Author: James Williams
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9788120827622
Description
This is the first critical introduction to Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze-s most important work of philosophy and one of the most significant texts of contemporary philosophy.
In offering a critical analysis of Deleuze-s methods, principles and arguments, the book enables readers to engage with the revolutionary core of Deleuze’s philosophy and take up favourable or critical positions with respect to its most innovative and controversial ideas. The book will also help to extend Deleuze’s work to philosophers working in the analytic tradition.
REVIEW:
“A major event in Deleuze scholarship.”
- JOHN PROTEVI, Louisiana State University
“James Williams succeeds in making Deleuze intelligible…he has performed an invaluable service both to existing readers of Deleuze and to new readers keen to expose themselves to certain vital possibilities of contemporary philosophy and theory in general. This will be the definitive guide to Deleuze’s text for many years to come.”
- KEITH ANSELL PEARSON, University of Warwick
Contents
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION
Deleuze’s masterwork
Deleuzian principles
Virtual and actual
Difference and repetition
Passive syntheses
Dialectics
Reading Difference and Repetition
CHAPTER 2 – OUTSIDE REPETITION, GENERALITY AND LAWS
The simulacrum
Repetition and generality
Repetition and law
Repetition and concepts
Tragedy
Freud and masks
Signs and the essence of repetition
CHAPTER 3 – DIFFERENCE
Difference in itself
Aristotle
Deleuze’s ontology
Hegel and Leibniz
Difference as experiment and experience
Plato
CHAPTER 4 – REPETITION
Repetition for itself
First synthesis of time
Second synthesis of time
Third synthesis of time
Freud and passive syntheses
CHAPTER 5 – AGAINST COMMON SENSE
The image of thought
Good will
Kant, Descartes and recognition
Representation
Error and illusion
Proposition and sense
Questions
Dialectics, problems and Ideas
Learning
CHAPTER 6 – WHAT IS AN IDEA?
The problem of determination
Ideas as multiplicities
The Necessity of Ideas
How to act
Determination and goundlessness
CHAPTER 7 – WHAT IS REALITY?
Science and significance
Explanation
Depth and space
Intensity
The individual
Individuals and species
CHAPTER 8 – CONCLUSION: BEYOND THE SELF
Reality
The self and the subject
Others
Bibliography
Index