This volume, part of the "Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism" series, sets out with a rather ambitious, yet wonderfully clear, dual goal: to help us understand literary modernism _better_ through the lens of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy, and equally, to help us understand Deleuze _better_ by seeing how his thought intertwines with literary modernism. Isn't that a neat idea? Instead of just looking at one in isolation, we see how they shed light on each other, revealing unexpected overlaps, folds, and cross-pollinations. The series, and this book on Deleuze specifically, positions itself amidst current reassessments of modernism and modernity. You know how critics are constantly revisiting historical periods, seeing them in new ways? Well, here, modernism isn't just treated as a fixed period in linear literary history anymore. It's being rethought through "new historicisms," "presentism," and viewed from multiple perspectives. This has led to critics suggesting all sorts of "new" or alternative modernisms – postcolonial, cosmopolitan, transatlantic, transnational, geomodernism, and even "bad" modernisms. This process isn't just about reclassifying texts; it involves rethinking fundamental philosophical ideas like epistemology (how we know things), ontology (the nature of being), aesthetics (the nature of beauty and art), metaphysics (abstract concepts like being or knowing), materialism, and history itself. This opens up possibilities for rethinking not only _which_ texts are considered modernist but also _how_ we read them. The book dives right into this exciting plurality of discourses. So, what makes Deleuze such a crucial figure for this exploration? As Michel Foucault famously (and perhaps provocatively!) suggested, "Perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian". That's quite a statement, isn't it? The sources tell us that Deleuze, both in his solo work and his collaborations with Félix Guattari, didn't just summarize philosophy or art; he challenged and reconstructed it, restaging philosophers like Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, and Bergson, and reinventing the story of modern and modernist literature, plastic arts, music, and film. His work has had a profound impact on cultural production and philosophical thought. Foucault saw his work, particularly _Difference and Repetition_ and _The Logic of Sense_, as so outstanding that they might define the century. Even if Deleuze considered this a joke, publishers certainly capitalized on it. This highlights the significant influence his ideas, like the critique of power, have had. The book has a clear and accessible structure, designed to welcome both those new to Deleuze and seasoned scholars looking for fresh perspectives. It follows a tripartite structure, like the volume on Henri Bergson in the same series. **Part One: Conceptualizing Deleuze** This section is all about getting to grips with Deleuze's core ideas. It offers close readings of some of his most important works, both solo ventures and those written with Guattari. The aim here isn't just to summarize, but to provide new readings that illuminate and expand current understandings of his work. Contributors explore his texts in the context of his entire body of work and sometimes even challenge his readings of other philosophers. Crucially, these essays also connect these philosophical texts to how we think about modernism, politics, aesthetics, and life itself. Let's peek at some of the specific works covered in this section: - _**Capitalism and Schizophrenia**_ (Volume 1: _Anti-Oedipus_ and Volume 2: _A Thousand Plateaus_): These two volumes, written with Guattari, are described as a "magnum opus". The discipline they call schizoanalysis is explored as an explanation for how genius emerges, driven by desire, not just in art but also in thinking, feeling, and behavior. The sources highlight their critique of psychoanalysis, particularly the "daddy-mommy-me" Oedipal account, arguing that desire is essentially "homeless" and achieves breakthroughs by jamming existing systems. Isn't that an interesting way to think about creativity and change – as a kind of deliberate breakdown? Desire makes its entry when we collapse the question "What does it mean?". They suggest that art and literature achieve "authentic modernity" when they pose the question of _use_ rather than meaning, treating a work like a "machine, producing certain effects, amenable to a certain use". This doesn't mean language is a technical machine; rather, meanings are assembled retroactively from "particles which do not mean anything but simply function" at a "molecular" level. This suggests a dismantling or re-engineering of the conventional system of meaning. - _A Thousand Plateaus_ introduces the concept of extensive and intensive multiplicities, differentiating between the permanent tension of arborescent structures (like a tree, with roots and hierarchy) and the rhizome (a decentralized, non-hierarchical network), or the organism and the body without organs, the apparatus of capture and the war machine. The concept of multiplicity itself is presented as crucial to Deleuze's philosophy, replacing the metaphysical