Essays Critical and Clinical

“Authors, if they are great, are more like doctors than patients: they are themselves astonishing diagnosticians or symptomatologists.” So wrote the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, setting himself the task of demonstrating the connections between literature and medicine. The essays collected here testify to Deleuze’s fundamental conviction that philosophy cannot be undertaken independently of science and art. As so often in his writing, the names of philosophers such as Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger appear beside those of literary figures including Melville, Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, Beckett and Artaud. With this book, Deleuze’s life-long ambition to dismantle the barriers between art and its adjacent domains is brilliantly realized.