Y Kant Nick Read?

The scintillating and bookwise Dr. S posted a comment to my last entry in which she heartily recommended a new book by Jonathan Safran Foer (I assume she means this one). I'd love to read it; I'd love to read everything. Sadly, as you watch the titles drop like flies from that "On My Nightstand" roll-call in the right-hand margin, you'd be wrong to get the idea that I am finishing these tomes. Great Expectations started deliciously, and my long-distance love-button and I were trying to read it in tandem, but he lapped me a long time ago and I can't catch up.

I have been relishing The Divine Husband by Francisco Goldman even more. It's a tantalizing, perversely embellished, and wittily historical story about two young novitiate nuns in 19th-century Guatemala and their rebellious libidos, acrid jealousies, religious confusions, and their intersections with various real-life characters from that volatile moment in Central American history. If I'm making it sound dry, it isn't. Read the first page or two, and you're in. But I'm still having the Jabba problem, so I haven't picked it up again in three weeks.

The one book I did finish recently was another academic read, D.N. Rodowick's Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (pictured above), which is a sort of graduated explication of Deleuze's theories of film, as propounded in his pair of famous Cinema books. Rodowick is a more than reliable Virgil if you're still trying to keep all of Deleuze's dazzling but dizzying categories straight in your mind; at the same time, it's not the kind of book you can read instead of the Cinema volumes, because Rodowick's translations and expansions already assume that you've made your own first pass through Deleuze (even if it was a slightly bewildered one, which, c'mon, is likely). So, I recommend the book, but it's kind of got limited appeal.

Plus it's not what you wanna take with you on Spring Break. If I had my druthers right now, I'd sail through the rest of Divine Husband and quench my desire to read a good play, which I haven't done in a while: piling up in my living room, I've got Jean Genet's The Screens (think The Battle of Algiers as staged by Artaud), John Guare's Landscape of the Body (a personal fave of Tony Kushner, apparently), and the collected works of Maria Irene Fornès. With the Pulitzer announcements just around the corner, I always get a hankering to read good plays. They're amazing, and they're short.

What's everyone else reading?

A Philosophical High

All this Oscar-watching can make a person feel a little shallow, especially in the midst of international disarray, the looming "deadline" for Iraqi "elections," the Senate Democrats' debates over Condi, the contentious anniversary of Roe v. Wade (marked by new, severe, and unprecedentedly perverse laws being introduced for discussion in state and federal legislatures), and any number of weightier topics of conversation. And then, since it always comes back to me—it's my party, and I'll self-obsess if I want to—I've still got a dissertation to finish, somehow, someway, amidst wondering whether Cate, Virginia, or Natalie will be declared the year's Best Supporting Actress. (My money is currently on Virginia.)

So, to the rescue comes Ian Buchanan's Deleuzism, a monograph from the Duke University Press that attempts to make an "-ism" out of Deleuze the way people already have out of Marx, Freud, and comparably copious philosophers. Holding Deleuze on a level with those thinkers is already an implicit value claim on the book's and the subject's behalf, and one of which I totally approve. If you're new to Deleuze, he was a French philosopher and critic who virulently opposed transcendental systems like Freud's or Marx's that attempted to construe all of human history and activity through a single model of behavior, psychology, or politics. Deleuze, in his own work and in several scholarly collaborations, focused his ideas around the paradigmatic figure of the "schizophrenic" (as opposed to Freud's Oedipus or Marx's worker), not just in the medical-diagnostic sense of a divided personality but in the sense most of us understand of moving through a world of profound divergences, irregularities, and discontinuities, even within our everyday thoughts, routines, and world impressions. Deleuze's system emphasizes the ceaseless iterations of difference in the world, believing that they supersede any false ideas of the stable personality/subject or of massive Marxian or Freudian-type systems with which we falsely attempt to bring a sense of order and conformity to a world of infinite and tumultuous variation.

For that reason, Deleuze opposed the whole notion of his work as a system, even a self-disrupting one. What Buchanan does so nicely in this book, however, is to situate Deleuze as both a predictor and a participant in postmodern theory and as an intellectual compatriot (despite lots of denials, including Deleuze's own) of Hegel, Benjamin, and other dialecticians of history. The implications of Buchanan's reading not only help to explain Deleuze to readers who struggle with his work, but it elucidates several ways in which Deleuze's work might helpfully serve or "apply" in other critical, analytical, or intellectual projects, even though there's no single method or ideology imposed by Deleuze's work that seems to make this possible. I love the book and plan to draw on it extensively in my own dissertation. If any of y'all reading this blog are into a good scholarly head-exercise every now and then (esp. a 200-page, fairly quick read), I hope you'll consider this one.

Oscar and Deleuze. Schizophrenia indeed.