Category: Compendium

Aphorisms and Kafka

The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka. Edited by Reiner Stach and translated by Shelley Frisch. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022. 256 p. $24.95/£20.00 ISBN 9780691205922

this new translation of Kafka’s Zürau aphorisms is a wonderful undertaking that allows the reader to easily see how this bilingual edition opens up new and complex paths in reading Kafka and his aphorisms. the dynamic of this editorial enterprise is an opportunity for the reader to reconnect, once again, with the author’s lines and with some of his thought fragments.

as a fragmentary writing this volume is another doorway into a particularly fascinating world of ideas. 

Grounding-Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze, What is Grounding. Grand Rapids, MI: &&& Publishing, 2015. Edited by Tony Yanick, Jason Adams & Mohammad Salemy. Translated by Arjen Kleinherenbrink. 185 pp. ISBN 978-0-692-45454-1. E-BOOK (PDF)

This volume is based on the notes taken by Pierre Lefebvre on Deleuze’s seminar Qu’est-ce que fonder? (1956-1957).

The Jefferson Bible

Peter Manseau, The Jefferson Bible: A Biography. Lives of Great Religious Books; Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2020. 236 pp. $24.95 / £20.00. ISBN 9780691205694.

The unusual artifact entitled the Jefferson Bible deserves a detailed bio-graphy. This enterprise was undertaken by Peter Manseau and delivered to the reader through the Princeton University Press’s series of Lives of Great Religious Books.

What is the Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, known as Jefferson Bible? A cultural artifact? It is an experiment? It is a book? It is all these and more. We know that was handcrafted, a cut & paste operation. (5)

Thomas Jefferson gathered passages, reordered, repurposed those passages according to ‘his own intuition and sensibilities.’ For Manseau, Jefferson’s enterprise resemble a dadaist découpé, a cut-up, a music sampling, a music remix, and simultaneously ‘it is many books.’ (7-8)

This hypercreative item contains its time(s) and remains a witness of what ‘new’ and ‘intriguing’ would be read in the future.

Ioan Petru Culianu, 05.01.1950

Logic-Deleuze

Corry Shores, The Logic of Gilles Deleuze. Basic Principles. London-New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 312 pp. $103.50. ISBN 9781350062269. E-BOOK (PDF)

Within the new volume on the logic of Deleuze the author, Corry Shores, manages to show how from concepts and tools developed by the contemporary logic can be formulated the basic principles of a deleuzian logic.

Corry Shores manages to give to the reader a strong logical assemblage already at work within Deleuze’s oeuvre. Within 3 parts, from dis-composition and dis-identification, the logic of otherness, to falsity, the author un-folds 8 well written chapters. A reading of this volume in parallel with Deleuze’s books Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation and The Logic of Sense give more sense to Shores creative logical experiment.

~ This volume is a must reading for anyone interested in Deleuze’s work.

Eef van Breen Group – Walk of Doubts (Groningen, 2019)