A genuine attempt to think differently, Gilles Deleuze's work challenges, provokes and frustrates. Surprisingly practical as well as innovative, it is now being seen as a "must read" for students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Claire Colebrook's "Understanding Deleuze" offers a comprehensive yet accessible introduction to his work. Deleuze's thinking is built on the notion of an immanent ethics: how can we have a political and ethical theory without some external foundation such as the subject or morality? He argues that the only way we can do this is with a theory of the virtual, and he sees all life (not just cyberculture) as virtual. Deleuze goes further than Foucault or Derrida in questioning the boundaries of the subject and knowledge. For Deleuze perception extends beyond the human, to animals, machines and micro-organisms. Deleuze's writing is challenging and hard to read. Claire Colebrook's primer offers an accessible introduction to the whole Deleuzian oeuvre, including the work he did with Guattari.
Author Biography
Claire Colebrook is Reader in the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is author of New Literary Histories, Ethics and Representation, and Gilles Deleuze, and coeditor with Ian Buchanan of Deleuze and Feminism.
