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Space After Deleuze

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DOI: 10.1080/2325548X.2018.1402267

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Space After Deleuze

Michael W. Pesses

To cite this article: Michael W. Pesses (2018) Space After Deleuze, The AAG Review of Books,
6:2, 110-112, DOI: 10.1080/2325548X.2018.1402267

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The AAG Review OF BOOKS
Space After Deleuze
Arun Saldanha. London, UK:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
xii and 232 pp., references,
index. $114.00 cloth (ISBN 978-
1-44111-188-3).
Reviewed by Michael W.
Pesses, Department of
Geography, Antelope Valley
College, Lancaster, CA.
Tarrying with Gilles Deleuze is a rite of
passage for human geography graduate
students wanting to gain some cred-
ibility in using theory. I remember an-
other student, from my very early days
in the master’s program at California
State University, Northridge, asking
me which theorists I used. I weakly offered Foucault,
weakly because I had yet to read that much Foucault, and
the other student nodded in approval. “You should read
Deleuze,” he said. “J. P. Jones likes Deleuze.” It was a brief
statement that today I look back at fondly with a post-
structuralist gaze toward our own productions of knowl-
edge. I recall once years ago, around those same days,
Kevin McHugh mentioned that he was reading Bergson-
ism (Deleuze [1966] 1988), which meant I immediately
logged onto Amazon.com and ordered a copy. Bergsonism
wasn’t that hard to read, but later I picked up a copy of
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and
Guattari [1972] 1983). That was a rite of passage, man.
Rite of passage.
In Space After Deleuze, Arun Saldanha has produced an
impressive synthesis of Deleuze’s solo writings as well as
his work with Félix Guattari, with a focus on the spa-
tial nature of works like Difference and Repetition ([1968]
1994), The Logic of Sense ([1969] 1993), and A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia ([1980] 1987). The
The AAG Review of Books 6(2) 2018, pp. 110–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2018.1402267.
©2018 by American Association of Geographers. Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.
book is centered around Deleuze, but
Guattari is ever present. A project like
Saldanha’s is bound to draw criticism
due the playful and dense nature of
Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophre-
nia work; there are multiple ways to
read, interpret, and use a Deleuzian
geophilosophy. Yet, a project of this
nature has the potential to help stu-
dents struggling to see how Deleuzian
philosophy connects to geographic
analysis. The title itself, Space After
Deleuze, is full of meaning, which Sal-
danha argues should be interpreted in
three ways. First, this is a book on how
Deleuze understood space, and second,
it is an effort to demonstrate how De-
leuze represents a major shift in theo-
rizing space. In addition to gathering
the spatial threads of Deleuze’s oeuvre,
Saldanha works toward a third meaning of the title: How
do we understand space after Deleuze’s work? Saldanha
brings Deleuze into our present moment to connect flows
and folding to the Anthropocene; that is, the suggested
epoch following the Holocene that signifies the tremen-
dous human impact on the Earth’s hydro-, bio-, and atmo-
sphere. “I think Deleuze and Guattari themselves would
concede the Anthropocene cannot but summon a new
kind of universalism against that of capital, which has
recreated the earth in its own image” (p. 44).
It is important to first state that Saldanha impressively
overlays the plateaus of Deleuze’s books and interviews.
Space After Deleuze is a valuable starting point for any stu-
dent of spatial theory. Due to the book’s scope, it can show
those who have previously read Deleuze new aspects of his
body of work. Personally, I was delighted to read about De-
leuze’s criticisms of academic “travel” (pp. 60–61) and that
“Deleuze had a soft spot for the celebration of travel in
U.S. fiction, of being ‘on the road,’ never in place and al-
ways in between” (p. 54). As Saldanha works through the
big texts like The Logic of Sense ([1969] 1993) and Anti-
Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari [1972] 1983), he focuses on
the key sections, but also offers his own interpretations
of what such work means. For example, Saldanha rightly
points out that the ethics of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo-
phrenia work is not to descend into anarchy and infinite
meanings but to instead “gain coherence at the edge of
nonsense and chaos” (p. 33, italics in original).
Due to the introductory nature of Space After Deleuze, at
times I think Saldanha could have been more explana-
tory of Deleuze’s work. Smooth and striated spaces, for ex-
ample, figure largely in A Thousand Plateaus, but despite
using these terms, Saldanha does not offer what is actu-
ally meant by a “smooth” or “striated” space until page
107. Once Saldanha does engage with these concepts, he
does an excellent job in distilling the main points, but I
think in an effort to stick with the book’s four-part struc-
ture of “Earth,” “Flows,” “Places,” and “Maps,” some key
