Writing and Immanence

"Gale’s book is a breakthrough in the most marvelous sense of that idea—of breaking through a dogmatic image of thought organized by stale, impoverished concepts but never landing, refusing to be still, always immanent, always breaking through. This book—a writing always escaping its text— is possible only for an accomplished and respectful scholar like Gale who has read deeply and carefully the orphan line of philosophers—Deleuze, Guattari, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Spinoza—and followers like Massumi and Manning whose concepts have taken him up and had their way with him. It is the long preparation of such reading, a trust in writing, and the risk of giving oneself up entirely to a different image of thought—of Gale no longer being Gale—that makes this astonishing book possible. Here is the pleasure of a book overfull and spilling into a life. It should be required reading for all in an education Gale reminds us must be unsettling, provocative, capacious, unrecognizable, always immanent and coming into being differently." -- Elizabeth A. St.Pierre, University of Georgia, USA

"One Sunday in May, you read Writing and Immanence sitting at the beach, the sound and feel of the cold Scottish sea in and around you. As you take the text in, not only through your eyes but through all the senses it evokes, you feel the text’s waves, flows, and currents. Their power is irresistible, compelling. They take you up, they take you over. You close your eyes, hold still, the text continuing to move in you. Back home, the class you teach next day becomes a swaying of energies, a gathering of forces. You can’t help but feel it all. You’re in it, of it. Later, you write at a table outside in the Spring breeze. You haven’t written for weeks, you haven’t understood what you’ve been missing, and it’s been this: this book floods into you, sweeping you with it, picking up your hand, your pen, your notebook; and writing begins." -- Jonathan Wyatt, University of Edinburgh, UK