What are the prerequisites to reading Deleuze...

What are the prerequisites to reading Deleuze? I've picked up Difference and Repetition and his stuff with Guattari a bunch of times but put it down because it was incomprehensible. I know there are people far better read than I am (Chomsky) who dismiss it as total horseshit, but I really want to understand his stuff if at all possible.

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plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze
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read the todd may book

Open the wikipedia page. Look up 'influences'.

Basically just read continental philosophy until your brain turns into pure energy and then everything makes sense

I wish I were joking. This is how you read all continental philosophy. Just keep doing it and eventually it's like you become a space alien made of ghostly elastic twizzlers that reach out and grab other continental philosophers and absorb them into your brain. I don't remember how my brain worked before I could read Deleuze or Derrida or Baudrillard with reasonable confidence. It might have been made of wood or something.

Did Chomsky ever say anything about Deleuze specifically?

Also, jumping into D&R is the worst thing you can do. Start with Nietzsche and Philosophy. Then pick up his article and interview collections (there are about 4 of them). Or just watch DeLanda, Lotringer and the Actual/Virtual guys (they have individual lectures as well) on Youtube.

He's not wrong. Choosing to engage in French continental philosophy is akin to performing an intellectual lobotomy. Don't do it unless you want to be in uncharted mental territory.

Well, these have all been helpful. I guess I'll pick up the Todd May book and then just read the major works of his influences.

I actually forget if he spoke about Deleuze directly, come to think of it. He obviously isn't a fan of the whole tradition though.

You basically have to turn schizo(not even kidding here). Deleuze often pushes past the boundary of what is supposed to make sense in intuitonist logic or any logic I can think of. If nothing is supposed to make sense, shouldn't everything make sense in its own terms? I suspect Deleuze confidently says yes it should.

That said, his Nietzche and Philosophy and Spinoza:Practical Philosophy are his most accessible pieces of thought and should give you a good start. But do realize, that while I don't agree with Chomsky, this stuff is kinda scarring.

This sounds cool I want to try it. Is there a certain trajectory to follow or should I just devour whatever I can whenever I can? Are there fictional works to aid in the process?

Deleuze would argue against the notion of "prerequisite reading."

read up on some elementary Leibniz (The Monadology and Discourse on Metaphysics) and then pick up Monadology and Sociology. then uhhhh go for some spinoza and bergson, i guess?

>Choosing to engage in French continental philosophy is akin to performing an intellectual lobotomy.
Stealing this.

Explain

One of the main threads of his philosophical work is reimagining the canon in unorthodox ways, creating your own thought with the philosophical material available. To say that there is a single list of prerequisite material for understanding Deleuze "properly" is to run up against his own views of how philosophical thought should play out and occur. If you find something in Deleuze that doesn't really match what people have interpreted in him before but it seems to have a coherent structure then there's nothing wrong with that in his view.

I keep thinking that's Glenn Gould.

the only people i've known that love deleuze and have his writing resonate deeply with them have been either autistic OR schizophrenic /and/ autistic people that believe in reincarnation and some really weird stuff so

the entire continental philosophy cannon.

marx, Freud, lacan,Nietzsche, Heidegger, merleau ponty, SPINOZA, hegel, husserl, foucault, derrida, etc etc.

I have fond memories of undergraduates getting tangled up in anti-oedipus and having no idea what they were talking about.

"why do you like deleuze?"
"um...um...um.. rhizome rhizome rhizome"

you're out of your depth son.

start with the greeks...not even joking

>reimagining the canon

which you need to be more than familiar with.

take note Land devotees

you're welcome

i mean it takes a lot to translate exactly what is written by deleuze into something simple but ive barely read much of anything and i still "get" it

DeLanda is interesting but he is rather misleading about Deleuze. Avoid him if you're looking for a more objective commentator.

>Are there fictional works to aid in the process?
Deleuze sees literature as being as philosophically important as pure philosophy, so the answer is yes. Authors Deleuze cites all the time as illustrating the type of thought he's trying to get at are Proust, Beckett, Joyce, Lewis Carroll, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Roussel, and Kafka, among others. Writers he doesn't mention but I'm sure he would love are Gaddis (JR is basically a fictional version of the economic sections of Anti-Oedipus), Pynchon, Krasznahorkai. If you have more of a background in literature, it might be useful to read his works of criticism on Proust and Kafka, both of which are a lot more accessible than his bigger works.

this

Just read: plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze

Most philosophers can be read this way anyways since they're just cliff notes to other philosophers.

Besides he was a post-modernist destroyer of Western culture and values, burn his book.

If you've read a decent amount of Nietzsche, his Nietzsche book is fairly accessible and the person who wrote the intro calls it the best place to start. Don't get me wrong, it's still hard (the dice throw stuff is nearly incomprehensible), but it's a rigorous scholarly work that stays close to Nietzsche's original writings. Some have actually criticized him for giving too systematic a reading of Nietzsche who is supposed to be a thinker resistant to such systemization. I haven't read any of his other historical works, but from what I've heard, they are also more accessible than the later collaboration pieces with Guattari. For those I think you're going to be fucked no matter what. Deleuze said somewhere that he wrote Anti Oedpius for 16 year olds (what an asshole). The texts he's referencing are all over the place, and there's no way you're going to be able to (or want) to read all of those to prepare. I would imagine a solid grounding in the history of philosophy will be helpful inlcuding thinkers like Spinoza, Marx, and Heidegger as other anons have pointed out (and especially Freud for AO), but at a certain point I think you just have to dive in and accept the fuckery.

I'm pretty sure Nick Land has Schizotypal Personality Disorder