Gilles Deleuze's Luminous Philosophy

Providing a comprehensive reading of Deleuzian philosophy, Gilles Deleuze’s Luminous Philosophy argues that this philosophy’s most consistent conceptual spine and figure of thought is its inherent luminism. When Deleuze notes in Cinema 1 that ‘the plane of immanence is entirely made up of light’, he ties this philosophical luminism directly to the notion of the complementarity of the photon in its aspects of both particle and wave. Engaging, in chronological order, the whole body and range of Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, the book traces the ‘line of light’ that runs through Deleuze’s work, and it considers the implications of Deleuze’s luminism for the fields of literary studies, historical studies, the visual arts and cinema studies. It contours Deleuze’s luminism both against recent studies that promote a ‘dark Deleuze’ and against the prevalent view that Deleuzian philosophy is a philosophy of difference. Instead, it argues, it is a philosophy of the complementarity of difference and diversity, considered as two reciprocally determining fields that are, in Deleuze’s view, formally distinct but ontologically one. The book, which is the companion volume to Félix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Ecology , argues that the ‘real projective plane’ is the ‘surface of thought’ of Deleuze’s philosophical luminism.