| CARVIEW |
Michael Hardt's Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy was a formative book for me in graduate school. Formative in the sense that it shaped my reading of Deleuze, but also in that it shaped my idea of what a book on a philosopher could or should do. What impressed me about Michael's book way back then is that he did the necessary work to excavate some of the concepts underlying Deleuze's books, not just Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson, but also Dun Scotus and Hegel, while at the same time recognizing that Deleuze's work is not pointed towards the past, to its history, but to debates with such philosophers as Althusser and with such movements such as autonomy. It is rare to find a book that is equally comfortable discussing scholastics and Nanni Balestrini.
When I was in undergrad at Hampshire College one of my professors, Meredith Michaels would refer to certain books as "worker bee" books. The term was not pejorative. Worker bee books were the books that did the work, traced the development of a philosophers thought, or the connection between different philosophers. They were patient and methodological. They were not the kind of books to be read on a whim, but they were the books that you were very glad existed when you did your research. The work they did laid the foundation for other claims and ideas. Incidentally they were the kind of books that were primarily bought by research libraries, which is to say as we lose research libraries, or as their budgets are cut or put towards online co-learning centers, we are losing some of the basic infrastructure of thought. The worker bees build the hive.