concept of essence. Unlike a unified, timeless essence, a multiplicity has a variable number of dimensions, is never given all at once, unfolds through progressive differentiation, and exists as a "work in progress" in duration and time. Multiplicities are concrete and form the "plane of immanence," being immanent to each other, not transcendent. - Related to this is the concept of becoming, often characterized as an ontology of becoming that critiques philosophies of being. Becoming is tied to the shift from "to be" to "and," focusing on process over form. There are various types of becoming, like becoming-woman, becoming-child, becoming-animal, and becoming-imperceptible. Becoming isn't imitation but entering a zone of molecular proximity to make transformation possible. Becoming has temporality (duration) and the capacity to form assemblages. - Becoming-minoritarian is particularly relevant politically. It's seen as tautological because _all_ becomings are minoritarian; the majority represents a state of power and domination, a static position that isn't becoming. Becoming-minoritarian tries to cross boundaries and invent new molecular forms. This links closely to the notion of minor literature. - _**Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature**_: Written between the two volumes of _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_, this book explores how to "enter into" Kafka's work. Kafka's writing is described as a "rhizome, a burrow," and the focus should be on its map and how it changes depending on the entry point. Their "enemy" here is the "freezing of understanding," introducing "the Signifier" and interpretation attempts instead of allowing experimentation. The book develops concepts from _Anti-Oedipus_ (desire) and looks forward to _A Thousand Plateaus_ (rhizome as image of thought). It introduces key concepts like "assemblage" and "minor literature" and discusses their political implications. Reading Kafka is viewed as a "productive use of the literary machine" to extract its "revolutionary force". - Reading and writing are seen as interconnected parts of a "literary machine". Deleuze and Guattari draw ideas from diverse fields and avoid methodological straightjackets, objecting to interpretations that impose a pre-existing theory. Instead, they focus on how a work _works_, insisting their "literary machine" concept works specifically _for Kafka_. They argue that a writer's individual struggles are instantly connected to a wider social and cultural terrain, like symptoms of larger problems. Kafka's writing is seen as grappling with the problems of when a statement is new and when a new assemblage appears. This links to the destruction of convention and breaking habits of thought. A statement also functions as a convention or command within a social machine. The emphasis on "sound" indicates how producing the new involves components of expression outside representation. Kafka's work is a "watch that moves forward," recording new collective assemblages like capitalism, Stalinism, and fascism inserting themselves into older ones. This connection isn't utopian but shows a "contiguous future" – hearing the sound of it in the present. It shows a movement from paranoid law to schizo law. The procedure of contiguity and continuity is the condition of Kafka's writing, explaining its unfinished quality and demand for ongoing reading. Their approach to Kafka exemplifies their method of constructing problems using questions like "who? how much? how? where? when?" rather than "What is...?". The Kafka they create is a construction, linked to the formation of new problems and concepts for their philosophy. - _**Proust and Signs**_: This early work is seen as a departure from Deleuze's historical studies of philosophers, instead engaging with a novelist to bring out the _philosophical implications of literary thought_. It argues that Proust's novel _In Search of Lost Time_ isn't primarily about memory but about the "apprenticeship of signs". The sources suggest that Proust's presence throughout Deleuze's later works shows philosophy's "debt to literary practice," especially regarding style, perspective, and the "violence that 'forces us to think'". - Fascinatingly, _Proust and Signs_ is described as a "virtual introduction" to key Deleuzian concepts, but embedded in a Proustian context. Notions like essences, the image of thought, sets and wholes, lost and pure time, and the problems explored in _Essays Critical and Clinical_ all appear here in nascent forms. Reading the book reveals how Deleuze's concepts manifest in series, each instance different, making a simple amalgamation impossible. It's like tracing the recurring melodies in a complex piece of music, each time slightly different but recognizable. Deleuze, as a reader of Proust, becomes a "seeker of truth, an interpreter of signs," potentially even falling in love with the work. His reading of Proust highlights the fragmented selves within the individual, revealing the "irreducible multiplicity of Deleuze as thinker". This encounter with literature happens at a deep level of difference. Proust's novel acts as a "partial object" that fertilizes the literary writer within the philosopher, while