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Comment by richardjdare | Hacker News Reader

I've wanted to read A Thousand Plateaus for a few years. The first time I tried it, all that stuff about wolves and geology just lost me. I will have to try again. Honestly, I found it harder than Heidegger's Being and Time, which I worked through while listening to Hubert Dreyfus's lectures on iTunes U a few years ago.

Whenever I read about Deleuze and Guattari I get this feeling they are on to something - I just don't know what!

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Perhaps try reading Freud's account of his treatment of the "wolf man" first - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Pankejeff#Der_Wolfsmann... - then read the chapter "One Or Many Wolves", bearing in mind that it's dripping in sarcasm. That chapter had me laughing out loud.

I know what you mean. It’s hard to avoid feeling like what appears to be glossolalic nonsense would all be revealed as a majestic tour de force, perfectly comprehensible and life-changing, if you were familiar enough with Marx, Freud, Leibniz, Spinoza, Bergson, Kant, Sartre, and god knows whom else, to put it all together. I’m not, so I can’t prove or disprove the case, which makes it a weird answer to OP’s question; but per above, it remains the case for me that images and terms from that book have never stopped working in my ideation processes since I picked it up.

One thing with Thousand Plateaus is that you don't have to read the book in sequence. You can start with random chapter. That's the only thing I remember from the book.

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