8

Immanence
MARCEL SWIBODA

This chapter deals with work published around the theme of immanence in the year 2001 and is divided into three sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Pure Immanence; 3. Immanent Embodiments.

1. Introduction Compared with the previous year, 2001 turned out to be a relatively quiet one on the topic of immanence, in particular in the area of scholarship that hasfor better or worsebecome almost synonymous with the term, namely the works of Deleuze and Guattari. In terms of major publications, 2001 yielded barely a handful: Deleuze's own writings comprising the Zone volume, Pure Immanence, Claire Colebrook's Gilles Deleuze, featured as part of Routledge's Critical Thinkers series of theory primers, John Protevi's Political Physics, published in Athlone's timely and pertinent Transversals series of books and noteworthy amongst journals published in this year, the themed issue of Parallax entitled 'Immanent Trajectories' {Parallax 7:iv[2001]). Deleuze's early study of Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity, was also reissued in 2001 (Columbia UP [2001]), yet whilst this text has hitherto been somewhat neglected as a key component of Deleuze's oeuvre, its reissue does not really constitute a new contribution to Anglophone critical and cultural theory in this year. That said, Deleuze's work on Hume does feature quite prominently in two of the texts that have already been mentioned.

2. Pure Immanence Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, by Gilles Deleuze, features just three short essays each of which provides a snapshot of the philosopher's work at three different key stages in his career. The book is introduced by John Rajchman, who provided one of the previous year's most notable contributions to studies based around Deleuze and the problematic of immanence with his short and lively book, The Deleuze Connections (MIT Press [2000]). His 'Introduction' carries over the clarity and concision that marked the earlier outing in order to provide a punctual The English Association

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restatement of Deleuze's aims at these various stages and how his project took shape overall. Importantly, as well as providing a point of departure for the reader, he appeals to the future of Deleuze scholarship and, arguably even more importantly, to the pragmatic deployment of Deleuze's thought with a mind to transforming social and political relations. Anyone with even the most passing acquaintance with the work of Deleuze will most likely be aware that a key concern of this work had always been to produce 'a philosophy of the future'. As Rajchman states: We need a new conception of society in which what we have in common is our singularities and not our individualities where what is common is 'impersonal' and what is 'impersonal' is common, (p. 14) The first essay in the volume, 'Immanence: A Life' turns out to be one of the last things Deleuze wrote before his death in 1995 andas suchis something of a swansong, bringing together as it does a number of the themes that preoccupied him throughout his long career, in a lucid and poignant restatement of his project. The second essay, 'Hume', harks back to the work that Deleuze produced in the early 1950s, the earliest of his recognized work (Deleuze did not consider the work of the late 1940s as an integral part of his oeuvre). Although this essay was actually published in French in 1972, it largely summarizes the work that he produced around Hume as early as 1953, published in Empiricism and Subjectivity, a work that in many ways heralds the first recognizable beginnings of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, a full fifteen years before the French publication of its primary solo-signed elaboration, Difference et Repetition (Presses Universitaires de France [1993]). The last essay in the volume, 'Nietzsche', published in French in 1965, is introduced to the Anglophone reader here once again as a summary of Deleuze's larger project on the philosopher, Nietzsche and Philosophy (Continuum [1983]), with which the English-speaking world has been familiar with now for quite some time (one of the first of Deleuze's works to actually receive an English translation back in 1983). The title of the first essay, 'Immanence: A Life' resonates quite strongly with a number of aspects of Deleuze's own 'life' and 'work'. Firstly, it points up the perennial preoccupation with the notion of immanence, of causes inhering in their effects, of complex material or virtual expression, the challenge to any transitive or final conception of causality bound up with his favourite target transcendence and the ultimate aim of creating a philosophy that most effectively founds a 'plane of immanence' capable of staking out the numerous paralogisms that continue to haunt philosophy. Secondly, in its subtitle, 'A Life', the title reiterates the crucial ethical dimension of the philosopher's work, whereby the laying of a plane of immanence is in its very execution an overcoming of superstition and its aim to promote an affirmative relation to the world, or in the language of Deleuze, the 'Outside'. 'A Life' harks back most explicitly to the work on the 'event' in the Logic of Sense (Continuum [1990]), reminding us that the privations of a person's life, the life of the so-called (neoliberal) individual, the mundane interiorized conception of subjectivity and selfhood which remains so prevalent and in some ways becomes increasingly more insidious and embedded with each turn of the Late Capitalist screw, is not a legacy that the world need uphold and that before it is my life; 'a' life is always already an embodiment of events or of pre-individual singularities. The

