Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
129 of 141 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worth the slog through it, and that's saying a great deal., October 28, 2000
I'm not particularly erudite, and I'm certainly not a genius. My schooling has left me (for better or worse) without any familiarity with some of the philosophers, artists and writers D&G namecheck as lynchpins of their untimely meditation.Why, then, would I struggle with this 800-odd page monstrosity of densely-referential Gallic thought? Why am I here recommending that you do it? Well...because it's worth the long, thorny trudge. You've got to get around some idiosyncratic vocabulary, but that's OK. Because, in fact, *A Thousand Plateaus* presents a credible candidacy for Philosophy for our Time (if you can still believe in that). The concept of the rhizome alone - burrowing, nonhierarchical, endlessly foliating thought - let alone fertile ideas like nomadology or the Body without Organs: once grasped, these are extraordinarily useful figures that can wind up restoring some sense of agency (and subversiveness, and fun) to your intellectual life. They're perfectly suited, especially, to life and work in the age of the deeply rhizomorphic Internet. Remember, you're smart enough to understand this stuff. (I had to keep reminding myself.) Reading with partners or in groups helps, a lot. There really is a *vast* amount of provocative and useful thought in here. Go for it.
|
|
|
85 of 95 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The masterpiece of modern French philosophy., May 7, 2000
Anti-Oedipus, the first collaboration by Deleuze and Guattari, is more famous than a Thousand Plateaus, but this is their masterpiece. It takes a while to get used to their strange terms and phrases, and an English-schooled "analytical" philosopher would probably find their work to be nonsense, but D & G work differently. They are creators of concepts, and A Thousand Plateaus is overflowing with them. The book moves from meditations on the face, to nomads, to courtly love, to geology, to, well, a thousand other things . . . you name it. A reader who is willing to be led where they will take him is in for quite a trip.Philosophically, D & G seem to be proponants of a dynamic, highly charged, pre-conventional world, in which even individual identity is not yet a given. They do not suppose that we can live in this world and function normally, but we can tap into it, so to speak, and thereby harness energy for more creative living in the "normal" world, the world of conventional ideas, personal identities, etc. (and to some extent transform the "normal" world). But to paraphrase their ideas in this way is to lose the excitement they generate as they dive into specific topics--the musical refrain, schizophrenia, rhizomes, laws, and so on and so on--ever coming up with new and surpising interpretations. This book has endless riches for the reader to discover.
|
|
|
31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
my endless book, February 21, 2004
By A Customer
I have been reading this book for about 10 years. Every time I look at it I get something new from it. D&G offer the most brilliant analysis of capitalism and modernity that I know of, and I am extremely well read on these subjects. They explain the relationship between not only such negatives as exploitation on the one hand and capitalism or "development" on the other, as Marx did. They also show how capital accumulation is dependent upon such things as sadnness and resentment.
In a way consistent with Marx, D&G celebrate the creative "deterritorialization" (everything that is solid melting into air, in other words) that comes with captalism. Their solution to the devaluation of life (as evidenced by the relationship between capitalism and war, hot or cold, on Communism, drugs, crime or terror) that also characterizes our situation is to push that deterritorialization further (to reject reterritorialization). My one main criticism of them is that this is an inadequate solution. Nobody else has much of an answer either, however.
To read this book it is nice if you are familiar with Nietzsche, Marx and Freud (especially Nietzsche), but almost noone will be familiar with everything they reference. The best advice is to not get bogged down in what you don't "get" right away. Give the book time. It can be worth it. As Massumi, the translator, writes, reading this book can be a lot of fun, but if it doesn't work for you go buy a new CD or something and enjoy that instead. Lastly, this is not a "postmodern" book, despite what some of your professors might tell you. It is staunchly in a Marxist tradition (see some of Guattari's solo work on this) and it is in the lineage of a Nietzschian sort of antinomian philosophy that Deleuze would actually trace back to Spinoza and the Medeival theologian, Duns Scotus.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Gilles Deleuze
by Manuel De Landa
by Michel de Certeau
by Professor Gilles Deleuze
See all 100 books citing this book
