tone, this is the most personable and accessible of all Deleuze's writings, in which he describes his own philosophical background, relationships and development, and some of the central themes of his work. This second edition includes a new essay, 'The Actual and the Virtual'. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam and Eliot Ross Albert.
136 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2002
13 people are currently reading
444 people want to read
About the author
Gilles Deleuze
260 books2,603 followersDeleuze is a key figure in poststructuralist French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence. He argued, then, that there is no good and evil, but rather only relationships which are beneficial or harmful to the particular individuals. This ethics influences his approach to society and politics, especially as he was so politically active in struggles for rights and freedoms. Later in his career he wrote some of the more infamous texts of the period, in particular, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These texts are collaborative works with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and they exhibit Deleuze’s social and political commitment.
Gilles Deleuze began his career with a number of idiosyncratic yet rigorous historical studies of figures outside of the Continental tradition in vogue at the time. His first book, Empirisism and Subjectivity, is a study of Hume, interpreted by Deleuze to be a radical subjectivist. Deleuze became known for writing about other philosophers with new insights and different readings, interested as he was in liberating philosophical history from the hegemony of one perspective. He wrote on Spinoza, Nietzche, Kant, Leibniz and others, including literary authors and works, cinema, and art. Deleuze claimed that he did not write “about” art, literature, or cinema, but, rather, undertook philosophical “encounters” that led him to new concepts. As a constructivist, he was adamant that philosophers are creators, and that each reading of philosophy, or each philosophical encounter, ought to inspire new concepts. Additionally, according to Deleuze and his concepts of difference, there is no identity, and in repetition, nothing is ever the same. Rather, there is only difference: copies are something new, everything is constantly changing, and reality is a becoming, not a being.
He often collaborated with philosophers and artists as Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, René Schérer, Carmelo Bene, François Châtelet, Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, Jean-François Lyotard, Georges Lapassade, Kateb Yacine and many others.
Gilles Deleuze began his career with a number of idiosyncratic yet rigorous historical studies of figures outside of the Continental tradition in vogue at the time. His first book, Empirisism and Subjectivity, is a study of Hume, interpreted by Deleuze to be a radical subjectivist. Deleuze became known for writing about other philosophers with new insights and different readings, interested as he was in liberating philosophical history from the hegemony of one perspective. He wrote on Spinoza, Nietzche, Kant, Leibniz and others, including literary authors and works, cinema, and art. Deleuze claimed that he did not write “about” art, literature, or cinema, but, rather, undertook philosophical “encounters” that led him to new concepts. As a constructivist, he was adamant that philosophers are creators, and that each reading of philosophy, or each philosophical encounter, ought to inspire new concepts. Additionally, according to Deleuze and his concepts of difference, there is no identity, and in repetition, nothing is ever the same. Rather, there is only difference: copies are something new, everything is constantly changing, and reality is a becoming, not a being.
He often collaborated with philosophers and artists as Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, René Schérer, Carmelo Bene, François Châtelet, Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, Jean-François Lyotard, Georges Lapassade, Kateb Yacine and many others.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 2, 2010
I avoided Deleuze and Guattari in college as best as I could. I don't know why, they just seemed to be the then-hipster's style of philosophy, the kind of people who specialized in David Brain classes and would "compose" 18-minute long improvisational bass jams for their electronic music final project. But I've long suspected that there was something to Deleuze and Guattari, particularly Deleuze. During the semester, I read a smidgeon of "A Thousand Plateaus" and found the little bits I read quite intriguing. I found this book at the Strand and it seemed to be the ideal introduction: a dialogue that is not a dialogue with the names of the participants invisible. In it you'll find a fascination with becomings and conjunctions, an exhortation to stammer instead of speak, a trenchant analysis of psychoanalysis, and a great rejoinder to Hegel on p. 45: "the spider and his web, the louse and the scalp, the tick and a small patch of mammal skin: these and not the owl of Minerva are the true philosophical beasts." The first two sections are quite extraordinary, as the pages just brim with idea after idea as only the best continental philosophy can. The sections on psychoanalysis and politics sparkle at times, but have a little less flow to them. Nonetheless, this is a tremendous "dialogue," one that I read during the semester and then re-read within the last week. And I still don't think the ideas have settled. This is one of those books to return to again and again over time.
