Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Yeah, you wouldn’t be alone there. I think it’s the opposite of muddled, it is being precise; the words are chosen very carefully! They’re chosen to try and convey very specific meanings. And everyone does this, my own choice of “wordplay” is meant to evoke meaning for specific reasons to convey what I was trying to, to specifically acknowledge that some folks feel the way you do. Heck, the parent chose “lingua franca,” which is not from English, to convey the specific meaning evoked from that phrase’s time and space!

In the end, talking about talking is hard (oh no there I go accidentally elevating speech above writing again), but not everyone is interested in everything or every methodology. We’re all trying to figure it out in our own ways.

IMO (and I am a professional philosopher), you're right, it doesn't make very good philosophy ... except that (unlike most fields) it's not at all clear what counts as philosophy and what doesn't. I think Derrida makes very good something (I'm not sure what).

I am saying that words are hard, and some things are more easily expressed in different languages.

Any Turing-complete programming language can implement anything from any other Turing-complete programming language, but that doesn't mean that a web application is just as easy to write in assembly as it is in Ruby, even if you could do it. And if we said "all serious programming must be done in assembly," it would make discussing web applications more tedious than allowing folks interested in stuff Ruby is good at to write Ruby. More generically, this is the argument for DSLs.

And, while theoretically possible to do so, practically speaking, a lot less people would do it, and so we'd probably wouldn't have as advanced web applications.

I really like DeLanda too. Other related folks I enjoy are Brian Massumi and John Protevi (who wrote the SEP page on Deleuze, IIRC).

I think the first order of business is to understand that there are kind of three Deleuzes: there's Deleuze, and then there's Deleuze and Guattari. Finally there's also his film stuff.

There's a connection between them, of course, but they're kind of two different projects. Deleuze on his own is a scholar of philosophical history; he wrote a lot of books on other philosophers. There's a sort of over-arching project though; he's creating a kind of "secret history" where all the folks he write about are all building towards something. They're generally regarded as good books, but they're also just as much a sort of product of how Deleuze sees them, rather than purely about them themselves. The most controversial (and arguably his best, IMHO) is Nietzsche and Philosophy. He draws a bunch from material that Nietzsche didn't actually publish before his death, and his sister kind of... selectively edited. It's a whole thing. Regardless, IMHO it's a good take. Reasonable people may disagree. In order, they're "Empiricism and Subjectivity," "Nietzsche and Philosophy," "Kant’s Critical Philosophy," "Proust and Signs," "Bergsonism," "Spinoza: Practical Philosophy," "Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature," "Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation," and "Foucault." That is... a lot. IMHO, Nietzche, Spinoza, Foucault, and Kafka are the big ones, if you don't want to read like, ten books about ten people you probably haven't read yet. You can follow these up with "Difference and Repetition," his primary thesis, and "Logic of Sense," his final solo work before meeting Guattari. He wrote these in between some of those solo works, but IMHO, they make sense as a unit, with these as the end, even if they weren't written in that order.

Oh, and https://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/netzkritik/societyofcontr...

His mind-meld with Guattari has a lot of the themes of his solo work, but is much more experimental and out there. A Thousand Plateaus is, well, you already know this: pretty friggin' wild. So it's not so much "student of philosophical history" as it is "holy shit." To me at least. This is the stuff DeLanda and a lot of secondary literature engages with,

Oh, and I really love "What is Philosophy?" even if it's a less intense, more straightforward text.

Finally, film Deleuze. I've always wanted to study film but never managed to. I don't have much to say about this.

Oh gosh, that's a lot of works and orderings, but uh, yeah. Actual strategy. IMHO, if you don't have a foundation in Marx, all of this is going to be really tough. Make sure you understand at least a good chunk of Capital Volume I, the first three chapters (aka part i) are the most important, parts VI, V, and VIII aren't necessary, but Marx is pretty foundational. Even if folks don't agree with him, everyone is familiar with him, and often speak in his terms, and you have to be able to understand something to reject it. Many do agree, to be clear, just like... it's foundational. David Harvey can help there, he's not always perfect but he's better than most.

From there, what I personally did was read On the Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche. Then Discipline and Punish by Foucault. Then the Deleuze.

I am less well read with Freud than I should be to truly engage with Anti-Oedipus, but Civilization and its Discontents is worthwhile. Same with Marx, many many disagree, but all assume some level of familiarity.

Really, the best you can do is exactly what Massumi says about A Thousand Plateaus and "read it like a record":

> How should A Thousand Plateaus be played? When you buy a record there are always cuts that leave you cold. You skip them. You don't approach a record as a closed book that you have to take or leave. Other cuts you may listen to over and over again. They follow you. You find yourself humming them under your breath as you go about your daily business.

Read some stuff, if you get to things you don't understand, go follow the citation and try to dig into that. Get that you probably won't really grok things the first time you read them, be curious, dig into stuff you like, ignore stuff that doesn't resonate, maybe come back to it later if your tastes change.

Good luck :)

Oh, one final thing: Ignore the "dark deleuze" garbage. It's bad. I literally forgot it existed because I wish it did not, but this is the internet so...

EDIT 2: oh my gosh. also, for computer folks: Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, by Galloway. Not strictly Deleuzian, but related, and useful.

Exactly, you're using the German word. "Coming of age" is certainly not coming close to capturing the meaning of Bildung.

The idea of an encyclopedia is based on the idea that paragraphs and sentences express ideas which can be reduced to their logical essence and put very simply. This is exactly what "continental philosophers" reject and so I don't think it makes sense to summarize them in this way.

With continental philosophy, most of the value is in how it makes you, the reader, feel, and not in the ideas that it expresses. This is not to say that there are no ideas (of course there are) but that, when those ideas are extracted and added to an entry in an encyclopedia, the result is a denaturing of the work. Some continental philosophy is very explicit in its hostility to being expressed analytically (particularly feminist philosophy like Kristeva and Irigaray).

Downthread you summarized what Derrida meant by difference. But if that's what Derrida wanted to do (transmit the idea you posted), why wouldn't he just have written what you wrote? That's what philosophers do. Plato, Hume, Kant, etc all write as clearly as possible. Derrida is explicitly rejecting this approach and therefore he is as much literature as he is philosophy (he was up for the Nobel in literature and is mainly influential in literary studies). This also means that, with Derrida, most of the point is how he says things, and so you should not summarize his ideas in an encyclopedia entry. Summarizing Derrida would be like summarizing Shakespeare, the plot is only a small part of the value.