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renewed appeal to the work the First World War poet Joe Bousquet, an appeal that contributed so memorably to the Logic of Sense, illustrates this ethical aspect: My wound existed before me: not a transcendence of the wound as higher actuality, but its immanence as a virtuality always within a milieu (plane or field), (p. 32) Despite its title, the essay is as much a meditation upon death as it is on life (Deleuze, at least since Difference and Repetition, gave a place of prominence to a singular conception of death in his immanent philosophy). The engagement with death is also the source of the essay's poignancy, given Deleuze's increasingly terminal state and his imminent suicide. It is this meditation that provides the essay with its most insightful moment, although it has to be said that the insight is perhaps more attributable to Charles Dickens than to Deleuze: The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from subjectivity and objectivity of what happens: a 'Homo tantum' with whom everyone empathizes and who attains a sort of beatitude, (pp. 28-9) The life in question is that of that of Riderhood, a character from Dickens' novel Our Mutual Friend: A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest sign of life. (p. 28) The receding of constituted subjectivity, investment, indeed 'personality' into the zone of indiscernibility between life and death heralds the extraction of an event from the life of the character whereby the life becomes 'A LIFE'the capitalization used by Deleuze, almost as if he is struggling with the forces of life and death affecting him. It is perhaps this more than anything that provides the piece with its moving tenor. It should be pointed out that there is very little, if anything, that is genuinely new or original about this last piece of work. It really does seem to be something of a swansong, paradoxically, perhaps, a highly personal restatement of profound impersonality. The appeal to Stoicism and the work of Bousquet still carry the same difficulties and dangers that they did in the Logic of Sense, in that they belie a residual asceticism, diagnosed by Badiou in another of the previous year's great works on immanence, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (University of Minnesota Press [2000]), which Deleuze himself has always been at pains to avoid. The second essay, 'Hume', deals with Deleuze's characteristically skewed view of the Western philosophical tradition, taking the ostensibly conservative empiricism of the Scottish philosopher and unearthing from it a sophisticated philosophy of immanence, relationality, radical politics and jurisprudence, a prelude to Deleuze's later, more explicit attempts to develop a transcendental empiricism and to his collaborations with Felix Guattari. Pre-empting his work on Nietzsche and

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Bergson, the 'powers of the false' of the former and the 'fabulation' of the latter, Deleuze claims that Hume's philosophy is itself bound up with (science)fictionalization. The association of ideas that underpins Hume's empiricism isfor Deleuzea philosophical principle that upholds the exteriority and heterogeneity of relations (p. 38). Hereby, Hume's empiricism is itself a 'superior' empiricism of the kind that Deleuze wishes to develop and the 'autonomous logic of relations' Deleuze finds in Hume bears more than a striking resemblance to the rereading of Freudian psychoanalysis that we find in Difference and Repetition, the immanent reworking of Eros and Thanatos, and therefore also resembles the three syntheses of the machinic unconscious that in many ways arguably provide the motor force of the entire project of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. It is here also that we find the project of an immanent philosophy, with its emphasis on effects rather than on transitive causes: [F]or the problem is not of causes but of the way relations function as effects of those causes and the practical conditions of this functioning, (p. 39) In addition, we find the ethical correlate of immanent thinking, when a little further on we come across the following incisive observation: The problem is no longer how to limit egotisms and the corresponding natural rights but how to go beyond partialities, how to pass from a 'limited sympathy' to an 'extended generosity', how to stretch passions and give them an extension they don't have on their own. (p. 46) Where the essay really comes into its own, however, is in its location of a radical political and juridical element in Hume's thought, which ties directly in with the relational character of association: Does the throw of a javelin against a door ensure the ownership of an abandoned city, or must a finger touch the door in order to establish a sufficient relation? ... The principles of association find their true sense in a casuistry of relations that works out the details of the worlds of culture and of law. And this is the true object of Hume's philosophy: relations as the means of an activity and a practicejuridical, economic and political, (pp. 50-1) This pragmatic element that Deleuze finds in Hume again occurs throughout his own work in which philosophy becomes a full-blown constructivism, with the stratoanalysis of A Thousand Plateaus that he developed with Guattari and, in the last phase of his career, in What is Philosophy? (again with Guattari) with the idea of philosophy as the creation of concepts. In short, the essay on Hume recapitulates key Deleuzian themes with his characteristic rereading of the tradition, echoing the earliest of his work and gesturing towards his later thought. In this sense the essay can be seen as pivotal and, as such, requires readers of Deleuze and immanent philosophy more generally

