Pure Immanence

Essays on a Life

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by Gilles Deleuze

Zone Books

Due/Published March 2005, 102 pages, paper

ISBN 1890951250

New in paper (S05)

The essays in this book present a complex theme at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy, what in his last writing he called simply "a life." They capture a problem that runs throughout his work--his search for a new and superior empiricism. Announced in his first book, on Hume, then continuing in his early studies of Nietzsche and Bergson, the problem of an "empiricist conversion" became central to Deleuze's work, in particular to his aesthetics and his conception of the art of cinema. In the new regime of communication and information-machines with which he thought we are confronted today, he came to believe that such a conversion, such an empiricism, such a new art and will-to-art, was what we need most. The last, seemingly minor question of "a life" is thus inseparable from Deleuze's image of philosophy not as a wisdom we already possess, but as pure immanence of what is yet to come.