Read
October 29, 2019A conversation is never between two people but rather between a multitude, a peoples; a whole geography of regions, territories and movements. So it becomes that the point of a question, properly speaking, is to get out of the question. The only useful questions serve as stimuli: stimuli to movements and becomings, lines of flight and of action; and best be clear: there is no history in becomings, only geography, nomadism. Nomads know nothing of 'history', or even 'future', everything is played out in the present-becoming. Memories themselves do not belong to the realm of the past; the unconscious has nothing to do with childhood memories, but it does have something to do with a child-becoming: a double capture and a-parallel evolution that sees each drawn in to the regimes of signs of one another.
Is there a certain combination of flows, intensities and affects that would make the horse bare its teeth and little Hans show his peepee? There are infinite bodies without organs and likewise an infinitude of concrete assemblages that are constantly being actualised, but there are nonetheless specific bodies without organs, marked by specific regimes of signs that do trace a broken line through world-history and become actualised in concrete assemblages. Regimes of signs are constituted by particular populations on a body without organs; they demarcate certain becomings, transitions, gradients, combinations of flows, emissions and absorptions of particles. Anorexia is a regime of signs, but so is bureaucracy and even capitalism. Sadism and masochism: these regimes attest to the proper use of the proper noun; Felix Guattari does not designate a global person or subject but rather something that is happening; Parkinson's disease is another example, even when the name used is that of the diagnoser of the symptoms.
Desire has nothing to do with subjects or even objects; "there is no subject unless there is repression". Desire is the set of passive syntheses, the immanent field of flows of energy and bodies. It is the Will to Power, a will to life that vitalises all life, but that also goes beyond even this: that interpenetrates organic and non-organic phenomena to create an entire plane of immanence. The plane is not pre-existent, it is created. We must each of us construct with meticulous prudence our own immanent fields of desire. Desire is not spontaneist but rather constructivist; we must bring forth desire into the world. It is not about pleasure or even sexuality, these flows are already always in combination with other flows. Where there is ascesis there is flourishing desire.
We must be the most prudent of experimenters, we the multiple. How do we carry ourselves along lines of flight without destroying ourselves in the process? Why are the deaths of so many visionaries so tragic? Virginia Woolf's suicide, Fitzgerald's alcoholism (Nietzsche's breakdown and isolation?). The destructive tendency of nomadism will always come up against the self-preservation of the state; all war-wachines have their victims. We must have the prudence of men of the line, the thoughtfulness and organised flight of experimenters.
There is no desire for revolution, or even for power, to oppress or be oppressed. There is only revolutionary desire, desire that exerts power or that submits to it, desire that oppresses or that constitutes its own oppression. All collectives, whether individual or group, already contain these lines of desire crossing each other, encountering each other and getting entangled. There is no dualism, properly speaking, between the transcendent plane of organisation and the plane of immanence: all collectives are constituted by these entangled lines and planes in their nature as living multiplicities. A so-called desire for revolution is already fabricated after-the-fact, already victim to the traps of the state, already transcendentalised. Again, this doesn't mean that desire is spontaneist: the plane of desire and the regimes of signs must be organised, intimately experimented with and upon, schizoanalysed and micro-politicised.
Is there a certain combination of flows, intensities and affects that would make the horse bare its teeth and little Hans show his peepee? There are infinite bodies without organs and likewise an infinitude of concrete assemblages that are constantly being actualised, but there are nonetheless specific bodies without organs, marked by specific regimes of signs that do trace a broken line through world-history and become actualised in concrete assemblages. Regimes of signs are constituted by particular populations on a body without organs; they demarcate certain becomings, transitions, gradients, combinations of flows, emissions and absorptions of particles. Anorexia is a regime of signs, but so is bureaucracy and even capitalism. Sadism and masochism: these regimes attest to the proper use of the proper noun; Felix Guattari does not designate a global person or subject but rather something that is happening; Parkinson's disease is another example, even when the name used is that of the diagnoser of the symptoms.
