Where do I start with Deleuze?

word... maybe i should check out bergson then

In his vision, the humans are not the active parts on the act of creation, but rather the "conduits", from an ontological perspective. Relating this to the concept of the body without organs, he creates a philosophy to endure capitalism - much like the stoics envisioned the harmony between us, the physical reality emanating from the pneuma and the state (the syntony of logos, physis and polis, in other words).
I honestly don't know were you can start with Deleuze, though. He directly mentions stoicism in Logic of Sense. You should also read Difference and Repetition for a more clear view on his ontology, and Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateus for body without organs stuff. Also, look up for John Sellars, he wrote severel papers and a book on the influence of stoicism in Deleuze's philosophy (you can also find a lecture of him on YouTube).

>have not read Logic of Sense

Watch this and then consider killing yourselves, but don't actually do it as that would be unstoic of you:

youtube.com/watch?v=O8FCNKpnf0U

You posted that just as I was about to post . Spooky.

Is Deleuze eternally recurring to haunt us?

Shit, I meant I was about to post , not . Damn it.

how familiar with history of philosophy are you? spinoza, nietzsche, bergson are his three biggest influences (spinoza more than the others.) start with the SEP article, then the todd may introductory book. then maybe spinoza's ethics, deleuze's book on nietzsche and go from there. i also think that a good understanding of what came just before him in france—beauvoir and sartre—would be helpful; so would an understanding of the student stuff in '68. additionally, you should be trying for an understanding of his french contemporaries to get an idea of the kind of milieu his shit came out of: lacan (deleuze was anti-freudian), foucault (he and deleuze were friends), derrida, etc. france before '68 was all marxist/freudian; a lot of the stuff that comes immediately after is a reaction to its failures. for some lighter shit, also check out the movie abecedaire.

Can't I work back? Like research what I don't understand? Just to make clear I'm not academic or trying to hold academic niveau. I just want to understand him.

>how familiar with history of philosophy are you?
Poorly.

You can still get a lot out of Deleuze even without knowing the authors, but you risk losing a lot because he can be quite cryptic at times. Maybe start with his essays, articles, conferences and interviews (five books in total: Desert Islands and Other Texts, Two Regimes of Madness, Essays: Critical and Clinical, Dialogues, Negotiations). The 7 page text "Letter to a harsh critic" in Negotiations is a good start in understanding how Deleuze expects you to read him. You should also skim his courses on webdeleuze.com (they're available in several languages) and check out Youtube Videos from authors such as DeLanda, Lotringer and the guys from the Actual/Virtual Journal. There are also some Vimeo videos not available on Youtube.

Thank you very much. Also the others itt who gave advice. Will it be worth it? Can you guys give me a basic gestalt on him? Particularly as the OP mentioned his relationship to stoicism and the "answer" he has.

No, honestly. His books are complex, convoluted, filled with very specific, necessary references. You may end up understanding 2 pages at a time, but you'll never be able to get the full picture.
Deleuze's books are meant to be read in a fluid manner, which means that you have to be prepared from it. It can't be your first approach to philosophy, and even if it could it would be the most inefficient one (it would take you years if not decades to decode his books, while you might as well study other philosophers for a decade and then read Deleuze with ease in a few months).

> Will it be worth it?

It can be very frustrating due to how condensed the texts are, but also very rewarding and life-changing or at least mind-blowing.

> Can you guys give me a basic gestalt on him?

Here are some resources:

A rather elegant bibliography: immanentterrain.wordpress.com/biblio/

A decent intro:
youtube.com/watch?v=5EHnrE3j9kg

Another decent summary:
youtube.com/watch?v=lajsoQJ0V6A

A bit on Klossowski, an important influence for Deleuze's later work and his work on Nietzsche:
youtube.com/watch?v=O7l7ZAKZZZU

A bonus about D&G's theory of language:
youtube.com/watch?v=kr11PhgyOOk

A channel dedicated to this stuff (searching the people individually, by name, also yields some useful:
youtube.com/channel/UC4CtHPqv6eKr8pYqe8qEoEA/videos

Once you're a bit familiar with his work, begin reading his proper books starting with Nietzsche and Philosophy (including the Michael Hardt intro to the English edition)

It's not my first approach to philosophy though I'm realistic about the complexity and ability to understand it. An "introduction" into his train of thought or a "summary" of the books conclusions would suffice for now. I just want to know whether it is what I look for before I devout so much time on one author/train of thought.
This isn't meant as arrogant as it probably sounds.

