Review of the book: Space after Deleuze (Saldanha, 2017)

Space after Deleuze is an entrance to Deleuze's thinking focusing specially on the concept of space. The author's objective is to show that Deleuze's work is geographical and that it provides “one of the best philosophical resources for continuing and refining the project of giving a dynamic thickness to space” (p. 3). Thus, Arun Saldanha invites us to open the possibilities for thinking that Deleuzian space brings to a contemporary political project due to four main reasons. First, other


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from "the earth" (p. 13). In other words, it seeks to generate new concepts; that is, the iteration of the process of thinking itself as "radically open and undetermined" (p. 12). Geophilosophy then, is a topological and critical approach that provides lines of flight to apply an "earthly politics" (p. 33) according to the needs of the entanglement between researcher and research, situated within the Anthropocene era.
Our current moment, defined as the Anthropocene, is understood by Saldanha as the collapse or the self-destruction of the capitalist system. Therefore, the Anthropocene, climate change, and the current crises of the planet force us to rethink the different temporal space layers of globalization, in a more-than-human way.
These realities require rethinking the Earth but not as a deconstructive move, but rather as "creat[ing] and multipl[ying] 'smoother spaces' within the geographies of capitalism" (p. 43).
Deleuze identifies a clear political dimension in the creation of concepts because they must produce non-capitalist environments and collectives (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991 in Saldanha, 2017). Philosophy serves to create a new world, a different globalization. Thus, understanding critically this global phenomenon is achieved through a notion of space that emphasizes interdependencies and inequality between places, and denounces the provincialisms that perpetuate these inequalities. A new Earth and new people are required, which is not based on the principles of the neoliberal democratic system.
In chapter two, Flows, Saldanha explores the relationship between flows and society (understood this last one as population, war and capitalism) (p. 104) through a Deleuzian geographical analysis. This allows to explore how they understand politics (breaking through molar and molecular as binary oppositions) and ethics. These interactions are materialized through "flux" is the "basis of how a Deleuzian ontology of population, committed to ethics and inseparable from politics. Deleuze's political project wonders about how difference is distributed in an unfair way, and reconfigures not only the flows and desires of capitalism, but also social structures.
Capital is central to Deleuze's thinking. He argues that there is only one world, the world of capital, "which is internally split and re-split as insecurities multiply" (p.87). The framework exploring how human beings build their geographies is presented in chapter three, Places. This chapter is particularly important for feminist contemporary theory and politics since it gives us an entry to think the concept of identity otherwise.
Deleuze and Guattari and critical geographers agree in stating that movement and desire are prior to the human "and hence constitute place and identity." (p. 105). That is, identities are conformed by movement, desires and spatiotemporalities even before the human being is presented. That is to say, identities (politically speaking) are affective flows, or as Felicity Colman (2010) On the one hand, is how Deleuze and Guattari "talk about the self-segregation of political identities" (p. 156). This is directly related to the economic-cultural-wasteful surplus that capitalism creates within cities. These "ghettos" are "anyspaceswhatever" (p. 161) and they are continuously becoming together with the bodies concluding in an entanglement of the city and the body that re-defines both concepts and pursues the monist univocity so present in new materialisms. In Shaldanha's words, "The city is not a static background of life but actively implicated or enfolded into the capacities of bodies." This explanation demonstrates how pertinent and relevant is Deleuzian theory to understand migratory flows, environmental diseases, fascist regimes, etc. since all partaking bodies in a specific phenomenon are always going to be subjected to the 185) points out, "Deleuzian Ideas are problems that demand solutions by the material system they inhabit but are never fully answered." In his book, Shaldanha provides multiple definitions for differing concepts of Deleuze, covering almost the totality that any Deleuzian dictionary would cover but following a single entry point, that is space.
He finishes the book without conclusions only to follow this type of methodology.
"Problems are changed a little every time they are solved.
[…] Problems are not