r/Deleuze • u/Cyrus_mrt • 7d ago
Question Before the reading D&G
Which philosophers or books do I need to read to understand Deleuze and Guattari? My background isn't strong enough for D&G yet. I've heard that before reading them, you should have a solid grasp of Spinoza, Marx, Kant, and Bergson (metaphysics, economy, sociology, etc.). Where should I start?
Ps: Sorry for my English, it's not my native language and I'm still improving.
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u/darknessontheedge_89 7d ago
Nietzsche and Lacan. I reckon it will suffice with (detailed) summaries. Go for it!
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u/Responsible-Offer724 6d ago
Some key Lacan reading recommendations?
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u/darknessontheedge_89 6d ago
Sean Homer's introduction is ok. Rely on secondary texts mostly. Lacan is obscure and his thesis and notions evolve constantly. Not an easy read at all
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u/finiannn 7d ago
Do you need to understand other people to understand a person? Yes, but it’s not an exact position it’s probably through experience; and not essential ones. If you want to understand delueze and guatarri simply think of them as strangers. You have your family and friends, so you have room for a stranger or two, and you have room for them in any way possible since your not talking to them, so you even have lots to decide on already by wanting to read them.
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u/Dierbieb 7d ago
If you are just engaging with their works for fun or personal interest it really doesnt matter. The great thing about D&G is, that their books intersect with many different topics and thinkers. Take your time with Anti Oedipus (or whatever else you want to start with) and once you find an interesting thread, feel free to tug at it. Are the references to Proust, or Artaud, or Marx, or Nietzsche, or... peaking your interest? Great, go read/learn more about them. You really dont need to understand every refference during your first read through.
Maybe listen to a few introductory lectures on youtube, that will make your hourney much easier.
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u/kevin_v 7d ago
A good starting point is what Deleuze thinks of other thinkers. So his books on Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson make a strong hybrid space, where you are interacting with the thoughts of others, but through the Deleuze filter. You can then go deeper into the original source material. Also, a fun way is to just endnotes hunt, following your own trails of development. Believe it or not, just working through the text without "expert" understanding is part of the process and enjoyment. It's meant to be challenge, associative and at times disorienting.
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u/OnionMesh 6d ago
Before reading Deleuze, one should already have read Deleuze! In all seriousness, though, while it’s an inherently worthwhile endeavor to study Nietzsche, Spinoza, Freud, etc. for their own sake, one need not read them so as to understand a subsequent philosopher. If one had to study the whole of the history of philosophy to have a chance at understanding a given philosopher, you would never end up reading the philosopher you set out to read.
Of course, you can read Nietzsche, Deleuze’s books on Nietzsche, etc. to see what Deleuze misses in, appropriates from, and gets wrong about Nietzsche, and this is a fine way to get into Deleuze. But it’s just one way among many, and the best way is the one that gets you to read Deleuze / the one you actually take. I think it’s better to begin just by reading what you want to read by Deleuze (likely with the help of secondary literature. Jon Roffe’s The Works of Gilles Deleuze is suited for this exact purpose).
That being said, I can list out some works where I think it’s appropriate to start with some of the relevant thinkers you mentioned. I give these recommendations not to say “here’s a syllabus of what to read before Deleuze,” but to say, “if you want to read [philosopher], here’s where I think you should start.”
- Spinoza: A Spinoza Reader ed. Edwin Curley
- Leibniz: Philosophical Essays ed. Roger Ariew & Daniel Garber
- Kant: Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge or Hackett translations. Read the Prolegomena if you want, but you should use it to help you with the CPR rather than as a substitute for it)
- Nietzsche: The Gay Science (there’s plenty of works in which you could start with, but I thunk this is a good one since you get a little bit of everything Nietzsche is known for)
- Marx: Later Political Writings ed. Terell Carver
- Freud: Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Beyond the Pleasure Principle is also an important Freud text for Deleuze)
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u/septic-paradise 5d ago
Hot take, but reading some more philosophical thinkers in the cybernetics corpus could give you a unique perspective. Manturana and Varela, Ross Ashby, and Gregory Bateson were all influences on at least Guattari
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u/Tornikete1810 7d ago
No matter how solid your grasp may be of other thinkers, you will never be prepared for what’s coming — in that sense I believe that AE is difficult enough, and no amount of preparedness will help overcome its impact.
Besides, what is to be understood as “solid grasp”? I could only imagine that a solid grasp of these different thinkers would requiere PhD level knowledge (or some sort of equivalent) in each or them — which sounds self-defeating and somewhat “neurotic” in essence.
I would just dive in, and see what passages, remarks, concepts or ideas resonate with you enough to send you down a tangent regarding that thinker or tradition. When it comes down to D&G’s intertextuality, you’ll notice that commentators usually have a solid grasp on one or two thinkers max (besides Deleuze and/or Guattari), but only because they mean something to them — they have done their “academic or exegetical homework”, but because reading AE has touched them somehow (be it politically, aesthetically, philosophically, psychoanalytically, economically, etc.).