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to reconsider the value and importance of Hume, as well as Deleuze's early work on the philosopher. With the final essay in the book, 'Nietzsche', one finds perhaps the most outstanding piece of the three, which in some ways itself proves poignant when read in the light of Deleuze's death, despite the fact that it was published thirty years before. 'Nietzsche'with its emphasis on a philosophy of illness and of health enables the reader to reflect on the ways in which the proper names 'Nietzsche' and 'Deleuze' name symptomatologies that point to forces and power (puissance) too great to withstand without succumbing to illness or even death. Indeed, this is where the force and power of Deleuze's work on Nietzsche (including Nietzsche and Philosophy) emerge. Proceeding as it does from what Deleuze discerns as Nietzsche's conception of the symptom and underlying force, Deleuze's work on the philosopher goes onto examine in some detail the complexities and nuances of Nietzsche's key concepts, his style and his inventory of 'characters', both human (all-too-human) and animal. In his elucidation of these aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy, again with the characteristic minoritarian spin, Deleuze provides his own reading of the eternal return, indexed quite closely to his notion of the 'event' mentioned earlier as well as the attempt to extract events from one's life to discover 'a' life. It is here where the moralism that Nietzsche so brilliantly diagnoses in his Genealogy of Morality and the various stages of its transformation and final overcoming (ressentiment, bad conscience, nihilism, the 'last man and the man who wants to die', revaluation of values, etc.) turn on the aforementioned relation between a notion of sickness or more generally weaknesseven where the term connotes depravityand a notion of health: [W]hatever I want (my laziness, my gluttony, my cowardice, my vice as well as my virtue), I 'must' want it in such a way that I also want its eternal return ... Even a cowardice, a laziness, that would wish for its eternal return would become something other than a laziness, a cowardice; it would become an active power of affirmation, (p. 88) The eternal return hereby becomes a pragmatic principle for overcoming moralism, ressentiment, bad conscience and so on, towards the possibility of a demolition of established values and the creation of new values, not in a simple trading of new for old, but for a perpetual revaluation, whichat least since Spinozahas in some way been a fundamental aspect of immanence, in that in each instance one attempts to lay a plane of immanence there is the play of chance and that the actualizations of the plane, if they are not immersed in error, illusion, transcendence or superstition, will always be constituted by a repetition of difference and not a repetition of the same, that is to say, that the elaboration of immanence will unfold differently each time it is undertaken. Deleuze writes here quite extensively of the figure of Zarathustra, how this character is caught in the play of sickness and health and how his sickness is itself a product of misunderstandings, in particular a misunderstanding of eternal return as being a cyclic conception of time:

IMMANENCE What makes Zarathustra sick is precisely the idea of the cycle: the idea that everything comes back, that the same returns, that everything comes back to the same. (p. 90)

