Tusen platåer: Kapitalism och schizofreni

by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Gunnar Holmbäck (Översättare)

Tusen platåer är den andra och avslutande delen av filosofen Gilles Deleuzes och psykoanalytikern Félix Guattaris monumentala tvåbandsverk Kapitalism och schizofreni.

Precis som i del ett, Anti-Oidipus, ifrågasätts såväl strukturalismens grundvalar som den traditionella marxismen och psykoanalysen, men i Tusen platåer är författarnas teoretiska ramverk - en närmast hallucinatorisk väv av neologismer och kätterskt bruk av skilda vetenskapliga discipliner - integrerat i bokens själva form. Texten består inte av kapitel disponerade i kronologisk följd, utan av en samling "platåer" som överlappar och interagerar med varandra och som kan läsas i vilken ordning som helst.

Deleuzes och Guattaris oförsonliga kritik av dialektiskt tänkande och enhetlig systematik leder dem kors och tvärs genom historien och det mänskliga vetandet, från den "arkaiska statens" uppkomst till lingvistikens återvändsgränder, genom den amerikanska litteraturen via zoologin och botaniken och tillbaka till nomadisk metallurgi, minoritär demografi och det epistemologiska motståndet mot "kunglig vetenskap". Denna mångfaldiga anordning av vitt skilda linjer och perspektiv genomsyras emellertid av en ständigt närvarande tematik: det sociala fältets förändring i förhållande till konst, vetenskap och politik.

Tusen platåer är i flera avseenden ett banbrytande verk som både har citerats flitigt och upphöjts till kultstatus, men som också har rönt ett avsevärt inflytande på de senaste decenniernas samhällskritiska tankeströmningar och idétraditioner.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Politics, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, France

855 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Deleuze is a key figure in poststructuralist French philosophy. Considering himself an empiricist and a vitalist, his body of work, which rests upon concepts such as multiplicity, constructivism, difference and desire, stands at a substantial remove from the main traditions of 20th century Continental thought. His thought locates him as an influential figure in present-day considerations of society, creativity and subjectivity. Notably, within his metaphysics he favored a Spinozian concept of a plane of immanence with everything a mode of one substance, and thus on the same level of existence. He argued, then, that there is no good and evil, but rather only relationships which are beneficial or harmful to the particular individuals. This ethics influences his approach to society and politics, especially as he was so politically active in struggles for rights and freedoms. Later in his career he wrote some of the more infamous texts of the period, in particular, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These texts are collaborative works with the radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and they exhibit Deleuze’s social and political commitment.

Gilles Deleuze began his career with a number of idiosyncratic yet rigorous historical studies of figures outside of the Continental tradition in vogue at the time. His first book, Empirisism and Subjectivity, is a study of Hume, interpreted by Deleuze to be a radical subjectivist. Deleuze became known for writing about other philosophers with new insights and different readings, interested as he was in liberating philosophical history from the hegemony of one perspective. He wrote on Spinoza, Nietzche, Kant, Leibniz and others, including literary authors and works, cinema, and art. Deleuze claimed that he did not write “about” art, literature, or cinema, but, rather, undertook philosophical “encounters” that led him to new concepts. As a constructivist, he was adamant that philosophers are creators, and that each reading of philosophy, or each philosophical encounter, ought to inspire new concepts. Additionally, according to Deleuze and his concepts of difference, there is no identity, and in repetition, nothing is ever the same. Rather, there is only difference: copies are something new, everything is constantly changing, and reality is a becoming, not a being.

He often collaborated with philosophers and artists as Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenghem, René Schérer, Carmelo Bene, François Châtelet, Olivier Revault d'Allonnes, Jean-François Lyotard, Georges Lapassade, Kateb Yacine and many others.

Reviews

[katie luisa borgesius · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hate this fucking book.

[Peter Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

wrote my MA thesis on these fuckers

[The Awdude · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most difficult book ever written. EVER. But it’s also liberating as hell. Just sit back and enjoy how strange it makes you feel. And then how ecstatic, confused, angry, etc., all at once. But if you're ever climbing and all of a sudden you realize that you're getting it, like, really getting it, then hang on and stay with it because it will probably change your life when you get to the top. And that feels pretty groovy. Especially when you really have to work for the plateau. It ain’t easy becoming a body without organs. And if you think the reading part pushes you to the limit, just wait till it’s time to sew up the ol’ asshole. The anus machine awaits the stratification of the sewing machine, the needle-and-thread aSSemblage, for the Dogon Egg awaits its de-territorialization! Whether you’re Chasing Freud’s patients alongside a pack of becoming-wolves, or watching poor Dr. Challenger evaporate, or pursuing a line of flight aboard the rhizomatic acid-cloud to Dr. Angrypants’s Masochingdom in the Metallurgy Matrix, ATP will not disappoint. Seriously. Read it. Don’t be afraid.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tired of seeing everything from the point of view of the individual? Bored of anthropomorphism? This might be the book for you. This book changed the way I think about thinking. Swirls in your pot of boiling water will seem as complex and contingent as hurricanes. The migration of humans will look like the crawling of ants. Most importantly, though, Deleuze and Guattari show everything as a process of strategic movement through territory, whether it be the formation of layers of sediment or nomads trekking through the desert plains. Like a roving spiderweb over the Cartesian grid of your window screen and your city, their thought shows us how to capture new territory while evading capture ourselves. But be wary, because capitalism has been doing just that for longer than we've been alive, and it's much better at it than we are.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a method to the madness within this extraordinary book. At first blush it often seems as if it’s a hodgepodge of a mish mash of stray threads at most loosely connected concerning the paradox of existence, but this book never makes the mistake of taking itself too seriously within its post-structuralism paradigms therefore allowing the reader to pretend to believe what the authors' are saying is deserving of the reader’s attention.

By pretending to believe what the authors are saying the book starts to make sense when the reader realizes that the book has multiple levels of interpretations: narrative, literal, metaphorical, and absolute rather than analogical. The book often at times reads as if it was a post-modern novel where space and time have been collapsed into a world without past or future but only the now of synchronic contingency.

The authors’ form of post-structuralism is convinced that the truth is out there and knowable and being qua being is directly knowable. They’ll mention that relative and analogical relationships are not enough and that haecceity can get us beyond the vagueness of the essence that Husserl hypothesizes with his hyletics, (defn: The study of matter or raw impressions of an intentional act; the abstraction from the form) as a starting point. Haecceity is a Duns Scotus way for experiencing the world and invokes an appeal to an object’s thisness and thatness distinction and believes being is knowable as being (being qua being) as in contrast from Thomas Aquinas who believes the supreme good is only knowable analogically. These authors think along the same lines as Scotus and try to collapse the being and becoming, or the appearance and reality, form and content, or other such dichotomies into a post-structuralist super-structure.

