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Comment by zupatol | Hacker News Reader

I read a few pages of thousand plateaus and I didn't get the impression he really wanted the reader to make sense of it.

It's full of quotations of works you would certainly know if you had enough culture. It feels like an violent attempt to humiliate the reader into submission. Apparently the english version came out with a lot of footnotes to provide context. This probably betrays the spirit of the original.

I'll try to listen to the podcast though, maybe some civilized people did manage to find something valuable in his writing.

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So a thousand plateaus is great but also very weird, by design. One of their goals is to reject the very structure of a book. One of the forwards by the English translator elaborates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35459054

Honestly I think his forward is one of the better simple examples of the big ideas of the book.

But anyway.

Deleuze’s own work and his work with Guattari are very different. The series of books he wrote on other philosophers, and his own thesis, have a much more straightforward style. In my understanding they are often considered unorthodox readings of the source material (in particularly Nietzsche) but that is on purpose. You may find that stuff more interesting than the more adventurous stuff.

Continental philosophy has some starting points, but some authors will be completely incomprehensible without reading most of the classical works. It's written for philosophers. If you haven't read at least Kant and Hegel, Heidegger and know what psychoanalysis and structuralism are about you have no basis of understanding for it.

Haven't read all of that, but it strikes me that some of these authors like Freud and Levi-Strauss are perfectly understandable without much background. Haven't tried Kant but other authors consider him very methodic and logical, about the opposite of Deuleuze, and he's a big inspiration for the very readable Schopenhauer.

Maybe Hegel and Heidegger are where things get complicated.

Do try Kant; being "methodic and logical" in no way implies being easy to read!

Freud and Levi-Strauss were scientists/academics who influenced philosophy, but not philosophers. Philosophy has a lot of dependencies, this is why every so often a fork is needed to 'restart' but it never works and dependencies start piling up again.

I would like to support this observation. Obviously, they generated some language of their own, with lots of implications and references. Once you start reading it, it becomes a rabbit hole (back in the days my entry point was Adorno and Horkheimer). Words might be familiar, but their meaning is different. There was a reason to study, and the trend to render science accessible to laypeople was not yet born. Maybe even not wanted, to quote the ideas behind the concept of cultural industrial complex.

I would like to third this as well. Software developers are incredibly familiar with the concept of a field that contains a lot of jargon and that you can't have meaningful conversations about certain things until you've learned some of it: that's also software engineering!

Just because these folks are writing for people with a different background than the one that you have doesn't mean it's nonsense, it means you have yet to engage with enough of the field to understand what's going on. Everyone starts there!

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