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University of California Press

About the Book

Dorothea Olkowski's exploration of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze clarifies the gifted French thinker's writings for specialists and nonspecialists alike. Deleuze, she says, accomplished the "ruin of representation," the complete overthrow of hierarchic, organic thought in philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and ethics, as well as in society at large. In Deleuze's philosophy of difference, she discovers the source of a new ontology of change, which in turn opens up the creation of new modes of life and thought, not only in philosophy and feminism but wherever creation is at stake.

The work of contemporary artist Mary Kelly has been central to Olkowski's thinking. In Kelly she finds an artist at work whose creative acts are in themselves the ruin of representation as a whole, and the text is illustrated with Kelly's art. This original and provocative account of Deleuze contributes significantly to a critical feminist politics and philosophy, as well as to an understanding of feminist art.

About the Author

Dorothea Olkowski is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She coedited Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy (1992).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations 
Acknowledgments 

1. Women, Representation, and Power
Difference Itself 
The Logic of Difference 
Difference and Organic Representation 

2. Can a Feminist Read Deleuze and Guattari?
Cosmic Empiricism 
Negative Desire 
Nomadism 
A Thousand Tiny Sexes 

3. Against Phenomenology 
Feminist Narrative 
The Origin of the Work of Art 
Reconsidering Space and Time 
Interval

4. Bergson, Matter, and Memory 
Order-Words, Common Language 
Interpretation and Force 
The Earth Screams; Life ltself 
Duration and Memory 
Memory and the Second Synthesis of Time 
Association of Ideas and the Unconscious 

5. Creative Evolution: An Ontology of Change 
Tendencies, Not Oppositions 
Duration and Space 
The Dominance of Action 
Spiritual Life 

6. Beyond the Pleasure Principle 
Biopsychic: Life 
The Purloined Letter 
The End of Eros 

7. The Ruin of Representation 
The Dead Body 
'The Theater of Terror 
A Science of the Singular 

8. The Linguistic Signifier and the Ontology of Change 
Signification or Sense? 
Does the Linguistic Signifier Rule? 

Conclusion: Making Language Stutter 
Notes 
Bibliography 

Reviews

"Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation will undoubtedly contribute to a renewed understanding of this important twentieth-century philosopher. . . . [It] contains some of the very best and clearest accounts of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, and an account of Bergson, and Deleuze's reading of Bergson, that is simply the most compelling I have read in English."—David N. Rodowick, author of Gilles Deleuze: Time Machine