The Deleuze Connections

by John Rajchman
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000.
167 pp. Trade, paper, $15.95.
ISBN: 0-262-18205-X; ISBN: 0-262-68120-X.

Reviewed by Fred Andersson
Department of Art History and Musicology, Lund University, Box 117, 221 00
Lund, Sweden
Email: konstfred@hotmail.com

This book was published two years ago, and this review is late indeed. Thereis no risk, however, that the book or its subject will lose its urgency very soon. It presents the work of Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher who is generally considered to be very difficult to read and understand. But maybe the difficulties are to a great extent related to some people's inability to grasp more than a few levels or trails of thought at the same time.Deleuze's thinking is, as Rajchman writes, "unlikely to work for those minds that are already settled, already classified". What it's all about is, essentially, an openness which permits connections to be made between fields of experience that are for the most time held apart in academic quarters.Deleuze always searched for connections between discursive and pre-discursive levels, between sensation and cognition. Thinking was, for him, to experience life in its sensual multitude and to connect it to the history of abstract thought.

Some of his and his friend Felix Guattari's fantastic metaphors, such as"bodies without organs", "rhizomatic activity" and "desiring machines" havecommonly and easily been turned into popular and simplistic slogans oftechnological determinism. Therefore it's often necessary to point out thata body without organs isn't necessarily a robot, that a rhizome isn'tnecessarily an electronic network and that the notion of an "abstractmachine" doesn't have to imply the presence of a machine in the literal,material sense. In Deleuze's thinking, there is indeed very little supportfor the notion of the brain as some kind of computer. And that's only one ofthe many reasons why Rajchman's book fulfills an urgent need ofclarification and explanation.

Rajchman has chosen to divide the book into six chapters, each reflecting acentral aspect of the matter. In the first chapter, called Connections,Rajchman briefly summarizes Deleuze's re-reading of the history of Western thought. He puts forward the notion of connective, experimental thought as being the essential trait of this re-reading. The arguments are further elaborated in the following chapters, called Experimentation and Thought. In the chapter Multiplicity he successfully clarifies Deleuze's inquiry into levels of complexity in nature and in thought, i.e. into things that aren't reducible to schemes or binary oppositions. The significance of this thinking in relation to the social and aesthetic spheres is exemplified in the concluding chapters about Life and Sensation.

As an easily accessible introduction into a big and labyrinthine body ofwork, Rajchman's book is most useful. It's less rewarding if one looks for a more critical evaluation of Deleuze's work in epistemological, political andsemiotic terms. Such evaluations would, however, be the task of a great number of large-scale, specialized studies.