Review by Choice Review
Well-known French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, author of Logic of Sense (CH, Dec'90) and Nietzsche and Philosophy (CH, Nov'83), among others, here teams up again with the late psychoanalyst F'elix Guattari (d. 1992) for a fourth book together. (Their best-known previous book was Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1977). Although focused on the question that is its title, this book is packed with insights into historical periods, art, and philosophy. The mission of philosophy, it argues, is not to contemplate ideas, or reflect on them, or communicate them, but to "create concepts." Logic works with concepts; science creates statements, not concepts (a concept is not a statement); and art is dedicated to preserving "a compound of percepts and affects." The concept "speaks the event, not the essence or the thing--pure Event, a haecceity, an entity: the event of the Other or of the face." A particular strength of the book is the depth of its exploration of philosophical concepts--both what they are and are not and what they presuppose. Chapter 2 explores the "plane of immanence" on which the concepts of a given philosophy operate. Another chapter deals with the view of the person, which different philosophical concepts presuppose. A pleasure to read, this is a rigorous structural reflection of the philosophical concept and a genuine contribution to philosophy. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and graduate students in philosophy; faculty; professionals. R. E. Palmer; MacMurray College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Philosophy, according to the authors, is the only study that is concerned with the creation of concepts, which distinguishes it from science, logic, and art. To support this thesis, the authors discuss the nature of these disciplines and the thought of a wide spectrum of philosophers, from Plato to Foucault. Unfortunately, singular insights are buried in a text so dense with metaphor and figurative language (e.g., ``the plane of immanence,'' ``conceptual personae'') that it is impossible to decide whether they have argued their case successfully or even whether they have made their thesis fully intelligible. For academic libraries collecting these authors and continental philosophy.-Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Mgt. Lib., Washington, D.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
