Desert Islands and other texts (1953-1974)

This volume anthologizes 40 texts and interviews written over 20 years by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who died in 1995. The early texts, from 1953-1966 (on Rousseau, Kafka, Jarry and so forth) belong to literary criticism and announce Deleuze’s last book, “Critique and Clinic” (1993). However philosophy clearly predominates the rest of the book, with sharp appraisals of the thinkers he always felt indebted to: Spinoza and Bergson. More surprising is his acknowledgement of Jean-Paul Sartre as his master. However, the figure of Nietzsche remains by far the most seminal, and the presence throughout of his friends and close collaborators, Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault. The book stops shortly after the publication of “Anti-Oedipus”, and presents a kind of genealogy of Deleuze’s thought as well as his attempts to leave philosophy and connect it to the outside – but, he caution, as a philosopher.