concepts are glossed over early on in the book. Fortu-
nately, because the book is broken into clearly delineated
sections, it is not difficult to seek out greater explanation
of key Deleuzian terms.
I do find two faults with Space After Deleuze. First, Sal-
danha promises critique: “To think space constructively
we will sometimes arrive at the limits of Deleuze’s sys-
tem . . . this will require offering criticism” (p. 6). Yet,
the criticism is scarce throughout the book. Saldanha
does offer the occasional contemporary limitation to
Deleuze’s concepts; nonwhite, non-American cultural
products like kung fu movies and manga complicate
Deleuze and Guattari’s “White-Man face” (p. 143). A
sustained critique never emerges, though. Saldanha’s
invocation of the Anthropocene would be an excellent
place to situate such a critique. For example, Saldanha
uses the section “Geologies” to show what is at stake for
both physical and human geographers and to introduce
some of the theoretical tools provided by Deleuze. “[T]
he Anthropocene necessitates conversations amongst
stratigraphy, environmental studies, evolutionary the-
ory, political economy, and the humanities, and many of
Deleuze and Guattari’s intuitions will be of great help”
(p. 18). In what follows, however, Saldanha explains the
concept of strata from A Thousand Plateaus as a mate-
rialist response to the linguistic turn, which Deleuze
and Guattari felt was too idealist. Saldanha pushes for a
reading of A Thousand Plateaus as an entry toward un-
derstanding the Anthropocene, yet it is never clear just
how the physical geography verbiage is to be used in un-
derstanding physical systems and phenomena. It is clear
that Deleuze and Guattarian strata can help explain the
SPRING 2018 111
durability of racism, but there is little evidence that this
could work for something like climate change (p. 21).
Yet, Saldanha makes the call for stratigraphy: “After De-
leuze and Guattari earth science can become complete,
that is critical, when it conceives human cultural evolu-
tion, capitalism, and earth science itself as precipitated
by, or at least responding to, the ultra-slow movements
of plates, mountains, oceans, and fossilization” (p. 17). I
cannot help but think of Diamond’s work in relation to
such a statement. Does Diamond’s (1999) focus on lati-
tude and metal ores make Guns, Germs, and Steel: The
Fates of Human Societies Deleuzian? I doubt Diamond or
Deleuze and Guattari would claim the other’s work, so
how does such a “critical earth science” work according
to either the original philosophers or Saldanha? Later
in the book, Saldanha shows the clear applicability of
Deleuzian concepts to political topics like the Donald
Trump administration and Syrian refugees (p. 157),
yet the realm of physical geography is presented rather
than argued. My hypothesis is that despite Deleuze’s in-
sistence that many of his concepts are not metaphors,
his geological and biological terms cannot always be
used in their original sense. Although Saldanha did not
criticize the use of these terms as I would have liked,
he did anticipate such a critique. “[T]he question with
Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts is never whether their
borrowing is fair or accurate but whether it allows for
thinking afresh” (p. 32). Of course, that is precisely what
Saldanha gives his readers; fresh perspectives for their
own problems and projects. Although I would have liked
more critique on Saldanha’s end, he certainly generated
my own as I read Space After Deleuze.
My second criticism lies in the fact that Space After
Deleuze does not produce a Deleuzian affect. The book
simply did not feel Deleuzian as I read it. This could
be a strength for some in that the book is more acces-
sible than the source material, but I think it also is a
weakness in that Deleuze’s style works to push for new
conceptions of philosophy. Saldanha is a good writer
and disciplined, but I would have liked to get his own
Deleuzian playfulness injected into the text. Deleuze’s
own approach is enlightening here, where he saw “the
history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes
to the same thing) immaculate conception” (Deleuze
[1990] 1995, 6). The resulting work, the child of Deleuze
and the philosopher of study, was faithful to the original
author, but “was bound to be monstrous too, because it
resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations,
and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed” (Deleuze
[1990] 1995, 6). Space After Deleuze is good, but it feels
far from monstrous.
References
Deleuze, G. [1966] 1988. Bergsonism. Brooklyn, NY: Zone
Books.
———. [1968] 1994. Difference and repetition. New York,
NY: Columbia University Press.
———. [1969] 1993. The logic of sense. New York, NY:
Columbia University Press.
———. [1990] 1995. Negotiations, 1972–1990. New York,
NY: Columbia University Press.
112 THE AAG REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. [1972] 1983. Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press.
———. [1980] 1987. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and
schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minne-
sota Press.
Diamond, J. 1999. Guns, germs, and steel: The fate of hu-
man societies. New York, NY: Norton.