Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy (Continuum Impacts)

Customer Reviews

• Helpful so far as it goes...  Jun 29, 2006 (21 of 23 found this helpful)

  De Landa's Deleuze, as presented in this and other works, has its own unique "niche" among the various ways of reading this important figure. His approach tends to take as its principal text Deleuze/Guattari's *A Thousand Plateaus* and emphasizes that difficult "subtext" surfacing throughout Deleuze's broader corpus that involves what DeLanda refers to as an "ontology" derived from chaos and complexity theory and the non-linear mathematics underlying them. "Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy" is certainly the best available elucidation of this often perplexing strand of Deleuze's work and any serious student of Deleuze will benefit from it. The problem, addressed by the author in an "appendix" to the work, is that Deleuze quite deliberately alters his basic terminology from one work to the next, making a good deal of forcing necessary to fit other Deleuzian texts into DeLanda's "ontological schema." It is, in fact, not at all clear that Deleuze would have accepted DeLanda's claim about him operating with a fixed "ontology." And since DeLanda is convinced that the "key" to Deleuze is to be found in modern non-linear mathematical theory and its scientific applications, he tends almost completely to ignore that which constitutes another major aspect of Deleuze's work, namely, his intense and extensive engagement with the history of philosophy. As a helpful introduction to one very difficult aspect of Deleuze's work, this book excels; as a broader account of Deleuze's philosophy and its influence, it is quite limited and somewhat contrived.

• Good Good Stuff  Mar 6, 2003 (45 of 54 found this helpful)

  Delanda is certainly not the least controversial of Deleuzeans, so I imagine some folks will dislike the (sort of) analytic flavor of this work. Nonetheless it gives--or makes a painfully valient attempt to give--what a lot of 'clarificationary' work on Deleuze ultimately fails to provide. A solid, relevant reconstruction of Deleuze's world without all the cumbersome jargon that bogs down the more continental reconstructions (e.g., Badiou's "Clamor of Being"...really an excellent book, but rough-going in the prose department).
  Delanda takes his by now standard fascination with complexity theory and other cool stuff and mines Deleuze's works for its scientific & mathematic underpinnings. John Protevi's "Political Physics," another book in this series, could be seen as an intro. to this book--not to downplay the significance of Protevi's work. Where Protevi explored the possibilities for Deleuzean applications to complexity, Delanda actually applies it, fearlessly, using the analytic style, I imagine, as a way to not cower in the face of some of Deleuze's absurdities. This work should be hotly debated, but it should be deeply appreciated as well, for the age of freeplay is waning, and now that the fog is clearing it really is time to figure out what the hell Deleuze was talking about.
  This is first on my list of Deleuze commentaries, and it stands as a powerful independent work in its own right. Read it. Delanda rules.