Essays Critical and Clinical

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by Gilles Deleuze,

Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco

University of Minnesota Press

Due/Published November 1897, 216 pages, paper

ISBN 0816625697

This is Deleuze's final work, a collection of essays, all newly revised or published, on such diverse literary figures Melville, Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, Beckett, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,Alfred Jarry, and Lewis Carroll; as well as philosophers such as Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.
From the Minnesota catalog: For Deleuze, every literary work implies a way of living, a form of life, and must be evaluated not only critically, but also clinically. As Proust said, great writers invent a new language within language, but in such a way that language in its entirety is pushed to its limit or its own "outside." This outside of language is made up of affects and percepts that are not linguistic, but which language alone nonetheless makes possible. In this volume, Deleuze is concerned with delirium--the process of Life--that lies behind this invention, as well as the loss that occurs, the silence that follows, when this delirium becomes a clinical state. Taken together, these eighteen essays present a profoundly new approach to literature.