Journal Article

Ronald Bogue

Nabais, Catarina Pombo

2019

Overview

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!

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Subject: 20th century / Aesthetics / Archaeology / Curiosity / Deconstruction / Ethics / Forum: In Honour of Ronald Bogue / Foucauldian analysis / Literary criticism / Music / Philosophers / Philosophy / Politics / Social sciences