The authors will say nomads are people of the desert without spaces separated by strata which have no history and thus no culture and therefore are the true warriors and worthy of growth and even a Henry Miller can be a nomad within the city as he walks by himself at night in a world constructed with rhizomes (a word the authors coined with significant philosophical meaning for the text and it gets at the sameness within the one until it’s a multiple, one needs to read the whole book to really get at what they mean). Fascism needs a multiple of the intensity in order to thrive and all of the themes in this book are anti-fascist and anti-Spengler. Oswald Spengler gets quoted once but not from his seminal fascist book, Decline of the West, but from one of his lesser-known works. Spengler believes the opposite from what the first sentence in this paragraph states and from what Deleuze and Guattari are saying within this book as a whole. When in doubt on understanding what the authors are saying, it’s possible to just say think the opposite of what Spengler said.

The authors speak about a Body Without Organs (BWO). It is part of the abstract machine that holds all of our thoughts together and its ‘grey book’ is Spinoza’s Ethics and exemplifies what they mean, according to the authors. It is the One of Spinoza and is the explanation for the One substance that makes up everything in the universe until the rhizome devolves into the multiplicity of the many. Also, not from this book, I would say BWO is partly explained as the abstract machine that is the ‘ontological difference’ between being and becoming, or subjective and objective, and so on. I’d like to note how I discovered this book; I saw a review on Goodreads by someone who was reviewing this book and definitely did not like it because of its difficulty and said something about the BWO and a commentator (one of my Goodread friends, I think) said ‘your full of shit’. Two things, if I see a review for a book and the person says it’s difficult to understand, I know I want to read it, and if someone else says someone else is ‘full of shit’, I know I want to see why they would say that.

The authors are writing a post-structuralist defense and are rejecting relational truths knowable only by analogical and are sneaking in the Haecceity of Duns Scotus and his synchronic contingency (all understanding is of the now, not the past or future except for ultimate Being who sees all at once). The German Mark on November 20, 1923 was made into a German Mark but with a trillion to one ratio and that solved that nation’s travails through the recoding of the code axiomatically thus leading to a beer hall putsch and paving the way for a re-coding of the code such that a multiplicity of power would be manifested into a Hitler and the Nazis. The axioms (a word they use frequently) that float around us, determine us until they don’t.

The authors are right when they say Bergson is right to criticize Einstein’s general theory since it uses stratified space and smooth space gets pushed aside and he needed Riemann space which is not a metric space since time gets convoluted within space with the self-referential transformation. The authors are dealing with literal truths while they are telling their narrative on the nature of being qua being in a post-structural world that they are constructing, all the while they never really take themselves seriously since they ultimately know that means they could never be seriously taken. I cite this example from this book mostly to show how all encompassing this book is at times and how Bergson had a point.

The book makes the point that Norm Chomsky universal grammar is not necessarily wrong but that he just didn’t go far enough. Linguistics is a big part of the book. They’ll also say that psychoanalysis will discover the hidden reasons even when they aren’t there. The author’s preferred psychology, schiozoidanalysis, is a big part of the book. The definite not becoming the indefinite is another large part of the book. Art reflecting the inner difference between nature and the human is a big part. Economics, history, anthropology are all dissected by the authors. This book is equivalent to the first two years of undergraduate study for most students, and then some.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. These authors loved Carlos Castaneda and his fictional mystical book The Teachings of Don Juan. I always thought of him as a fake mystic not worthy of my consideration. I’m tempted to read his first book even though I truly hate any book that encourages psychedelic drug taking for recreational purposes.

Overall, I want to say that this book does have a narrative that ties the book together. It has a literal meaning within its sections that the reader can get without reflection, and it has a metaphorical meaning that the reader has to piece together, and finally, the authors are post-structural and think the truth is out there and being qua being is knowable. This book reads like some of my favorite post-modern fictional books such as Gravity’s Rainbow, Third Policeman, or like Finnigans Wake or The Divine Comedy. There is a meaning within the text but the reader needs to collapse space and time such that they see beyond the narrative, get the literal meaning of the text and see the metaphor all at once and the reader is rewarded with figuring out if the truth is really out there and knowable as Duns Scotus and the authors believe or the truth is knowable by relation, analogy and relativism as Thomas Aquinas would say.

These are the kind of books that makes reading most pleasurable for me. I liked this book so much that I even read all the end notes, and I noticed a lot of what the authors really believed seemed to be hidden within them while it was not always obvious within the main text.

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

August 9, 2010
We will be reading this for our next bookclub selection (because it follows Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals so well?). Once my boyfriend finds his second copy of this I'll get started. Yes, my boyfriend is the kind of person who owns two copies of this book. Intentionally.

I would also like to mention that I will be reading this at the mercy of the one who decided we should read this (who is not my boyfriend, believe it or not - apparently there are other people like him in the world...). And since this person has chosen this and has previously read this himself, I will be "forced" to read this book out of order. The "schedule" is forthcoming. I am promised that it's only appropriate to read the chapters in a non-linear fashion. My entire face twitched and I might have thrown up a little in my mouth, but hey. You only live once, right?

(I think reading this alongside Infinite Jest might make me the most pretentious person ever. Suh-weet! For the record, this most certainly was not my idea.)


March 20, 2011
(I'm tired.)

This is an incredibly difficult book to rate and review, and that's probably how Deleuze and Guattari would have wanted it anyway. It's also incredibly late and I'm half-asleep so anything I say here is really not going to give this book much credit; though whether or not the book deserves much credit is still to be determined. Our book club meets again next Sunday and chances are my opinion will change after we talk about this for another several hours, just like we have done at each meeting since we started this.

(I hate spending this much time on any book.)

So what I intend to do here is list the chapters in the order our group's moderator decided to have us read the book. Reading the book in order is not necessary, nor is it even recommended. Brian Massumi (translator) writes in his forward,

The reader is invited to follow each section to the plateau that rises from the smooth space of its composition, and to move from one plateau to the next at pleasure. But it is just as good to ignore the heights. You can take a concept that is particularly to your liking and jump with it to its next appearance. They tend to cycle back. Some might call that repetitious. Deleuze and Guattari call it a refrain.

(I hate jumping around in a book.)

Since there's no clear direction on how this book should be read the only thing I could do was surrender my reading habits to the moderator. Dude has taught classes on this book and these authors so he's the best person to come up with a plan for me. I guess. This was our reading plan which I hope may be helpful to someone attempting to read this book for the first time:

Chapter 2 - 1914: One or Several Wolves?
Introduction -Rhizome
Chapter 14 - 1440: The Smooth and the Striated
Chapter 3 - 10,000 BC: The Geology of Morals (Who Does Earth Think It Is?)
Chapter 11 - 1837: Of the Refrain
Chapter 10 - 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible
Chapter 6 - November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?
Chapter 9 - 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity
Chapter 12 - 1227: Treatise on Nomadology: - The War Machine
Chapter 13 - 7000 BC: Apparatus of Capture
Chapter 7 - Year Zero: Faciality
Chapter 5 - 587 AD: On Several Regimes of Signs
Chapter 4 - November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics
Chapter 8 - 1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?"
Conclusion

That being said there were a few things that stood out for me and/or I felt the need to write down:

p 358: Even in bands of animals, leadership is a complex mechanism that does not act to promote the strongest but rather inhibits the installation of stable powers, in favor of a fabric of immanent relations.

p 371: Slow and rapid are not quantitative degrees of movement but rather two types of qualified movement...

p 376: Because the less people take thought seriously, the more they think in conformity with what the State wants. Truly, what man of the State has not dreamed of that paltry impossible thing - to be a thinker?

p 381: Movement is extensive; speed is intensive.

p 400: Affect vs. emotion: Affect is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack, whereas feeling is an always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion. Affects are projectiles just like weapons; feelings are introceptive like tools.

