The essays in this book present a complex theme at the heart of the philosophy o
f Gilles Deleuze, what in his last writing he called simply "a life." They captu
re a problem that runs throughout his work--his long search for a new and superi
or empiricism. Announced in his first book, on David Hume, then taking off with
his early studies of Nietzsche and Bergson, the problem of an "empiricist conver
sion" became central to Deleuze's work, in particular to his aesthetics and his
conception of the art of cinema. In the new regime of communication and informat
ion-machines with which he thought we are confronted today, he came to believe t
hat such a conversion, such an empiricism, such a new art and will-to-art, was w
hat we need most. The last, seemingly minor question of "a life" is thus insepar
able from Deleuze's striking image of philosophy not as a wisdom we already poss
ess, but as a pure immanence of what is yet to come. Perhaps the full exploitati
on of that image, from one of the most original trajectories in contemporary phi
losophy, is also yet to come.
