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Desert Island and Other Texts, 1953-1974

by Gilles Deleuze; David Lapoujade, Editor; Michael Taormina, Translator
Semiotext(e), distributed by MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003
328 pp., illus. Paper, $17.95
ISBN: 1-584-35018-0.

Reviewed by Eugene Thacker
School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology. Atlanta, GA. 30332-0165

eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu

Desert Islands is, at first glace, a collection of essays, reviews, interviews, and miscellany from the early to the middle Deleuze. Arranged chronologically, the texts include philosophical investigations of Hume, Nietzsche, and Bergson, literary reflections (on Rousseau, Jarry, and crime novels), and engagements with contemporaries (such as Simondon, Guattari, and Foucault). Stopping just after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, the collection contains mostly un-translated material.

So then, what does one gain from a collection of miscellany, after the dense, thick tomes of Difference and Repetition, and The Logic of Sense? What more can one know about Deleuze’s philosophy by reading book reviews, interviews, and fragments? In one sense, nothing. A reader looking for insights into Anti-Oedipus or other books will be disappointed here. But, at the same time, Deleuze’s writing always attempts to de-totalize itself, to insistently and energetically open itself to still other concepts. From this perspective, Desert Islands is actually quite significant, and much more than a collection of un-translated texts. Desert Islands does not contain any neat summaries of Deleuze’s major concepts; it does, however, "capture" something of Deleuze’s thought: the fleeing, itinerant, and errant quality of the concept. In this sense Desert Islands does for Deleuze’s work what the Dits et Écrits has done for Foucault, and indeed what the whole of Blanchot’s work expresses. Desert Islands is not a "themed" collection, or an attempt to gather into a new book, a sort of meta-book, those utterances that have escaped. Rather, it is an attempt to do something extremely difficult: to let the errant quality of thought express itself in something as inclusive and enclosed as a book. Blanchot and Jabès, among others, have noted the tensions inherent in the concept of the "book," at once a proliferation of thought yet at the same time that which always encloses, expands, encircles. Arguably, Deleuze’s thought operates in a similar manner, deterritorializing at the same time that it constructs concepts.

This, of course, makes writing a review somewhat pointless, since one of the tasks of the reviewer is to thematize, summarize, or otherwise re-present the work in way that makes obvious its inherent organization or relevance. This ends up taking Desert Islands as a sort of secondary text, a text whose sole function is to be read by the "experienced" Deleuzian scholar or student. Instead, Desert Islands would be better served by a highly idiosyncratic selection of quotes:

"Geographers say there are two kinds of islands . . . . Continental islands are accidental, derived islands. They are separated from a continent . . . . Oceanic islands are originary, essential islands. Some are formed from coral reefs . . . others emerge from underwater eruptions . . . . These two islands, continental and originary, reveal a profound opposition between ocean and island" (9). "Dreaming of islands . . . is dreaming of pulling away, or being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone——or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew" (10). "Hence the fundamental list of the senses of the word planetary: global, itinerant, errancy, planning, platitude, gears and wheels" (75). "Who speaks and who acts? It’s always a multiplicity, even in the person that speaks or acts. We are all groupuscles . . . there is only the action . . . in the relations of relays and networks" (207). "If we look at today’s situation, power necessarily has a global or total vision" (210). "Imperial unity gave birth to philosophical discourse . . . . Philosophical discourse has always maintained an essential relation to the law, the institution, and the contract . . . traversing the ages of sedentary history from despotic formation to democracies" (259). "Whoever reads Nietzsche without laughing, and laughing heartily and often and sometimes hysterically, is almost not reading Nietzsche at all" (257). "An island doesn’t stop being deserted simply because it is inhabited" (10). "The simple is not divided, it differentiates itself. This is the essence of the simple, or the movement of difference" (39).

If anything, the errant quality of Deleuze’s thought points to a largely under-explored aspect of the work of Deleuze and his collaboration with Guattari: geophilosophy. In What is Philosophy?, they write that "thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and earth." Desert Islands takes this further: "Islands are either from before or after humankind" (9). Thus, "the island is also that towards which one drifts" (10).

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