Deleuzism: A Metacommentary (review)

At the start of his insightful but perplexing and ultimately disappointing study of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical project, Ian Buchanan takes special note of Deleuze’s statement, inspired by Melville, that every writer composes two books, one in ink, the other “written in the soul, with silence and blood” (3). This insight inspires Buchanan to find ways to read this “other book” within Deleuze’s project by arguing that “some new hermeneutic relation must be established—Deleuzism” (3). To do so, Buchanan’s approach also creates two distinct, yet overlapping books within one volume: on the one hand, successive commentaries on Deleuze’s works (with and without Félix Guattari) as well as on various cultural and critical texts, and on the other hand, a recurrent metacommentary on Buchanan’s own critical project and its implications for elucidating the Deleuze-Guattarian corpus. That the goals and claims of the second “book” fail to do justice to the strength and occasional brilliance of the former may cause frustration and, indeed, confusion for any reader seeking a clearer understanding of the projects that Buchanan proposes to elucidate, his own as well as Deleuze’s.