Why have you not read the greatest work of 20th century philosophy yet?

i'm still working my way through the rationalists

Deleuze basically is a rationalist.

Would anyone mind giving a rapid-fire summary of Deleuze's epistemology/ontology? I really feel like I'm going to love Deleuze when I get to him, but I can't responsibly afford to read him right now because I'm hammering out a thesis for the next month and a half.

I'm pretty familiar with philosophy otherwise, including Bergson, Foucault, Heidegger, but just the tradition in general. Mostly steeped in German Idealism and Heideggerian phenomenology.

Check out David Harvey's course for Marx. He gives his own take on it obviously, but I had a great time with the course. His explanation of Marx's visualisation the dialectical process, and how the text is kind of a working-backward from the appearances and into that, was really neat.

For Freud, Peter Gay's anthology book is pretty good but biased and (so I've heard) whitewashed. Still very helpful for the early Freud, and not reading Freud's mature work as a platonic system but as the development of his earlier periods.

That's not Being and Time

/thread

protevi.com/john/LearnDR.pdf

here's a deleuze scholar telling you what you need to know.

i'm not a deleuze expert by any means but as far as I understand basically, process philosophy, immanence and vitalism so kind of mix of whitehead/spinoza/bergson. there is no trancendent subject or even immanent static subject, only immanent processes of becoming. I don't think deleuze wrote on epistimology all that much, he was primarily concerned with metaphysics and kind of took a hard rationalist/materialist view for granted.

So he's actually not a fucking pomo thing, where it's all just an elaborate metaphor for how we have to become porous bidividual un-selves and jerk each other off in perfect gender fluidity? Like, actual Bergsonian vitalism, actual metaphysical commitments like process philosophy has?

That's what I was hoping, based on how I've seen some people appropriate his ontology. But 90% of his followers seem to be trying for a Foucault 2.0 thing where he's just a useful tool for critiquing patriarchy in Italian cinema, so I was worried.

That's cool. Thanks bro. I am looking forward to reading him.

Yeah, I mean with Deleuze, especially in the stuff with Guattari, it's sometimes hard to tell what's meant metaphorically or just a reference and what's "real" and Deleuze wastes little time telling you what is what so you kind of have to figure things out for yourself. So I think that's why with a very surface-level reading stripped out of the philosophic-historical context, you get this totally trivialized idea of deleuze you have in the gender/cultural/media sciences etc. But at it's core it's still serious metaphysics dealing with a serious philosophical problem. The late Deleuze wrote a lot about arts and cinema but that doesn't really compromise or clash with his metaphysics.

>it's sometimes hard to tell what's meant metaphorically or just a reference and what's "real"

really NOTHING there is metaphorically. he insisted so much in his books & lectures that he always spoke literaly. if you can, try to grab a article called "Deleuze and the question of literality" by François Zourabichvili.

Incredibly useful, thanks user! Protevi also has youtube conferences, as many other Deleuzians do.

Is god literally a lobster? Is he talking about literal bodies out of flesh without organs? Is literally everything a machine?

I mean, as so often, Deluze isn't wrong per se, but if you take that advice you're going to fail miserably. It's like that advice in the beginning of anti-oedipus, I think, where they say that one should just jump in without prior knowledge instead of reading up beforehand. Which is obviously suicide because there's a billion terms and concepts which they use but don't even properly define in the actual book.

My french is kind of mediocre so I haven't read D&G in french but I have a feeling that the tone of the english translation just ends up giving things a very different tone, it lacks that implied playfulness that is all over D&G. I always read deluze as slightly winking, how else could be talking about god being a lobster and anal raping philosophers. maybe that's a wrong interpretation but that how he always comes across to me.

>Deleuze
>great
pick one

So on a meta-level, deleuze saying everything is literal is exactly what i'm doing talking about. you're expected to do your own thinking about what he means by that and if you don't and take everything at face-value, you're going to be drowning in contradictions and confusion.

And about Deleuze slightly winking, he does the same thing in the cinema lectures where he says outlandish things in a very kind of dry humor, slightly chuckling, slightly serious way so i'm convinced that what he does in writing as well.

No, just ignorant.

deleuze is an incoherent obscurantist

like the rest of the french

t. pleb

you're only cheating yourself, man

I don't know much about Deleuze's philosophy, but from what I have read from him (basically One Thousand Plateus) his claims on epistemology and ontology are purely aesthetical - if that makes any sense. He does not seem to ground his concepts on any solid logical base, but rather on abstractions derived from "images". It seems like he watched a fungus growing on an agar plate or some shit like that and thought it would be a nice idea to formulate his entire world view around it because it looks interesting.

You read A Thousand Plateaus and nothing else and expect what is often considered their most difficult book to make sense? ATP is a book that clarifies many things they said in the past and at times is an empirical description of phenomena (D&G were very disappointed by how AO was received and tried to clarify some fundamental concepts in ATP). Of course it seems like poetry if you don't know what they're referencing.

