Beginning 'A Thousand Plateaus'

'The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognisable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. 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. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.'

Deleuze and Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus

Yesterday I indulged myself in a guilty pleasure. A Thousand Plateaus has been sitting in Waterstones for over a month and I decided that if I went in and it was still there I would buy it. So I did. And thus another distraction is added to my already distracted life. I had to quote the first paragraph because it picked me up by the throat and throttled me. The people I was on the bus with at the time were a little amazed by that.

Since each of us was several there was already quite a crowd. I love it, it reminds me just why I love philosophy, why I put up with all the Kant and Hegel. Next year I'm going to have to go back to those old guys to give myself a better grounding. I'll be travelling Asia with The Republic, Kant's 3rd Critique, Hegel's Phenomenolgy and Heidegger's Being and Time. But for now, just before I am forced to reassert myself as a 'serious student of philosophy' I will continue my flirtations with Deleuze and Guattari.

On a side note, I've been reading Michel Serres' conversations with Bruno Latour and in their first conversation Serres is full of praise for Deleuze. It's quite cute how he talks about him. I won't quote it now because my post will be full of quotes but if I find anything else interesting I'll note it.

|