<P>The essays in this book present a complex theme at the heart of the philosophy ofGilles Deleuze, what in his last writing he called simply "a life." They capture a problem that runsthroughout his work--his long search for a new and superior empiricism. Announced in his first book,on David Hume, then taking off with his early studies of Nietzsche and Bergson, the problem of an"empiricist conversion" became central to Deleuze's work, in particular to his aesthetics and hisconception of the art of cinema. In the new regime of communication and information-machines withwhich he thought we are confronted today, he came to believe that such a conversion, such anempiricism, such a new art and will-to-art, was what we need most. The last, seemingly minorquestion of "a life" is thus inseparable from Deleuze's striking image of philosophy not as a wisdomwe already possess, but as a pure immanence of what is yet to come. Perhaps the full exploitation ofthat image, from one of the most original trajectories in contemporary philosophy, is also yet tocome.</P>