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Twice, within a short period of time, I have been asked to write and talk about a person's life and work in a Deleuzian context. The first time was when I was invited to write a critical biography of Gilles Deleuze himself and the second was when I was invited to speak to the honour of Ronald Bogue, Ron Bogue, Ron, undoubtedly one of the most respected Deleuze scholars in the field, at the roundtable in his honour at the Deleuze Studies conference in Toronto, Canada, in June 2017. Both invitations were in themselves great honours but they both also caused me pause and concern. As those familiar with Deleuze's philosophy will recognise, it is hard to talk about someone's life and work without falling right into the trap of all those things that Deleuze sought to move away from— the individual, history, chronology. For the biography, I therefore worked to find a way of talking about Deleuze, the philosopher and his work, in a somewhat chronological order— indeed, the publisher positively demanded it! —while continuing to stay attuned to his philosophy of difference. Thinking about how to talk about Ron at the conference, and although the organisers did not positively demand even a somewhat chronological order, I figured I could be helped by speaking to and of him via the same assemblages I found useful in writing about Deleuze: A Child, An Apprenticeship, A Friendship, A Practice, and A Life.

To pay tribute, or to give homage, is always a public act of praise or affirmation. In the present context, we are here to pay tribute to Ron Bogue for the history of his contribution to the field of Deleuze and Guattari Studies—a contribution that is too large to quantify in the time allotted, since one could not only count the books, chapters, and articles published, but would also have to account for all the letters, reviews, and book reports that, for many in the audience today, and just as many who are not, have materially contributed to the work and livelihood of those who have called themselves, at one moment or another, 'Deleuzians'. A secondary source for the act of paying tribute, of course, comes to us from Rome, and concerns those auspicious and highly politicised gestures when one leader or procurator pays a form of tribute (usually a form of payment) to an official of greater stature in the Empire— or, as in this case, the Empire of Deleuze Studies. So, on this occasion, my form of payment is this portrait of what I will call the 'Bogean commentator'. In my own writings about Deleuze, I have often addressed what I called 'the art of commentary' and the conceptual persona of the modern commentator, especially the so-called writer of secondary works on a philosopher. If anyone remembers what I have written on this subject, they might recall more than a little humour and irony concerning those whom Deleuze himself calls 'scholars and familiars', those who he said would only bring the author shame and sadness.

Ronald Bogue's Deleuze and Guattari: Critics of the Twentieth Century (1989) was the first book on Deleuze and Guattari published in English. Ronald Bogue belongs to the first group of scholars who deeply and extensively commented Deleuze and Guattari's work in the USA together with Charles Stivale and Paul Patton, who had already published two important texts (Stivale 1984; Patton 1984). And, by doing so, Bogue brought fresh novelty to American academia. He did so at the time when Derrida and Foucault were the most noticed philosophers in the USA, even if their deconstruction and archaeology programmes were studied, not in philosophy departments—dominated as they were by analytical philosophy—but only in literature and social sciences departments. So, bringing Deleuze and Guattari to the USA was much more than simple curiosity. It was an act of courage, the affirmative gesture of introducing a new, radical way of thinking. This is even more noteworthy when we think Deleuze as a philosopher with an enormous and extensive body of work, who has written about a huge range of philosophical domains such as ethics, politics and aesthetics. And in all these areas Ronald Bogue gave us comments and interpretations to enrich and clarify Deleuze's theses. Deleuze is a monument to philosophy and Ronald Bogue is also a monument because he dedicated himself to writing about Deleuze's work in all its extent: from ethics to politics, passing through his extensive aesthetics: cinema, theatre, literature, painting, music To analyse all these fields with such an intense gaze is monumental!