Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974)

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by Gilles Deleuze,

Translated by Mike Taormina

Semiotext(e)

Due/Published February 2004, 328 pages, paper

ISBN 1584350180

One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian, Michel Foucault once wrote. This book anthologizes 40 texts and interviews written over 20 years by Deleuze, who died in 1995. The early texts, from 1953-1966 (on Rousseau, Kafka, Jarry, etc.), belong to literary criticism and announce Deleuze's last book, Critique and Clinic (1993). But philosophy clearly predominates in the rest of the book, with sharp appraisals of the thinkers he always felt indebted to: Spinoza, Bergson. More surprising is his acknowledgement of Jean-Paul Sartre as his master. "The new themes, a certain new style, a new aggressive and polemical way of raising questions," he wrote, "come from Sartre." But the figure of Nietzsche remains by far the most seminal, and the presence throughout of his friends and close collaborators, Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault. The book stops shortly after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, and presents a kind of genealogy of Deleuze's thought as well as his attempt to leave philosophy and connect it to the outside--but, he cautions, as a philosopher.

Review

“If you don’t admire something, if you don’t love it, you have no reason to write a word about it. Spinoza or Nietzsche are philosophers whose critical and destructive powers are without equal, but this power always springs from affirmation, from joy, from a cult of affirmation of joy, from the exigency of life against those who would mutilate and mortify life. For me, that is philosophy itself.” – Gilles Deleuze

Desert Islands and Other Texts gathers almost all the texts which Gilles Deleuze published in France and abroad between 1953 and 1974. The collection includes articles, book reviews, and interviews all previously published, but not found in one volume. Presented in this fashion, these early works – Desert Islands includes writing up to shortly after the publication of Anti-Oedipus – offer a new perspective on the development and shifting aims of Deleuze’s thought. The collection includes writings on Spinoza and Nietzsche, two thinkers that profoundly shaped his thinking. Deleuze’s approach to those philosophers offers original assessment of their work and also reveals elements of what we have come to know as Deleuzian thought. Desert Islands reminds us how far-reaching and ambitious Deleuze can be. Inside we find works on philosophers and non-philosophers alike, including Henri Bergson, Jean Hyppolite, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Raymond Roussel, Alfred Jarry, Kant, Hume, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Hélène Cixous. Coming off the heels of the recent publication of Deleuze’s book on the painter, Francis Bacon, Desert Islands adds to the growing appreciation of the richness, diversity, and complexity of Deleuzian thought.

Essays include: “Bergson’s Conception of Difference,” “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Precursor of Kafka, Céline, and Ponge,” “Raymond Roussel, or the Abhorrent Vacuum, “How Jarry’s Pataphysics Opened the Way for Phenomenology,” “The Philosophy of Crime Novels,” “Nietzsche’s Burst of Laughter,” “Mysticism and Masochism,” “Gilles Deleuze Talks Philosophy,” “How Do We Recognize Structuralism,” “What Our Prisoners Want From Us...,” “Intellectuals and Power” “Deleuze and Guattari Fight Back,” “Capitalism and Schizophrenia,” “Your Special ‘Desiring Machines’: What Are They,” “Five Propositions on Psychoanalysis”