Get Your Smart On
From the annals of our top fifty books in Philosophy originally published on Goodreads.
A Thousand Plateaus is the second volume of the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project (the first is Anti-Oedipus) by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. This is a very different kind of philosophy work: A Thousand Plateaus offers a non-linear thought experiment, one that embodies a schizophrenic nomadology of thinking under capitalism. 🤯 I know, right? It’s like an intellectual adventure story where the stakes are your sense of reality.
Readers are encouraged to encounter this work on their own terms, moving along the “plateaus” of the text according to their own rhythm. There is nothing in the history of philosophy to prepare readers for this experience — perhaps reading Hegel for the first time is a similar encounter, but Hegel is nothing if not a structuralist. Readers will need to let A Thousand Plateaus do it’s work on them, at their own risk. It is not wholly without logic, but the nomadic logic of the text can be as captivating as it will be off-putting to some others.
Arguably, this experiment in non-linear thinking has been successful, judging by the kind of influence it has exerted, as it continues to proliferate both inside out outside of philosophy. For example, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s *Empire *, a case-study in capitalism that takes A Thousand Plateaus as it’s theoretical model; Rosi Braidotti's *Nomadic Subjects *, and Elizabeth Grosz' *Chaos Territory Art Deleuze and the Framing of Earth *.
The project of bringing Marxism and Psychoanalysis into relation is begun in this work, and arguably, the project remains a chief philosophical project in the 21st century.
“wrote my MA thesis on these fuckers” — katie luisa borgesius
“The most difficult book ever written. EVER. But it’s also liberating as hell. Just sit back and enjoy how strange it makes you feel. And then how ecstatic, confused, angry, etc., all at once. But if you're ever climbing and all of a sudden you realize that you're getting it, like, really getting it, then hang on and stay with it because it will probably change your life when you get to the top. And that feels pretty groovy. Especially when you really have to work for the plateau. It ain’t easy becoming a body without organs. And if you think the reading part pushes you to the limit, just wait till it’s time to sew up the ol’ asshole. The anus machine awaits the stratification of the sewing machine, the needle-and-thread aSSemblage, for the Dogon Egg awaits its de-territorialization! Whether you’re Chasing Freud’s patients alongside a pack of becoming-wolves, or watching poor Dr. Challenger evaporate, or pursuing a line of flight aboard the rhizomatic acid-cloud to Dr. Angrypants’s Masochingdom in the Metallurgy Matrix, ATP will not disappoint. Seriously. Read it. Don’t be afraid.” — The Awdude
“There is a method to the madness within this extraordinary book. At first blush it often seems as if it’s a hodgepodge of a mish mash of stray threads at most loosely connected concerning the paradox of existence, but this book never makes the mistake of taking itself too seriously within its post-structuralism paradigms therefore allowing the reader to pretend to believe what the authors' are saying is deserving of the reader’s attention. By pretending to believe what the authors are saying the book starts to make sense when the reader realizes that the book has multiple levels of interpretations: narrative, literal, metaphorical, and absolute rather than analogical. The book often at times reads as if it was a post-modern novel where space and time have been collapsed into a world without past or future but only the now of synchronic contingency.” — Beauregard Bottomley
Historical introduction to the first volume, as context: