General Information
Course Description
9621 - Gilles Deleuze [C] - Joshua Schuster
This graduate seminar is a focused, close reading of Deleuze’s major philosophical works. We will begin with Bergsonism and get a slice of Bergson himself with his An Introduction to Metaphysics. We will then follow with Difference and Repetition, and works co-written with Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, and What is Philosophy? We will finish briefly with some shorter essays on aesthetics and politics. In the last weeks we will attend to some recent critiques of Deleuze (Badiou among others) and extensions of his work (Brian Massumi and Elizabeth Grosz).
Our aim in this course is to go slowly and with deliberate plodding through Deleuze’s major conceptual propositions, without getting too caught up in jargon. The point is to grasp inside and out a few central texts by Deleuze and find a way to evaluate his thought for today. We will not be attending too much to Deleuze’s many readings of other philosophers and the history of philosophy, but will instead concentrate on immanent ways of coming to terms with Deleuze’s own philosophy of immanence. Here we will discuss the account of the world Deleuze offers, and the philosophical methodology that he uses to construct such an account. We will consider whether this philosophy can or cannot coincide with the physicalist, yet non-determinable, account of the universe that contemporary science offers (especially in the domains of physics and the life sciences).
