Deleuze's Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms

Aidan Tynan addresses Deleuze's assertion that 'literature is an enterprise of health' and shows how a concern of health and illness was a characteristic of his philosophy as a whole, from his earliest works to his groundbreaking collaborations with Guattari, to his final, enigmatic statements on 'life'.

He explains why alcoholism, anorexia, manic depression and schizophrenia are key concepts in Deleuze's literary theory, and shows how, with the turn to schizoanalysis, literature takes on a crucial political and ethical role in helping us to diagnose our present pathologies and articulate the possibilities of a health to come.

• The first book length study of Deleuze's critical and clinical project and the conceptualisations of health and illness he developed over the course of his career
• Uses the idea of the literary clinic to unify Deleuze's literary theory with the political critique he developed with Guattari, and argues in this way for a distinctively Deleuzian critical practice
• Draws on Deleuze conceptualisations of health and illness to reassess his relationship to key thinkers such as Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Melanie Klein and literary figures such as Melville F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kafka, Beckett and Artaud