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In addition, he briefly yet concisely examines the significance of Nietzsche's other protagonists: Dionysus, the Overman, Theseus, Ariadne, Saint Paul and Buddha, in the context of the philosophy of revaluation and overcoming. It is perhaps in addressing the bestial love-triangle of Ariadne, Theseus and Dionysus that Deleuze, as he does elsewhere, presents a rather conservative picture of philosophy, in the sense that he uncritically appeals to a seemingly naive or even essentialist conception of (hetero)sexuality (one is reminded of his description of philosophy as enculage): Ariadne and Theseus: She is the anima. She was loved by Theseus and loved him. But that was just when she held the thread and was a bit of a spider, a cold creature of resentment. Theseus is the hero, a picture of the higher man ... As long as Ariadne loves Theseus and is loved by him, her femininity remains imprisoned, tied up by the thread. But when Dionysus-the-Bull approaches, she discovers true affirmation and lightness. She becomes an affirmative anima who says Yes to Dionysus. Together they are the couple of the eternal return and give birth to the Overman, (p. 94) Of course, Deleuze is taking the story from Nietzsche and its powers of illustration remain intact, with Ariadne, Theseus and Dionysus all functioning as 'conceptual personae', facilitating the elaboration of key Nietzschean-Deleuzian concepts in the laying out of a plane of immanence. Furthermore, it would be naive to simply criticize Deleuze for using this example because it essentializes heterosexuality, just as it would be to write off Nietzsche for being a misogynist. However, it seems that philosophy of this kind has lessons to be learned from work in cultural theory, cultural studies, feminism and queer theory, which for a long time now has highlighted the dubiousness of such tabulations. Whilst it would be easy to get embroiled in a parlour dispute pitting Deleuzian 'extra-textuality' against the 'textuality' prevalent within these fields, such potential 'rigid segments' as these should always be avoided and it is ultimately the job of those writers, critics and artists who hold store by Deleuze's work, as have feminists working with Nietzsche, to watch out for such potential residual paralogisms like sexual normativization and to use the philosophy itself to work towards a perhaps more banal, though no less important, 'overcoming' of these segmentations. In the last analysis, Pure Immanence forms something of an appropriate philosophical epitaph, inscribing as it does the plane of immanence that the name 'Deleuze' shall continue to be most instantly associated with. The essays contained here will doubtless serve to further inscribe the name of Deleuze into the strata of cultural and critical theory.

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In this final section of this chapter, I will briefly examine the major secondary work produced around immanence, the work of Deleuze and related problematics, in 2001. Claire Colebrook's Gilles Deleuze proves a welcome addition to the Routledge Critical Thinkers series of introductory texts outlining the key ideas, themes and concepts of a number of the protagonists of critical theory and contemporary philosophy. Aimed primarily at students new to the work of Deleuze and written to cater for an undergraduate audience, Colebrook's book represents a considerable achievement in making the work of a notoriously complex, dense and heavily neologistic corpus accessible without being unnecessarily reductive. This is not an easy task given the breadth of material covered by Deleuze from many different disciplines produced over a career spanning five decades. A lot of material is packed into this slender volume, introducing most of the key themes and concepts of the philosopher and the key areas of their pragmatic application, notably philosophy, film studies, feminism and literary theory. In fact what makes this book successful as an encounter with the work of Deleuze is the way in which the structure of the various chapters, taken both separately and together, tackles his concepts and ideas by recourse to these various areas of application. For example, in introducing the concept of the machine, Colebrook avoids the most obvious course of explanation, via Anti-Oedipus, and in so doing avoids the notoriously difficult first chapter of that book, instead opting for an embodied demonstration working with the concepts developed in the Cinema books that she covered earlier in the book. Commendable as this approach is, and certainly for the most part it is a successful one, it does at times gloss over the nuances distinguishing some of the concepts and terms from one another. Hence, whilst making the appeal to the film camera to demonstrate a machinic approach to philosophy, she does also risk the misunderstanding that might occur whereby machine in the technical sense is not sufficiently distinguished from machine in the 'abstract' sense (p. 56). That said, her account of these terms largely remains clear and workable, and the fact that she approaches the material in this 'transversal' way means that she not only introduces new readers to the key terms and concepts, but also to the capacity for an immanent philosophy to embody the effects that it articulates in writing. After many years in which only a few commentators attempted to do this (again, I am primarily thinking of Brian Massumi here, although we might add to his name that of Manuel de Landa and, more recently, John Protevi (see below)), with it only recently becoming a major concern amongst the secondary writing on Deleuze, I think it is good to find an introduction that can be both predominantly clear, but also embody the kind of processual logic with which it engages, emphasizing the importance of this aspect of immanence from the off. That Colebrook is aware of the crucial, albeit somewhat neglected, significance of 'free indirect discourse' in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (her approach in some ways being an example of this) is made all the more apparent by her eagerness to emphasize this aspect of their work towards the end of her book. Undoubtedly, more work needs to be done in this area and it is primarily from the perspective of literature that Colebrook views its worth, so it is refreshing to see thatin a book that deals with many terms from the work of its authorit finds space for this

