"After all, we wouldn't want people accusing him of plagiarism..."

Here is de Beistegui's response to my previous post. I have decided to publish it, though not without a degree of - ahem - encouragement. My own remarks to follow shortly...

"My attention has been brought to an accusation of plagiarism from a philosophy student’s Blog. As this is something I take very seriously, I’d like to respond right away.

As I don’t have DeLanda’s book to hand (many of my books are in storage these days), I haven’t been able to verify this accusation. But since I have been told that the two paragraphs in question from Truth and Genesis are virtually identical to the ones in DeLanda’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the claim. This accusation calls for an immediate and firm response.

It’s one thing to point to an error or an omission within a book (and had the blog done just that, I would have been grateful). It’s another to draw conclusions that aim at discrediting an author, to insinuate “disingenuousness” on his part, without having read his book, or even the passage accused of having been plagiarized. The author of the accusation remains anonymous (why?), and is actually proud of not having read any of the work (whether DeLanda’s or my own, preferring instead to rely on Axel’s (!) expert judgement). This does not stop him (or her) from qualifying the work in question as “rubbish.”

Turning to the passage in question, then, and re-reading the relevant pages from T&G (that is, those pages devoted to DeLanda, and which run from p. 258 to p. 274), I have found the following:
My intentions and sources are clearly stated from the start, on p. 258: "Throughout [my analysis of dynamical systems], I shall refer to technical analyses and examples developed in de Landa's Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy." DeLanda is then mentioned on p. 259, 261, 263 (quotation), 264 ("returning to de Landa's analysis..." from which I had deviated for a while). The latter page clearly stipulates that I am within de Landa's analysis. And then comes the passage I'm accused of having plagiarized. Right in the middle of it, there's a footnote (footnote 38, p. 269, in which DeLanda is again mentioned, in the context of his own sources). This suggests clearly that I am still following DeLanda’s analysis, despite the fact that quotations marks were omitted (an omission I plan to rectify at the earliest opportunity). De Landa is again quoted on p. 276. It's obvious that it's his analysis and his point of view that are being put forward in that section of the chapter. Equally obvious is the fact that, should I have wished to conceal my sources, and take credit for DeLanda's work, which I am the first to hail in that work, I could and should have done a much better job.

In short, having looked again at the entire portion of the chapter in which the two paragraphs in question appear, I feel reassured regarding transparency and the explicit references to sources. There are hundreds of quotations and references in Truth and Genesis. Despite my rigorous editing, and that of my editors at Indiana, an omission wasn’t picked up on. In any future edition, I would insert the relevant quotation marks." [My copy-and-paste job has elimated the italics. Thankfully, this only applied to book titles.]

I think SF sums up my situation well: "Dogmat, you may not be one of the greatest minds of our age, but you sure know how to irritate them." (And that is irritate, not imitate)