Gilles Deleuze

A posthumous collection of writings by Deleuze, including letters, youthful essays, and an interview, many previously unpublished.

Letters and Other Texts is the third and final volume of the posthumous texts of Gilles Deleuze, collected for publication in French on the twentieth anniversary of his death. It contains several letters addressed to his contemporaries (Michel Foucault, Pierre Klossowski, François Châtelet, and Clément Rosset, among others). Of particular importance are the letters addressed to Félix Guattari, which offer an irreplaceable account of their work as a duo from Anti-Oedipus to What is Philosophy? Later letters provide a new perspective on Deleuze's work as he responds to students' questions.

Echoing Jean Dubuffet's idea that thought must arise from material in artistic practice, Giuliana Prucca, through this essay, reinterprets a moment in the history of 20th-century art using materials such as stone, sand, earth, and dust. She employs the mineral to illustrate that the creative act would be a trace of the body's disappearance. The loss of humanity and the deconstruction of the subject objectify themselves in the image. In other words, art resides in the tension between representation and its loss, ultimately leaving nothing but an image.

Drawing from the influential figure of Antonin Artaud, she weaves critical and poetic connections between the texts and works of various artists, writers, and thinkers, ranging from Jean Dubuffet to Jan Fabre and Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein and Gutaï, Joë Bousquet to Camille Bryen and Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard to Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille to Aby Warburg.

The material is not merely a thematic pretext; it is an active and explosive catapult that questions the arbitrary linearity of a conventionally assimilated art history. Following Ponge's example, Prucca applies the principles of poetry to criticism, starting from Artaud's material, the most undisciplined of poet-artist-thinkers of the modern era. This results in a critically inventive approach dangerously suited to its object, celebrating an anti-critique. The chosen writing materials, stonepaper for the cover and recycled paper for the pages, is consistent, intending to give the impression of being covered in dust.

The essay disrupts traditional reading habits and shatters the conservatism of art criticism by inhabiting writing space differently, presenting a physically engaging interaction. This is an essay in the literal sense, an experience where form never contradicts content, urging readers to take the risk of thinking deeply and embracing a new rhythm. A complex and challenging design invites them to choose different reading options, ultimately treating criticism as one would poetry.

Giuliana Prucca [Paris | Berlin] is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She is the founder and art director of the publishing house AVARIE, specialising in contemporary art books that explore the relationships between text and image, body and space.

Graphic design, art direction by Vito Raimondi

Deleuzine: A Zine for Nobodies Without Organs is an experimental publication inspired by the writings of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, as well as figures whose life or work can be said to exemplify aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy of life, including Antonin Artaud, Ezekiel Mphaphele’s Wanderers and Kathy Acker among others. Encompassing the fields of literature, philosophy, ethnography, archaeology, and the arts, the publication aims at a radical exploration (and exploitation) of word, image, and printed matter towards beauty, but also aesthetic and political freedom.

1 Laurence Pritchard, Memories of the Penes 6 Natascha Nanji, Crisis in Three Parts 16 Max Henninger, From Poems For Two Voices 18 Sascha Akhtar, Now, You Become D/eath, Destroyer 34 Karina Bush, Claws; I Spit; Sonnet VI 36 Francesca Dobbe, Dog Lady’s Becoming Animal 9 George Micah Kuhn, Pharmacophilia 54 Uma Breakdown, The Graveyard of Extension 60 MUCK, ‘IN A FOLD, THE OUTSIDE IS NEVER FULLY ABSORBED…’  73 Anouk Asselineau, Angel’s Share 78 Maria Sledmere, Zebra; Lens Flare; Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Kitchen Disco; Jewel Organza; New Weird Kirsty 82 Paola Valentina, Tube people 85 Dalia Maini, Water Lilies Syndrome 88 Hugo Hagger, Death Dissensus 95 Michal Leszuk, Curating Cruising Culture in the Anthropocene 108 Joshua Jones, Petřín Hill, Dusk 111 Chiara Gambuto 143 Isaac Harris, Helioelagablaus Reborn 163Helen Samuels, Winterize 174 Aimilia Efthimiou, A Recipe 176Simon Barraclough, Vampire in the Funhouse, Part I 178 Suki Hollywood, Mortal Combat 186 Louis Mason, The Executioner 198 Rebecca Close, The Acephale Sonnets 204Sites Of Horror RU, RmIH8 U 90’s Ancestors 206 MUCK, THE STORM 215 George Finlay Ramsay, Raven’s Reprise 228Mike Templeton, The Window Journal: Looking out my Window onto Court Street 232 Caitlin Merrett King, She Has No References; Dylan Thomas; For S 235 Phoebe Eccles, Hold Me in Your Watchful Presence 238 Isabelle Bucklow, Some Bears, Some Moves 244 Alistair McCartney, The Textual Animal 248 Caspar Bryant, Diffraction of a Waterfowl 249 Flo Josephine Goodliffe, Alive Border (Husk or Shell) front & back cover(s) Jean-Robert Alcindor (dispersed) drawings by Rossen Daskalov designed by Alessia Arcuri

Vinciane Despret’s unique storytelling, woven with ethnography and family history, assembles accounts of those living their daily lives with their dead. She explores how the dead play an active, tangible role through those who are living, who might assume their place in a family or in society; continue their labor or art; or thrive from a shared inheritance or an organ donation. 

Vinciane Despret is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Liège and the Free University of Brussels. The original French edition of Our Grateful Dead ( Au bonheur des morts) won the prestigious Prix des Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco. Her books include What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? and The Dance of the Arabian Babbler: Birth of an Ethological Theory, both from Minnesota.

Stephen Muecke is professor of creative writing at Flinders University, South Australia. His many translations include works by Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray.