Learning to undo things, and to undo oneself, is proper to the war machine: the "not-doing" of the warrior, the undoing of the subject.

p 438-39: The same could be said for the last love. Proust has shown how a love can be oriented toward its own limit, its own margin: it repeats it's own ending. A new love follows, so that each love is serial, so that there is a series of loves. But once again, "beyond" lies the ultimate, at the point where assemblage changes, where the assemblage of love is superseded by an artistic assemblage - the Work to be written, which is the problem Proust tackles...

p 460: Should we then speak of "voluntary servitude"? This is like the expression "magical captive": its only merit is to underline the apparent mystery. There is a machinic enslavement, about which it could be said in each case that it presupposes itself, that it appears as preaccomplished; this machinic enslavement is no more "voluntary" than it is "forced".

p 102-03: Or the way Black Engish and any number of "ghetto languages" set American English in variation, to the point that New York is virtually a city without a language. (Furthermore, American English could not have constituted itself without this linguistic labor of the minorities.)

Good gravy, there's a lot of ground covered here and I'm not sure there is enough space for all my different thoughts. Am I glad to have read this cover-to-cover? Oy. That's a loaded question.

It's fascinating stuff as in listening to two insane genius mo-fo's is fascinating. The idea is to take a few thoughts from one philosopher, etc., throw those thoughts into a salad mixer, dump it out and there's Deleuze and Guattari. It's still lettuce, right? But not quite the same kind of lettuce that you first put in.

But my point throughout all of this reading is that I'm not sold on the idea that salad mixers need to exist. I don't own one because (ding-ding-ding!) I can mix my own salad. Deleuze and Guattari borrowed ideas from Freud and Marx and some other people, kind of tossed it all around, threw in some totally made-up words to help cement their status as crazy assholes points, and presented it as an entirely new way of thinking.



The thing I wasn't able to really get past - and the thing that almost made my book club partners want to smother me with a rhizomatic pillow - is that I'm not certain any of this was necessary. Deleuze and Guattari clearly were crazy mad geniuses, that's not the issue. But I'm always a little wary of someone that comes along and is all like, "Hey, I have this new way of thinking - listen up!" They're usually the same people who are handing out glasses of grape-flavored Kool-Aid.

Then again, as stated above, there were some moments of complete clarity. Some of what Delusional and Guitar had to say actually resonated with me. Of course then they'd go off in a complete different direction and I'd still be back in the dust just patting myself on the back for actually getting something. Oh, it's not just about a flying vagina, I get it now...

And - perhaps not surprisingly - I have found myself making connections between this stupid book and other stupid books I was reading at the same time. Especially Infinite Jest in which I found this whole passage that was obviously paying homage to D&G. I didn't think it could even be possible, but dude. It was right there in front of my face. And then the whole capitalism thing - gave a little flavor to freaking Atlas Shrugged; not that it mattered though - I mentioned Ayn Rand in our book club meeting and tried to compare the two texts and was met with blank looks and crickets.

Mostly this book pissed me off. Which really just means that I need to read it like fifty more times to really pick up on all the right points. I suck at math and reading this book at times felt like reading one giant word problem. Until tonight I wasn't even certain the word problem would ever actually end. I looked forward to the Conclusion most of all, thinking that conclusions are the time to sort of re-summarize all the main points, or at least the thesis, and maybe it will all come together for me. Silly rabbit! This conclusion wrote the whole damn book over again, but crammed it this time into just a couple of pages. Geniuses!

Way to go, Messieurs Deleuze and Guattari.




I hate you both and you have ruined my life.

[Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

You’d be forgiven for walking away from Anti-Oedipus thinking that deterritorialization is positive and liberatory force, and the circumscription of reterritorialization, reactionary and oppressive. Anti-Oedipus endorses schizophrenia, immanence and multiplicity while still using binary terms for its lavish metaphysics. This is to some degree inevitable. A Thousand Plateaus begins the process of ungluing these manichean oppositions but doesn’t quite undo the latent hierarchies. A Thousand Plateau’s broadest sense is one that discourages broad sense; micro-revolutions in molecular fields of difference rather than overturning molar aggregates. But even the most decentered register will come up against some hard limits; the only way to see the vampiric reflection of capital is in a black pool of oil.

A Thousand Plateaus is a demimonde of ambiguity and exceptions but D&G’s allegiance to one side of their dualistic coinages is always clear--The arborescent is bad; rhizomatics are good. Stratification is bad; destratification is good. Striated space is bad; smooth space is good. Suddenly, we have a power relationship, a normative claim about the general superiority of one function or entity, even if it’s subtle, complex and multidirectional. This is not a criticism; absolute fidelity to schizoanalysis, rhizomatics, molecular politics or whatever you want to call it would lead to total incoherency. D&G’s terms are always polyphonic and encase an sprawling system of internal difference. But the schism from Hegel and psychoanalysis (especially Lacan) is less dramatic than it is presented, the terms and claims of dialectics and psychoanalysis do, after all, possess identities which are multiple and variegated. Some of Capitalism & Schizophrenia’s pugilistic oppositions seem more operatic than theoretical.

(Before anyone corrects me to say “deterritorialization can be destructive” etc, I have heard this from many avid Deleuzians and I don’t doubt their sincerity--but I don’t believe that most people of a schizoanalytical persuasion think that the unwriting of territories is a bad thing except in certain specialized cases)

A Thousand Plateaus also backtracks some of the more extravagant claims of Anti-Oedipus, stratifying indexes which delimit the acceleration of deterritorializing flows. These ‘black holes’ are fascistic traps which ‘coil inwards’ toward the installation of binaries, hierarchies and the dialectical deletion of new lines of flight. I’ve spoken interminably about acceleration(ism) recently, so all I’ll say is; my deepest sympathies to Nick Land.

I have a certain level of confusion and dismay over the affirmationist vitalism at the morphogenetic heart of D&G. I think to some degree the negative is inscribed onto either the topology of our perception or whatever contours of the real are accessible by that perception. The Capitalism & Schizophrenia books model desire as ‘machinic’ (along with the unconscious, the social body and most other things)--and machines burn fuel and cough tubercular exhaust. They are built with their expiration and obsolescence in mind. Deft and dexterous theoretical maneuvers are prosecuted to try and extirpate dialectical negativity and the death drive but I don’t know that they can be quashed by a patchwork monism. The negative is resilient--and competition & entropy possess an undeniable (even affirmative) presence. How can we get past that Anti-Oedipus is a supremely Oedipal book? Capitalism & Schizophrenia wants to vanquish the choreographed arborescence of their father’s law and rejoin to the oceanic univocity of the maternal monism; or, kill Daddy Hegel and return to Mommy Spinoza.