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particular idea and that no less refreshingly there is the notable absence of references to the 'rhizome', a term which perhaps more than any other has become the mantra of many commentators and as such is in danger of becoming a term that represents something, the very thing it was introduced to overcome. Most of the other key terms in the book are more along the lines of what we have come to expect from work on Deleuze and the problem of immanence: transcendental empiricism, becoming and the term immanence itself, among others. However, on occasions one is surprised to discover section headings that adopt a less predictable vocabulary, as when in 'Chapter 3' Colebrook throws 'untimely' into the mix. Again, whilst highly commendable, this does also account for what is the one notable drawback with this book, the instances of loose usage or insufficient qualification of terminology, with the need to pay a little more attention to the intellectual-historical context of the terms, which is especially important if undergraduate students are to be persuaded that the concepts and ideas did not emerge 'in a vacuum'an explicit aim of this series as outlined by its editor Robert Eaglestone in his 'Preface' (p. vii). For the most part, Colebrook does not situate Deleuze's work in his unorthodox relation to the Western philosophical tradition. For example, the aforementioned section on the 'untimely' only sparingly references the work of Nietzsche and could therefore be more explicit in drawing out the affinities between the two thinkers, as at other points in the book. A similar thing takes place in the repeated references to 'transversality', which, despite the successful embodiments of the term's processual or machinic dimension, are not actually situated in relation to the work of Guattari, who actually developed the concept over many years both together with and independently of Deleuze from within milieus markedly different from those occupied by the latter (a perennial problem of Deleuze and Guattari scholarship is the tendency to gloss the latter's contributions whicheven when dealing with the solo works of Deleuze written since the late 1960scannot be treated as being wholly independent or separate). Doubtless it is very difficult to write a book of this kind on a thinker such as Deleuze and something inevitably has to give at some point, yet perhaps by focusing on slightly fewer concepts such a book as this might be able to give more attention to context. For all that, the book more often than not provides some very well written, lucid restatements of Deleuze's philosophy, deftly negotiating the embodied ethical trajectory of immanence in his thought and it seems pertinent to end this description of Colebrook's book with a positive instance of these aspects, for example where she discusses the Bergsonian 'image' as articulated by Deleuze: Deleuze's concept of the image ties back into his commitment to immanence and is also crucial for his creation of a concept of becoming. On a standard understanding, images or what we perceive are images o/some transcendent reality. The image would be a copy of the real, a secondary or virtual 'becoming' added on to being ... Deleuze, however, insists that we account for the notion of the image immanently. How do we come up with this idea of a mind/brain/eye that receives images? Well, we already have to have an image of the brain or self. From the flow of our experiences, movements or images we posit some organizing centre, and we also posit some real world behind the images we see. (p. 108)

