Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.

This book offers a readable and compelling introduction to the work of one of the twentieth century's most important and elusive thinkers. Other books have tried to explain Deleuze in general terms. Todd May organizes his book around a central question at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy: how might we live? The author then goes on to explain how Deleuze offers a view of the cosmos as a living thing that provides ways of conducting our lives that we may not have dreamed of. Through this approach the full range of Deleuze's philosophy is covered. Offering a lucid account of a highly technical philosophy, Todd May's introduction will be widely read amongst those in philosophy, political science, cultural studies and French studies.

Encounters with Bergson(ism) in Spain: Reconciling Philosophy, Literature, Film and Urban Space

Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty: The Logic and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life, and Perception offers the only full-length examination of the relationships between Deleuze, Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), and Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) succeeded one another as leading voices in French philosophy over a span of 136 years. Their relationship to one another's work involved far more than their overlapping lifetimes. Bergson became both the source of philosophical insight and a focus of criticism for Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Deleuze criticized Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as well as his interest in cognitive and natural science. Author Dorothea Olkowski points out that each of these philosophers situated their thought in relation to their understandings of crucial developments and theories taken up in the history and philosophy of science, and this has been difficult for Continental philosophy to grasp. She articulates the differences between these philosophers with respect to their disparate approaches to the physical sciences and with how their views of science function in relation to their larger philosophical projects. In Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Olkowski examines the critical areas of the structure of time and memory, the structure of consciousness, and the question of humans' relation to nature. She reveals that these philosophers are working from inside one another's ideas and are making strong claims about time, consciousness, reality, and their effects on humanity that converge and diverge. The result is a clearer picture of the intertwined workings of Continental philosophy and its fundamental engagement with the sciences.

The Image of Law is the first book to examine law through the work of Gilles Deleuze, activating his thought within problems of jurisprudence and developing a concept of judgment that acknowledges its inherently creative capacity.

By extending Gilles Deleuze's philosophy through diverse literary tracts, this book develops an account of what it means to be different and enters important contemporary debates about identity and the nature of solitude. At the same time, the book elaborates a limited philosophy. From unusual writings and rare human experiences, James Brusseau forges compelling understandings that scrupulously preserve his subjects' irregularities. The resulting philosophic narrative remains strictly localized; it elucidates narrow bands of experience and refuses broadening generalizations. The book's first section rigorously elaborates Deleuze's pioneering notion of difference. The second part conceives certain individuals as embodying difference and then employs the conception to elude difficulties blocking recent work on subjectivity. Part three combines insights from the first two parts with Isabelle Eberhardt's North African travel journals. In Eberhardt, Brusseau finds sexualities and a solitude that only Deleuze's unique notion of difference can explain. An energetic interaction between philosophy and literature drives this book. Brusseau weaves back and forth between the genres, engaging diverse literatures not only to embody but also to refine his philosophic positions. The literary authors he discusses range from Shakespeare and Fitzgerald to Borges, Bataille, and Eberhardt.