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Gregg Lambert. In Search of a New Image of Thought: Gilles Deleuze and Philosophical Expressionism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. 241 pp.
Gregg Lambert has been something of a star in the expanding scholarship that surrounds the work of Gilles Deleuze, a magnesium flare in the night of interpretation. Lambert's previous books and essays include The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (2003) and The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (2005), both of which stood out for their clarity of thought and expression. Here Lambert uses his concise skills to read a continuity in the enigmatic French philosopher's oeuvre, this continuity being the search for an image of thought. Lambert turns to Deleuze's work on literature and cinema as a way of describing this continuity, that first appears in his 1964 work Proust et les Signes, marking the moment at which a young philosopher begins to look outward beyond the history of ideas taught in the French education system. Deleuze's innovation here is to turn to literature for inspiration, rather than to philosophy, although as Lambert points out, he is no more or less radical than his contemporaries in 1960s France. The difference between Deleuze and his fellow poststructuralists lies in the way that he anticipated a new beginning, rather than marking an end of the philosophical tradition. It is not so much that Deleuze is...