I want to restate that I don’t think this is a bad thing. Recently I’ve found Deleuze extremely useful for understanding a wide variety problems. But it’ll be a cold day in the climate catastrophe holocene before you get me to substitute Bergson for Freud.

A Thousand Plateaus is somehow more fun to read than Anti-Oedipus despite being immensely more difficult. There are single paragraphs that cascade across multiple pages referencing a remit of inconceivably diverse knowledge. It reads like nonsense at first blush. But when I read these sections back I always I understand a little more, the coiled digits begin to articulate. If you have the patience to reread a paragraph three or four times, the reticent typologies WILL unfurl into ontogenetic dynamisms. The gift that keeps on becoming. On the other hand, there are individual sentences carved with the precision of a jeweller’s hands which can overturn everything you thought you knew prior to reading them, even upon glancing contact. Someone told me that Guattari wrote the Capitalism & Schizophrenia books on drugs and Deleuze edited / refined them on even more drugs. I don’t know if that’s true but I really hope it is.

The concept-salad from Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson accretes into molar aggregates which can be picked apart, reconfigured and developed, perhaps indefinitely. I think the popularity of D&G well into the time of my writing this at the end of 2018 (over 50 years since May 1968 which will always be remembered alongside these books) has to do with the insistence upon the contingency of structures and the importance of outlying flows, energies, data, etc which escape the architecture of the structure. These books are a project which invite universal participation.

This isn’t much of a review, just some disorganized thoughts I had while reading A Thousand Plateaus which is a book containing erudition vast beyond my comprehension with each plateau embedded with singularities it could take a lifetime to understand. My complaints may seem quibbling, and in some sense they are, as I’m just thinking aloud while I try to understand the points of dispute in two dominant currents of continental philosophy. This book is stunningly brilliant and probably lapped me several times while I wittered “but the dialectic...”

Oh and it’s actually like 15 plateaus.

[Sir Jack · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is basically a nonreview: like a restless nomad I would read several pages of one section and then find myself completely unable to go on, and then I’d move to the next one. Same for the next chapter and the next.

Right from the beginning I knew I had already read too much of this type of writing to have much patience for it. Here’re the authors justifying the fact that they affixed their names to the books they write:

“Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.”

Sigh. How easy it is to date and place such writing: it could only be sixties-spawned poststructuralist theory. The way the book seeks to undermine “structured” or “phallocentric” (of course) thinking is humorlessly rigorous.

There’s one chapter comparing States to “chieftans,” and there is not one mention of any country and hardly any reference to a single specific example (references to “the Orient” don’t count). Such breezy abstractions are the antithesis of Foucault’s fine-grained analyses of actual social structures.

The main philosopher they rail against (and neatly simplify) is Plato, who was writing philosophy 2,400 years ago. Plato is like Satan to these theorists: Everything is his fault.

Like many theorists, the authors are at their worst when they turn their maniacal gaze onto fiction. But they can’t resist, they must say something. Here is a representative sentence concerning literature (they’re talking about Moby Dick and Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer”):

“It is always with the Anomalous that one enters into alliance to become-animal.” [SIC!]

This will sound brisk and simplistic (like most of this review, perhaps), but I really do think that theorists in general just don’t *get* fiction. They have no taste. (See, for a chilling example, anything Frederic Jameson has said about literature.)

I exclude Foucault, an insanely original thinker, from the above critical statements about theorists.

[Fede · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sci-Fi(losophy).

I have nothing to add to the scholarly reviews of those enthusiasts praising the impenetrability of this book, thus 1) implicitly bragging about their superhuman intellect; and 2) putting everybody off by making it seem a bunch of unreadable crap.
In fact such enthusiastic apologia for Deleuze and Guattari's work shamefully overlooks the sheer pleasure it gives, if only one allows its paradoxical, grotesque, crazy, and exquisitely literary aspects to surface.

I mean - just relax. You can't take it so seriously, not to the point of mistaking it for yet another philosophy brick - and a relic of the 80s, for that matter.
This is hyperstion, pure and simple and genial and devilishly funny hyperstion. It's neither a test nor a challenge to one's intellect, and therefore mustn't be taken as such. It's a deep book with an optimistic and revolutionary message instead, an invitation to perform the dismantling of a whole system of thought: creative destruction from within. Nothing to do with the sterile intellectualism that has managed to gobble it down, digest it, and finally defecate it.

That's why this stuff has been working for forty years; why we're still willing to pay more than 25€ for a new copy; why we're still imitating it (Nick Land's and Reza Negarestani's works are HEAVILY indebted to the Plateaus, to name but two) and pretending to understand it, in all its inherent madness.

Because this is so insane that, in the end, it even makes sense.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

I DID IT.

[Clinton Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idea: Society is a vertically organized enterprise. Different concepts are used to attempt to implement a sort of control over others; the control of language, and of grammar itself, could be considered a type of imperialism...to paraphrase, there's no quicker way to implement a sort of control over a group of people than to ensure that they cannot have a voice within a society without adhering to strictly delineated guideline regarding how to write/how to speak. In response to the vertically oriented, top-down society, a "nomad" thought emerges in response, one that refuses to settle down within the predominant format, one that chooses to countermand the society. The development of a counter-reactive force to society, however, a society that attempts to eradicate "nomad thought", thought that does not organize into hierarchies and the idea of the have and the have-not, requires a "rhizomatic" form of connection. Imagine a set of differentiated cells that, rather than resting on a vertical plane, are organized horizontally, with the formation of different shapes, different types of conformities that help upend the tyranny of the dominant language, the dominant order. The rhizome is a dendrite that allows the players and actors in this philosophical field to connect outside the field of the hierarchy, in a way that could be more effectual than that of the "nomad"...for the "nomad" cannot by the sheer definition form an alternate to what DeLeuze and Guattari call "the war machine": the manner in which a society exerts control (and the "war machine" itself is much more effective if coercion can exist without war). These horizontal connections among those who have learned to become organs without bodies, that is, banished the internal hierarchies within their own personal thinking and concept of organization of their own bodies, are a potential counteractive force against coercion...

OK. Beyond that, a few words. The book has chapters, called plateaus, but I'd have to say that there doesn't seem to be any great degree of organization. Indeed, DeLeuze and Guattari indicate that one could read the book in any order, skip large parts, etc. The most pivotal chapters are probably the first (simply to become acclimated to the writing, which is somewhat inscrutable, exhortational, and didactic all at the same time...truly remarkable, though it wears a bit thin after 400 pages of it), then "How to Become a Body Without Organs," then "Nomadology: The War Machine." Under no circumstances (in my opinion) should the chapter on "Nomadology" be read before the "body without organs" chapter; best flow is reading the ones that focus on the individual reaction to the linguistic implements of imperialism, then the ones that deal more with group reactions.

Anyone who is expecting some sort of detailed critique of capitalism (and, if you're reading this to begin with, you're probably not...ie, you probably know what you're in for, or are familiar with DeLeuze and Guattari, who are brilliant if a bit discursive), this isn't the book.

