Deleuze is one of the best thinkers of the last century, but he requires a lot of reading before what he's saying can make any sense.
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.
Maybe Hegel and Heidegger are where things get complicated.
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!
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.
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!
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.