Deleuze: A Critical Reader

Review: Gilles Deleuze -- the eye of the Outside
--Two years after the death of French theorist Gilles Deleuze, fourteen critic-philosophers sync down together to scale his rich oeuvre. They have sensed him well, for this reader is exhilarated and renewed, having been returned to cognition more violently. My dog-eared volumes of Deleuze have spine-rolled even further since obtaining the essays in this anthology.
--Deleuze chose to refer to his canon as "nomadology" (a pun on Leibniz's "monadology": a theory of discrete particles), the ordering of nomadic perception and discernment, a non-totalizing heretic force or "eye of the Outside." The essays compiled in DELEUZE: A CRITICAL READER travel compulsively in their attempt to match the speed and strangeness of their subject (Deleuze's writings are beautifully difficult), allowing his philosophy to stand at breadth. The Deleuzian source-code is located in a sweep of precursors, ranging from the expected (Spinoza, Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, Foucault) to the more secular (Melville, Proust, Baudelaire, Peguy, the painter Francis Bacon). Each essay asserts itself in the grand manner, passionate and knowing yet without the maudlin knee-tribute we find in so much recent Foucault criticism.
--I can only say that we are witnessing a megatrend here. This compilation can only be the first of an extended post-millenial critical sequence devoted to Gilles Deleuze, the strongest and most original philosopher since Wittgenstein.