Finally, the book does reward patience, but (if philosophy is not your primary interest in your reading) you will need it...it is not an easy read, and the "plateaus" often "ramble" for 10-15 pages before they get to their core insight. Remember that, at their core, and amidst all of their other intellectual interests, what you have here is a philosopher/linguist and a psychiatrist who collaborated; in the end, everything is somewhat seen through the filter of language and how the use of language and other types of communication could possibly bring about changes of a society at its margins (while their posturing may suggest otherwise, I'd posit the idea that DeLeuze and Guattari are savvy enough to realize that most people aren't going to be able to read this book and understand it well enough to translate the concepts into potential society-changing thoughts on a large scale...).

But, if you really love DeLeuze, this is of course indispensable...though you'll probably already have read it. :)

[Andrew]

Fucking wow. I read Deleuze for the first time when my sophomore year of college, and found him impenetrable and obnoxious, but now, after falling in love with some people inspired by Deleuze (Edward Soja, Antonio Negri, etc.), I'm back on the bandwagon. Not only does it provide a phenomenal perspective on the world that will help any student of literature, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, art, etc., but also is extremely good at curing internal fascist malaise. Lovely!

[Dario]

Introduction: Rhizome

Where does one (/two/several) go from Anti-Oedipus? How does one take further a project constituted by such an extreme rupture? Is it possible? Anti-Oedipus followed the wake of the tumultuous riots of May '68; the breaches were clear, people had had enough; it was not just alienation in the work place, people could no longer stand the image of desire they had been presented with. Perhaps a new world was being fabricated; and yet, the momentum wouldn't last; the breach wasn't enough. Psychoanalysis was dealt a ravaging blow by Deleuze & Guattari, as well as many of their contemporaries; Oedipus had become ridiculous, but what was on the other side of the cloud of smoke? The final chapter of Anti-Oedipus - Introduction to Schizoanalysis - already delineated the first two positive tasks of schizoanalysis, but one got the impression of being on the verge of something, a something so full of possibilities that it would perhaps warrant a +600 page book composed of, not chapters, but plateaus, that could be read in any order...

Rhizome is defined as an introduction plateau, and, along with the 'Conclusion', is the only chapter given a chronological stipulation. One would be tempted to call it a somewhat 'central metaphor' of the book, if it weren't for the fact that both of those words are completely irrelevant; there is no centre of a rhizome, and metaphor is bullshit. D+G create the dualism of the rhizome vs the tree only in order to challenge all dualisms. As they will develop, it is not a case of certain things being rhizomes, while others are trees; rather, both of these dimensions are permanently enmeshed within each other's operations; one can always see the trees in a rhizome, but, contrariwise, the tree can always be rhizomatised. We look at a tree and take note of its base, its peripheries, and its limits; also its roots, its trunk, and its branches. Ah, how organised, and clearly structured! is the tree; but this is not all that there is to the tree. Always, rhizomatic connections: what of the man who, two hundred years ago, read a gardening book and decided to plant a tree here, the fact that he had chronic back pain from his labour and so wasn't able to plant it two hundred metres further away towards the forest, the chemical constitution of the air around the tree caused in part by the idiosyncrasies of the capitalist mode of production, what is the tree's relation to the various fungi that grow upon its bark? A friend of mine told me that the Buddhist perspective is quite similar: the mind 'paints' the top of the tree, as well as its base; it selects a certain amount of life to cut off off, isolate, and individualise; it fashions an illusory separation in a much grander general happening and connectivity of things. It is indeed this illusory perspective, 1) of separation between the idea of the tree and its surroundings, and 2) of continuation of this same 'tree' over duration, that is the root of suffering.

The point is that the rhizome can offer us new ways of living, and connecting to the world. Connecting in new and surprising, imperceptible ways. A 'point' in a rhizome can and must be connected to any other point. In fact, we can say that in the rhizome it is the lines that become focal; whereas in the tree the lines are made to submit to the points (you will move from here to there), in the rhizome the points are subordinated to the lines. There is no beginning or end to a rhizome, only 'middles'. Everything is movement, motion, deterritorialisation. The true traveler or adventurer knows this; to travel is never to be travelling anywhere; it is the intrinsic reality of the travelling itself that is of value. We in the West have somehow lost our grasp of something very important, perhaps we never had it...Everywhere we look for the goal, the destination; everywhere we seek the meaning, the higher purpose. But in life there is no meaning, nor is there in the book. The book is always a machine, awaiting its connection to other machines; a multiplicity, willing its insertion into other multiplicities; willing on its life.

6: November 28, 1947: How do you Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?

Artaud:
When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.

The body is the body.
Alone it stands.
And in no need of organs.
Organism it never is.
Organisms are the enemies of the body.

The body without organs is what is presupposed by every organism, and every organised body in general, as that which underlies all organisation; it is that which is un-organised, unengendered; it is a refusal of the organisation and subjugation that the organism makes the body undergo. It is the desert, the immobile motor. The zero intensity that every intensity fills. And yet, it is not the organs that are the enemy of the body; rather, their common enemy is in fact the organism, or, the organisation of the organs. The BwO does not precede the organism, it is contemporary with it. D+G ask us: "how can we convey how easy it is, and the extent to which we do it every day?" The dismantling of the organism and the construction of the BwO is no more or less difficult than the dismantling of signifiance in favour of experimentation, and the dismantling of the subject in favour of the multiplicity, the group, or the assemblage.

Some fascinating examples are provided. First they give us the BwO of the masochist. Psychoanalysis has completely misunderstood masochism by conceiving of it as a particularly roundabout way of achieving pleasure. No, masochism has nothing to do with the attainment of pleasure. In fact, it is nearer the opposite case. What we see in the often incredibly specific procedures directed by the masochist - a play of bindings, strappings, instructions, thrashings, lockings - is rather the banishing of pleasure, the arresting of the organs in their normal modes of function, and a veritable construction or fabrication of a BwO. These are the peculiar conditions that the masochist uses to unorganise and perhaps reorganise the body. In their particular case, it is such that they fabricate a BwO such as can only cause and allow flows of pain to pass across it. It is no doubt an unusual mode of construction, one that often veers close to danger, that courts danger. Yet, this is the procedure that they have chosen to halt the organism, the experimentation that they have chosen to conceive of a new way of living. It is perhaps the only way they know of destratifying desire, of facilitating desire's inorganic plane of consistency, of decoding it.

Another example: courtly love. In the prolonged gestures of courtship in feudalism, we again find the very peculiar construction of a BwO. Again, it is a matter of warding off the attainment of pleasure, which would indicate an interruption of the immanent process of desire, the process that fills itself up, and in which desire lacks nothing, is 'aimed' at nothing, and has nothing other than itself as its goal. For the consumption of the union would indicate a flow become too heavy, one that subjugates the flows of desire, the conjunction of flows. It is precisely through the banishment of this exteriority of pleasure, this 'goal' or 'end' of desire, that a true plane of immanent desire is assembled. The absolute joy in the overwhelming process of desire itself, the pure assemblage, without idea of subject or object, that pulls all involved inward, all the while opening up to more expansive worlds. Here again we see a veritable fabrication, making full use of artifice, enacted so as to construct the plane of consistency of desire.

