Radical Philosophy: A Deleuze for intolerable times

This book follows in a sequence of deaths: Nietzsche’s Death of God (after Feuerbach), Foucault’s Death of Man, and now, with Andrew Culp, the Death of this World. As with its predecessors, Culp’s announcement of death is also an attempt at its actualisation. The book begs us to inhabit a deep pessimism: to ‘give up on all the reasons given for saving this world’. In Nietzsche, it is Zarathustra who makes the announcement of death. For Culp, the harbinger of doom goes by the name of ‘Dark Deleuze’.

Dark Deleuze (Andrew Culp)This book follows in a sequence of deaths: Nietzsche’s Death of God (after Feuerbach), Foucault’s Death of Man, and now, with Andrew Culp, the Death of this World. As with its predecessors, Culp’s announcement of death is also an attempt at its actualisation. The book begs us to inhabit a deep pessimism: to ‘give up on all the reasons given for saving this world’. In Nietzsche, it is Zarathustra who makes the announcement of death. For Culp, the harbinger of doom goes by the name of ‘Dark Deleuze’.

 

In creating such a figure, the book launches a convincing assault on existing tendencies within Deleuzian scholarship, which, for Culp, has been wrongly overwhelmed by a “‘canon of joy’’ that celebrates Deleuze as a naively affirmative thinker’ concerned with ‘transversal lines, rhizomatic connections, compositionist networks, complex assemblages, affective experiences, and enchanted objects.’ Michel Serres, for example, is so convinced of Deleuze’s uplifting orientation of philosophy that he maintains a steadfast refusal even of the idea that Deleuze’s death was suicide, instead proclaiming that it must surely have been an accident.

 

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Published in: Radical Philosophy
By: Thomas Dekeyser