Essays Critical and Clinical was the final work of the late Gilles Deleuze, one of the most important and vital figures in contemporary philosophy. It includes essays, all newly revised or published here for the first time, on such diverse literary figures as Herman Melville, Wait Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Alfred Jarry, and Lewis Carroll, as well as philosophers such as Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

For Deleuze, every literary work implies a way of living, a form of life, and must be evaluated not only critically but also clinically. As Proust said, great writers invent a new language within language, but in such a way that language in its entirety is pushed to its limit or its own "outside". This outside of language is made up of affects and percepts that are not linguistic, but which language alone nonetheless makes possible. In Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze is concerned with the delirium -- the process of Life -- that lies behind this invention, as well as the loss that occurs, the silence that follows, when this delirium becomes a clinical state. Taken together, these eighteen essays present a profoundly new approach to literature by one of the greatest twentieth-century philosophers.