The Works of Gilles Deleuze I: 1953-1969

by Jon Roffe

The first of two volumes, The Works of Gilles Deleuze 1953-1969 introduces, book by book, the philosopher's daunting corpus, from his early monographs on Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, and Bergson; to the "literary clinic" he creates in relation to Proust and Masoch; and, finally, to the landmark publication of Difference and Repetition (1968) and Logic of Sense (1969). Perhaps no one is better suited to this ambitious undertaking than Jon Roffe. Possessing an encyclopedic knowledge Deleuze's work, he also claims an intimate familiarity with so many of the philosopher's sources, subjects, and conceptual personae. With enviable clarity, Roffe's eight substantial chapters adroitly elaborate the circumstances and argument, problems and concepts all but one of the nine books from this period. Indeed, the uniqueness of this volume consists in forgoing any reductive synthesis of Deleuze in order to elaborate each of his major publications on its own terms. The Works of Gilles Deleuze I is incredibly useful, deeply pedagogical, and structurally ingenious.

Genres: Philosophy

340 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

About the author

Jon Roffe is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, an editor of the journal Parrhesia, and teaches at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy.

Reviews

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

The back cover of this book is graced with extremely positive quotes from four senior and well-known scholars in the field of Deleuze studies, and Roffe is himself an academic, so this book might come across as a member of a familiar genre: a scholarly introduction to Deleuze, like a Routledge handbook or something. And it does serve that purpose: it's an extremely readable explication of all of Deleuze's books (excerpt the bigger Spinoza book) up to Logic of Sense. But, in addition to being published by the independent open publisher re.press, it has a really unexpected intimacy about it. Roffe makes extensive use of creative and surprisingly specific examples and anecdotes, including several recurring anecdotes about what it means to be a lover and to have ended a relationship. It doesn't dominate the book by any means but it has a pronounced affective impact and now I feel oddly close to Roffe. He has, as it were, ensured that the signs of this work have a palpable power of acting.

As Roffe claims, boldly, in the introduction, each chapter is supposed to be a "definitive" account of each book of Deleuze, in the sense that he ties up as many threads of the book under discussion as possible into a coherent argument (4). This is part of the appeal of his overall approach, which is to emphasise the way in which Deleuze is a systematic thinker, even a thinker who sees (and extracts) systematicity in unexpected other thinkers, principally Nietzsche. He is also clear on distinguishing Deleuze from deconstructive or poststructuralist traditions of French theory, although this is not a prominent part of his expositions. The confidence of this approach maybe obscures the variety of different interpretations, and the history of divergent interpretations of Deleuze, that proliferate in the scholarly literature. However, this also means that Roffe's exposition is very strong and to the point, making the confident voice very easy to follow, and possibly also easy to disagree with if that's what you want to do. And who wants to be introduced to Deleuze via a tangle of competing interpretations?

Each chapter begins with a short account of the context of publication of the book under discussion, which is a great feature that really draws you into Roffe's narrative each time, and his citations from Deleuze's books of interviews provide good contextual material and sometimes just interesting facts. Apart from these noteworthy features I've mentioned I would simply say that this book is one of the most readable and wide-ranging introductions to Deleuze available: an extremely valuable and non-intimidating introduction to several of Deleuze's often-difficult works. Also the PDF is available for free on the re.press website, re-press.org

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

I've not read the entire book - but I used this as an accompaniment for my first time encountering Deleuze and honestly couldn't have asked for better. Roffe strikes the balance one would hope for - unpretentious, leading, informative. It'll be a while before I come back to the earlier works here, but I'll certainly be using Roffe when I do.

I particularly noticed in the D&R section the frequency of romantic examples used to illustrate concepts? This is not by any means an issue. We speak about boiling water in order to cook eggs - so as to impress a lover. The agony of the scent of one's ex-lover on the metro. Calling out the wrong name during sex. And divorce. Who hurt you, Jon? I hope all is well.

[Josh Murkett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent introduction to Deleuze’s early philosophical work. I now feel more confident at having a crack at some of his work with Guattari. But before that I need to reacquaint myself with some Freud because phew 😮‍💨 that last chapter on Logic of Sense was hard work.