Essays Critical and Clinical »

Essays Critical and Clinical is the final work of the late Gilles Deleuze, one of the most important figures in contemporary philosophy. It includes essays, all newly revised or published here for the first time, on such diverse literary figures as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Alfred Jarry, and Lewis Carroll, as well as philosophers such as Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. As Proust said, great writers invent a new language within language, but in such a way that language in its entirety is pushed to its limit or its own "outside." In Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze is concerned with the delirium - the process of Life - that lies behind this invention, as well as the loss that occurs, the silence that follows, when this delirium becomes a clinical state.

Library Journal

Deleuze's last published work exemplifies his longstanding interest in how philosophy relates to literature. For Deleuze, novels and short stories express their authors' diagnosis of life. This Deleuze takes in a quite literal way: he maintains that writers such as Proust are concerned with particular symptoms of mental illness. Besides Proust, Deleuze discusses Samuel Beckett, Alfred Jarry, and Charles Dickens, among others. This valuable study is an ideal introduction to Deleuze's distinctive concerns.David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., Ohio