Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus': A Reader's Guide

by Eugene W. Holland

A Thousand Plateaus is the engaging and influential second part of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the remarkable collaborative project written by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. This hugely important text is a work of staggering complexity that made a major contribution to contemporary Continental philosophy, yet remains distinctly challenging for readers in a number of disciplines.
Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus': A Reader's Guide offers a concise and accessible introduction to this extremely important and yet challenging work. Written specifically to meet the needs of students coming to Deleuze and Guattari for the first time, the book offers guidance on:

- Philosophical and historical context
- Key themes
- Reading the text
- Reception and influence
- Further reading

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Politics

192 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2012

About the author

Eugene W. Holland is Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, USA. He specializes in social theory and modern French literature, history, and culture. In addition to a number of articles on poststructuralist theory and particularly the work of Gilles Deleuze, he has published a book on Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and an Introduction to Schizoanalysis (Routledge, 1999), and is currently working on books on citizenship and perversions.

- compiled from https://projectnarrative.osu.edu/peop...
http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/euge...

Reviews

[Jacob]

Holland does an excellent job of guiding the reader through 'A Thousand Plateaus'. Holland is able to present concepts in a more digestible manner so that the reader can grasp some of what Deleuze and Guattari are trying to say. I heavily reccomend this book as a companion while reading 'A Thousand Plateaus'.

[Reilly Baker]

Aaaaaand the Deleuze train keeps chug chug chugging along! 15 more until I can explain anything Deleuze ever wrote

[William West]

This is an excellently done explicative work on Deleuze & Guattari's famous book. Holland rearranges the deliberately "random" sections of "Thousand Plateaus" into what he sees as the main, reoccurring themes and questions of the work, showing that the authors' method is not as chaotic as they would have the reader believe.
Holland convincingly interprets "Thousand Plateaus" as an attempt to bring metaphysics into compliance with the latest breakthroughs in 20th century science, as Kant had done for philosophy in the 18th century.

[Gebo]

This is an amazingly helpful secondary source about A Thousand Plateaus. I greatly recommend it to anyone trying to make it through that text or anyone that's interested in Deleuze and Guattari's combined work. While it sometimes falls into the obfuscation that the source does, it's mostly rather clear and very concise.

[Doc Tor Mandrake]

A rhizome of metamorphosis and strata.

[graceofgod]

Mixed feelings.

[Liu HK]

good guide though some of the terms were coming too quickly for me to fully digest. the core thesis (from the scattering of ATP i've read and this book) appears posit a co-existence of fluid/nomadic/smooth/molecular consistency and rigid/State/striated/molar formations of desire/power/labour. yeah man sure, what the fuck.now im gonna have to spend the next 3 years reading the actual book.

though, to be fair, i was tripped up the reader's guide to Anti-Oedipus initially too. it got better once i actually dove into AO and could understand the book from reading the guide, and going back to the guide after reading most of the book I could understand it better too. knowledge do be non-linear.

[Gytis Dovydaitis]

It's my third time going back to A Thousand Plateaus, and this reader's guide made it surprisingly fruitful. It's a wonderful examination of a highly complex text by Deleuze and Guattari, and a perfect example of how widely applicable are the rhizomatic insights developed in ATP. Holland allows a more structured understanding of the vast conceptual jungle of ATP by subtly striating the smooth space of it. It's written in a clear and concise fashion without getting into any problematic oversimplifications.

[Biggus Dickkus]

အမှတ်တရကတော့ ဒီစာအုပ်စဖတ်တော့ သွေးလွန်တုပ်ကွေးဖြစ်ပြီး ဖျားနေတာနဲ့ တစ်ပါတ်လောက် မဖတ်နိုင်ဘဲပစ်ထားရတယ်။
ဘုန်းကြီး ဝတ်ဖြစ်လို့ တရားပွဲတွေ အဖိတ်ခံရရင် BwO,nomadism နဲ့ war-machine တရားတော်တွေ ဟောကြားတိုက်ကျွေးလို့ အောက်က နားထောင်တဲ့ ဒကာ ဒကာမ တွေ ဟာကနဲ ဟင်ကနဲ ဖြစ်သွားစေရမယ် ဘာရယ်တော့ မဟုတ်ဘူး D&G ဖတ်တဲ့ ပိုစ့်မော်ဒန် ဥူးဇင်း ဘာညာ သာရကာပေါ့

[Travis Kim]

A wonderful readers guide structuring the abstract arguments and notions of A Thousand Plateaus, finding ways to digest the far-fetched concepts, offering new opportunities of thought, a necessary distilling.

[Victor Hugo]

My mind is exploding with the sheer amount of concepts ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[Errol Orhan]

As good as a guide gets. It contextualises the ideas, and categorizes the different strands to provide the reader with an accessible primer.

[John Madera]

This is not only a great introduction to D&G's still vital text but an inspiring one its own right in terms of its various unique glosses on the text.

[Neus]

Really helpful text as a companion for 1000 plateaus. Second time around reading it (the other time was in a book club of sorts), it's been really helpful and enriching to have this kind of more straight forward text to read along.