Deleuze and Music

What would a Deleuzian music philosophy be like? For Deleuze, music informed his work on several levels. He did not merely write about music, it formed part of his thinking.

Deleuze and Music is the first volume to explore Deleuze's ideas from the perspective of music and sound. Music is central to Deleuze's work from Difference and Repetition and the Logic of Sense to Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature and A Thousand Plateaus (both written with Félix Guattari), music and sound-based problems contribute a great deal to the originality and singularity of his thought.

The essays in this volume explore a variety of these problems and their relevance to key debates in a number of areas including ethics, aesthetics, politics, epistemology and the history of ideas. They collectively demonstrate how music functions in Deleuze's work, exploring how at key stages in his thought ideas of melody, rhythm, harmony, counterpoint and the refrain provide the frame of reference for his immanent ontology, his Spinozist ethology and his (and Guattari's) politics of the 'people yet to come'. Furthermore, they show how music proves the exemplary medium for further exploring and developing his 'rhizomatic' conception of thought.

The volume provides a much-needed addition to the growing body of secondary work on Deleuze and will be of interest to students and researchers working across a diverse range of disiciplines, including philosophy and cultural and critical theory as well as art history, musicology and ethnomusicology.

Features

• The first book on Deleuze in relation to music covering all of the key Deleuzian texts
• Covers different types of music, jazz, pop music, electronic music, heavy metal and improvised music
• Demonstrate how music functions in Deleuze's work, exploring how ideas of melody, rhythm, harmony, counterpoint and the refrain shape his philosophical thinking.