I am hoping now to write an entry every day for the rest of my sojourn...on this planet, quoi. Mostly about the books I lay my hands on.
Today I took up Robert Hurley's translation of Deleuze's Spinoza: Practical Phiosophy and liked Hurley's preface immensely.
It's funny, come to think of it, that City Lights publishes this book. But when one hints upon the axis Spinoza-Bateson-Deleuze, it's all too natural that a Frisco house does so. This is such a Californian take on Deleuze!
"The environment is not just a reservoir of information whose circuits await mapping, but also a field of forces whose actions await experiencing."
So Batesonian,eh. I also like Hurley's great sentence: "the intuitive or affective reading may be more practical anyway."
And then, almost maxim-sounding: "Deleuze maximizes Spinoza."
That's exactly what we should aim at when reading; to maximize the author you are dealing with.
I don't know much about Hurley except that he's a translator of Foucault, Bataille, and Donzelot, among others. If anybody knows anything about his writings, pray let me know.
We belong to the invisible non-community of translators of the French texts: Richard Howard, Alphonso Lingis, David Macey, my friend Michael Richardson, and myself alike.
I still got some homeworks to do in this stream of collective-bodily consciousness.
