Essays critical and clinical : the book as a 'whole'

Critique et Clinique was published in France in 1993, 2 years before Gilles Deleuze's death. It would be the last book he would publish in his life and the culmination of a project that he had announced some years before in an interview in 1988, where he spoke about "bringing together a series of studies under the general title" Critique et Clinique. A number of things would urge us to approach this book as a collection of essays, rather than a properly coherent book: the comment just cited at first seems to underline this, as does the fact that eight of seventeen chapters of the original French edition of the book had been published before, and had been revised for the book. Further, in his introduction to the English-language version of the book, Essays Critical and Clinical, Daniel W. Smith indicates that Deleuze had made mention of the project even earlier (in his book on Sacher-Masoch in 1967, and in Logique du sens in 1969). That the first of the republished essays to appear, "Mystere d'Ariane' was revised for republication in Magazine Litteraire in 1992, and originally published in 1963, with the others appearing between 1970 and 1992, seems to demonstrate conclusively that this is a collection rather than a whole.