Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13551 in Books
• Published on: 1987-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 610 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, French (translation)

Customer Reviews

Worth the slog through it, and that's saying a great deal.
I'm not particularly erudite, and I'm certainly not a genius. My schooling has left me (for better or worse) without any familiarity with some of the philosophers, artists and writers D&G namecheck as lynchpins of their untimely meditation.

Why, then, would I struggle with this 800-odd page monstrosity of densely-referential Gallic thought? Why am I here recommending that you do it?

Well...because it's worth the long, thorny trudge. You've got to get around some idiosyncratic vocabulary, but that's OK. Because, in fact, *A Thousand Plateaus* presents a credible candidacy for Philosophy for our Time (if you can still believe in that). The concept of the rhizome alone - burrowing, nonhierarchical, endlessly foliating thought - let alone fertile ideas like nomadology or the Body without Organs: once grasped, these are extraordinarily useful figures that can wind up restoring some sense of agency (and subversiveness, and fun) to your intellectual life. They're perfectly suited, especially, to life and work in the age of the deeply rhizomorphic Internet.

Remember, you're smart enough to understand this stuff. (I had to keep reminding myself.) Reading with partners or in groups helps, a lot. There really is a *vast* amount of provocative and useful thought in here. Go for it.

The masterpiece of modern French philosophy.
Anti-Oedipus, the first collaboration by Deleuze and Guattari, is more famous than a Thousand Plateaus, but this is their masterpiece. It takes a while to get used to their strange terms and phrases, and an English-schooled "analytical" philosopher would probably find their work to be nonsense, but D & G work differently. They are creators of concepts, and A Thousand Plateaus is overflowing with them. The book moves from meditations on the face, to nomads, to courtly love, to geology, to, well, a thousand other things . . . you name it. A reader who is willing to be led where they will take him is in for quite a trip.

Philosophically, D & G seem to be proponants of a dynamic, highly charged, pre-conventional world, in which even individual identity is not yet a given. They do not suppose that we can live in this world and function normally, but we can tap into it, so to speak, and thereby harness energy for more creative living in the "normal" world, the world of conventional ideas, personal identities, etc. (and to some extent transform the "normal" world). But to paraphrase their ideas in this way is to lose the excitement they generate as they dive into specific topics--the musical refrain, schizophrenia, rhizomes, laws, and so on and so on--ever coming up with new and surpising interpretations. This book has endless riches for the reader to discover.

an architectural view
THE LATE French philosopher Gilles Deleuze seemed to provide the answer. "Deleuze talks about the production of space and power relations, and all that appeals very much to architects," says Lynn. According to Lynn, the Deleuze boom started in 1987, with the translation into English of A Thousand Plateaus. Thanks to his singular combination of disdain and reverence for techno-capitalism, Deleuze had an immediate and obvious appeal to today's cyberarchitects. A member of the radical French left, Deleuze viewed the triumph of capitalism as inevitable. In his writing, he is in turn horrified by and admiring of capitalism's raw power and extraordinary fecundity in transforming the world. But capitalism's strength, according to Deleuze, is also its weakness. As it moves toward global dominance, capitalism's inherent instability becomes increasingly susceptible to manipulation. Rather than preaching outright revolution, Deleuze proposes a "micropolitics": the establishment of local zones of freedom that tap the energies of capitalism to create a "war machine" against the "state apparatus."