Content area
Full Text
RR 2011/354 The Deleuze Dictionary (Revised edition) Edited by Adrian Parr Edinburgh University Press Edinburgh 2010 vili + 326 pp. ISBN 978 0 7486 4147 5 (hbck); ISBN 978 0 7486 4146 8 (pbck) £70 $90 (hbck); £22.99 $30 (pbck) Available in the US from Columbia University Press
Keywords Dictionaries, Philosophy, Twentieth century
Review DOI 10.1108/09504121111184246
The work and ideas of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), the French philosopher, continues to attract critical attention. His publications range across a wide area - not only philosophy itself, but also in cinema, politics and literature. Probably his best-known work, at least for students of cultural studies, is the book he co-wrote with psychoanalyst Felix Guattari (1930-1992) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (translated into English in 1983). This was the first volume of this work, the second, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia appearing (in translation) in 1987. Deleuze published on Nietzsche (1965), Kant (1983), Bergson (1988), Spinoza (1988), Leibniz (1993), Foucault, Proust, Francis Bacon, cinema and politics and much else. We are dealing, then, with a writer whose work is important and cross-textually complex - ideas bouncing off Kant and Spinoza, drawing on Nietzsche and Foucault, refracted by contemporary and later commentators: in other words, a specialists' specialist.
Edinburgh University Press has developed a distinctive list on Deleuze over the years, as the series generally edited by Ian Buchanan reveals. It includes studies of Deleuze and contemporary art, ethics, feminist theory, geophilosophy, history, literature, music, new technology, and performance. So it is logical for the same publisher to issue a companion or dictionary to Deleuze: the first edition of this dictionary appeared in 2005, and this revised edition was published in 2010 (in both hardback and paperback). The differences between the editions consist mainly in some expanded entries on architecture and cinema/film and cultural studies (with some things taken out), an updated bibliography (reflecting the vigour throughout the world of research into Deleuze), and more cross-references. As Clare Colebrook (herself the author of several important studies in this field) notes in the short introduction to the dictionary, such cross-references provide a key...