Claire Colebrook

I love reading Gilles Deleuze. I do not like so much reading what others have to say about him. I also do not like Deleuze explained in any way to me. I like owning my own interpretations. This book was OK, glad I read it, used it for a 2013 summer morning meditation of sorts, but I doubt I will ever read it again and could have lived without it. But still, Claire Colebrook obviously loves Deleuze as much as others who do, and it is always good to hear from smart acolytes. Anyone wanting to learn more about Gilles Deleuze should be instructed to read the book Dialogues as it is a very good and accessible primer to the work and ideas of this great thinker. Following that fine book I would think the very best of Gilles Deleuze can be found in A Thousand Plateaus.

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I think philosophy should stay away from the empirical universe. What constitutes the good life? How do we constitute and develop meaning? What do artistic and intellectual gestures signify in their historical and cultural context? Totally. But, What is thought? Time to break out the electrodes and answer that with science, buddy.


So Claire Colebrook's contemplation of Deleuze (and let Guides for the Perplexed fool you not--this is a critical musing on his body of work, not an intro or summary) has a fair bit of interest for me and a fair bit else that makes me roll my eyes. Opening with a dabble, an extended discursion on Deleuze and Guattari's writing on cinema, is a mistake--the eye wilts and the mind turns away as we fret over the difference between ideas and concepts (which is not even uninteresting, just abstract, and which D&G explain far better themselves in the first chapter of What is Philosophy?). And even though it's going somewhere interesting--the power of art to be pure perception, without seer and seen, the Isherwood move, because "I am a camera" is so much different than simply saying "I am an eye", and Deleuze would appreciate the technologic of that--you can't stick around to watch art show us different ways to be than the way we already know how to be, because you are stultified, dawg.


The argument on capitalism and the reinvestment of capital leading to an endless recursive loop where we work not to live but because the logic of our life is in work/consumption, that is more interesting but also maybe more banal. I like its potential as a French take on the alienation of labour in a Marxian sense, and Zizek's injunction to enjoy. And it did give me the greatest short story about idea about a man who starts shitting money. But overall, the anti-capitalism of Anti-Oedipus as represented by Colebrook gets short shrift and shorter space.


And then more ontology, and then a discussion of affect, which is where Colebrook really shines--helping me get the significance of this buzzterm as presented by the Big Head of the theorist, and its relationship to the modern, the space for moving from nouns (the Self) to verbs (move, splash, colour, shift, see) that it affords, and the realization that the "shared aesthetic experience" I always invoke as the real reason people read or go to the pictures is eally something closer to a "shared affective experience", or should be if we want to make something useful of it. There is more in here, and ultimately even if it annoyed me it prepared me pretty well to go back to Deleuze and find more in him and let it swell and rhizome all over me. But ugh, leave brainology to the brainologists, Colebrook, not the brainosophers--and then summarize for us their brainological papers.… (más)