Deleuze and Literature

Book excerpt: Although he is best known as a philosopher, Deleuze's interests were extremely far reaching - in addition to his important critiques of major philosophers like Kant, Hume and Spinoza, he also wrote extensively on literature, cinema and art. Characteristically, he didn't apply philosophy to the arts, he always tried to extract philosophy from them. Deleuze wrote widely on literature, but always with an eye to extract something new and interesting, never merely to interpret. Indeed, his most notorious slogan was 'don't ask what it means? Ask how it works?' He wrote monographs on Proust, Kafka and Sacher-Masoch. He also wrote essays on Beckett, Melville, Jarry, T.E. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence, and Whitman. The essays collected in this volume are the first devoted solely to Deleuze's work on literature. Written by leading Deleuzian scholars the essays focus on two main questions: how does Deleuze read literary texts? And how can we read texts in a Deleuzian way? Contributors: Bruce Baugh, Ian Buchanan, Claire Colebrook, Andre Pierre Colombat, Tom Conley, Hugh Crawford, Marlene Goldman, Eugene W. Holland, Greg Lambert, John Marks, Timothy S. Murphy and Kenneth Surin