The Hermetic Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze drew upon a vast array of source material in his writing, from philosophy and psychoanalysis to science and art. Among the intellectual currents that influenced his work, however, one has been largely neglected in Deleuze scholarship: Western esotericism, specifically the lineage of Hermetic thought that extends from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance through the work of such figures as Iamblichus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. In this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics, and politics were informed by-and can only be fully understood through-this Hermetic tradition. Ramey identifies key Hermetic moments in Deleuzian thought-including his theories of art, subjectivity, and immanence-arguing that Deleuze's work represents a kind of contemporary Hermeticism, a consistent experiment to unite thought and affect, percept and concept, mind and nature in order to engender new relations between knowledge, power, and desire. In uncovering and clarifying the Hermetic strand in Deleuze's work, Ramey offers both a new, cogent interpretation of Deleuze-particularly his insistence that the development of thought demands a spiritual ordeal-and a framework for retrieving the pre-Kantian paradigm of philosophy as spiritual practice.