For when you make desire, rather than being positive and constitutive of itself, a desire for pleasure, you take everything away from it. Desire has no object or goal other than itself; no transcendent exteriority. It is the very process of desire that fills itself out, with no need for an exteriority or a transcendent goal. Desire is never a desire for any 'thing'; desire is neither the behest of a subject nor the striving for an object. It is a pure flowing, the flowing that all flows constitute.

D+G raise the question: why so somber? Why such a dreary and depressive vision of BwO's? Paranoiac BwO's, hypochondriac BwO's, catatonic schizophrenic BwO's? BwO's that are empty, that have been wiped out of their organs, destratifications undertaken to vigorously, too suddenly; did you not take the necessary precautions? It is only through a meticulous relation with the strata that one can succeed in freeing lines of flight, lines of decoding, lines of desire, and continue to do so. For self-destruction helps no one; suicide, self-poisoning, these are not revolutionary paths, they lead nowhere; or if death is avoided, the strata come back down upon us harder and firmer than ever. One must retain just enough of the organism, just enough of 'the self', in order to maintain a locus upon which to continue the fight; there must be something to experiment with.

2: 1914: One or Several Wolves?

This develops into a fascinating plateau. It begins with Freud's famous Wolf-Man analysis - a case study of a case study, if you will - before progressing into one of the more concise and singular elaborations of the authors' notions of the multiple that I have found anywhere in their oeuvres.

Sergei Pankejeff, later known as the Wolf-Man, was one of Freud's most famous case studies. He began analysis with Freud in 1910 at the age of 23. The Wolf-Man's case revolved around a dream he had when very young, in which he saw a tree in front of his bedroom window populated by six or seven wolves."Who is ignorant of the fact that wolves travel in packs? Only Freud. Every child knows it. Not Freud." Freud will exorcise multiplicity from the unconscious. Everywhere he will look for the One, no doubt the Father, the Mother, the Phallus, Castration. Everything else, all the real elements of the unconscious, of life, will simply serve as substitutes; always a unity, always a globalising, totalising subject. As Nietzsche says, from our ignorance we construct the subject, and from our vanity we construct 'objects'. But the psychotic and the schizo speak in multiplicities: The sock becomes an aggregate of stitches, the skin a field of pores. But for Freud, a scar in the skin, a crack, a hole, can only ever represent the tired, old, subjugating castration, the imperial despotic sign.

For D+G, the wolves are a pure multiplicity, a pack, and the problem is not one of unification, but rather of a peopling of the unconscious. The BwO is not empty, far from it; the desert has never been the enemy of the tribes and species that play out their lives upon it. As Deleuze says in Dialogues, "we are all deserts, but populated by tribes, flora, and fauna." And it is only when we begin speaking through these populations, these groups, multiplicities, that we earn a name for ourselves. A depersonalisation effected through love rather than subjugation; it is when we stop thinking of ourselves as egos, as the 'I', that we become what we are; the proper name that assumes its proper function, being the designation of a pure multiplicity, a pack. And doubtless, once we have replaced the 'I' of Being with the 'we' of multiplicity, it remains to be seen that there can only be collective agents of statements and enunciation. A whole machinic factory, involving all sorts of connections, disjunctions, conjunctions, always conjuring up statements that are by their nature products of packs and masses, according to rhizomatic or arborescent multiplicities respectively.

9: 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity

We are all, whether groups or individuals, run through by lines; lines which run through us, and through which we also run. Lines should be taken in their most general sense. It is through (along the lines of) a theory of lines that we must understand the dissolution of the ego or subject. It is in the theory of lines that any vaguely determinist principle must be understood. A line is simply an articulation, a flowing or flow. What are the lines that flow through us, that determine us to act, think, or feel a certain way, at a certain time? And which lines do we constitute, when we flow? A line is a dimension, and society - any social formation - is criss-crossed by an immense pure multiplicity of them at every point in time. Never a totalising, globalising unity; always a play of lines, a network, a rhizome. Experience the lightness: no need for anger, no need for hatred nor resentment; people can never be separated from the lines that run through them, that determine them from within and without.

D+G give us several theories of lines. To a large extent they are interested in the molar, and the molecular. 1 mole = 6x10^23 molecules; mass vs multiplicity; macro vs micro. "Everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics." In this sense they continue the opposition proposed in Anti-Oedipus, where they expounded a molecular unconscious of partial objects and sub-atomic forces, against the great molar aggregates that repress desire by introducing subjects and objects into its field or plane. As with that book, they are again keen to stress the interpenetration of these two opposed poles. It is not a case of mutual exclusivity, and D+G do not wish to merely construct another tired dualism. There is always the one within the other. Who doesn't live, at least to some extent, with the great molar categories? of gender, class, race, personality type, sexuality, vocation etc., complete with rigidified senses of taste, preference, and inclination? But on the other hand, who doesn't feel the push and pull of the fringes of each of these zones? of the micro inclinations and senses that never quite allow us to feel at home in the great molar territories? of the little desires and flows that will never neatly align, that will always place part of us outside the dominant ideals, always lending us a minoritarian-becoming. 

ran out of room... shit i only got like 4 chapters in lmao.
here's the rest of my review ! :
https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...

Update - 3: 10,000 BC: The Geology of Morals - added!
Update - 7: Year Zero: Faciality - added!
Update - 4: November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics - added!
Update - 8: 1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?" - added!

[Noah · Rating 5 out of 5]

i. There isn’t metaphor.
ii. There is nowhere the book ends and I begin.
iii. I’m a lobster, a wolf-man, child, woman, and egg.
1. ((The plane of immanence is of noncontradiction.))
2. If there’s a plan, it’s God’s mind.
3. No God but Spinoza’s.
4. Time is running out of you.
5. Miracles happen. Don’t let mysticism fool you.
6. Grammatical you is a miracle. It’s coming out of everyone, though.
7. Only Freud neglects the pack.
8. They won’t see you if you exit through the side. ((“I may be fleeing, but the whole while I’ll be looking for a weapon.”))
9. Closure isn’t necessarily annihilation.
10. All closure is incomplete.
11. This information has been brought to you by a project of closure. Or, thankfully, it hasn’t been brought to you.
12. ((What is a girl? Haecceity, pure haecceity. “Fugitive beings.”))
13. The infinitesimal ds is where the force function finds its expression. dx marks intervals on a plane of approximation.
14. The self only ever arrives somewhere with the help of the anomalous. You’re going to have to trust strangers.
15. ((But there are times it necessarily gives us a taste for death; not so much happiness as dying happily, being extinguished. […] Peace and exasperation.))
16. Some people’s best fantasy is a contract. ((We sorcerers have always known that.))
17. If I start speaking nonsense, something else is happening. If these statements are making sense, they’re also making a nest.
18. ((The plane of immanence is a fixed plane, a fixed sound plane, or is of absolute movement as well as of rest, from which all relative speeds and slow messes spring, and nothing but them.))
19. Being is, distributed. ((Becoming produces nothing other than itself.))
20. ((It is this, a plane of proliferation, peeping, contagion; but this proliferation of material has nothing to do with an evolution, the development of a form or the filiation of forms. Still less is it a regression leading back to a principle. It is on the contrary an involution, in which form is constantly being dissolved, freeing times and speeds.))
21. Everything happens without a plan. “Eventually,” from where we’re standing.
22. ((But you don’t know.))
23. ((So experiment.))
24. ((“Goodbye, I’m leaving and I won’t look back.”))
25. Some day all this rusted metal, it’ll come for you and get you.

