Deleuzism: A Metacommentary

Deleuzism: A Metacommentary is an engaging and provocative treatment of the principal features of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and their applicability to cultural studies. Deleuze was a philosopher who offered sharp critiques of - as well as radical alternatives to - psychoanalysis, semiotics, all forms of structuralism and all forms of expressionism. While Deleuze was not a dialectician, as readers of him we must be. The conviction that Deleuze was doing something radically new in his work has accompanied a corresponding anxiety as to how to read it. In this rigorous and lucid work, Ian Buchanan takes up the challenge ofanswering the questions: how should we read Deleuze? And, how should we read with Deleuze? Buchanan shows us how Deleuze's philosophy works. He offers a clear delineation of Deleuze's way of thought, one that is inseparable from a conception of philosophy as a way of living. Buchanan ranges over the entire Deleuzian corpus engaging with elemental concepts in Deleuze - 'the dark precursor', 'desire', 'flow' 'nomad', 'the image', 'betrayal', 'becoming-woman'- and shows that despite Deleuze's self-declared moratorium against dialectics he was in a number of important respects a dialectician. Offering concrete Deleuzian readings of literary works such as Wuthering Heights, films such as Blade Runner, architectural structures such as the Bonaventure Hotel and popular cultural practices, including 80s pop music, Buchanan demonstrates the effectiveness of Deleuzian analysis for interdisciplinary cultural critique. Deleuzism is a work that will engage all those with an interest in the twentieth century's most radical and original philosopher.

Ian Buchanan is Professor of Cultural Studies and Critical Theory at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the founding editor of the journal Deleuze and Guattari Studies and the author of Assemblage Theory and Method (Bloomsbury, 2020).