Shit Sandwich.
I grabbed a cheap used copy of Charles Stivale's book because I discovered a very interesting "quote" from Deleuze's L'Abécédaire interviews in it. Stivale subtitled these interviews for the English edition, and I thought that this book was mostly going to be excerpts of that. Unfortunately, since Deleuze prohibited their publication as a transcript, Stivale is forced to summarize Deleuze's comments rather than truly quote him. In itself this wouldn't be so bad, and there are a number of useful summaries like this in the book. But even more unfortunately, Stivale is not content to merely indirectly quote Deleuze, or relate the comments in the interviews to his publications, but instead feels that he has to play the philosopher himself. This is how Continental philosophy gets a bad name. Hack professors try to ape the difficult style of the subject they're writing about and end up producing something closer to a parody of the original. I'm sure Stivale speaks French real good, but his commentary did not improve my understanding of Deleuze's philosophy at all. This is the sort of book that makes me want to become a philosophy professor as a sort of public service, so that no one else has to be subjected to this level of academic wankery ever again.
No comments:
Post a Comment