126 REVIEWS

How to Read Barthes’ Image — Music — Text. By ED WHITE . (How to Read Theory).
London: Pluto, 2012. vi + 198 pp.
For many of his readers, Roland Barthes’s genius lies in his early ‘scientistic’ work. And
yet scholarly attention today focuses strongly on his late, rather ‘literary’ projects, which
are perhaps the more challenging: his lecture series at the Collège de France (1976 – 80),
La Chambre claire (1980), and the Journal de deuil: 26 octobre 1977 – 15 septembre 1979 (2009).
However, it is the period of transformation of Barthes the ‘theorist’ into Barthes the
‘writer’ that interests Ed White in his erudite readers’ manual to the thirteen essays,
originally published between 1961 and 1973, edited and translated by Stephen Heath as
Image — Music — Text (London: Fontana, 1977). White takes particular care in unpacking
the methodic complexity that becomes apparent when Barthes’s essays are read in dia-

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logue with one another, a complexity that has turned Heath’s anthology into a classic in
the Anglo-American world. White’s detailed section-by-section interpretation of the indi-
vidual texts is very clear. Although his accessible language may appear conversational at
times, he avoids oversimplifying the ambiguities of Barthes’s writing. Following Heath’s
non-chronological ordering of the essays, White organizes his reading according to three
main themes: Barthes’s changing positions on language from ‘a system of meaning
veiling reality’ to ‘the environment of humans comprised of both repressive and emanci-
patory potential’ (p. 2); his shifting attitude towards radical or Marxist politics; and,
finally, the modifications in Barthes’s style from the problem-solving, didactic orientation
of the earlier work towards the more experimental, fragmentary, and ambivalent quality
of his later writings. Despite his considerable sensitivity towards the manifold contradic-
tions, divisions, and jolts in Barthes’s writing, White aims for synthesis, frequently
pausing to summarize and contextualize positions, concepts, and the terms discussed.
Treating Image — Music — Text according to the motto of the ‘How To Read Theory’
series as ‘a single, key-text’, however, potentially runs the risk of prioritizing Heath’s
compilation over Barthes’s original essays, suggesting a coherence that never really
existed. This impression is further enhanced by the fact that White pays comparatively
little attention to questions arising from Heath’s highly acclaimed translation itself. At
the same time, throughout his treatment of Barthes’s essays, White aims to ‘correct or
modify’ Barthes’s predominant use of the male pronoun (p. 12), an interference with
Barthes’s writing that Heath himself had contemplated but then, quite rightly, dismissed.
The concluding section, ‘Reading across Barthes’, offers a good overview on relevant
primary and secondary literature, yet stops, unfortunately, as early as 2009. Nonetheless,
White has written a valuable introduction to key aspects of Barthes’s semiological work,
one that will serve as a useful companion to undergraduate students and teachers alike.

KATJA HAUSTEIN
doi:10.1093/fs/knt289 U NIVERSITY OF K ENT

Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Difference and Repetition’: A Critical Introduction and Guide. By JAMES
WILLIAMS. 2nd edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. xii +
260 pp.
In the world of computer hardware, Moore’s Law states that processing power doubles
roughly every two years. On recent evidence, the same might be said of the Deleuze in-
dustry, which surely cannot be far from collapsing under its own weight. Even before
production reached its peak, Deleuze studies attracted trilogists, exemplified by the bril-
liantly original Keith Ansell-Pearson and the wonderfully lucid Claire Colebrook, writing,
when the field was still nascent, in the 1990s and early 2000s. The old master Ronald
Bogue produced a hat-trick in 2003 alone — the year of the first edition of James
Williams’s book, his first of three on the philosopher. Unlike the aforementioned,
 REVIEWS 127
Williams has specialized in high-end primers on Deleuze’s major works, the other two
being Gilles Deleuze’s ‘The Logic of Sense’: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh
University Press, 2008) and Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and
Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), the latter focusing heavily on both Différence et
répétition and Logique du sens. The competition has increased since that first edition,
notably with Joe Hughes’s Deleuze’s ‘Difference and Repetition’: A Reader’s Guide (London,
Continuum, 2009), which reads the work as a rewriting of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,
and Henry Somers-Hall’s tightly argued Deleuze’s ‘Difference and Repetition’: An Edinburgh
Philosophical Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Rather than engage with new
work on Deleuze’s magnum opus by major figures like Bernard Stiegler and François
Laruelle, these newcomers are discussed generously in a closing chapter that marks the

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most obvious addition to Williams’s second edition. The revised ending also justifies
some criticisms of the first edition (the absence of Gilbert Simondon, for example),
while correcting others, such as its ‘tendency to quote Deleuze’s text as evidence for my
more simple claims, instead of quoting passages then giving my interpretation of them’
(p. 226). If this tendency amounts to an (un-Deleuzian) repetition of identity, in place of
difference, there is nonetheless a balance to be struck between avoiding hermetic entrap-
ment and becoming so far detached as to lose one’s object of study. Williams does ad-
mirably in respect of the former, bringing a wealth of philosophical experience to bear
on elucidations of key terms like difference and repetition (obviously), univocity, singu-
larity, multiplicity, idea and reality, among others. With a writer as difficult as Deleuze,
though, some sustained commentary on the style of harder passages would have helped
readers to orientate themselves in relation to the original — however much one might
dispute ‘the original’ as a concept. The combination of helpfully broad critical purview
and less rigorous adhesion to texts is reflected elsewhere in promising but undersubstan-
tiated references to analytic philosophy. In another Deleuzian twist, Williams supple-
ments his explanations with noirish literary parentheses to vocalize the multiple voices at
work in the process of thought: ‘(a sadder smile, faster tears, less furrowed brow — this time
around)’ (p. 51). They add a schizophrenic charm to proceedings, but hint that this very
good philosopher would make a less successful novelist.

GERALD MOORE
doi:10.1093/fs/knt288 D URHAM U NIVERSITY

Deleuze et le cinéma: l’armature philosophique des livres sur le cinéma. Par JEAN -MICHEL
PAMART. (Philosophie en cours). Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2012. 255 pp.
As its subtitle pointedly suggests, Jean-Michel Pamart’s book provides a genealogical in-
vestigation of the multiple philosophical layers underpinning Deleuze’s Cinema books,
known for their elaborate conceptual constructivism. Unlike similar exegetic studies on the
subject, Pamart goes far beyond the descriptive exposition of Deleuze’s taxonomy of film
images and delves into the very logic behind its dynamic composition, which is that of the
genesis of faculties through active and passive syntheses elaborated in Chapter 2 of
Difference and Repetition. It is this chapter of Deleuze’s magnum opus, Pamart emphasizes,
rather than Bergson’s Matter and Memory, that serves as a ‘veritable matrix’ (p. 112) for his
Cinema books. Part I examines Deleuze’s creative appropriation of concepts from a
number of philosophers on whom he gave his seminars at the Université de Paris VIII in
the early 1980s, such as image (Bergson), sign (C. S. Peirce), time (Kant), and body and
thought (Spinoza). Pamart skilfully demonstrates how Bergson’s trinity of images
(perception-image, affection-image, action-image) resonates with Peirce’s semiotic categor-
ies (zeroness, firstness, secondness), as does Kant’s notion of time as the affection of self
by self with Spinoza’s understanding of thought as auto-affection, or active passion. Part II