Reviews for Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives

The average rating for Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-09-21 00:00:00 Michael Woodruff Deleuze was resistant to biographical accounts of his life, saying "academics' lives are seldom interesting"--well I disagree with Deleuze on several à la mode problematics, including this one. Dosse's biography is interesting. You get to know Deleuze and Guattari very well over the 500+ pages of Intersecting Lives. Deleuze comes across especially well. He is patient, courteous, hard working--a loyal friend & an assiduous teacher--erudite, creative and brilliant. There may be a slight bias here, on my part or the author's, but I admired Deleuze immensely when I put this biography down. Guattari is more uneven; a disputatious womanizer who's personal life didn't always live up to his lofty revolutionary ideals, but none the less impressive, dynamic & indefatigable. We get to know Guattari as a flawed man but a tireless political militant and energetic & original thinker, finally illuminated from the pitch-black expanses of Deleuze's intellectual shadow--Dosse portrays Guattari as his co-author's equal. The bricolage of their influence too-often overlooks Guattari and is tabulated merely as 'Deleuzianism'. More to the point there are long bibliographies of Deleuze & Guattari's influences--itineraries of the books they read and how they read them. The itemizations of intertextual encounters are the most interesting parts of the book. Further, this is a good companion not only to the Deleuze & Guattari ouvre, but the entire 20th century French political / philosophical milieu. There are extended treatments of Lacan, Foucault, Badiou, the New Philosophers and many others. The last few chapters investigating the global legacy & influence of D&G provide many lines of flight for readers to follow. But the biography itself has limitations. Dosse's long readings of Deleuze and Guattari's texts will not be for everyone--I was at odds with several of his interpretations. And I got impatient with the surplus of detail on the harlequin retinues of French communist cells surrounding Guattari; the back-and-forth of their snide in-fighting can become at times violently boring. I was also hoping for more information on the co-authorship of the Capitalism & Schizophrenia books and was disappointed by the scarcity of detail on their writing process. But it's well researched and fun to read, if perhaps a little too long. Probably not essential but recommended to any reader of Deleuze & Guattari.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-14 00:00:00 Linda Gall How does one write a book when one is more than one, when one is a multiplicity? This is one of the questions that the assembled partnership of Deleuze and Guattari brings to the fore. The answer, it would seem, is thrpugh letters. Dosse's work sketches out the lives of these two thinkers, as well as providing general overviews of their works (both together and individually). What earns this work its encomiums is how it drags Guattari out from the oblivion that many thinkers and writers have lost him in by mentioning only Deleuze. Dosse does a wonderful job of unearthing how many of the conceptual whirlwinds that rage throughout Capitalism and Schizophrenia were brought forth by Félix and not Gilles. Guattari and his thinking profoundly affected Deleuze and set his already creative philosophy down a multiplicity of lines of flight.