Kenneth Surin - Deleuze and Guattari: Selected Writings

Deleuze and Guattari

Also available from Bloomsbury

Whos Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari?, Gregg Lambert

Schizoanalysis and Ecosophy, edited by Constantin V. Boundas

Deleuze and Becoming, Samantha Bankston

Deleuze and Art, Anne Sauvagnargues

Deleuze and Becoming, Samantha Bankston

Ecosophical Aesthetics, edited by Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack

Deleuze and Guattari

Selected Writings

Kenneth Surin Duke University, USA

For Alastair and Rebecca

This collection of sixteen essays (five previously unpublished) contains essays Ive written on Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari in the last couple of decades. The first essay (Chapter 14) was published in 1991, the most recent in 2018.

Nearly every essay was written in response to invitations to give lectures or conference presentations, as well contributions to journals or essay collections. The task of revising the essays to efface all traces of oral delivery or obvious conformity to the prescribed agenda of a journal issue or book collection would have been impossible. Ive limited myself to forms of updating that remain within the realm of plausibility, the addition and removal of paragraphs here and there, and of course correcting typographical errors. Where the same passages are to be found in more than one essay, Ive allowed them to stand so as not to compromise the flow or coherence of my argument in that particular essay.

The essays range fairly widely. One (Essay 1), for a commemorative issue of Theory, Culture and Society shortly after Deleuzes death, is an attempt, futile of course, to assess his philosophical legacy. Four (Essays 2, 3, 4, 5) deal fairly specifically with Deleuzean themes and conceptshis ontologies (Essay 2), his materialism (Essay 3), his concept of force (Essay 4), and his theory of the image-narrative-concept (Essay 5). A couple deal with his relation to other thinkers (Essays 11 [Raymond Williams] and 15 [Antonio Negri]). One deals with Deleuze and literature (Essay 6), another with Deleuze and ethics/aesthetics (Essay 7). The remaining essays deal with themes in political philosophy, especially Marxism.

I am grateful to Janell Watson for much help given in countless ways while most of these essays were written. My indebtedness to others is expressed in the individual essays.

I thank the publishers for permission to reprint material from the following articles and book chapters:

The Epochality of Deleuzean Thought, Theory, Culture, and Society 14 (1997), pp. 921.

Force, in Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, ed. Charles J. Stivale (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005), pp. 1930.

On Producing the Concept of the Concept-Image, in Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, ed. Robert Mitchell and Jacques Khalip (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 17180, 2667.

A Question of an Axiomatics of Desires: The Deleuzean Imagination of Geoliterature, in Deleuze and Literature, ed. Ian Buchanan and John Marks (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp. 16793.

Existing Not as a Subject but as a Work of Art: The Task of Ethics or Aesthetics?, in Deleuze and Ethics, ed. Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 14253.

1000 Political Subjects, in Deleuze and the Social World, ed. Adrian Parr and Ian Buchanan (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 5778.

On Producing (the Concept) of Solidarity, Rethinking Marxism 23 (2010), pp. 44657.

Control Societies and the Managed Citizen, Junctures 8 (2007), pp. 1125.

The Undecidable and the Fugitive: Mille Plateaux and the State-Form, SubStance, #66 (1991), pp. 10213.

Reinventing a Physiology of Collective Liberation: Going Beyond Marx in the Marxism(s) of Negri, Guattari, and Deleuze, Rethinking MARXISM, 7 (1994), pp. 927.

Maos On Contradiction, Mao-Hegel/Mao-Deleuze. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 20.3 (2018):

References to the works below are given in the text using the following abbreviations. The abbreviations are followed by two paginations, the first to the English translation cited in the Bibliography, the second to the French original, also given in the Bibliography. Translations that have been modified on occasion will be acknowledged as such.