Eleanor Kaufman

This attention to the negative or minor category has implications that extend beyond philosophy and into feminist theory, film, American studies, anthropology, and architecture.

Dialectic, Structure, Being

Deleuze, The Dark Precursor

The laudatory essay, in which one author praises the work of another, is frequently characterized as an unimportant, even uncritical mode of writing. But as Eleanor Kaufman argues in The Delirium of Praise, this mode of exchange is serious and substantial enough to merit scholarly attention. By not conforming to standard practices of critical discourse, laudatory essays give new status to supposedly inferior forms of communication and states of being -- including chatter, silence, sickness, imbalance, and absence of work -- and emphasize affective states or emotions such as joy, friendship, and longing. The Delirium of Praise examines a group of five twentieth-century French intellectuals -- Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Pierre Klossowski -- and their laudatory essays about each other. Structured as a circular series of exchanges, the book examines pairings of two thinkers with respect to a given theme. The exchange between Bataille and Blanchot takes up the themes of chatter and silence with regard to the novelist Louis-René des Foróts; the Blanchot-Foucault exchange explores friendship and impersonality through the lens of Jacques Derrida; the Foucault-Deleuze exchange considers "absence of work" ( désoeuvrement) and the obscure French philosopher Jacques Martin; the Deleuze-Klossowski exchange revolves around the question of the sick body and the person of Nietzsche; and the final exchange between Klossowski and Bataille focuses on imbalanced economies and the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Where the praise is most excessive, approaching delirium, Kaufman locates a powerful thought-energy that pushes the laudatory essay to its limits. In her conclusion, she presents this unique mode of thought exchange as a form of intellectual hospitality. Kaufman uncovers a suspension of subjectivity, of personality, even of place and time, that is both articulated in the laudatory essays and enacted by them. Her examination of this neglected mode as practiced by five important French thinkers offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century intellectual history. -- Allan Stoekl

Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski

The Delirium of Praise

Kevin Jon Heller

During their lives, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari were two of France's most prominent thinkers, and their work continues to be a vital and influential part of critical theory. The essays in this collection, written by prominent scholars, offer a new approach to their work. Unique in its emphasis on Guattari, both in conjunction with Deleuze and independently, this volume features an essay by Deleuze himself and includes a comprehensive bibliography of Guattari's and Deleuze's work. The body of work explored here spans three decades and cuts across the lines of philosophy, political theory, geography, literature, aesthetics, and even the applied sciences. Readers unfamiliar with Deleuze and Guattari will gain a broad sense of their work from these pages; specialists will discover new and different methods of understanding the contributions of these writers. The essays map out a set of applications that, rather than explain Deleuze and Guattari, aim to extend and reinvent their thought in new and "real life" domains, from cinema to the Gulf War, from quantum mechanics to the L.A. riots, and from Israel's deportation of Palestinians to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's masochism. Overall, the collection demonstrates the wide range of potential applications of Deleuze's and Guattari's theories and expands current readings of their work.

New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture

Deleuze & Guattari

Her examination of this neglected mode as practiced by five important French thinkers offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century intellectual history.

Eleanor Kaufman

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