the novel gains by making its wide range of concepts visible. It even critiques a totalizing Logos. This book continues to "bear fruit," complicating how we read Deleuze. - The distinction between the virtual and the actual, which Deleuze develops significantly, is found and partly inspired by his engagements with Proust, particularly involuntary memory. Proust's critique of Bergsonian voluntary memory exemplifies the "original and internal difference that is fundamental to experience," which is compatible with Bergson's ontological stance. This reading allows for an "immanent criticism" of Bergsonian time, freeing it from charges of subjectivism. - _**Difference and Repetition**_: Often considered his masterwork, this metaphysical treatise is central to understanding Deleuze. Near the end, Deleuze makes a striking claim: "The theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image". The sources explain that this means the theory of thought needs to become _modernist_. This isn't just a metaphor; it's a functional way to approach Deleuze's method in the book. Framing _Difference and Repetition_ as a work of abstract art is key to its methodological gestures. This revolutionary shift from representation to abstraction involves a new conception of the philosophical concept and reconfigures the philosopher's position. It's about developing a philosophical style adequate to thinking immanence. - Reading _Difference and Repetition_ is described as difficult, like hitting a wall, but a different kind of wall than Kant or Hegel. The sources detail its unique characteristics: it operates like dreamwork (condensation, displacement), uses collage (fragments of other thinkers repeated alogically), employs a philosophical free-indirect discourse (unclear whose concept it is), poses problems whose sense isn't immediately apparent, creates its own unusual citational world (Duns Scotus and Jacques Monod together!), asks readers to take metaphors literally and statements metaphorically, and crucially, refuses an authoritative position outside the text, cultivating a "radical perspectivism". Many of these techniques – collage, deformation, decontextualization, defamiliarization – are called specifically modernist. Their function is to disrupt the reader's habits and expectations, disorienting rather than orienting, creating a world without others, annihilating cliché, and derailing recognition. This "stylistic violence" is crucial to how the text works. - The book explicitly foregrounds the problem of philosophical style, demanding a new style beyond the "old style," a search begun by Nietzsche. This involves making metaphysics move, act directly, substituting "direct signs for mediate representations," inventing movements (vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances, leaps) that directly touch the mind. This is a call to break with representation not just as a concept, but _at the level of philosophical style_. This demand is tied to the task of thinking immanence. Nietzsche, who pursued immanence, provides the model of a philosopher artist attached to "this world" and its senses. Deleuze's style mobilizes a new concept grounded in acts, merging with the "violence of intensity" rather than the calm of representation. Ignoring the text's difficulty means erasing this basic methodological gesture. - The book also explores the question of how a reader might respond to such a text that resists coherence. One itinerary described links the faculties (sensibility, imagination, memory, thought), starting with sensibility and following a fixed order. - _**Bergsonism**_: Deleuze's book on Henri Bergson is highlighted as a notable example of him engaging with modernist philosophers. Bergson is seen as key to many modernist writers, though his significance has been overshadowed by Freudian theories. Deleuze's book reclaims Bergson as a modernist philosopher, resulting in a kind of "creative ventriloquism". - The book returns to Bergson's thought in terms of intuition (posing problems), the division between science and metaphysics, and rethinking scientific problems temporally. It maps where Deleuze "embellishes or diverges from Bergson's texts," especially on memory and the virtual/actual. Deleuze's method of intuition is intertwined with the evolution of life as Bergson conceived it. The book also aligns Bergson's project with a Spinozist understanding of nature, revealing that life and consciousness can create but also suffer alienation through habit. - The most significant departure is the relation between the virtual and the actual, which Deleuze develops further in _Difference and Repetition_. Reading Bergson's _Matter and Memory_, Deleuze distinguishes between ontological memory (the virtual coexistence of memory levels, the pure being of the past) and psychological memory (translating into present action). This recognition of a difference in kind, rather than degree (memory as weakened perception), rethinks the nature of time. Time isn't just a succession of moments, but the _virtual coexistence_ of present and past. The past is seen as ontologically prior to the present. Deleuze's reading of a specific passage and metaphor in _Matter and Memory_ affirms his ontological concept of memory, even suggesting it wasn't fully formulated by Bergson himself. He reads the unifying arc of Bergson's later work back onto the earlier observations. - ***What is Philosophy?