The following are quotes from Deleuze’s book on Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.
“As Deleuze will say, we always start from the middle of things; thought has no beginning, just an outside to which it is connected.” –from Robert Hurley’s preface.
And I would say the same about any intro or preface to a book: it’s never the beginning; it is only the point at which the thinker began to record their thoughts in any possible kind of lasting way. As Deleuze, with Guatarri, pointed out in A Thousand Plateaus:
A book doesn’t reflect the world as much as form a rhizome with it.
And even here we see, in one of Deleuze’s early books, one of the primary themes (the rhizomatic approach (that provided a backbone to pretty much everything else Deleuze wrote after that. It tends to show up in all of Deleuze’s writings as well as writings about him. It could, in fact, be the main thing that anyone that only wanted to dabble in him needed to understand. But in order to truly understand it, one needs to understand the mechanistic model that Deleuze utilized (more for convenience than any final statement about the nature or existence of free will (as described by Hurley:
“Deleuze opens us to the idea (which I take as a contribution to ecological thought) the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us.”
The creative act (that which gives us the experience of free will (never being that far from the back of Deleuze’s mind, he encourages us to treat ourselves as nodal points in a vast rhizomatic network of discourse (much like the model provided in Layotard’s The Postmodern Condition: the earth as a ball drifting through space with individual ball bearings stuck to it, via gravity, clacking against each other in acts of displacement (so that we may participate in the communal creative act he considers himself to be a part of –that is as compared to the leader of it all with some kind of grand narrative.
And while those of a more neo-classicist sensibilty or who, embarrassed by the term “Postmodern” (that which is Passé (would either try to fix him in the post-structuralist category or argue that regardless of how most people take him, he is offering some kind of fixed meaning as his use of scientific and mathematical terms suggests , I would argue that to understand Deleuze is to understand the postmodern sensibility: which is always about participation as compared to control. This is why he works in the elusive style he does, to encourage us to read him in the same way we might a poem. Once again, Hurley:
“The fact is that Spinoza is difficult. And this book on Spinoza is difficult. But the situation is helped by the author’s word to the wise: one doesn’t have to follow every proposition, make every connection –the intuitive or affective reading may be more practical anyway. What if one accepted the invitation –come as you are- and read with a different attitude, which might be more like the way one attends to poetry.”
And if you think about it, the movement of philosophy has been one of moving from the control of Plato’s classicism to the postmodern emphasis on participation laid out by Deleuze.