What is Deleuze?

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Strayed in Schizophrenic Landscapes of a Celibate Machine | Uraiqat Architects

Deleuze and Guattati meets Atelier Uraiqat! Discover this project inspired by Anti-Oedipus. a conceptual piece based on philosophy.

uraiqat.com

 

[version]

@Linebaugh

Did you ever finish AO?

 

[version]

I like that any newbies will go "Oh, nice. A thread on Deleuze." and open it to find us talking about Spar bags and onion rings.

 

[catalog]

this thread is emblematic of dissensus

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I just started reading Anti-Oedipus

(I've been hearing people talk about Deleuze forever, might as well actually engage the text)

started Nichomachean Ethics at the same time

hopefully the result will be the production of a nice counterbalance

 

[version]

Have you read it before? I ended up buying ATP instead because it sounded the more exciting of the two.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

no I've never read either

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

my immediate thought was "oh shit I have to read more school of suspicion, especially Freud, to really get something out of this"

which leads back to idk, Hegel and/or Kant or whatever

you know, that general feeling that you need a solid grasp of the entire history of at least Western philosophy to engage a text

but I thought, fuck it, just gonna grind on

I did read Civilization and Its Discontents a long time ago, tho I don't remember it v well

 

[constant escape]

Have you read it before? I ended up buying ATP instead because it sounded the more exciting of the two.

I'm on maybe the fourth section of A Thousand Plateaus currently, "Postulates of Linguistics" and this one is particularly rough. There was a passage about the synthesizer in this section that I might post here to get thoughts on.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I was going to counterbalance AO with getting back to Spinoza

but the thought of his impossibly dry Euclidean propositions on the one hand and D+G's desire-machines, multiplicities, etc bullshit on the other was too close to willful self-punishment

 

[version]

I like what Deleuze says about beginning in the middle. You just have to jump into it, like catching a wave or current. I think I posted the clip with the turtles from Finding Nemo earlier in the thread. That's how I think of it.

 

[constant escape]

But I can only imagine the edge you have @padraig (u.s.) with whatever familiarity you have with Spinoza.

 

[version]

Deleuze says we're always in the middle. And so his books always begin mid-conversation. That is, he doesn't even try to frame his conversation as if he could stand outside his own text and let us survey the scene. That's what text books do; they want to be definitive and tell you: this is what is known. But Deleuze operates from the middle, amidst the fray and teem where all there are are assertions, positions, postures — never certainties. And so he just begins wherever he is.

Beginning from the Middle (with reference to Deleuze)

Francis Bacon in his studio. Note the images everywhere. As Deleuze argues, the painter doesn't begin with a blank canvas; he begins wit...

hilariousbookbinder.blogspot.com

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

But I can only imagine the edge you have @padraig (u.s.) with whatever familiarity you have with Spinoza

I would hardly say that

I read about half of Ethics. I don't claim to really familiarity with it, certainly not as it might relate to Deleuze.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I like what Deleuze says about beginning in the middle

I prefer to read a book from beginning to end

both as personal preference and as a willful rejection of the direction of beginning in the middle

I understand what he means and it's true that "we're always in the middle" in terms of life or history

but a text, unlike life, has a beginning and an end, even if they're not called the beginning and the end

also it's just my tendency to contrarianism

 

[version]

I don't think he meant literally starting his books in the middle. Just the point you just made about "always being in the middle", although apparently once you've read the intro to ATP you can read everything but the conclusion in any order you like.

 

[version]

That was something that put me off philosophy for a long time. The thought that I'd have to slog through everything chronologically in order to get to the stuff I actually wanted to read.

 

[constant escape]

I mean the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, by Brian Massumi, mentions how the book is written in such a way that you could start with any of the sections/plateaus and read them in any order, so long as you read the last section last, because it is a summary of sorts. So far, I can see it. I can even see how one can start in the middle of any given section, and work their way from there.

I started form the start though.

 

[version]

Admittedly, I've just jumped all over the place. I read the intro a couple of times then just looked up Joyce, Beckett, Burroughs etc in the index and jumped to any point at which they were mentioned.

 

[constant escape]

That was something that put me off philosophy for a long time. The thought that I'd have to slog through everything chronologically in order to get to the stuff I actually wanted to read.

My approach to this is to read what you want to read, and just frequently play lectures/podcasts about the other stuff in the background as you do other things, until whenever you get to studying them directly.

After hearing however many talks about the central points of so-and-so, or how so-and-sos project fits into the meta-narrative as such - you get to have a running start when you actually read them.