Gilles Deleuze: Affirmation in Philosophy

This study demonstrates how the work of Gilles Deleuze must be understood as constructive and systematic. Instead of reducing philosophy to criticism, or thought to the criticism of philosophy's history, Deleuze ridicules the notion of overcoming philosophy and calls for the production of new concepts. More importantly, he affirms philosophy by producing novel reformulations of the concepts of others and by engineering concepts of his own: becoming, Idea, Problem, univocity, desiring-production, the body-without-organs, the virtual, incoporeal sense, actualization, and counter-actualization. All too often commentary on these concepts has been marked by generalities, cliches, and a confusion of part for whole. In Gilles Deleuze: Affirmation in Philosophy, Conway provides the remedy in the form of careful exposition, concrete illustrations, and original applications. The result is a detailed and far-reaching portrait of Deleuze's thought-one that highlights hitherto overlooked or underappreciated features. These include Deleuze's unique vision of system building, his relentless circumvention of habitual conceptions of unity and difference, and his insistence that metaphilosophy be folded into a general conception of the real. This Deleuze has nothing to do with vague celebrations of difference. This Deleuze is a philosopher who generates a philosophical theatre (a cast of conceptual figures) and redirects Platonic gestures with the aim of restoring a combative, political impulse to the practice of metaphysics.

Jay Conway holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Riverside. For the past decade he has been researching, teaching, and writing on the philosophy of Deleuze, the history of metaphysics, and social-political theory. He currently teaches philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles.