Essays Critical and Clinical

Rating:
Summary: Critique et Clinique. . .Real Horrorshow
Review: Deleuze follows Nietzsche in asserting that literature, at its strongest, plays a *clinical* role in our lives, providing us with a technology to discharge blockages, to liberate the penal colonies of our overcoded neuroses. Literature is a vector of disease, the writer a physician of the spirit, the world a dissoluted Body without Organs shimmering between the escape-routes of Life and the leprous snares of a doctrinal judge-mentality. Sickness and disequilibrium on a world-historical scale, a delirium far beyond the personal and the individual, the great authors (in this anthology: Melville, Whitman, Carroll, Lawrence, Jarry, Masoch, Beckett) struggling to plot the epidemiology of these terrors, groping for an escape-hatch that may redeem the years of incarceration, both psychical and political. Illness is defined as the *stopping* or interruption of the writing process, the exhaustion of the literary machine, when the schizo-author feels abandoned by the world's epic Traverse and wills her own destruction. Where once the literary agent had all her powers engaged in the machinic exploration of her own narrative Immanence, there now remains only an outmoded cyborg husk, having lost "the spontaneity or the innate feeling for the fragmentary, and the reflection on living relations that must constantly be acquired and created. Spontaneous fragments constitute the element through which, or in the intervals of which, we attain the great and carefully considered visions and sounds of both Nature and history"(60). These essays show how every great writer is also a master aetiologist, a "holistic pathologist" trying to identify and dissolve the negative forces which separate Life from what it can do, that keep Immanence from exploding against its world-historical targets. As a supplement to *Capitalism and Schizophrenia* (that immaculate Public Health textbook), these discourses are outstanding.

Rating:
Summary: At last, a clear explanation!
Review: I must confess, I've only read three of the essays so far in this book, but it's the introduction that I'm most grateful for. Daniel W. Smith does a magnificent job of explicating many of the concepts that have perplexed and confounded my poor artistic mind. I feel that Deleuze had a special understanding of literature, and I was interested to see what he has to say about some of the writers I also love (Beckett, Kafka, Melville). But I've mostly had this experience of wishing I could get what it was he was saying. I felt all along like I was just-this-close, until Smith cracked it open for me. Lots of "Aha" experiences. For people with an artistic bent and with an attraction to philosophy, Deleuze is perhaps a kindred spirit whose words and thoughts about literature, painting and music can give hope and faith to whatever projects we work on at the foot of the capitalist mountain. I've also read his book on Kafka, and I selected that one because I want to understand more, and based on a review here on Amazon where someone said "this was the one to start with." I would say, that Kafka is definitely the one to start with, but Smith's intro to this book gives a very helpful overview of what one can expect. So Start with the Intro, go to Kafka, then come back to the essays. My .02.

Rating:
Summary: At last, a clear explanation!
Review: I must confess, I've only read three of the essays so far in this book, but it's the introduction that I'm most grateful for. Daniel W. Smith does a magnificent job of explicating many of the concepts that have perplexed and confounded my poor artistic mind. I feel that Deleuze had a special understanding of literature, and I was interested to see what he has to say about some of the writers I also love (Beckett, Kafka, Melville). But I've mostly had this experience of wishing I could get what it was he was saying. I felt all along like I was just-this-close, until Smith cracked it open for me. Lots of "Aha" experiences. For people with an artistic bent and with an attraction to philosophy, Deleuze is perhaps a kindred spirit whose words and thoughts about literature, painting and music can give hope and faith to whatever projects we work on at the foot of the capitalist mountain. I've also read his book on Kafka, and I selected that one because I want to understand more, and based on a review here on Amazon where someone said "this was the one to start with." I would say, that Kafka is definitely the one to start with, but Smith's intro to this book gives a very helpful overview of what one can expect. So Start with the Intro, go to Kafka, then come back to the essays. My .02.