Teaching Philosophy, 25:4, December 2002 the Crito on the one hand and the Euthyphro and Apology on the other. Socrates recognizes that within the context of fifth-century Athenian religious culture, he has done wrong, and if Athens is to remain a state at all he should have to pay for this wrong. Nonetheless, without having recourse to a Father in heaven or the like, Socrates maintains in the Apology that in a context-independent sense he has done no wrong. Socratic questioning requires civil disobedience whenever a society insists upon unquestioning acceptance of its groundless conventions. And the Crito's statement of the obvious condition of a state's continued existence notwithstanding, Socrates is no authoritarian. The final article in the volume, Enid Bloch's "Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates: Did Plato Tell the Truth?" is a curious multidisciplinary investigation of the evidence, textual, botanical, and toxicological, about what actually happened that fateful day in 399 B.C.E. Without going into detail here, the reader of this article might be pleased to learn from Bloch that "Plato not only told the truth, he did so with astounding medical accuracy" (272). The reader might also find this sort of forensic investigation irrelevant to our appreciation of Socrates' legacy. In all, this collection of ancient texts and recent scholarship constitutes a much needed resource for students seeking to understand and appreciate the importance of the primal sacrifice that set philosophy in motion. I intend to include it among the required texts in my survey course on ancient philosophy, and it has even inspired me to start thinking about the trial and execution of Socrates as the possible basis for a special topics seminar. Justin Smith, Department of Philosophy, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056; smithje3@muohio.edu. Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life Gilles Deleuze Anne Boyman, translator, with an introduction by John Rajchman New York: Zone Books, 2001, 102 pp., $24 h.c. 1-890951-24-2 DANIEL W. SMITH Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life brings together in a slender volume three important essays by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925– 1995) that were written over a thirty-year period: "Immanence: A Life" (1995), "Hume" (1972), and "Nietzsche" (1965). The essays appear here in English for the first time in fluid and accurate translations by Anne Boyman. Although most of Deleuze's major books have been published in English, this collection is a significant addition to the growing list of Deleuze's essays that have appeared in translation. The first of two volumes of Deleuze's BOOK REVIEWS 395 collected essays has recently been published in France-L'île déserte, et autres textes: textes et entretiens 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit, 2002)-and one can only hope it will spur the publication of similar collections of these important texts in English. Scholars and students of Deleuze's work will therefore welcome the publication of Pure Immanence, but it will be particularly useful to teachers of philosophy, since these essays present in short and accessible forms some of the fundamental themes of Deleuze's philosophy. The concise introductory essay by John Rajchman-whose book The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000) is one of the best recent interpretations of Deleuze-sets out the fundamental theme that links these otherwise disparate essays: Deleuze's "transcendental empiricism." Deleuze's philosophy, Rajchman shows, is a philosophy of pure immanence that rejects any appeal to transcendence, and finds its expression in the notion of an impersonal "life" that exceeds the experiences of a self or ego. These notions receive their fullest treatment in the book's title essay, "Immanence: A Life," a trenchant and moving article that was one of the last pieces Deleuze published before his death in 1995, almost as if it were his philosophical testament (20). "A life," writes Deleuze, is indefinite and impersonal, an absolute immanence that is "made up of virtualities, events, singularities" (31), and is therefore irreducible to the "subject" that experiences it. It is this plane of immanence that constitutes the "transcendental field" for Deleuze-a field that is no longer constructed in the image of the empirical, as in Kant (27), but achieves an autonomy that is independent of the determinations of consciousness. The two remaining essays explore Deleuze's early formulations of this radical empiricism. The essay on Hume, written in 1972, revisits the themes of Deleuze's first book, on Hume, written in 1953: Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). The essay on Nietzsche is in fact the text of a small book Deleuze published in 1965, Nietzsche (Paris: PUF, 1965), which revisits the themes of Deleuze's landmark 1962 study, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Both essays have a pedagogical importance for teachers of philosophy. On the one hand, they can be read as summaries of these earlier studies; but on the other hand, and more importantly, they exemplify Deleuze's idiosyncratic approach to the history of the philosophy, and the way in which Deleuze extracts from these thinkers movements of thought that in turn mark important moments in his own philosophical trajectory. As Rajchman suggests, what the young Deleuze had already found in Hume was a "superior empiricism" in which the self is not given, but rather is presented as a "fiction or artifice" that is constituted within the plane of immanence through the operation of habit-a conception of subjectivity that opens us up to "what is singular yet 'in-human' in 396 Teaching Philosophy, 25:4, December 2002 the composition of ourselves" (13). Similarly, the Nietzsche essay presents an extraordinarily succinct summary of the history of nihilism (ressentiment, bad conscience, ascetic ideal, death of god, the last man, the man who wants to perish)-but precisely in order to point to the possibility of a "transvaluation" in which Life itself is affirmed in its multiplicity and becomings: an active life coupled with an affirmative thought. The essays in Pure Immanence will be useful to teachers who want to incorporate Deleuze's work into their courses, but who cannot expect their students to read Deleuze's full monographs. Indeed, throughout his career, Deleuze seems to have intentionally produced, alongside his monographs, short interviews and articles that provide useful points of entry into his books. Pure Immanence makes three such essays available to an Englishspeaking audience, in excellent translations, and with the helpful guidance of Rajchman's introduction. The volume is beautifully produced, as one expects from Zone Books, and is essential reading for anyone interested in Deleuze's thought. I highly recommend it. Daniel Smith, Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907; dsmith@sla.purdue.edu. Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy Teresa Brennan New York: Routledge, 2000, 203pp. $21 pbk. 0-415-23706-8 MICHAEL J. SIGRIST If nothing else, Teresa Brennan's latest work, Exhausting Modernity: Grounds for a New Economy, serves as a respectable testament against those who fear that contemporary continental philosophy lacks the conceptual resources and resolve to mount sustained ethical and political criticism or to suggest alternatives to existing practices. Here we have a book, openly acknowledging its debts to thinkers such as Deleuze and Lacan, situated at the crossroads of Marxism and psychoanalysis, yet managing to offer a positive program not stuck in perpetual self-effacement and auto-critique. Readers familiar with Brennan will immediately recognize this work as a slimmed-down and less technical recapitulation of her previous book, History after Lacan. This latest work is comprised of three sections along with a more general introduction and conclusion that hope to place the main theses of the book into a larger social context. The three sections, sequentially, are "Psyche," "Economy," and "Polity." At the heart of the work is the development of a persuasive if oblique structural homology between the works of Freud and Marx. The matrix around which this homology advances is the following: in the same way that fantasy, as the first step into