***: This final collaboration with Guattari is seen as a return to earlier themes, like Nietzsche's eternal return (repetition with a difference) and Bergson's critique of the concept. They are described as "folding the static outlier concept as conceived by Bergson within the process and multiplicity of thought". Isn't that a powerful image – the dynamic folds of process encompassing the seemingly fixed concept? - The book explores the image of thought, the problem of the one and the multiple (taken up by Beckett), the idiot ("who discovers in thought the inability to think"), and sensibilia. It's described as above all, "a performance of philosophy," philosophy become affect. - Deleuze and Guattari rethink history not as a causal sequence but as becoming, as multiplicity. They offer alternative histories. The book takes a historical arc, a genealogy like geology or stratification, producing multiple layers and plateaus. There's no single perspective or dominant history, but histories and multiplicities. - They contrast their view of the concept with Hegel (situated in subjectivity, created through consciousness) and Bergson (general or abstract idea). For them, the concept is situated within immanence, becoming, life, and movement. It needs "conceptual personae" or friends to determine its moment and circumstances. Philosophy is seen in its Greek etymology, not as loving wisdom, but as a "friend of wisdom," seeking but not possessing it. This marks philosophy as a Greek encounter and returns to Nietzsche's idea of a friend as a "third person in between 'I' and 'me'," suggesting a state of "in betweenness". - They critique contemporary appropriations of the concept by social sciences, computers, and marketers, seeing it as a "most shameful moment" where Critique is replaced by sales promotion. Marketing appropriates the concept, and advertising presents itself as the conceiver. Their enterprise, pedagogy, is situated "in between" material culture and metaphysics, a critique of creation conditions as singular moments of perpetual disruption and change. - The chapter "What is a Concept?" doesn't define it but opens and problematizes it. Concepts are inseparable from problems, which preexist the concept, meaning concepts aren't foundational. They explore the problem of subject and object, the self and another, and the plurality of subjects. "The other" is a concept with three components: a possible world, an existing face, and a real language. Concepts relate to others in history, becoming, and present connections; they extend infinitely and aren't created from nothing. A concept is absolute as a whole but relative as fragmentary. - The book explores the relationship between philosophy, science (particularly "Royal, positivist, or major science"), and art as creative responses to chaos. Science gives up infinite speed for reference (functions, functives) to actualize the virtual in space and time for prediction. Philosophy retains infinite speeds to gain consistency, giving the virtual a specific consistency on a plane of immanence. Science works on a plane of reference, philosophy on a plane of immanence or consistency. Concepts have inseparable variations, functions have independent variables. - They discuss the role of the observer, moving from determinism to Heisenberg's uncertainty, seeing the latter as a "truth of the relative" rather than relativity of truth. A partial observer's experiences/perceptions aren't localized in a subject but "belong to the thing studied," invoking Bertrand Russell's sensibilia. For Deleuze and Guattari, this suggests a "nonsubjective observer," finding manifestation in the "time image" of _Cinema 2_. Conceptual personae are seen as philosophical sensibilia. - Propositions are discussed as "prospects" with informational value, limiting becoming. States of affairs, objects, bodies, and lived states (actualities) form the function's reference, while events are the concept's consistency. - When discussing art, their performance "soars". Art "preserves," establishing independence as a "bloc of sensations". Percepts aren't perceptions, affects aren't feelings; they are "beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived". Artworks are beings of sensations existing in themselves, whose action is not memory but fabulation. Great writers create these beings of sensation, like the percept of a landscape before man. Affects are "nonhuman becomings of man," percepts are "nonhuman landscapes of nature". Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes, becoming animal, plant, molecular, zero. Percepts and affects are created on a plane of composition, a corollary to the plane of immanence. The book is both expository and performative, a saying and a staging where authors disappear into performance, becoming text, a bloc of sensations, philosophy become affect. - _**Essays Critical and Clinical**_: This final book is suggested to be read as a "whole," not just a collection, drawing on Walt Whitman's idea of constructing a whole from fragments. Deleuze's work in this book is seen as echoing and answering the forms and methods of the writers he discusses. The relationship between philosophy and literature here is always "in relation to life". - The book returns to the theme of a "literature of health". It interrogates the idea of form and creates a new concept linking form directly to life and becoming: the procedure and the formula. The procedure follows the process of emergence, linked to life as becoming. The formula is linked to formation, suggesting technical means of training subjects for social formations. - In an essay on Louis Wolfson, a schizophrenic writer, Deleuze discusses the "procedure" as inventing a new language based on rules to annihilate the oppressive mother tongue. While Wolfson's work might be a curiosity, it allows Deleuze to explain the nature of the procedure, where writing is governed by transformation rules, seen also in Roussel and Brisset. Deleuze suggests this "schizophrenic vocation" haunts American literature, like Melville inventing a foreign language beneath English. Terms like "schizophrenic" and "psychosis" are used as concepts floating free of real conditions. "America" becomes a concept of literary production. American writing, like Whitman's, recognizes fragments and draws external relations to construct a whole, applicable to modernist literature's engagement with fragmentary reality and experience. These explorations in Part One provide the philosophical foundation for the book's subsequent discussions. **Part Two: Aesthetics** This section maps the relationships between Deleuze's thought and modernist literature through new research. Essays identify key modernist trends and offer readings of specific authors and texts. It looks closely at the connection, arguing that modernist writers served as examples for Deleuze's concepts and that their philosophically inflected writings are central to understanding Deleuze's thought itself. Some authors and connections explored include: - **Thomas Hardy:** Connected to a network of stylistic affects important for reading Hardy and other modernists like Woolf, Powys, Lawrence, and Proust, who followed their own paths of individuation or "lines of flight". - **Virginia Woolf:** Highlighted as important in Deleuze's ontological mappings and literary aesthetics, positioned as a "distinctly philosophical writer". Deleuze's interest indicates their mutual concern with "material reality that is entangled with that which is outside the 'human'". Both offer a non-anthropocentric worldview and attention to "nonhuman entanglements". - _The Waves_ and _Mrs. Dalloway_ are significant for Deleuze. _The Waves_' rhythmic interludes articulate the mixing of internal and external worlds, including nonhuman "vibrations". An entry from Woolf's diary, where she seeks to "saturate every atom," is almost seen as a philosophical concept by Deleuze and Guattari, used to conceptualize "haecceities" or worldly assemblages, eliminating resemblance and analogy but putting everything into the moment. This connects to conceptualizing molecular movements on the "plane of consistency," dealing with particles defined by movement/rest/speed/slowness, and material-semiotic assemblages where things and relations aren't distinct. Understanding Spinoza's influence on Deleuze also helps understand his readings of Woolf and broader modernist themes of nature, animality, and immanent life. - **D. H. Lawrence:** Deleuze's attraction to Lawrence is linked to the "eruption of animality in a post-Darwinian era and the particular becomings-animal that era cultivates". His reading of Lawrence is tied to dance as enactments of becoming-animal. Dance is seen as a "creaturely or inhuman" aesthetic form, and inhuman dancerly becomings in modernist literature are "charged minoritarian zones of metamorphosis". Lawrence is also listed among "Strange Anglo-American literature" considered superior to French literature by Deleuze and Guattari (except Proust and Artaud). - **Henry Miller:** Also in the list of "Strange Anglo-American literature," Miller's work is positioned as a bridge between Anglo-American and European literary traditions. It's argued that Deleuze and Guattari don't fully account for how Miller's focus on the processual, productive, and schizophrenic nature of literature (creating a counterfeit self) aligns with European modernism. Discussing Miller's work this way becomes a very Deleuzian argument, emphasizing writing as production rather than a finished product. - **Antonin Artaud:** Artaud serves as an example of modernism understood as a concept that "holds together" practices rather than referring to a set. He's seen as a "clinician" who created art to heal or find a way of living. His retreat to the "body without organs" (BwO) when suffering was too much is discussed. The sources note that there's no consensus on what the BwO is, arguing this is because scholars haven't heeded Deleuze and Guattari's principle: ask how it _works_, not what it _means_. Artaud is also in the list of "Strange Anglo-American literature". - **Leibniz and the Baroque:** Deleuze links Leibniz and the Baroque to modernism. He suggests that Leibniz is a "source of all modern