The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal: Book Review

★★★★ Crikey, for me it's certainly a “spiritual ordeal” to get my head round Joshua Ramey's The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal. Understanding perhaps 0.1% of Ramey's interpretation, I should perhaps have eased my way into the terminology (which often reads like a highbrow wine-tasting review with which I have difficulty relating to the reality of actually drinking) via Deleuze for Dummies, or Finnegan's Wake. I was, however, more at home with the author's scattered references to the art of “learning how to swim”, which was, quite possibly, metaphorically one of the main reasons for writing and having interested parties read this and related works.

As Jeremy Garber so aptly writes in a review at Goodreads: “Ramey’s reading certainly squares with my life-changing experience of reading Deleuze, an act of tortured comprehension I have frequently compared to having my brain scooped out of my head, thrown against a wall, and then dumped back into my skull. Deleuze’s frequent references to Artaud’s theatre of cruelty are also not accidental. The fruit of such painful endeavors, however, is a renewed capacity to see the world in a way that allows for the real possibilities of change.”

In the end, I'm reminded that “[t]o ‘learn ignorance’ is to learn one’s limitations”, and “to be conscious of ignorance is wisdom”, to which I can but distantly aspire.