The draft is here. (Updated with a section on "evolution and involution" as of 5:20 pm CDT.)
It's forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, edited by Henry Somers-Hall and Daniel W Smith. As it's intended for a reference work it's more of an overview rather than original argumentation. Still, comments welcome here or by email at protevi AT lsu DOT edu.
Here are the introductory remarks, with accompanying notes below the fold:
“Life” was a major theme for Deleuze, so much so that he would say at one point: “Everything I’ve written is vitalistic, at least I hope it is…” (N, 143). But before we get out the pitchforks at this uttering of a forbidden word, we should remember Deleuze’s love of provocation, and read the beginning of the passage to see his idiosyncratic notion of vitalism: “There’s a profound link between signs, life, and vitalism: the power of nonorganic life that can be found in a line that’s drawn, a line of writing, a line of music. It’s organisms that die, not life. Any work of art points a way through for life, finds a way through the cracks.” (N, 143)
In this article we will skirt the relation of life and art,[i] however, and instead focus upon Deleuze’s writings that are aimed at life as it is understood in the biological register.[ii] We’ll begin with a guide to some key biophilosophical investigations in Deleuze’s single-authored masterpiece, Difference and Repetition: Chapter 2 on organic syntheses and organic time, and Chapter 5 on embryogenesis.[iii] Then, in the second part of the article, we will consider several biophilosophical themes in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, addressing “vitalism,” “life,” “nature,” “content and expression,” “milieus, codes, territories,” “nonorganic life,” “body without organs,” and “organism.”
[i] Treated ably in Bogue 2003, Sauvagnargues 2004 and 2005, and Grosz 2008.
[ii] The founding work in examining Deleuze's biophilosophy is Ansell Pearson 1999. Also of interest are, in addition to the works cited in note 1: Caygill 1997; Hansen 2000; DeLanda 1997 and 2002; Parisi 2004; Braidotti 2002 and 2006; Toscano 2006; Shaviro 2010; and Colebrook 2010.
[iii] We will, regrettably, not be able to discuss Deleuze’s relation to the biological thinkers whom he cites – an important field of research already well underway See Ansell Pearson 1999 on Darwin; Bogue 2003 on Raymond Ruyer; Sauvagnargues 2004, 2005, and 2010 on Gilbert Simondon, Georges Canguilhem, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire; and May 2005 and Marks 2006 on François Jacob and Jacques Monod.
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