This is a collection of essays from leading experts in a number of fields offering an overview of the work of Felix Guattari. "The Guattari Effect" brings together internationally renowned experts on the work of the French psychoanalyst, philosopher and political activist Felix Guattari with philosophers, psychoanalysts, sociologists and artists who have been influenced by Guattari's thought. Best known for his collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze, Guattari's own writings are still a relatively unmined resource in continental philosophy. Many of his books have not yet been translated into English. Yet his influence has been considerable and far-reaching. This book explores the full spectrum of Guattari's work, reassessing its contemporary significance and giving due weight to his highly innovative contributions to a variety of fields, including linguistics, economics, pragmatics, ecology, aesthetics and media theory. Readers grappling with the ideas of contemporary continental philosophers such as Badiou, Zizek and Ranciere will at last be able to see Guattari as the 'extraordinary philosopher' Deleuze claimed him to be, with his distinctive radical ideas about the epoch of global 'deterritorialization' we live in today, forged within the practical contexts of revolutionary politics and the materialist critique of psychoanalysis.

A detailed and inventive study of the thinking at work in modern painting, drawing on a formidable body of scholarly evidence to challenge modernist and phenomenological readings of art history, The Brain-Eye presents a series of interlinked 'case studies' in which philosophical thought encounters the hallucinatory sensations unleashed by 'painter-researchers.' Rather than outlining a new 'philosophy of art,' The Brain-Eye details the singular problems pursued by each of its protagonists. Striking readings of the oeuvres of Delacroix, Seurat, Manet, Gauguin, and Cezanne recount the plural histories of artists who worked to free the differential forces of colour, discovered by Goethe in his Colour Theory, in the name of a "true hallucination" and of a logic proper to the Visual. A rigorous renewal of the philosophical thinking of visual art, The Brain-Eye explores the complex relations between concept and sensation, theory and practice, the discursive and the visual, and draws out the political and philosophical stakes of the aesthetic revolution in modern painting.

The Guattari Effect brings together internationally renowned experts on the work of the French psychoanalyst, philosopher and political activist F;lix Guattari with philosophers, psychoanalysts, sociologists and artists who have been influenced by Guattaris thought. Best known for his collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze, Guattaris own writings are still a relatively unmined resource in continental philosophy. Many of his books have not yet been translated into English. Yet his influence has been considerable and far-reaching. This book explores the full spectrum of Guattaris work, reassessing its contemporary significance and giving due weight to his highly innovative contributions to a variety of fields, including linguistics, economics, pragmatics, ecology, aesthetics and media theory. Readers grappling with the ideas of contemporary continental philosophers such as Badiou, ek and Rancire will at last be able to see Guattari as the extraordinary philosopher Deleuze claimed him to be, with his distinctive radical ideas about the epoch of global deterritorialization we live in today, forged within the practical contexts of revolutionary politics and the materialist critique of psychoanalysis.

A detailed examination of the motivations and precise coordinates of Duchamp's break from painting into the field of the linguistic sign. Matisse and Duchamp seem to incarnate ideal poles of the tension internal to modern art as it plunged into crisis the idea of the image-a polemical operation that opened the way to contemporary art's auto-problematization of experimental constructivism. Where Matisse subverted the aesthetic regime by bringing painting out of itself to invest its environment in a Bergsonian energetics of color, Duchamp cuts it offfrom the plastic arts through a reversal of Bergson's in-the-making. The readymadecaptures a literalized signifier of this perspective. Duchamp Looked At is an extraordinarily rich philosophical study that offers a startling new account of the dis/continuity between the problems of contemporary art and the new articulations Duchamp fabricated between image and idea, science and art, painting and language. Alliez and Bonne's meticulous archaeological survey rediscovers the real problems and motivations of "Duchamp-thought" through a close analysis of his entire oeuvre: from the Nudes in which the problem of representing movement is gradually displaced into the realm of the virtual, the image disqualified in favor of the diagram, to the pataphysical sciences of chance and the particular, the readymades, the Large Glass and Etant donnes-and beyond, as the artist carbonizes the gallery with 1200 Sacks of Coal and ties it up with Miles of String, in installations that take Duchamp beyond Duchamp.

A detailed and inventive study of the thinking at work in modern painting, drawing on a formidable body of scholarly evidence to challenge modernist and phenomenological readings of art history, The Brain-Eye presents a series of interlinked 'case studies' in which philosophical thought encounters the hallucinatory sensations unleashed by 'painter-researchers.' Rather than outlining a new 'philosophy of art,' The Brain-Eye details the singular problems pursued by each of its protagonists. Striking readings of the oeuvres of Delacroix, Seurat, Manet, Gauguin, and Cezanne recount the plural histories of artists who worked to free the differential forces of colour, discovered by Goethe in his Colour Theory, in the name of a "true hallucination" and of a logic proper to the Visual. A rigorous renewal of the philosophical thinking of visual art, The Brain-Eye explores the complex relations between concept and sensation, theory and practice, the discursive and the visual, and draws out the political and philosophical stakes of the aesthetic revolution in modern painting.

The Signature of the World focuses on one of the most influential works of contemporary philosophy: What is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, their last joint work after Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. It sets What is Philosophy? in the context of earlier work by the two thinkers and, in a manner sure to challenge and provoke, juxtaposes it to the work of both analytic philosophers and continental phenomenologists. Alliez explores the distinctive theory of thought put forth by Deleuze & Guattari from a series of angles, delving into their revolutionary, Spinozist treatment of the history of philosophy, elucidating their engagement with the metaphysics of current research programmes in the sciences and delineating their invention of a material meta-aesthetics capable of responding to the most radical experiments in contemporary art. Much recent philosophy has revelled in declaring the end of metaphysics, of ontology, and sometimes of philosophy itself. In sharp contrast, The Signature of the World is a forceful reminder of the power of ontology and the need for a materialist reinvention of metaphysics. The Signature of the World is here accompanied by two appendices, Deleuze Virtual Philosophy and On the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction to (the) Matter, as well as a preface by Alberto Toscano.