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Literature holds a privileged place in Deleuze's works. Not only is it the art that most clearly reveals his aesthetics, but it also serves as the laboratory of his thought, the space where he experiments with concepts that become part of his ongoing philosophical project. In this brilliant analyses of Deleuze's texts on Proust, Sacher-Masoch, Kafka, Carmelo Bene, Melville and Beckett, Pombo Nabais traces the development of Deleuze's aesthetics across three distinct periods of his thought: the transcendental empiricism of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense; the philosophy of Nature of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus; and the philosophy of Spirit of The Fold, What Is Philosophy? and Essays Critical and Clinical. More than a simple account of Deleuze's literary theory and aesthetics, this book offers a provocative and original reading of Deleuze's entire philosophy, highlighting the question of modality (the actual, the virtual, the possible, the impossible and the incompossible), the problematic relationship between the event and the assemblage, and the unifying theme of the vitalism of nonorganic life.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Preface by Jacques Rancière
Translator's Preface by Ronald Bogue
General Introduction: Toward a Cartography of Art
Part One: Toward A Cartography of Art
Introduction: Four, Three, Two
Chapter One: The Proust of 1964. Toward a Kantian Theory of Literature
Chapter Two: Sacher-Masoch: From the Phantasm to the Event
Chapter Three: The Proust of 1970. The Literary Machine
Chapter Four. The Proust of 1973. The Madness of the Narrator
Part Two: Kafka and Bene: The Power of Literature
Chapter Five: Kafka-Of the Real in Order to Have Done with the Law and the Imagination
Chapter Six: Carmelo Bene and the Real of Less
Chapter Seven: Event and Assemblage: The Statement and the Haecceity
Part Three: Beckett and Melville: The Possibility of Literature
Introduction: From Power to the Possible
Chapter Eight: Art as Spiritualization of the Possible
Chapter Nine: Bartleby, or the Formula of the Incompossible
Chapter Ten: Beckett and the Exhaustion of the Possible
Conclusion: The Deleuzian Vitalist Chaosmos
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Catarina Pombo Nabais is a Researcher at the Department of History and Philosophy of Sciences, Faculty of Sciences, University of Lisbon and at the Center for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon.
Summary
This book offers a provocative and original reading of Deleuze’s entire philosophy, highlighting the question of modality (the actual, the virtual, the possible, the impossible and the incompossible), the problematic relationship between the event and the assemblage, and the unifying theme of the vitalism of nonorganic life.
