Recommendations of the Editorial team
How do you do justice to the work of an idiosyncratic French star philosopher? Maybe with a comic. Gilles Deleuze would certainly have liked the project by Jens Balzer (the writer is of course known to ROLLING STONE readers; by the way, he is a studied philosopher) and illustrator Martin tom Dieck.
Deleuze, who died in 1995, saw concepts as tools and understood thinking as a process in sequences, cuts and transitions. And that’s exactly how comics work formally. Last year the philosopher turned 100, which is why “Holy Deleuze!” the third part of the trilogy “Salut, Deleuze!” (at Reprodukt), in which Jens Balzer and Martin tom Dieck transform some of Deleuze’s ideas into extraordinary picture stories.
With assigned roles, both of them are now reading Friday (January 16th) at 7:30 p.m. in the reproduction shop at Modern Graphics in Berlin (Kastanienallee 79, 10435 Berlin) from her newly published complete works. A nice insight into the creation of a special comic project and certainly a funny reading aid for Deleuze’s works, which are not easy to read.
Oh yes, what does a Deleuze comic story look like? Something like this: “The philosopher Gilles Deleuze has died. He lets Charon, the ferryman of the dead, row him across the Lethe; his friends Lacan, Foucault and Barthes are already waiting on the other bank. Together they go on an adventurous journey through the underworld, encountering talking animals and ancient heroines. They build a wishing machine to travel back to life, but not all of their wishes are fulfilled. So Deleuze withdraws, and in the end he just sits alone in his cave is dedicated to cultivating rhizomes and mushrooms. Can the Others, at the end of days, win back his friendship?”
All pictures: Reproduct