It's not that I disagree with you, but getting a full picture is always impossible without extensive study, this isn't limited to Deleuze.

Here's some stuff he said about this stuff:

> I belong to a generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less bludgeoned to death with the history of philosophy. The history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy, it's philosophy's own version of the Oedipus complex: ''You can't seriously consider saying what you yourself think until you've read this and that, and that on this, and this on that." Many members of my generation never broke free of this; others did,
by inventing their own particular methods and new rules, a new approach. I myself "did" history of philosophy for a long time, read books on this or that author. But I compensated in various ways: by concentrating, in the first place, on authors who challenged the rationalist tradition in this history (and I see a secret link between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, constituted by their critique of negativity, their cultivation ofjoy, the hatred of interiority, the externality of forces and relations, the denunciation of power. . . and so on). What I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics. My book on Kant's different; I like it, I did it as a book about an enemy that tries to show how his system works, its various cogs--the tribunal of Reason, the legitimate exercise of the faculties (our subjection to these made all the more hypocritical by our being characterized as legislators). But I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed.

(to be cont.)

(cont.)

> But I'm struck by the way it's the people who've read lots of other books, and psychoanalytic books in particular, who find our book really difficult. They say: What exactly is a body without organs? What exactly do you mean by "desiring machines"? Those, on the other hand, who don't know much, who haven't been addled by psychoanalysis, have less of a problem and happily pass over what they don't understand. That's why we said that, in principle at least, the book was written for fifteen- to twenty- year-olds. There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you're even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there's the other way:you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is "Does it work, and how does it work?" How does it work for you? If it doesn't work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading's intensive: something comes through or it doesn't. There's nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It's like plugging in to an electric circuit. I know people who've read nothing who immediately sawwhat bodies without organs were, given their own "habits," their own way of being one. This second way of reading's quite different from the fIrst, because it relates a book directly to what's Outside. A book is a little cog in much more complicated external machinery. Writing is one flow among others, with no special place in relation to the others, that comes into relations of current, countercurrent, and eddy with other flows-flows of shit, sperm, words, action, eroticism, money, politics, and so on.

[...]

> This intensive way .of reading, in contact with what's outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything. . . is reading with love.

But this sounds like he is telling people to just jump into his books without further background in history of philosophy.

It's mostly about his work with Guattari that aimed to be "Pop Philosophy", not in the sense of popularizing philosophy as we use it today, but in the sense of connecting philosophy to all kinds of other disciplines and concerns, artistic or scientific or everyday behavior.

It's a bit different for his academic work, but it is true that reading those books make you learn more about Deleuze and Deleuzian philosophy than about the authors discussed.

> And we wouldn't of course claim that Anti Oedipus is completely free of any scholarly apparatus: it's still pretty academic, fairly serious, and it's not the Pop Philosophy or Pop Analysis we dreamed of.

> So anyway,I got to work on two books along these meandering lines, Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. I know well enough that they're still full of academic elements, they're heavy going, but they're an attempt to jolt, set in motion, something inside me, to treat writing as a flow, not a code. And I like some passages in Difference and Repetition,those on tiredness and contemplation, for instance, because in spite of appearances they're living experiences. That's as far as it went, but it was a beginning.

wtf you DON'T have to know greeks, deleuze said that his work was 20 years old

Greeks spammers are reddit crossposters who want to join in on HILARIOUS memes

> deleuze said that his work was 20 years old

What does that even mean?