Publications

Since I've been asked, list subscribers might be interested these new books:

Philip Goodchild, Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy
     Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996
     London: Associated University Press.  On sale.  I don't know the $.

Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of 
Desire
     London, Thousand Oaks CA, New Delhi: Sage, due September 1996.

Briefly,
GD and QP:
     attempts to uncover the image of thought used by Deleuze by focusing on 
the question, 'What is philosophy?', posed implicitly throughout Deleuze 
publications.  It traces the development of a highly sophisticated, 
coherent, and rigorous practice of thought that underlies Deleuze's 
apparently flamboyant and anarchic discourse.
     This question of philosophy is posed in the context of an awareness of 
the historical, social and cultural conditioning of a plurality of 
rationalities that bring into question the value of the philosophical 
enterprise as a whole.  Deleuze meets this problem by identifying something 
'unthought' and 'unthinkable' that conditions the way in which people do in 
fact think, and by directing philosophy toward this as its transcendental 
field.
     This work explores in detail three strategies: the laying out of planes 
of immanence, the tracing of lines of flight, and the construction of 
crystals; it also draws out Deleuze's conceptual personages, so that he 
thinks as a schizophrenic, a masochist, or a sorcerer.
     In conclusion, this book examines Deleuze's deepest metaphysical 
presuppositions and finds that, while a certain kind of materialism pervades 
Deleuze's thought, the practice of that thought also presupposes a kind of 
metaphysics of creative awareness, where planes, lines, and crystals are 
folded onto each other in a 'fractal of philosophy'.  The result is an 
escape from the dead ends of postmodern thought.

______________________________________________________________

D and G: An Intro:

     Deleuze and Guattari conceive of nature, society and thought as a 
relational ecology.  Following an empiricist insight, relations are regarded 
as external to their terms, or unconscious - while our relations themselves 
do not know, act or desire, they enable us to know, act and desire, and, 
indeed, are events of knowing, acting and desiring.  This book sets out to 
introduce Deleuze and Guattari's thought by exploring the possibilities of 
relation on such an ecological plane.

     Charting the emergence of key concepts to describe such an immanent 
social unconscious - difference, force, deterritorialization, becoming, 
desire, assemblage, abstract machine, plane of immanence - Goodchild 
explores the kind of knowledge appropriate for this unconscious, its 
ultimate metaphysical presuppositions, its expression through concepts, and 
its use of paradox and humour to encapsulate implicit meaning.

     Turning to the formation of power in capitalist societies through the 
structuring of thought and desire, Goodchild then explains the role of 
Oedipus in psychic and social repression.  Deleuze and Guattari's thought is 
differentiated from
contemporaneous intellectual movements that also attempt to liberate 
thought, since it escapes the human strata of subjectivity, language, and 
organization to an 'outside' that functions as an immanent unconscious.

     The liberation of desire, regarded as a cultural and aesthetic 
revolution to be brought about by a collective reconfiguration of work 
together with a creation of new ways of evaluating, is explored as an 
emergent society that enfolds and engulfs
capitalist repression.  The essence of such a utopian society is an ethos or 
style of
friendship - as manifested in Deleuze and Guattari's intellectual relation.

_____________________________________________________________

Aden,
     The excerpt is from the latter book.  I learned Deleuze solely from his 
texts - well, my PhD was at Lancaster University, UK, supervised by John 
Milbank and Paul Morris in a dept of Religion.  I now teach at a small 
college, the University College of St Martin, Lancaster, UK.  There's 
further embarrassing biographical details on the back of the first book.

Phil

p.goodchild@xxxxxxxxxx

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