Deleuze Beyond Badiou (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture)

First published in 1997, Alain Badiou’s Deleuze: The Clamor of Being cast the thinker as a secret philosopher of the One, compromising Deleuze’s standing among political philosophers concerned with the practical and historical aspects of existence. Clayton Crockett rehabilitates Deleuze’s position within contemporary, cutting-edge political and philosophical thought, advancing an original reading of the thinker’s major works and a constructive conception of his philosophical ontology.

Through close readings of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with Felix Guattari), and Cinema 2, Crockett argues Deleuze is anything but the austere, quietistic, and aristocratic intellectual Badiou portrays. Instead, Crockett underscores Deleuze’s radical aesthetics and innovative scientific, political, and mathematical forms of thought. Challenging predominant orthodoxy, he also refutes the notion that Deleuze retreated from politics toward the end of his life, grounding his argument in the revolutionary political concept of the time-image developed in Cinema 2. Using Badiou’s critique as a foil, Crockett maintains the profound continuity of Deleuze’s work and builds a general interpretation of his more obscure formulations. His study also offers original readings of Badiou’s central philosophical texts, Theory of the Subject, Being and Event, and Logics of Worlds, and uses the devastating earthquake in Haiti as a test case for applying Deleuze’s thought.