This session of the Deleuze seminar will address itself to two of Deleuze’s most important and well-known books: his seminal engagement with the history of philosophy in which his own position is most fully fleshed out, Difference and Repetition (1968), and A Thousand Plateaus, the largest, most provocative and most complex of the works composed with Félix Guattari (1980).
We will spend six weeks on each volume, according to the following schedule:
Difference and Repetition
1. Course introduction/Introducing the idea of a transcendental empiricism
2. The philosophy of difference within the context of the history of philosophy
3. The dogmatic image of thought and thought without an image
4. The virtual and the actual
5. Habit, memory and time
6. Intensity and individuation/Summary
A Thousand Plateaus
7. Rhizomes and trees: the structural ambition
8. Lobsters and wolves: the ontological fabric
9. Linguistics, semiotics, birdsong: the expressive character of reality
10. Faces, segments, bodies without organs: human existence
11. States, war machines, the axioms of capital: the political analysis
12. Stratification and the abstract machine: recapitulation and summary
As with the previous session of the seminar, short texts by Deleuze will be made available on for each of the classes to provide either a general overview of the area to be covered that week, or a particularly illuminating case study that cuts to the heart of the matter at hand.
Difficulty: Intermediate. While the classes are open to all, a familiarity with either the broad outlines of Western philosophy or with some of Deleuze's works would be beneficial.