literature". The key concept is the Leibnizian monad, used to develop a nontranscendent metaphysics of perspective and immanence. The aesthetics of the Baroque, derived from Leibniz, is seen as a critique of transcendence and a subversion of the "Image of Thought". The Baroque is an aesthetic born of a crisis in modernity, exposing the "dark background" of immanence when transcendence dissolves. Deleuze's study of Leibniz and the Baroque aims to express the "aleatory instant of ontological rupture" when immanence rises up, revealing the creative essence of life and thought. The monad is used to fortify a philosophy that avoids chaos and nihilism without resorting to transcendence. - The challenge is to develop a metaphysical theory of perspective within the monadic totality of immanence without transcendence. This perspective must negotiate its own threat of dissolution through metamorphosis into "anamorphic images and vanishing points of inflection". Deleuze's account of how a subject functions amidst this "continual catastrophe of its anamorphic dissolution" is seen as an "invaluable philosophical contribution" to understanding the aesthetics of perspectivism in modernists like Borges, Bacon, and Beckett. - The Baroque is an "operative function," a trait that produces folds. The monad synthesizes lines of flight (movement and curvature), melding dynamic vitalism with physical matter and force. This movement requires differential calculus for its non-linear, variable trajectory. This mathematical perspective requires metaphysical philosophy and Baroque aesthetic theory. - Deleuze identifies modalities of virtual perception in the monad, including the "point of inclusion" or "metaphysical point". Though seemingly contradictory in a non-transcendent system, this point is saved by its link to the Baroque's operative function. This metaphysical point is described as occupying a "higher point" and "another nature". The analytic of the monad is circular, not tautological. This metaphysical point is the concept closest to thinking the "nonthought within thought," the prephilosophical "plane of immanence". The monadological circuit is "virtuously immanent". The metaphysical point of inclusion reinforces the monad's ontological One, reflecting other monads and the infinite series. Converging points of perspective form an anamorphic point of vanishing, but not a void or nothingness. This theory reacts against nihilism as the only revolt against transcendence. The differential calculus of metaphysical perception is a "psychic mechanism," a "hallucinatory perception" with psychological but not physical reality. The "neo-Baroque project of modernist aesthetics" involves unveiling incompossible worlds and thinking without principles, God, or man, indebted to Leibniz. Leibniz provides the ingredients for perspectivism sharpened in obscurity and chaos. - This theory determines Deleuze's contribution to a modernist theory of perception that is Baroque in style and wary of transcendence. Anamorphic logic is its horizon. The essence of the Baroque involves realizing something in illusion, tying it to a spiritual presence and collective unity, recognizing that "presence is hallucinatory". This is how Jameson reads Deleuze and Guattari on "schizophrenic literature" and decoding the "bonds of time and of logic". The most authentic modernist moment is creating art in the "pure primordial flux" of immanence while resisting recoding by ideology. The best modernists push hallucinatory visions into the virtual substratum, the in-between zones of transcendence/immanence, figuration/abstraction. This is where Bacon paints and Kafka and Beckett write. This metaphysical perspective applies to the vision, sensation, and imagination opened by modernist works. - The Baroque is also associated with a "crisis of property" linked to capitalism, new machines, and new living beings. - **Jorge Luis Borges, Francis Bacon, and Samuel Beckett:** These figures represent a particularly Deleuzian strain of modernism, sharing an aesthetic perspectivism. Their work exemplifies the philosophical contribution Deleuze finds in the Baroque-inspired worldview. - **Beckett**'s narrative in _The Unnamable_ is seen as implicitly taking Deleuze's post-Leibnizian insights to heart. His writing explores the impossibility of speaking from the "unthinkable unspeakable" (a "partition," a supple membrane), sustained by the desire to "speak and yet say nothing". This sentences the narrator to the turbulent, hallucinatory reality of his imagination, folding one textual instant into another. Beckett provides "negative proof" that modernist literature's adventures are sustained by the desire for a perspective inscribed in dark recesses, between empirical and hallucinatory reality, able to see itself from within and without this space of confusion. His aesthetic vision makes sacrifices (tyranny of the perhaps, refusal of refusal). His literature answers the demands of "Ill seen Ill said," inseparable from its own disappearance. Beckett comes closest to unearthing the metaphysical perspective that folds within the monadic totality. He continues the Baroque project by beginning in darkness, where clarity emerges from obscurity and then plunges deeper. The task of modernism, like post-Leibnizian perspectivism, is to access the unplumbed depths of imagination/reality, tearing open the surface to reveal it as an incompossible, hallucinatory, fictional collection of possibilities. Beckett's work also takes up the problem of the one and the multiple, mentioned in connection with _What is Philosophy?