"This essay proposes [that] when Jorge Luis Borges ponders sundry seventeenth-century writers in the biased scales of his metaphorology, this can induce renewed belief in the Baroque as a term designating the styles of writing and thinking intrinsic to a historical period. To closely scrutinize Borges’s writings, it contends, is to contemplate the existence, scope, and meaning of the historical Baroque. It is also to entangle and to disentangle the historical Baroque from Borges’s notion of a recurring, eternal baroque [...]."
“Deleuze argues that if philosophy is to survive it is only through a creative engagement with these forms of non-philosophy — notably modern art, literature and cinema. In other words, philosophy today can only hope to attain the conceptual resources to restore the broken links of perception, language and emotion. This is the only possible future left for philosophy if it is to repair its fragile relationship of immanence to the world as it is. In its attempt to think the immanence of this world, which is neither the 'true' world nor a different or 'transformed' world, philosophy has returned to its original sense of 'ultimate orientation' as its highest vocation and goal. However, something new, and distinctly modern, occurs in the philosophy of Deleuze when we recognize that the sense of ultimate orientation is no longer described in terms of verticality —a dimension of transcendence that Deleuze takes great pains to avoid - but rather in terms that are essentially horizontal, or terrestrial.” (The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, p. 9) The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze" takes up Deleuze's most powerful argument on the task of contemporary philosophy in the West. Deleuze argues that it is only through a creative engagement with the forms of non-philosophy - notably modern art, literature and cinema - that philosophy can hope to restore the broken links of perception, language and emotion. In a sequence of essays, Gregg Lambert analyses Deleuze's investigations into the modern arts. Particular attention is paid to Deleuze's exploration of Liebniz in relation to modern painting and of Borges to an understanding of the relationship between philosophy, literature and language. By illustrating Deleuze's own approach to the arts, and to modern literature in particular, the book demonstrates the critical significance of Deleuze's call for a future philosophy defined as an 'art of inventing concepts'. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The late reflections of G.W. Leibniz on eternal return have often been dismissed as insignificant as regards his wider philosophy. This may be due to the prevalent championing of his optimistic views on the continual progress of humanity, which seem to contradict the notion of eternal return. Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze both put forward concepts of eternal return that form part of their respective critiques of historical progress, yet these have rarely been read in conjunction with their views on Leibniz. This article argues, first, that for Leibniz progress and return are not contradictory, and second, that Benjamin’s and Deleuze’s concepts of return were informed, in different ways, by their readings of Leibniz, and specifically by his conception of multiple worlds as the spatial equivalent of eternal return. In doing so I will shed light on the contribution of Leibniz’s philosophy not only to the progressive theories of history put forward during the Enlightenment, but also to the critique of these very visions.