A book of interviews with Sylvère Lotringer.

French philosopher Sylvère Lotringer (1938-2021) was the general editor of Semiotext(e). A younger contemporary of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault, he was one of the main introducers and interpreters of French Theory in the United States. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions (Semiotext(e), 2007).

François Aubart is an art critic, independent curator and publisher (co-founder of <o> future <o> and Même pas l'hiver).

Reading / Feeling examines affect, a term that delineates a field where the personal and political meet in sensory movements between bodies. A pre-emotional experience, affect constitutes the social and economic relationships that make up the fabric of society. Reading / Feeling considers the meaning of affect in theory and artistic practice through texts by theoreticians, artists, and curators read in If I Can’t Dance’s Reading Groups in Amsterdam, Toronto, and Sheffield as part of the programme for Edition IV – Affect (2010–12). It also includes three new essays, short statements by Reading Group members, and artist pages.

Contributors: Sara Ahmed, Rhea Anastas, Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Lone Bertelsen, Gregg Bordowitz, Judith Butler, Jeremiah Day, Gilles Deleuze, Lucien Febvre, Simone Forti, Adam Frank, Andrea Fraser, Félix Guattari, Michael Hardt, Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Jutta Koether, Glenn Ligon, Brian Massumi & Mary Zournazi, Helen Molesworth, Andrew Murphie, Sina Najafi & David Serlin, George Orwell, Emily Roysdon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Baruch Spinoza, Susan Sontag, Jan Verwoert; it also includes: essays by Tanja Baudoin, Emma Cocker, Jacob Korczynski; contributions by Reading Group members Stephen Bowler, Alison J Carr, Belen Cerezo, Jon Davies, Anik Fournier, Victoria Gray, Linda Kemp, Wjm Kok, Janice McNab, Gabrielle Moser, Cecilia Paldino, Andrew James Patterson, Hester Reeve, Julie Swalloa, cheyanne turions, Vivian Ziherl; and artist pages by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy.

The sequel to Pendleton's acclaimed Black Dada Reader, compiling an anti-canon of radical experimentation and thought.

In 2011, artist Adam Pendleton (born 1984) assembled Black Dada Reader, a compendium of texts, documents and positions that elucidated a practice and ethos of Black Dada. Resembling a school course reader, the book was a spiral-bound series of photocopies and collages, originally intended only for personal reference, and eventually distributed informally to friends and colleagues. The contents - an unlikely mix of Hugo Ball, W.E.B. Du Bois, Adrian Piper, Gertrude Stein, Sun Ra, Stokely Carmichael, Gilles Deleuze -formed a kind of experimental canon, realized through what Pendleton calls radical juxtaposition. In 2017, Koenig Books published the Reader in a hardcover edition, with newly commissioned essays and additional writings by the artist. A decade later, Pendleton has composed another reader, building upon the constellation of writers, artists, filmmakers, philosophers and critics that emerged in the first volume.

Source texts by Sara Ahmed, Mikhail Bakhtin, Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Augusto de Campos, Hardoldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, Angela Davis, Gilles Deleuze, Julius Eastman, Adrienne Edwards, Clarice Lispector, Achille Mbembe, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Charles Mingus, Piet Mondrian, Leslie Scalapino, Leonard Schwartz and Michael Hardt, Juliana Spahr, Cecil Taylor and Malcolm X.

Deleuzine: A Zine for Nobodies Without Organs is an experimental publication inspired by the writings of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, as well as figures whose life or work can be said to exemplify aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy of life, including Antonin Artaud, Ezekiel Mphaphele’s Wanderers and Kathy Acker among others. Encompassing the fields of literature, philosophy, ethnography, archaeology, and the arts, the publication aims at a radical exploration (and exploitation) of word, image, and printed matter towards beauty, but also aesthetic and political freedom.

With contributions by: Egle Ambrasaite, Alex Aspden, Edoardo Biscossi, Sabeen Chaudhry, Ruby Conner, Genevieve Costello, Andrew Culp, Anna Luisa Di Lauro, Sophie Fitze, Roxman Gatt, Helena Grande, Rose Higham-Stainton, Sevana Holst, Patrick McAlindon, Geiste Kincinaityte, Michele Muraca, Holly Rowley, Katie Shannon, Natalie Stypa, Katarina Sylvan, Elaine Tam, Haydée Touitou, Samuel White, Romy Day Winkel.

Edited by: Lilly Marks, Sabeen Chaudhry and Holly Rowley.

Memories that evoke the physical awareness of touch, smell, and bodily presence can be vital links to home for people living in diaspora from their culture of origin. How can filmmakers working between cultures use cinema, a visual medium, to transmit that physical sense of place and culture? In The Skin of the Film Laura U. Marks offers an answer, building on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and others to explain how and why intercultural cinema represents embodied experience in a postcolonial, transnational world. 

Much of intercultural cinema, Marks argues, has its origin in silence, in the gaps left by recorded history. Filmmakers seeking to represent their native cultures have had to develop new forms of cinematic expression. Marks offers a theory of “haptic visuality”—a visuality that functions like the sense of touch by triggering physical memories of smell, touch, and taste—to explain the newfound ways in which intercultural cinema engages the viewer bodily to convey cultural experience and memory. Using close to two hundred examples of intercultural film and video, she shows how the image allows viewers to experience cinema as a physical and multisensory embodiment of culture, not just as a visual representation of experience. Finally, this book offers a guide to many hard-to-find works of independent film and video made by Third World diasporic filmmakers now living in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada.

The Skin of the Film draws on phenomenology, postcolonial and feminist theory, anthropology, and cognitive science. It will be essential reading for those interested in film theory, experimental cinema, the experience of diaspora, and the role of the sensuous in culture.

(Jan 2000)