_. His procedural works are linked to the concept of procedure in _Essays Critical and Clinical_. He is described as a "minor" (minoritarian) artist reread influentially by Deleuze. The section highlights that Deleuze's modernism is "intrinsically linked to his overall philosophical system" and must be explored within this context. It notes that while Deleuze expresses admiration for modernist authors and artists, his cinema books, for instance, don't explicitly use the term "modernism," a reflection of his generation of French intellectuals. However, his engagement with figures commonly associated with modernism is undeniable. The influence of Bergson (durée, new image concept) and Nietzsche (transvaluation) is central to Deleuze's "modernism," echoing their importance in modernist literature and studies. There's also a discussion about a tension in Deleuze's work, sometimes described as between a "high modernism" (associated with endorsing the canon) and a "second poetics" developed with Guattari (associated with the collective assemblage of enunciation, which goes against hierarchical canons). This tension is explored through the concept of style, which can be seen as both individual and not ascribed to a person. Style in his late work is linked to the fragmenting and mutating efforts by which literature reveals that an assemblage is speaking. While Deleuze subscribes to the auteur ideology in cinema, the theme of style as "stuttering" language (also linked to his collaboration with Guattari and the concept of foreign language in language) plays a part. All great works excavate a foreign language within language, a phrase adapted from Proust. Classification of directors or artists is seen as a "symptomology," linking names to particular ways forces come together (a Nietzschean idea). The foreign language concept emerges with political force from the collaboration with Guattari, first in _Kafka_. The idea of "the people are missing," also from _Kafka_, reappears in the cinema books, particularly regarding authors/filmmakers producing collective utterances that are "like the seeds of the people to come". This is seen in cinemas of decolonization and postcolonial contexts. Ultimately, the book suggests that there are different ways to understand Deleuze and different modernisms. One might see a "high modernist literary" Deleuze and a "post-post-modern materialist" Deleuze. Similarly, there might be a "linguistic and self-reflexive" modernism and another oriented to intuition and creating styles adequate to "inhuman perception". The book leans towards exploring the latter, a Bergsonian modernism of intuition and pure perception, which generates an imperative to think beyond human systems. **Part Three: Glossary** The final section isn't a typical, brief glossary. Instead, it offers _extended_ entries for Deleuze's key terms, treated as short essays. This allows for a full engagement and examination of the many, sometimes contradictory ways he uses particular terms. The goal is to make terms comprehensible to newcomers while also mapping their various appearances and applications for experienced scholars. Some terms that seem central based on the discussions in the sources and are likely candidates for inclusion are multiplicity, rhizome, body without organs, becoming, line of flight, assemblage, minor literature, image of thought, concept, plane of immanence/consistency, percept, affect, sensibilia, procedure, formula, difference, repetition, virtual/actual, monad, Baroque, schizoanalysis, desiring machine, and Signifier. The glossary is intended to help illuminate Foucault's idea of a "Deleuzian century" and its ongoing relevance. For example, it would likely delve into concepts like the "Abstract Machine," which is understood in opposition to mechanism, is immanent, machines its own rules, and synthesizes heterogeneities. In sum, "Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism" provides a rich and detailed exploration of the complex, dynamic, and mutually illuminating relationship between Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and the world of modernist art and literature. It invites readers to rethink categories, embrace multiplicity, and explore how thought can move beyond representation, all through the engaging lens of specific texts and concepts. It's a book that doesn't just summarize but actively builds connections, showing how philosophy and literature are interwoven in profound ways. This exploration makes you wonder, doesn't it? How else might Deleuze's ideas challenge our understanding of other periods or artistic movements? What entirely new concepts might emerge if we applied his methods to contemporary culture? And how do our own "habits of thought" prevent us from seeing the world – or a text – in truly new ways? The possibilities for further exploration seem endless!