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Such clear, unencumbered exposition stands out as the most valuable aspect of Gilles Deleuze and, as such, makes it a valuable primer. John Protevi's book, Political Physics, takes up the mantle of Continuum Press' Transversals series of books, employing Guattari's notion of the transversal to promote creative and experimental engagements with immanence and neomaterialism both within and beyond the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Protevi's approach to this task is to provide a transversal reading of Derrida and Deleuze, exploring the points at which their thoughts intersect, whilst remaining sensitive to the singularity of their respective approaches. The point of focus for this doublereading, as suggested by the title of the book, is the political, or more specifically, the way the Western philosophical tradition has constructed its political view of the world along the lines of 'bodies politic'. Citing 'force' as the main area of transversal linkage between Deleuze and Derrida, Protevi produces a very scholarly and detailed analysis of the body politic as articulated by a number of key protagonists in the Western tradition, from Plato and Aristotle through Kant and Hegel and on to Heidegger. The motor-force of Protevi's analysis points to the other word making up the title of his book, 'physics', whereby he explores the complex and hitherto undertheorized role of scientific ideas in the construction of political philosophy. Ultimately, Political Physics strives for a neomaterialist concept of the political which is capable of overcoming the 'hylomorphism' characterizing political thought dating back to antiquity and it is here that Protevi will make an evaluative distinction between Derrida and Deleuze that posits only the latter as having effectively reconnected political philosophy with its immanent, material conditions. Political Physics, from the perspective of its engagement with immanence and its deployment of a certain Deleuze-inspired approach, represents a very welcome addition to the field, effectively combining scholarly rigour with a creative and subtle synthesis of key concepts and ideas, and rather than always seek to provide a didactic account of political philosophy, opts for an embodied approach which generates some very imaginative relays, as for example where the connection is drawn between architecture as a principle of organizing disciplinarity and artisanship as a challenge to the former's hylomorphic betrayal of immanence, read carefully out of the work of Plato, in particular the Timaeus ('Chapter 5'). This care and attention to detail is in no small measure a result of Protevi's explicit aim of using Derridean close-reading to show how hylomorphism is written into Western thought since its Socratic "beginnings*. In the last analysis, it is this trade-off between the aim of promoting a Deleuze-inspired reconnection of the political with immanent materiality and the need to show how and why the tradition largely eschews this aim in its complex textual play that marks out Political Physics as an important book and also as an effective retort to the intellectual parochialism that all-too-often impedes a transversal, ethical relation to theory and its academic dispostif. Furthermore, it arguably remains one of the shortcomings of Deleuze and Guattari's approach(es) to philosophy that their pragmatic syntheses on occasion tend to be too liberally applied, without the requisite attention to rigour or 'sobriety'. This shortcoming is most certainly one towards which scholars working in the field should turn their attention, and Protevi's book is a welcome addition to Deleuze scholarship in this regard.

