Woman in Limbo

Deleuze and His Br(others)

Bibliographic Data

ID4387154
AuthorsAlice Jardine (corresponding author)
Year1984
Volume13
Issue3/4
Pages46
Publication date1984-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSubStance (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/3684774
OpenAlexW2328552974
LanguageEN
Citations received14

Responding to the appearance of Deleuze and Guattari's (D + G) Mille Plateaux in 1980, Catherine Clement pointed out what could be said about most of Deleuze's books, whether or not his is the only signature: it is a book of history, economy, ethnology, politics, aesthetics, linguistics. And a book of philosophy? philosophy. Or maybe not. It's writing and thinking. Chagrined people those with thin skin you know? will sit worrying in their corner, smaller and smaller. The others, philosophers or not, will amuse themselves. And even seriously.2 Seriously. For some, especially in the United States, this adverb is irrelevant to D + G. That judgement, in my opinion, is, however, simple and unfortunate. First, because D + G are very serious-perhaps not in the French sense (grave, without laughter, reasonable) because their work is also frivolous, gay, light (and perhaps even futile). But they are most certainly not joking. This is clear if only because of the wide impact they have had on contemporary thought and, most especially, on its students everywhere. In the U.S., where theory from France enters through language and literature departments, that impact has tended to be academically minimized with words like utopian, anarchistic, perverse. This is in part because Deleuze and Guattari take you further and further out of the text, not deeper into it. It is also because

Art · History · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

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