The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animati

The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations    Charles J. Stivale, a scholar in French literary and cultural studies, tries to articulate Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical concepts with practical studies on culture, analyzing films, cyberspace, and Cajun dance.   Although he says that the goal of the book is to provide "an initial orientation" to Deleuze and Guattari's collaborative works, it is not a simple job at all for those innocent of Deleuzean concepts to follow the flow of his thought (ix).   He provides short explications of the concepts and quotations from Deleuze and Guattari's books before his application, but only the readers, who are familiar with Delezean concepts, seem to be able to articulate the whole idea.     Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   As the title implies, Stivale considers Deleuze and Guattari's works as "expressing 'thought' that arises from two individual, fluctuating subjectivities"(xi).   He attempts to grasp and animate this two-foldedness, both sorting out two different voices of Deleuze and Guattari and presenting the intersection between them.   This two-fold thought, as Stivale stresses, should be understood not only as an overlap of two particular sensibilities and modes of knowing but also as "one of action and opening outward, of formulations, unheard-of juxtapositions of concepts, monstrous couplings," that is, rhizomatics of n-1 dimensions (24).   In his introductory chapter, he differentiates Deleuze as a philosopher from Guattari as a psychotherapist and political activist: first, he explicates Deleuze's passion of the concept, examining Deleuze's relation with Nietzsche and Foucault and several concepts including "body without organ," "image of thought," and "rhizome"; seco nd, h... ...o his attempt to bridge over the conceptual gap between the "local" and the "global" within cultural studies with Deleuze-Guattarian concepts.   His point-of-view of cultural studies, especially, is valuable in terms that he recognizes the danger within its becoming-discipline: "These geopolitical negotiations of 'forms and feelings' [in Cajun dance] are precisely the proper focus of a 'cultural studies' understood not in a limited, 'territorialized' sense of dueling disciplines between adjoining theoretical and conceptual articulations and strategies" (186-7).   If one can keep his/her own distance in reading this book, it will serve as a great source book for further research on cultural studies. Work Cited The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations.   By Charles J. Stivale.   New York: The Guildford Press, 1998.   Pp. xxii, 361.