[Jake · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is pseudo-intellectual garbage. The striations and stratifications of the molar body without organs and deterritorialized flows of jargon were empty of meaning. Crap. Took forever to read it all. 'Anti-Oedipus' had a little thought involved at least.

[Samuel Moss · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have now read this book.

I cannot say whether it was good or bad or whether it was fiction or non-fiction or whether it was anything. I don't know whether I enjoyed it or not, nor whether I learned anything or not. There seems to be something here, but maybe not. This could be the key to all human structures, states, therapy and capitalism, or it could be the amused riffing of two academics who never left their homes and offices. Indulgent free jazz of the mind.

I have had two other reading experiences similar to this one: reading 'Finnegan's Wake' and reading 'Tale of Genji' where reading was an ordeal, wherein I felt like I was forcing myself through an endless stream of text, a stream to which I am able to apply essentially no anchors nor find any footing. It felt like wandering in a labyrinth, and at many places I was sure I was passing a point I had passed one or a dozen or a hundred times before.

I come out the other side of this book feeling no different, understanding nothing different, seeing the world in no different way. But maybe I did? I saw the documentary 'American Factory' (which follows the opening of a Chinese owned factory in economically depresses Dayton Ohio) and there seemed to be some bearing on the flows of capitol to be applied here, but what are those connections exactly? I cannot say? Would having the CEO of Fuyao or the workers at the factory read this book changes their attitudes or behavior? I suspect not.

What does it mean for something to be deterritorialized? I do not know. What is a double articulation? I do not know(?) What is the place of consistency? I have no more answers to these questions than before, but-maybe even worse-these questions do not seem like questions. I would not be able to tell the difference between a line taken from 'ATP' and a line generated by an automated Deleuze quote generator. Is this the point?

Before reading this book it held this mystical place in my consciousness. While reading it all I seemed to find were people, thinkers and even academic philosophers, who were critical or even derisive of D&G.

Is it a good book? Is it a bad book? Is it a book?

Maybe this is a book that infects the reader, changing them (and your relation to the world) absent their notice. It's a romantic thought, and romantic thoughts are often wrong, but it would be cool if it were true.

The cynic in me sees vast quantity of articles, books and scholars that heavily rely on ATP (and its specific vocabulary) as a kind of fan-fiction, but I very well might be wrong.

[Christoph · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am torn on this review and rating. On the one-hand I recognize this as one of the quintessential post-modern tomes up there with Lyotard's Postmodern Condition or Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge but on the other hand, the quixotic hubris in this text is almost overbearing. It really depends on how I am looking at the purpose of the writing. If i try to look at it like a true philosophical text with intended insight and description, it falls completely flat. It truly is the inane charting of ontology (even if not hierarchical ontology) like Husserl's Phenomenology for a significant portion of the text. But whereas Husserl was truly tilting at windmills, Deleuze and Guttari seem to be bullfighting them. On the other hand, if I view this as surrealist prose with as much meaning as a non-sequitur then I can appreciate this book as the most beautifully coherent yet abstract expressionist writing I have ever seen.
The subtitle of the book points to the two main objects of the critical theory developed here: hegemonic economics (capitalism) and hegemonic psychology (psychoanalysis). But neither ever seem to be directly addressed. The book seems to be nothing but a series of tangents vacillating between descriptions of how to use the method, actual methodological analysis associated generally with topics relating to the two objects mentioned above, and then there are the non-sequiturs.
Since one never truly understands the intention of the writing other than to get lost in the hubris of deterritorializing reterritorialized lines of flight back to some strata in some assemblage comprising an abstract machine (I am sorry that statement is the most meaningless concept ever devised), I cannot accept this as an actual method of critical thought. That said, there are conceptions in here that when not trying to be so diagrammatical are ingenious and necessary for conceptualizing our time. The idea of the rhizome and how it could describe contemporary social networks or the stratification of elements within a concept. Also, the discourse on Chomsky's linguistic theory (why is Chomsky such a common punching bag for the post-modernists?) is probably the most compelling. Meanwhile the embedded text aka Nomadology is literally the most farcical foray into meaningless abstract pretension I have endured although the distinction of royal versus normal science is a tangential concept in that section worth investigating (although already done to some degree by TS Kuhn about twenty years before).
That this book can both me overwhelmingly insightful in one breath and crushingly bombastic the next without ever truly revealing whether this is completely meant to be serious, a joke, neither or both, tells me there is something much more to this. But frankly, I do not have the patience to sit through it again to find out. Perhaps, at the least, as reference.

[Frank Kool · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've never been a big fan of... whatever it is you call this style (postmodernism, post-structuralism, continental philosophy, or just fashionable nonsense). In fact, one of my favorite essays of all time is Richard Dawkins' Postmodernism Disrobed, in which he lashes out against what he calls "intellectual imposters".

Having said that, I do think D&G make a few worthwhile points. But much like the three hour company meeting that could have been an email, the critiques that the authors lay at the feet of Western metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics could have been distilled to a 50 page booklet or a single lecture. Why anyone would need to wade through 650 pages of experimental prose and pseudo-science to arrive at the conclusion that Plato and Kant were idiots for suggesting that words actually mean something is beyond me.

In the introductory chapter, the authors recommend that we approach this book like we would a melody. A puzzling metaphor if you ask me, for a melody must at the very least possess harmony and a steady pace. The frantic rambling that is A Thousand Plateaus is the furthest thing I could imagine from that. If we were to apply a musical analogy, this text is like a hostile take-over of the orchestra by a horde of drunk baboons, with the resulting cacophony being recorded in a different room by holding a microphone to a walkie-talkie. It's no exaggeration to say that you could read it while flipping pages at random intervals without any noticeable effect on its legibility (in fact, the authors even claim it can be read starting anywhere and ending anywhere).

Between the near infinite presence of self-made jargon are sloppy references to quantum mechanics which only serve to illustrate the authors scientific illiteracy. Just when you think it cannot get anymore insane, you come across quotes like these:

Physicists say that holes are not the absence of particles but particles traveling faster than the speed of light. Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration.

Enough, enough! This book is a joke played out to an audience to dazzled by verbosity to realize that they are the punchline.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Any book of philosophy that features a chapter in which a geologist (named Challenger no less) undergoes a metamorphosis while delivering a lecture is pretty good. What takes it to the next level is what Challenger the geologist turns into: a lobster! This book has it all from Deleuze and Guattari: wolf packs, war machines, nomadologies, becomings-animal, rhizomes, the differences between the games of Go and Chess, and plenty of rips on Freud and psychoanalysis. My favorite chapters were the introduction (Rhizomes), the first chapter on wolves, the 'becoming-intense, becoming-animal' chapter, the 'Body without Organs' chapter, and the final chapter. Hell, just read the whole book.

I can't give it five stars because there are a few passages that are a bit lengthy and overly technical, but perhaps I missed the joke in those passages. Regardless, this is definitely a book worth taking a look at again, with all of its messiness and intensity and humor.

