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(More customer reviews)Germinal Life is the sequel to Keith Ansell Pearson's well-received book on Nietzsche and biophilosophy, Viroid Life, which appeared in 1997. It is also the middle-entry in what is unfolding as a series of three books examining the work of Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Bergson, the third of which will focus on the ontological concept of the `virtual' commonly found in both Bergson and Deleuze. Like any middle-child, one might expect such a volume as this to be somewhat troublesome, possessing neither the seniority of the first in the series (and the respect that goes with that) nor the relative youth and indulgence enjoyed by the latest arrival. To switch the analogy to one with literature, the novelty of the first book in any trilogy is seldom surpassed by what follows it, while the kudos of being the final entry where everything is brought to a climax is likewise unparalleled. This usually leaves the second book an intermediary role in the most anodyne sense, that of pushing the plot forward (normally by complication) and deepening the characterisation. What is uniquely philosophical about a trilogy of philosophy books may well thwart such a structural characterisation as this (especially if it is a trilogy in name only), but there is, nonetheless, evidence for this homology in Ansell Pearson's latest work: it builds on the main them of Viroid Life, namely contemporary biophilosophy and its significance for the `transhuman condition', by intensifying its interpretation of Deleuze's vitalist metaphysics (through reading Bergson in particular), while also anticipating future research into the various political implications of such a philosophy. In other words, the characterisation of Deleuze's philosophy (already a central component in Viroid Life) is deepened and the philosophical problematic of what going beyond `the human condition' truly entails is complicated. However, where Viroid Life played with themes that are fairly intoxicating (techno-theory, nihilism, viruses), used theorists who have always had a wide appeal (Nietzsche, Lyotard, Baudrillard), and did all this in a politically engaged manner, Germinal Life is temperate and measured in its progress: it provides more of the arguments necessary to support the points introduced so spectacularly in the earlier book. This is not to say that Germinal Life is dull by comparison, but rather that it is eminently philosophical (in this sense, all genuine philosophy would have to be called dull). Indeed, what is true of Ansell Pearson's work in general is also the hallmark of Deleuze's own oeuvre: beneath the apparently `flashy' surface (as Foucault once put it) there is a well thought-out metaphysics at work (for Ansell Pearson, the end of philosophy, which is to say, the end of metaphysics, is far from being upon us). It is only that the balance has shifted in this latest work: names like Baudrillard are still there (no less than Bergson and Deleuze were present in Viroid Life), only more as a background to the hard task of philosophising. Consequently, while Germinal Life may have less appeal amongst non-philosophers in cultural studies and sociology, it cannot fail to impress philosophers interested in biology, the history of Twentieth-century French thought, and the fundamentals of Deleuze's philosophy of immanence. This type of serious, philosophical engagement with Deleuze is all the more necessary now that the reception of his work in the English-speaking world is entering its second phase and moving away from basic introductions and commentaries to the appraisal of its actual value for contemporary debates. What Germinal Life admirably demonstrates is that, firstly, Deleuze's vitalist philosophy belongs to a tradition of non-mechanistic, non-teleological, and non-reductionist thought about evolution running from Bergson to Gilbert Simonden through Jacob Von Uexkull and Raymond Ruyer: but Ansell Pearson also argues for the tenability of this oft-derided approach by examining in great detail the latest research in favour of the creativity of evolution, evidence that shows us the non-hierarchical, relatively chaotic, and molecular phenomenon which is life, far removed from the unilinear, organicist, and perfectionist model normally drawn. These ideas are articulated through three chapters (bordered by an introduction and conclusion), on the theoretical relationship between Bergson and Deleuze (Chapter One), Deleuze and Darwin(ism) (Chapter Two), and creative evolution and Deleuze's `creative ethology' (Chapter Three). Clearly, the presence of Bergson looms large in these pages, and Ansell Pearson is as scholarly and expert as ever in his exposition of his thought and its influence on Deleuze. But this book is not only about the history of thought. As the title would suggest, its primary text is Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (1968), which is both the most biological and ontological of his works: as such, it is the text that constitutes - if any one book can - the bedrock of the Deleuzian philosophy. The method of transcendental empiricism was announced in Difference and Repetition and its delineation of this method brings together most of Deleuze's central ideas, be they ontological (the univocity of being, difference as the groundless ground of repetition, etc.) empirical (Deleuze's biophilosophy itself) or metaphilosophical (the shock of the new, the image of thought, and so on). Other texts from the Deleuzian corpus are invoked by Ansell Pearson when necessary, of course, especially the Logic of Sense (1969) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) (the latter is particularly important for the third chapter). Overall, however, this focus on one text and one theme (biophilosophy) gives Germinal Life a continuous organisation: where Viroid Life was composed of a loosely integrated set of articles that, quite fittingly, dispersed its argument through the space of its chapters, Germinal Life, no less appropriately, fosters a continuity of argument over time, a germ-line of thought rather than a zig-zag line-of-escape (to recycle some of the most popular Deleuzian jargon). I recommend it wholeheartly to all those seriously interested in Deleuze, Bergson and the Philosophy of biology.
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Germinal Life is the sequel to the highly successful Viroid Life. Where Viroid Life provided a compelling reading of Nietzsche's philosophy of the human, Germinal Life is an original and groundbreaking analysis of little known and difficult theoretical aspects of the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.In particular, Keith Ansell Pearson provides fresh and insightful readings of Deleuze's work on Bergson and Deleuze's most famous texts Difference and Repetition and A Thousand Plateaus. Germinal Life also provides new insights into Deleuze's relation to some of the most original thinkers of modernity, from Darwin to Freud and Nietzsche, and explores the connections between Deleuze and more recent thinkers such as Adorno and Merleau-Ponty.
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