Desire has nothing to do with subjects or even objects; "there is no subject unless there is repression". Desire is the set of passive syntheses, the immanent field of flows of energy and bodies. It is the Will to Power, a will to life that vitalises all life, but that also goes beyond even this: that interpenetrates organic and non-organic phenomena to create an entire plane of immanence. The plane is not pre-existent, it is created. We must each of us construct with meticulous prudence our own immanent fields of desire. Desire is not spontaneist but rather constructivist; we must bring forth desire into the world. It is not about pleasure or even sexuality, these flows are already always in combination with other flows. Where there is ascesis there is flourishing desire.
We must be the most prudent of experimenters, we the multiple. How do we carry ourselves along lines of flight without destroying ourselves in the process? Why are the deaths of so many visionaries so tragic? Virginia Woolf's suicide, Fitzgerald's alcoholism (Nietzsche's breakdown and isolation?). The destructive tendency of nomadism will always come up against the self-preservation of the state; all war-wachines have their victims. We must have the prudence of men of the line, the thoughtfulness and organised flight of experimenters.
There is no desire for revolution, or even for power, to oppress or be oppressed. There is only revolutionary desire, desire that exerts power or that submits to it, desire that oppresses or that constitutes its own oppression. All collectives, whether individual or group, already contain these lines of desire crossing each other, encountering each other and getting entangled. There is no dualism, properly speaking, between the transcendent plane of organisation and the plane of immanence: all collectives are constituted by these entangled lines and planes in their nature as living multiplicities. A so-called desire for revolution is already fabricated after-the-fact, already victim to the traps of the state, already transcendentalised. Again, this doesn't mean that desire is spontaneist: the plane of desire and the regimes of signs must be organised, intimately experimented with and upon, schizoanalysed and micro-politicised.
August 2, 2020
The dream team
December 31, 2020
Serves as a great primer on D&G. Though the text is ultimately prosaic, it is based on conversations between Deleuze and Claire Parnet, including an opening chapter which reflects on the potentials of conversation (and also sheds light on the collaborative process of Deleuze & Guattari). It seems as though Parnet pushed Deleuze to lay out the foundations of many of D&G's seminal concepts, finding a myriad of different applications for the war machine, assemblage, deterritorialization, etc. As an entryway into Deleuze I found it very satisfying and illuminating.
June 20, 2012
Deleuze can be abstruse and tedious, which makes his pairing with Claire Parnet perfect, as she keeps him in check and on task as few others (including Guattari) have succeeded in doing. I think this short book might be one of the most lucid and accessible explanations of Deleuze's major theoretical contributions. Of particular interest for me is the book's focus on Deleuze's theory of the "line of flight," a concept which doesn't seem to have impressed other critics and theorists much, but which for me is probably Deleuze's most genius and invaluable proposition. The book also captures Deleuze's essential playfulness and eccentricity.
July 7, 2012
This book is brimming with huge, important ideas. Easily one of the more affecting works of philosophical discourse I've read. Also, a very difficult read. Deleuze's ontology is operating at the absolute limits of abstraction, so he's almost forced to develop a near-impenetrable and neologistic vocabulary. Despite slogging through Hegel and Heidegger in previous lives, I found Deleuze's writing in this collection to present a unique challenge to his readership. Nonetheless: a diligent reader will be rewarded with the mind-melting conceptual conjuring that only Deleuze can deliver.
Read
June 11, 2008long live the multiple
Read
January 17, 2013the clearest, most concise overview of deleuze's thought, looking back to the earliest work on hume and forward to a thousand plateaus. also some of his best polemical writing.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews