Deleuze, A Stoic
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Deleuze dramatises the story of ancient philosophy as a rivalry of four types of thinkers: the subverting pre-Socratics, the ascending Plato, the interiorising Aristotle and the perverting Stoics. Deleuze assigns the Stoics a privileged place because they introduced a new orientation for thinking and living that turns the whole story of philosophy inside out. Ryan Johnson reveals Deleuze’s provocative reading of ancient Stoicism produced many of his most singular and powerful ideas. For Deleuze, the Stoics were innovators of an entire system of philosophy which they structured like an egg. Johnson structures his book in this way: Part I looks at physics (the yolk), Part II is logic (the shell) and Part III covers ethics (the albumen). Including previously untranslated French Stoic scholarship, Johnson unearths new possibilities for bridging contemporary and ancient philosophy.
Ryan J. Johnson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Elon University, in North Carolina. Ryan’s early books include The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter (Edinburgh UP 2016) and Deleuze, A Stoic (Edinburgh UP 2020), as well as the co-edited collections Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics (Edinburgh UP 2018) and Nietzsche and Epicurus (Bloomsbury 2020). His recent work includes the co-written Phenomenology of Black Spirit (Edinburgh UP 2023) and the monograph Three American Hegels (Rowman & Littlefield 2024). His future work is on the radical abolitionist John Brown, Spinoza, and John Coltrane.