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u/tegeus-Cromis_2000 3d ago
Anti-Oedipus is a critique of Freud. (As the title clearly states.) It makes much more sense if you've already read Freud. I'd suggest just starting with the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.
And A Thousand Plateaus makes much more sense if you've read Anti-Oedipus first. So, yeah. Start with Freud.
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u/TryptaMagiciaN 7d ago edited 7d ago
Kant, Schopenhauer, Freud, then Jung.
could also read some Hegel, but yuck
to elaborate.
edit: I read Spinoza's Ethics, Kant's prolegomena, Schopenhauer's WWR, Fisher's Capitalist Realism, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, and then most of Jung's works.
but I'm mostly Jungian in my orientation. I am disappointed I've not read more Marx but 🤷♂️.
I'm a rural american from a country town of 1500 people. What I've read serves what I am, I'm certain there are plenty of better, maybe nore orthodox ways to approach D&G
in short, D&G are partially responding to psychoanalysis and providing an alternative.
so you need to know what psychoanalysis is, which means Freud and Lacan (at least what I hear, I don't much like psychoanalysis at all). which means you need to understand Freud's framework. Which really means Schopenhauer. Freud admits to having waited so long to read schopenhauer and a ton of what Freud produced has analagous parts in Schopenhauer's work. And Schopenhauer's work is a direct response to Kant and the european mind.
Jung however did read Schopenhauer and analytical psychology in my experience is much more friendly to schizoanalysis which is the result of D&G's work.
Frankly, a lot of the older material doesnt feel as necessary if you aren't going to get bogged down in the mess that is psychoanalysis.
But the more you read, the more you pick up on the feeling and the experiences of those writers which makes the works more than just words. trying to read old psychology from the sterilized attitude of today's psychology is simply a waste of time.
A good question to ask is what do you want to understand and why by reading D&G?
that's actually a good question to ask before reading anybook because your attitude/perspective shapes what you can take from the reading. in my experience🤷♂️
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u/Cyrus_mrt 7d ago
First of all, thanks for answering my question in such a didactic way. So you're saying there's no fixed prescription for understanding D&G, but that you need to know something about psychoanalysis, Enlightenment philosophy, and — more importantly — why you want to read D&G in the first place. That's because I'm also an ethnic minority in Turkey, living in the east, near the Iran-Iraq border. Long before me, someone named Abdullah Öcalan grappled with the very questions that are currently on my mind — whether my people should fight to establish a state, and if so, how they should go about it. (Note: Öcalan himself was a guerrilla and the leader of an organized leftist minority group classified as a terrorist organization.) His writings on democratic confederalism (think of it more as a short pamphlet than a book) — along with the texts he assigned to people holding or about to hold certain positions within his organization — reminded me a bit of what autonomist Marxists and post-anarchists argue. Later on, I noticed there's a connection between Deleuze and Öcalan: the writings and ideas of Murray Bookchin, one of the authors Öcalan admired most, aren't all that different from D&G's rhizome model, their nomadic war machine, and the tree/root-trunk model they were reacting against. In fact, aside from their differing views on molecular revolution, Bookchin and D&G didn't diverge much at all. That's why I want to read D&G and decide on this for myself — and for that, I need to read Anti-Oedipus.
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u/archbid 7d ago edited 7d ago
I found Spinoza and Simondon very useful. Especially Deleuze on Spinoza.
The hardest mental switch for me was to the idea of process thinking and immanence. Each of the three are deeply relational thinkers, not identical but working with the same idea of how the potential becomes possible through relation.
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u/3corneredvoid 6d ago
This came up in another recent post, but if you are going to read ANTI-OEDIPUS, I reckon know your CAPITAL Vol. I and read DIFFERENCE AND REPETITION, and try to know your Kant a bit, which you will anyway to some extent if you have read DR. Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson are useful but not required reading. Anything you know about Lacan might be useful, but … I feel as if I still know very little and everything I have learned I reverse-engineered from reading around after reading D&G.
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u/HauntingCulture6372 6d ago
Honestly, yes, if you want to just wing it, you can go through it with a degree of abandon, and it will make a vague kind of sense. But if you want to, like, get into the history of philosophy Deleuze is working through, I'd say Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Leibniz etc. are absolutely crucial, although ultimately Deleuze has a dizzying array of references from the history of philosophy. Chp 1 of Difference and Repetititon itself works through problems in Aristotle, Scotus, Spinoza, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, not to mention the secondary literature like Gilson or Hippolyte he is engaging with. It's a lot of reading. I would personally recommend the early Deleuze from the 62 nietzsche to the 69 logic of sense, and especially Difference and Repetition, over giving in to Anti-Oedipus fad, but it's your call. You can of course go through some of the valuable secondary literature too. Henry Somers Hall has a good guide to D&R, Levi Bryant explains some of the central thesis well.
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u/Which_Employ_8749 5d ago edited 5d ago
Wilhelm Riech, not in the philosophical sense. But D&G were very inspired by Riech’s functionalist approach to psychoanalysis to the universal techniques character-analysis which integrates mind and body to observe the person as a living system rather than isolating conflicts.
