Also, accusing Deleuze of obscurantism is absolutely unfair and ignorant: Deleuze was truly one of the great teachers, those who can be pedagogical while keeping and increasing your interest in the topic, much akin to Feynman, in his works which disentangle the works of previous philosophers: Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Kant's Critical Philosophy (1963), Proust and Signs (1964), Bergsonism (1966), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1981), Foucault (1986), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988). The aforementioned What Is Philosophy? is also extremely clearly written, and it is one of the best books ever to tackle in such a direct manner such a question.
Also, accusing Deleuze of "complicated words for trivial points" is just ridiculously funny: it's like accusing Bach of composing too much music: couldn't he just sum up all the toccatas, fugues, partitas, and so on in one single massive beat drop.
Google has a few different definitions for the word "simple". I don't mean it in the following ways:
- easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty
- composed of a single element; not compound
I do mean it in the following ways:
- used to emphasize the fundamental and straightforward nature of something
- plain, basic, or uncomplicated in form, nature, or design; without much decoration or ornamentation
- humble and unpretentious
Keep in mind my comment was in the context of a discussion about postmodernism. I think that when compared with some of the more complex postmodern music, even the most virtuosic Bach pieces are simple. A couple examples:
Finnissy - English Country Tunes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8VSRTl9tfw
Ligeti - Etudes for Piano - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHhZ2TzHlow
Sure, you can reduce the passage above to "Chess is a game of specific, regimented roles, whereas Go is characterized an emergent, contingent understanding of purpose" — but you lose a lot of information compressing it like that, in the same way you lose a lot of information when you tell kids that black holes work like a bowling bowl on a trampoline. Sure, neither are incorrect at a phenomenological level, but it's such a reductive understanding that you can't accurately reason about it without reintroducing the "complicated words and sentences".