The essays in this book present a complex theme at the heart of the
philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, what in his last writing he called simply "a
life." They capture a problem that runs throughout his work - his long search
for a new and superior empiricism. Announced in his first book, on David Hume,
then taking off with his early studies of Nietzsche and Bergson, the problem of
an "empiricist conversion" became central to Deleuze's work, in particular to
his aesthetics and his conception of the art of cinema. In the new regime of
communication and information-machines with which he thought we are confronted
today, he came to believe that such a conversion, such an empiricism, such a
new art and will-to-art, was what we need most. The last, seemingly minor
question of "a life" is thus inseparable from Deleuze's striking image of
philosophy not as a wisdom we already possess, but as a pure immanence of what
is yet to come. Perhaps the full exploitation of that image, from one of the
most original trajectories in contemporary philosophy, is also yet to come.
