On the bright side, today I discovered Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux, which was unexpectedly wonderful.
Several people have told me that Deleuze is great, but I’d asumed they meant it in the sense of “worthy but impenetrable theory designed for academics to show off their brainpower”
In fact, it’s more like something Timothy Leary would have written if you locked him in a library for ten years. Most of its arguments are somewhere between dubious and downright wrong. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s not really philosophy: it’s more like a preternaturally well-informed rant. Every paragraph pulls together three or four very different bits of research or culture, makes a totally bogus argument that they’re all saying the same thing, then jumps off in another unexpected direction. You can start reading anywhere in the middle (I did), and inside a couple of pages you’ll have a dozen things to think about and look up.
I’m going to have to buy a copy of this book, and leave it by my bed. If nothing else, it should give me a few interesting dreams