Nice feelings you have there. Wanna paint our nails, eat chocolate and talk about boys, girlfriend?

k grandpa

no, I'd rather waste my life reading big books that don't mean anything

>ATP is a book that clarifies many things
>Of course it seems like poetry if you don't know what they're referencing.
you have a bad idea of what is clarify.
you can not say that is an empirical description and after that imply it seems like poetry.

I'm working my way through the entire philosophical cannon in chronological order. Not there yet sadly.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough on the "at times" part, not all of it is empirical. Still, if you don't know what to look for even the empirical heavy bits such as the BwO chapter can seem like poetry.

Fine, I'll bite, what are some philosophical books that do mean something?

Well this is pretty damning

>Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont accuse Deleuze of abusing mathematical and scientific terms, particularly by sliding between accepted technical meanings and his own idiosyncratic use of those terms in his works. Sokal and Bricmont state that they don't object to metaphorical reasoning, including with mathematical concepts, but mathematical and scientific terms are useful only insofar as they are precise. They give examples of mathematical concepts being "abused" by taking them out of their intended meaning, rendering the idea into normal language reduces it to truism or nonsense. In their opinion, Deleuze used mathematical concepts about which the typical reader might be not knowledgeable, and thus served to display erudition rather than enlightening the reader. Sokal and Bricmont state that they only deal with the "abuse" of mathematical and scientific concepts and explicitly suspend judgment about Deleuze's wider contributions.

For Deleuze there is a philosophical use of concepts that is not reduced to their scientific function as those concepts do not aim to be formulas, but to preserve chaos, contingency, indeterminacy, etc. while still explaining something. Deleuze said that his collegues from various fields told him that his usage of the terms made sense. While his work is very difficult and really doesn't spoonfeed at all, the Sokal affair stuff, as far as I know, boils down to the reader having to do some basic research himself and understanding that metaphysics is not physics.

>pseud apologia

I guess you showed me.

Absolutely. He described himself as a "pure metaphysician" and anyone who misses this or glosses over it is ENTIRELY WRONG about Deleuze. His work with Guattari is only an adaptation of his ontology into the realms of psychology, history, politics, etc. Remember that Deleuze became popular in America via LITERATURE departments that are ignorant of the philosophical traditions Deleuze confronts. Even still, those dumbfuck literary theorists managed to completely ignore passages in A Thousand Plateaus that explicitly mention it's all literal, not metaphorical. For fuck's sake, chapter 3 is entirely devoted to metaphysics, and still you have inbred literature profs continuing to claim that it's all one big literary project that never touches on the "Real." Fuck. Yes I mad.

why are English departments such shit? i'm glad i got a phil major on top of the English one

>He does not seem to ground his concepts on any solid logical base
sounds pretty striated, bro

inferiority complex that they're not doing le serious work like hard sciences and that their work isn't """real""" like social sciences, so they imported Derrida to show everyone that everything is a text and really LITERARY ANALYSIS is ACTUALLY the realest of the real! :^)

if they could stick to dry stuff like analyzing tulips in paradise lost it would be great, but the pressure to attract students makes them churn out courses like VAGINA AS TEXT: LISTEN TO BEYONCE AND PRETEND WHATEVER RETARDED SHIT COMES OUT OF UR MOUTH IS ACADEMIC WORK

Literature departments were invented pretty recently, I think like in the wake high modernism and Joyce, and had to self-justify very strongly with theoretical pretensions. They kind of ran out of shit to do pretty quickly because they exhausted the literary criticism of their era, and they often get absorbed into other disciplines like intellectual history, so they'd have to continually import new paradigms of theory. Derrida and the linguistic and cultural turns were big for them.

>yfw every time you ask this there's no answer

Deleuze's views in analytic terminology.png

Seems accurate. He described himself using many of those terms.

Because after the failure of New Criticism they realised they couldn't do anything that wasn't already (un)covered by Art History.

Now the main artistic currents in Art History are Deleuzian. Coincidence?

I'm still working on the Greeks, user.

>tfw to stupid too understand deleuze

Start with his interviews, conferences and courses. He can be crystal clear when he wants to.

Does Deleuze have any published lectures that deal with his central philosophy? I've found reading lectures to be tremendously helpful in the case of Heidegger.

Because I'm already beyond differance

It's a step back from Foucault.

Honestly, every good in D&G was already in Foucault.

They're all in several languages on webdeleuze.com. There are also some on youtube, but iirc only the Cinema one has subtitles. Still worth it even if you're not interested in Cinema.

Sokal is just a mathematician who isn't smart enough to understand Deleuze. Few are intellectually capable of this, you can't hold it against him.

i don't know what i think abt it yet
have to think abt it for a few years
maybe reread it