Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts. Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts. Edited by C harles J. S tivale . Chesham, Acumen, 2005. xii + 212 pp. Hb £40.00. Pb £13.99.

This collection seeks to render assimilable to the general reader some of the recurrent concepts deployed within Deleuzian analysis. Divided into a tripartite sandwich, the chewy and juicy filling, ‘Encounters’, spills out of its slimmer surrounding sections, respectively ‘Philosophies’ and ‘Folds’. In fact, perhaps a tortilla wrap is a more productive image, since the target concepts do fold into one another in true Deleuzian style. As Charles Stivale recounts in a lively introduction, Deleuze found on publishing his 1988 study Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque that he received appreciative letters not only from an association of letter folders, but also from surfers, who described their watery existence as a constant self-posting into the fold of the briny. As Judith Poxon and Charles Stivale point out in their chapter on ‘Sense, Series’, this moving enfoldedness facilitates transitions and jumps into new thought-series, thus achieving ‘the Deleuzian ideal of getting out of philosophy through philosophy’. Though singular in its expression, Deleuze's thought is multiply implicated with that of other writers and philosophers, and the volume's first section includes chapters which discuss concepts of force (Surin), expression (Lambert), difference and repetition (McMahon), and desire (Holland) in an intellectual landscape which includes Spinoza, Nietzsche, Kant and Marx, not forgetting Deleuze's co-itinerant, Félix Guattari. One attractive and useful feature of this collection is that ideas return in alternative guises and environments, enabling further layers of embeddedness and expansion. Thus, for instance, Surin's discussion of how Nietzsche's dramatology stages sense not as a reservoir but as an effect provides an interesting linkage with McMahon's exposition of the Deleuzian thinker as being not a spectator but an actor. The same tendency emerges in the second section, where specific concepts are examined in relation to their productivity in given contexts. Hence, Bogue's consideration of the minor is applied fruitfully to Kafka, as is Albrecht-Crane's consideration of style and stutter. Jennifer Daryl Slack's chapter on the logic of sensation turns engagingly to The Matrix to explore how the film provides access through ‘the accumulated and coagulated sensations that coexist, converge, and fold on to one another’. Surprisingly, there is no essay on the Body-without-Organs — a problematic Deleuzian concept for many — although it does float up for discussion across a number of the chapters, in relation to assemblage, desire and feminism, for example. The final section is reserved for those concepts deemed to be overarching in Deleuze's work — affect, folds and folding, symptomatology (critical and clinical). As with most edited collections, the essays as a whole vary in quality and ambition. The strongest ones demonstrate persuasively not only how Deleuze's key concepts can be understood, but also how they can be put to work. Thus, in an imaginative and fascinating reading, J. Macgregor Wise applies the concept of assemblage to the techno-human domain, using the example of the mobile phone. Accessible and stimulating, this collection is to be recommended both for drop-in and for season-ticket pursuants of Deleuze's conceptual orchestra.