Now onto the one that started it all (or ended it all) for Deleuze and Guattari: Anti-Oedipus.

[Ronan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Becoming Animal is such an epic chapter

[Sajid · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is not there in this freaking piece of a book? They definetly weren’t talking about coffees and restaurants, but i wouldn’t mind taking this book in a coffee shop and spill some coffee on the cover just to see how hyper it can get with its zig-zag outpourings. Shut up all the bourgeoisies! Shut up all the leftists! Shut up everything! This is something in the realm of texts which is so wierd that you mightn't have read anything like this in your whole life. So many crazy things are happening one after one. You don't know what to do! You might get high and read this. You can get drunk and read this. Anything. No axiomatic,no state apparatus. You can even read this book while running after your crazy bulldog. This is not a book of sedentariness. It is about nomadic navigation. You don't have to sit still to read this. You don't have to note and underline to read this. Fuck everything, go outside and play with the words of this book. Is it too much? Okay. Stop! Stop a for a moment! Take a deep breathe. For despite all the madness and neurosis present in this book there is also some lines and aggregates through which you can understand the whole book. Some recurrent ideas and themes constantly appear in every plateaus. Cut down the tree system,see the rhizome. Look at a body without organs. There are different concepts which deliver the same effeect,or we can say the samness of the differences. I also don't want to write a review about this which would be organized and transparent. Because i am not even writing anything about this book. I am just becoming-words.

[Sachin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second part of Deleuze and Guattari's two volume mind boggling and yet a playful critique of capitalism is full of insights and useful ideas. They do manage to take the language of critical theory forward from Lacan, Derrida and Foucault. One of the most intersting and useful metaphor is the metaphor of rhizome used instead of hierarchic logic of the metaphor of `tree'. One of the most important philosophical treatise of this `post modern' era.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book has no ending, or beginning for that matter.
infinitely provocative but nearly impossible to read.
presupposes familiarity with a vast array of recondite materials, from a number of different disciplines. more than most students could be expected to weed through in a lifetime.

[Melani · Rating 1 out of 5]

unintelligible does not equal brilliant

[Iain Clowes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book dismantled my head and put it back together in better condition.

[suso · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow. de las mierdas más reveladoras q he leido nunca no les mentiré

[Lydia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Thousand Plateaus is the greatest book I have ever read.

The book is brutally difficult but for a good reason. Every chapter, every page and every sentence is so densely packed that it's impossible to keep up with unless you have dedicated an incredible amount of time studying not only to the book and its rhizomes itself but also a deep understanding of Deleuze and Guattari’s long list of influences. Needless to say I was not able to keep up with all the intricacies in the web (or maybe I should call it a rhizome) of neologisms, references to authors or philosophers and nomadic thought present in A Thousand Plateaus. This difficulty did not leave me feeling defeated, on the contrary I am a changed person after reading A Thousand Plateaus and the preceding volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus. I feel motivated and inspired. In part to educate myself further by reading, watching and experiencing more of everything in the world ranging from nature to art and to more philosophical works but also a drive inside of me to find my lines of flight and deterritorialize from the territories I have been put in by the social machine.

One thing I’m certain of is that I will keep returning to this book for a long time, I am nowhere near finished even though I have read the entirety of it. Maybe one day I will fully comprehend this work and all the small but important details but I hope that I won’t. I hope that I will forever keep finding new meanings and depth that was perhaps not intended or thought of when writing. It is even preferable in a certain way if I reach something totally new not even considered by Deleuze and Guattari!

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally, finally, I have finished this book, I was very definitely punching above my weight trying to read this, but overall I have enjoyed it thoroughly, well perhaps not enjoyed the actual reading of it, but this book has provided such a vast resource of ideas for me, I don't regret a single one of the many months that it has taken me to read through this, this is a huge personal achievement for me, now that I have read this I feel like I could read anything.

For the most of this book the subject matter is suitably sprawling, but there is a fair chunk devoted to the pairs earlier musings on capitalism dissected in anti-Oedipus, having not read that book I feel it would have been useful for what comprises one of the main propositions of the book.

I had felt for a long time reading this book that it is better taken chapter by chapter and seen more as a collection of essays, but the duo manage to very skilfully marry all of the various ideas in the book together in the last chapter, a great deal of the ideas slot in together at this point, and you begin to see the bigger picture of what Deleuze & Guttari are getting at, and it really is quite an awe inspiring vision. That being said I still couldn't really profess to know what an abstract machine was, let alone differentiate between the different types of abstract machine. But I think that it is o.k. to not get this because they seem to be saying that this is the thing that links everything together and is the gel that holds together everything we understand, so ultimately the boys are setting their sights pretty high in terms of what they are trying to achieve.

Overall the main merit of this book is its skill in not treating things that are collectively subjective as being much closer to being objective. If enough people are aware of a phenomena then it is there whether it is objective or otherwise, and should be treated in this manner, adopting this stance Deleuze and Guttari delve into subjects many others feed to tread, and making some surprisingly logical and poignant observations.

[Troy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've finally finished this difficult, confusing, brilliant book.

I've been reading it for years; off and on; a chapter here, a chapter there. (And a warning about that: in the beginning of this book, the authors claim that you can read the book like a record player, reading a chapter here and a chapter there, but that really isn't true. The book rhymes, sure, but it also builds concepts and ideas, starting from some basic premises and building up to some pretty in-depth case studies. It's really worth reading it from start to finish, which is not the way I read the book.)

There is no review that could sum up this behemoth of ideas. This book touches on so many things. They're arguing for a new way of conceiving and approaching the world, starting with a new conception between substance and form, expression and content, and leading up to a new way of conceiving power, the State, war, and "lines of flight," which is one of the concepts that the book sets out to explain.

I really can't give you a summary. I really can't give you "my take." I will say that there are massive parts of it that I need to read again, and there are very fundamental concepts that I just don't understand (the event, haecceity, the machinic assemblage).

I will tell you that my recent re-immersion into the book came from one of the better reading groups I've ever been part of. We read a fair chunk of A Thousand Plateaus together, which at times was a real joy.

I will also tell you that what I love to do most of all with theory is find out what I can use and what I jettison. I want to fight with what I'm reading, and I want to be able to know it well enough to point my finger and shout "bullshit" in a shrill voice. But that's not the case with Delueze (and Guattari) and I'm afraid that won't be the case for awhile. First, I need to understand their basic fights, who are with a panoply of philosophical figures, and I have to figure out which of those fights I care about.

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

In many ways a truly unreviewable book. Had the absolute time of my life reading this closely with a great group of friends over the course of 2-3 months. I highly recommend reading this with others.

In another work, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” Deleuze encourages the reader, “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” And this is precisely what ATP does. Rhizome/Arborescence, smooth and striated, BwO, assemblage and strata, plane of immanence, packs, war machine and nomads, pragmatics and plateaus, becoming-animal becoming-woman, and so many more. These are weapons in and for a life open to becoming, flows, intensities, and affects, for those willing to become intense, a nomad in place, daring to construct a body without organs.