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2015–2021years
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Mentions per year
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- I really like DeLanda too. Other related folks I enjoy are Brian Massumi and John Protevi (who wrote the SEP page on Deleuze, IIRC).
I think the first order of business is to understand that there are kind of three Deleuzes: there's Deleuze, and then there's Deleuze and Guattari. Finally there's also his film stuff.
There's a connection between them, of course, but they're kind of two different projects. Deleuze on his own is a scholar of philosophical history; he wrote a lot of books on other philosophers. There's a sort of over-arching project though; he's creating a kind of "secret history" where all the folks he write about are all building towards something. They're generally regarded as good books, but they're also just as much a sort of product of how Deleuze sees them, rather than purely about them themselves. The most controversial (and arguably his best, IMHO) is Nietzsche and Philosophy. He draws a bunch from material that Nietzsche didn't actually publish before his death, and his sister kind of... selectively edited. It's a whole thing. Regardless, IMHO it's a good take. Reasonable people may disagree. In order, they're "Empiricism and Subjectivity," "Nietzsche and Philosophy," "Kant’s Critical Philosophy," "Proust and Signs," "Bergsonism," "Spinoza: Practical Philosophy," "Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature," "Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation," and "Foucault." That is... a lot. IMHO, Nietzche, Spinoza, Foucault, and Kafka are the big ones, if you don't want to read like, ten books about ten people you probably haven't read yet. You can follow these up with "Difference and Repetition," his primary thesis, and "Logic of Sense," his final solo work before meeting Guattari. He wrote these in between some of those solo works, but IMHO, they make sense as a unit, with these as the end, even if they weren't written in that order.
Oh, and https://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/netzkritik/societyofcontr...
His mind-meld with Guattari has a lot of the themes of his solo work, but is much more experimental and out there. A Thousand Plateaus is, well, you already know this: pretty friggin' wild. So it's not so much "student of philosophical history" as it is "holy shit." To me at least. This is the stuff DeLanda and a lot of secondary literature engages with,
Oh, and I really love "What is Philosophy?" even if it's a less intense, more straightforward text.
Finally, film Deleuze. I've always wanted to study film but never managed to. I don't have much to say about this.
Oh gosh, that's a lot of works and orderings, but uh, yeah. Actual strategy. IMHO, if you don't have a foundation in Marx, all of this is going to be really tough. Make sure you understand at least a good chunk of Capital Volume I, the first three chapters (aka part i) are the most important, parts VI, V, and VIII aren't necessary, but Marx is pretty foundational. Even if folks don't agree with him, everyone is familiar with him, and often speak in his terms, and you have to be able to understand something to reject it. Many do agree, to be clear, just like... it's foundational. David Harvey can help there, he's not always perfect but he's better than most.
From there, what I personally did was read On the Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche. Then Discipline and Punish by Foucault. Then the Deleuze.
I am less well read with Freud than I should be to truly engage with Anti-Oedipus, but Civilization and its Discontents is worthwhile. Same with Marx, many many disagree, but all assume some level of familiarity.
Really, the best you can do is exactly what Massumi says about A Thousand Plateaus and "read it like a record":
> How should A Thousand Plateaus be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business.
Read some stuff, if you get to things you don't understand, go follow the citation and try to dig into that. Get that you probably won't really grok things the first time you read them, be curious, dig into stuff you like, ignore stuff that doesn't resonate, maybe come back to it later if your tastes change.
Good luck :)
Oh, one final thing: Ignore the "dark deleuze" garbage. It's bad. I literally forgot it existed because I wish it did not, but this is the internet so...
EDIT 2: oh my gosh. also, for computer folks: Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, by Galloway. Not strictly Deleuzian, but related, and useful.
- Capital Volume I By Karl Marx
- Conveniently, I can just tack onto this list two more books and there we will have the 4 most important books on my life so far.
Sexual Personae By Camille Paglia
Capital: Volume I By Karl Marx
- "Debt: The First 5000 Years" David Graeber
"Kokoro" Natsume Soseki
"The Politics of Dialogical Imagination" Hirano Katsuya
"History and Repetition" Karatani Kojin
"The Structure of World History" Karatani Kojin
"Anti-Oedipus" Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari
"Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors" Nicholas Wade
"Capital, Volume I" Karl Marx
These books have been the most informative and thought-provoking for me this year.
- "John Stuart Mill says in his Principles of Political Economy: ‘It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.’ That is, however, by no means the aim of the application of machinery under capitalism... The machine is a means for producing surplus-value."
"Hence that remarkable phenomenon in the history of modern industry, that machinery sweeps away every moral and natural restriction on the length of the working day. Hence too the economic paradox that the most powerful instrument for reducing labour-time suffers a dialectical inversion and becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labour-time at capital’s disposal for its own valorization."
Marx (1867), Capital Volume I, Chapter 15 ("Machinery and Large-Scale Industry")
- Whether you agree with it or not, it's a documented fact that Marxist/Leninst theory is clear on the desire for a reasonable length of working day.
https://socialism.com/fs-article/karl-marx-on-the-struggle-f...
Marx gives credit to the abolition of slavery for sparking new life in the U.S. labor movement in Capital, Volume I, published in 1867, in a section on the length of the workday.
"In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.
The General Congress of labor at Baltimore (August 16th, 1866) declared: “The first and great necessity of the present, to free the labor of this country from capitalistic slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working-day in all States of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained.”
At the same time, the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association at Geneva, on the proposition of the London General Council, resolved that “the limitation of the working-day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive … the Congress proposes eight hours as the legal limit of the working-day.”