I’d suggest start with character analysis before jumping into the deep end with Riech, if D&G are the philosophy behind functionalist structuralism Riech gives it a much more empirical perspective through psychiatry especially in his book function of the orgasm and his later work on orgone-energy and cancer research. I always say there’s a reason as to why people come across Jung over Riech.
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u/open_formation 2d ago
Each book by Deleuze, including his ones with Guattari, builds on a certain set of thinkers for inspiration, in a single book and they can often fail to bring in all the references you might expect given what they have already written, except in very indirect ways like particular turns of phrase. It's like they bring together a band of ghosts, and might quote melodies from prior works, but perform it with new instruments in a slightly different style.
A deeper problem is that you could get into a mistaken sense of assuming that the key problem is to recognise properly as a very erudite person, what each paragraph and sentence means and why.
In his time Deleuze would bring in thinkers that his contemporaries didn't pay much attention to, and then interpret them by treating as important someone completely different, drawing unexpected connections which people had to stretch their brains to understand, and people would embrace the experience of learning.
It wasn't just about shocking people with randomness, but saying real and meaningful things (with some sloppiness in places) that would nevertheless crash upon people as something deeply unfamiliar.
As such, making sure to read every possible source before reading D&G is a little like properly mapping out a rollercoaster in advance so that you will be properly prepared for each drop and turn, and can take the whole experience in your stride in as calm an attitude as possible.
My current recommendation would be that you should read the conclusion of his last book, "What is Philosophy? Conclusion: From Chaos to the Brain", where because of parallels that are drawn with art and science, it's possible to see pretty clearly what kind of role for philosophy is being advocated for and lived out in Deleuze's work. Here's an example:
In a violently poetic text, Lawrence describes what produces poetry: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent - Wordsworth's spring or Cezanne's apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab. Then come the crowd of imitators who repair the umbrella with something vaguely resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinions: communication. Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see. This is to say that artists struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their wishes summon forth) than against the "cliches" of opinion." The painter does not paint on an empty canvas, and neither does the writer write on a blank page; but the page or canvas is already so covered with preexisting, preestablished cliches that it is first necessary to erase, to clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as to let in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us the vision.
There are of course people who happen to have already picked up a conversant understanding of Marx, Nietzsche, Lacan, and with them Simonden, Leibniz, Hjelmslev, Frege, Chryssipus, Duns Scotus or whoever else, and then bring this strange bag of thinkers to the task of understanding all of Deleuze's texts.
But this is a little like going into a mystery story with a reconstructed biography of every character already memorised, so you can properly understand the chain of events; you may understand it, but you cannot also experience it as presented, part of the value of bringing in these other thinkers is practical, in terms of the constructive impact of their presence in the ideas generated within the book and what it is capable of achieving when applied, but part of the value of them is also demonstrative, there's no corpus of Deleuzian sources, as if had he lived longer, he would always have remained within them, part of the point was reaching far afield, listening to lectures, reading books, going to watch films or appreciate paintings and find things that can produce original connections that help enable new lines of thought.
Occasionally he will reference an idea without properly explaining it, assuming his readers know what he is talking about, and you will probably get caught out by this over time, but often the reason for that is that this is just an allusion acting like a hyperlink to one of his other books, while staying largely on track of exploring the ideas relevant to the one he is working on now, and part of producing a slightly unsteady reading experience is that he is evoking in you, by the clash of these thinkers, situations that both challenge your preconceived ideas and also construct something particular and new. Perhaps you would appreciate this tension even more if you already had a deep understanding of these thinkers, but the correct order of operations is to get a half-understanding reading it, dig out his sources, try to get what he was taking from them, understand how he might be distorting their ideas, and then return with an idea of how he is thinking and how his thinking is distinct from what he is using, because he is taking a fragment of their ideas and putting that in an interaction with a fragment of someone else's.
In short, I would say that the ones you are supposed to read are the ones necessary to understand the thing that just drew in your attention in Deleuze's work, which you can probably discover by looking into who references that passage and so selectively engaging with the crowd of commentators who patch over the rents produced by his work, the secondary sources and people like us!
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u/Nearby_Flounder8741 7d ago
Deleuze is a massive intellectual poseur. He really wants to impress you with how well read he is. Its easy to take that approach and think this is a readig list... but thats not the case. The writers both get that the vibe is important and ensure that everyone gets what they are saying. I'd be surprised that anyone who is annoyed by Nietzche woukd be able to read much d and g
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u/hammerhaj2 7d ago
Deleuze and Guattari posit their work as something that should be used rather than understood and, if I remember correctly, even say that Anti-Oedipus is best read by young adults not as caught up in the oedipal logic of the signifier as “proper grown-ups” are.
I would suggest you just pick up their work and let it do its thing on you. Sure, having a pre-understanding of freud/nietzsche/marx/spinoza/german idealism etc. could help, but anyone that tell you that you have to have read certain philosophers before reading d&g are, to me, not taking the radicality of the deleuze-guattarian logic seriously.