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In attempting to locate a potential artisanal approach to the political or, more specifically, a corporealized account of the political that affirms self-organization, Protevi resynthesizes the work done on itinerancy and 'nomadic science' in '1227: Treatise on NomadologyThe War Machine', from A Thousand Plateaus. His exploration of the artisan and his reading of the non-hylomorphic potential of such a conception of the body politic make effective use of recent work in the field of complexity theory, most notably the potential for self-organization set against formal (transcendent) impositions of order. As such, Political Physics makes some very worthwhile contributions to contemporary debates around the present and future of democracy. In summary, the combination of Derridean close-reading of the Western philosophical tradition and the pragmatic, embodied resynthesis of Deleuzian and Deleuze-Guattarian concepts, make the book a grounded, sober and challenging engagement with debates around the question of immanence as it pertains to the potential for political transformation, combining the best elements of scholarship and inventive thinking in order to provide a persuasive and timely contribution to work in the field. The issue of the journal Parallax entitled 'Immanent Trajectories' (Parallax 7:iv[2001]) features some interesting and valuable contributions to the theme of immanence and to scholarship in the field of neomaterialism. As is outlined in Marcel Swiboda's 'Introduction: A Few Lines on (the Plane of) Immanence', the issue takes up the theme from two main perspectives, delineated by recourse to the Hjelmslevian glossematic schema as adapted by Guattari and Deleuze, in order to tendentially differentiate those pieces in the volume that take immanence as an explicit topic and those which seek to position themselves on the process lines that immanent thinking seeks to survey yet simultaneously keep in movement. Representatives of the former tendency take certain ideas around immanence, its philosophical and cultural theoretical elaboration as 'forms of content', whilst the latter largely tend towards a plane of expression whereby the ostensible contents might not tackle immanence head-on, but will explore it through different forms of content. Examples of the former here include Claire Colebrook's essay on 'life' and 'death', as variously conceived by Derrida and Deleuze in the article 'Passive Synthesis and Life', and Ian Buchanan's very complex piece on 'Deleuze's Immanent Historicism' in which he primarily appeals to literary cases and the concept of the 'crack of time' to examine the oft-neglected yet ethically and politically crucial issue of history and historicism in relation to (Deleuze's) immanent philosophy. Examples of the latter tendency number amongst them one of the two articles featured on the work of Michel Serres, 'Poem, Theorem' by Stephen Clucas, which opens up the intellectual terrain of immanence and materialism to the work of an important and largely neglected (in Anglophone studies) philosopher/historian of science, Michel Serres. Such an opening-up also is marked by the conjuncture between Deleuze and Badiou in the experimental piece by Yve Lomax and Vit Hopley, 'Immanent Trajectories', notable for its fascinating synthesis of photographic images, philosophical exposition and 'fictional' anecdote. A somewhat different but no less interesting opening-up of immanent analysis also takes place in relation to the work of Lacan in two very dense and challenging pieces: 'Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze' by Bracha Lichtenberg-

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Ettinger and 'God is of (Possibility)' by Peter Canning. It should be noted, however, that for all the protagonists of philosophy and theory listed here, the overriding concern of this issue is not to privilege the proper name (see below). The division between the two tendencies of exposition and embodiment is not here intended to generate any kind of exclusive disjunction or evaluative distinction (the avoidance of such exclusivity is the very theme of Maria L. Assad's piece 'A Trajectory of Learning: The Quest for an Instructed Middle', by recourse to Michel Serres' concept of the tiers-instruit), so much as aims to show that work on 'immanence' that attempts to situate itself on a plane of immanence without reflecting upon the term's 'meaning' is of no less importance than any actual analysis of the term in helping us to better understand and deploy it. In fact, it is such a two-fold approach that this issue posits as a way forward in this field of investigation. The various formations and deformations between 'forms of content' and 'forms of expression' in this issue include work being done across a number of disciplines, ranging from philosophy, cultural studies, art and architectural theory and practice (see Felix Guattari in conversation with Shin Takamatsu in 'Singularization and Style', with Gary Genosko's 'Introduction'), psychoanalytic theory and practice, new media (see Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova's piece, 'A Matter of Affect: Digital Images and the Cybernetic Re-wiring of Vision'), theology and religion (see Simon O Sullivan, 'Writing on Art (Case-Study: The Buddhist Puja)'). Given the aims of the volume, what is at stake here is not simply an 'interdisciplinary' engagement so much as a series of encounters with immanence that seek to promote an inventive relation to the concept without simply privileging the proper name, but rather to try and show the ways in which proper names themselves only mark tendencies and effects when viewed immanently. The ultimate value of such a strategy as the one deployed here is thatbetween them the various articles making up the volume might generate some new refrains and enable a glimpse of hitherto-unacknowledged diagrammatic tendencies. The extent to which this works in practice is something that must await further investigation, debate and assembly.

Books Reviewed Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze. Routledge. [2001] pp. 170. pb 8.99 ISBN 0 4152 4634 2. Deleuze, Gilles, 'Introduction' by John Rajchman. Pure Immanence: Essays on Life. Zone. [2001] pp. 104. 15.99 ISBN 1 8909 5124 2. Protevi, John. Political Physics. Continuum. [2001] pp. 245. pb18.99 ISBN 0 4850 0619 7.