He is very popular in the arts, but I don’t understand why. It’s vaguely platonic (which I like) but obtuse (like kant).
Several popular French philosophers say a lot, so there will always be some interesting hook for people to catch on.
The rational thinker will get annoyed, because the drivel is unfounded. The artist will feel inspired and enlightened.
(Source: have formal education in both mathematics and fine arts.)
A thing with Deleuze is that I still see very little value in some of his ideas. The idea of a "rhizome" for instance (which might be related to Latour's "actor-network theory") seems rather trivial to me. This may well be because I grew up in a time when these ideas were already fairly mainstream, but I find it highly unlikely that people before Deleuze only thought in black and white.
A hurdle that I may once have to cross is that I should not read these philosophers for their original thought, but more for their critique on contemporary society. The latter seems rather pointless, because it costs me almost no effort to superficially critique contemporary society myself :)
The late stages of philosophers' works are often quite wacky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus with the subtitle "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" ... and in the second part "A Thousand Plateaus" they discuss a lot of artists
> obtuse
who isn't? but seriously, first-hand reading of philosophy seems like a big no-no, almost all of it is derivative and it's very hard to present it in an efficient way (just the exposition/background/context required for [comprehending] thought experiments is usually a few dense pages, etc.)
or possibly my past encounters were very unfortunate, and it'd be great to hear some suggestions!