Dark Deleuze
In Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), I argue that Google’s connectivity thesis typifies a popular approach to networks that contributes to a culture of compulsory happiness, decentralized control, and overexposure. It has been translated into Spanish, Japanese, and German.
Short Description:
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is known as a thinker of creation, joyous affirmation, and rhizomatic assemblages. In this short book, Andrew Culp polemically argues that this once- radical canon of joy has lost its resistance to the present. Concepts created to defeat capitalism have been recycled into business mantras that joyously affirm “Power is vertical; potential is horizontal!”
In Dark Deleuze, Culp recovers the thinker’s forgotten negativity. He presents them through a series of contraries, each explored in playful prose. He unsettles the prevailing interpretation through an underground network of references to conspiracy, cruelty, the terror of the outside, and the shame of being human. At the end of his search, Culp still charges Deleuze with one fatal error – too busy encouraging us to ‘find reasons to believe in this world,’ Deleuze fails to teach us how to oppose what is intolerable about it. Culp claims that to be a communist today, we must also learn how to hate this world.
Additional materials:
- Audio for the talk I gave at the University of Washington.
- A short post for my press relating the book to monsters and aliens (an extended version on my blog).
- An interview with Alexander R Galloway published by boundary 2 where we discuss its connections to Queer Feminism, Media Studies and Black Studies.
- An interview with Alfie Bown for the Hong Kong Review of Books in which I further expand on Queer Feminism, nomadism, and its critique of capitalism.
- The podcast Theory Talk episode 44, where Joe from Fractal Ontology talks to me about the book.
The project has received advanced praise by tactical media progenitor Geert Lovink in his e-flux review of the book Ex-Communication and in his opponent speech at Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s dissertation defense.
Links to reviews of the book:
-Religious Theory, Snediker, "A Darker, Grittier Deleuze"
-Hickman, "A Short Summary"
-Berger, "A Conspiracy Against the World"
-Stones, "Conspiring Against the World"
-Galloway, Blurb
Non-English reviews:
-Ideas, Heffesse, "Un rizoma no nos va a salvar la vida"
-Deutschelandfunk, Kramachek, "Deleuzes dunkle Seite"
-松本 潤一郎, "偽悪的挑発に満ちた書
非対称的なドゥルーズ"
-manifold, Tanju, "Zamanı Zıvanadan
Çıkarmaya Çağrı"
Related Events:
1) Book launch at Left Bank Books, July 9, 2016
2) Dark Deleuze in the Dark, UC-Santa Cruz, Feb 22, 2017
3) German book launch, Bbooks, Berlin, Mar 26, 2017
4) Dark Deleuze, Global Debate Symposium, Colorado College, July 13, 2017
5) Dark Deleuze Seminar, High School of Economics, Moscow, Oct 25, 2017
6) Dark Deleuze, European University at St. Petersburg, Oct 27, 2017