Introduction

Those coming to Deleuze's work for the fi rst time (and even those returning to it anew) fi nd themselves confronted by the dilemma of where to begin, of how to engage with it.Two diffi culties present themselves.The fi rst and more immediate one is that, conceptually, Deleuze's work is so richly detailed and complex.Thus on opening one of his books the reader is confronted by a plethora of concepts that already seem to presuppose on the reader's part an intimate familiarity with numerous other related concepts, theories, or thinkers.It is akin, perhaps, to a labyrinth in which one can easily become lost, or frustratingly disheartened at the prospect of navigating such a complex architecture.This leads into the second, more dangerous, diffi culty -the place of commentary in respect to such an encounter.Readers will, not unreasonably, peruse existing interpretations in search of guidance in relation to Deleuze's philosophy.But whatever reassurance they fi nd will often prove misleading, for in the fi eld that can, more or less, be called Anglo-American 'Deleuze Studies', an orthodoxy seems to have installed itself.This orthodoxy or 'Image of [Deleuzian] Thought' has multiple sources, and as a result requires detailed elaboration.In the fi rst instance, it was the case for a long time that few of Deleuze's texts were available in English translation, making it diffi cult to determine any larger or more accurate 'perspective' on Deleuze's project.Related to this is the fact that the texts were translated in non-chronological order, which made it diffi cult to assess the development and overall signifi cance of specifi c concepts and which led in turn to the distortion and sometimes misrepresentation of concepts or terminology (e.g. the 'body without organs') by various critics.Also, and perhaps most signifi cantly, there is the acceptance at face value of Deleuze's own more 'personal' utterances in interviews (the invocation of 'buggery' as his proper method in respect to the history of philosophy, the claim that his philosophical work is to be treated as a toolbox, and so on).This last is a more signifi cant problem than

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