Gilles Deleuze: Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974 (2002/2004)

“‘One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian,’ Michel Foucault once wrote. This book anthologizes 40 texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who died in 1995. The early texts, from 1953-1966 (on Rousseau, Kafka, Jarry, etc.), belong to literary criticism and announce Deleuze’s last book, Critique and Clinic (1993). But philosophy clearly predominates in the rest of the book, with sharp appraisals of the thinkers he always felt indebted to: Spinoza, Bergson. More surprising is his acknowledgement of Jean-Paul Sartre as his master. ‘The new themes, a certain new style, a new aggressive and polemical way of raising questions,’ he wrote, ‘come from Sartre.’ But the figure of Nietzsche remains by far the most seminal, and the presence throughout of his friends and close collaborators, Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault. The book stops shortly after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, and presents a kind of genealogy of Deleuze’s thought as well as his attempt to leave philosophy and connect it to the outside—but, he cautions, as a philosopher.”

Originally published by Les editions de Minuit, Paris, 2002.

Edited by David Lapoujade
Translated by Mike Taormina
Publisher Semiotext(e), 2004
Foreign Agents series
ISBN 1584350180, 9781584350187
323 pages

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François Laruelle: Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-philosophy (1986/2010)

A crucial text in the development of François Laruelle’s oeuvre and an excellent starting point for understanding his broader project, Philosophies of Difference offers a theoretical and critical analysis of the philosophers of difference after Hegel and Nietzsche. Laruelle then uses this analysis to introduce a new theoretical practice of non-philosophical thought.

Rather than presenting a narrative historical overview, Laruelle provides a series of rigorous critiques of the various interpretations of difference in Hegel, Nietzsche and Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida. From Laruelle’s innovative theoretical perspective, the forms of philosophical difference that emerge appear as variations upon a unique, highly abstract structure of philosophical decision, the self-posing and self-legitimating essence of philosophy itself. Reconceived in terms of philosophical decision, the seemingly radical concept of philosophical difference is shown to configure rather the identity of philosophy as such, which thus becomes manifest as a contingent and no longer absolute form of thinking. The way is thereby opened for initiating a new form of thought, anticipated here with the development of a key notion of non-philosophy, the Vision-in-One.

Originally published in French as Les philosophies de la difference Univeritaires de France, 1986
Translated by Rocco Gangle
Publisher Continuum Intl Pub Group, 2010
ISBN 0826436633, 9780826436634
228 pages

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Raymond G. Stokes: Constructing Socialism: Technology and Change in East Germany, 1945-1990 (2000)

With a cloud of blue smoke and a high-pitched whine, Trabant cars carried many East Germans westward after the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989. The car’s 1950s design, obvious environmental incorrectness, and all-plastic body became a symbol of the technological limitations of East German communism. Though unfair and oversimplified, the famous image from the early 1990s of the rear of a Trabi protruding from a dumpster seemed to imply that the car, like the system which had produced it, had been consigned to the dustbin of history.

But as Raymond G. Stokes points out in Constructing Socialism, eastern Germany in 1945 was one of the most highly developed, technologically sophisticated industrial areas in the world. Despite the evident failings of its technology by the late 1980s, the German Democratic Republic maintained advanced technological capability in selected areas. If the system itself was fundamentally flawed, what explains successes under the very same system? Why could the successes not be repeated in other areas? And if examples of success are so isolated, how did East Germany last as long as it did?

To answer these questions, Constructing Socialism examines the system of innovation that delivered some minimal level of technological excellence into the East German economy and industry. Focusing on success rather than failure, Stokes offers a general history of East German technology between 1945 and 1990. He combines an overview and synthesis of emerging scholarly literature with an examination of newly opened archival material in order to explore issues that include automation, standardization, technology transfer and technological tourism, and espionage.Constructing Socialism investigates specific technologies and machines but also emphasizes the people who designed and implemented them and the cultural context and meanings of technological systems.

Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000
Johns Hopkins studies in the history of technology
ISBN 0801863910, 9780801863912
260 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)