5 Responses to John Protevi on ‘How to begin reading Deleuze’

1. mydesiringmachines says:

   August 27, 2012 at 5:52 pm

   Reblogged this on My Desiring-Machines and commented:
   My path is much more disjointed and less cohesive, but is, of course, still a work in progress. I read:
   1) “Postscript on Societies of Control” in a class, alongside Part 3 (Discipline) of Discipline and Punish.
   2) Anti-Oedipus in my reading group; we read it in four installations, corresponding to each chapter.
   3) A Thousand Plateaus, both on my own in preparation for my general exam and with the group.
   4) Deleuze’s lecture notes of Spinoza’s concept of affect (from webdeleuze)
   5) Portions of the two Spinoza books while I was taking a seminar on the Ethics.
   6) Portions of Cinema 1 while preparing to write my paper for the Deleuze Studies conference.
   7) Around the same time I also read Guattari’s “Ritornellos and Existential Affects” essay and Massumi’s chapter “The Autonomy of Affect.”
   

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   • mydesiringmachines says:

     August 27, 2012 at 8:14 pm

     hopefully this close my italics…apologies for that.

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2. deleuzianexcursus says:

   August 27, 2012 at 6:54 pm

   Reblogged this on deleuzianexcursus and commented:
   My path was an early path of fits and starts:
   I read Smooth and Striated out of ATP before I knew anything about anything.
   I revisited that a year or two later, alongside the Introduction to ATP; and again a year or two later still. At some point, it started to really make sense and fit into my brain.

   After that, I jumped into Cinema 1 and 2, which feels incredibly relevant for thinking about my topic, Google Street View
   For my exam reading list, I also read (in addition to C1 and C2, again):
   What is Philosophy
   A-O and ATP (also with our reading group, Becoming Poor)
   What felt like way too many secondary sources at the time:
   Bronta/Protevi: Geophilosphy
   Colebrook: Deleuze
   Flaxman: Brain is the Screen
   Rodowick: Time Machine and After Images
   I also read Bergsonism and Hume for a paper on Duration
   then for fun, I read
   Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (agreed, really helpful)
   a large portion of Nietzsche
   Immanence: A Life essays

   From there, I developed a course proposal which focused on some of the key concepts of Deleuze, which forced me to dig a little deeper, read a little wider, and found a lot of his sources that he references for the topics. That was extremely fruitful.

   This past spring, I took a philosophy class on Spinoza, reading The Ethics. I think this has been one of the most helpful aspects of understanding Deleuze at a completely different level. I wrote a paper about Wonder, using Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosohpy, and returning to Practical Philosophy, placing the role of wonder alongside the concept of deterritorialization. I’m screwing up the courage to try again to read Difference and Repetition, but the timing isn’t quite right. I have a sense that it will be far easier, after tangling with Spinoza.

   My advice is to read broadly to get a sense of how he talks about things, then focus on something that feels relevant. I think Deleuze’s own advice is that we necessarily start in the middle, and finding something particularly relevant for one’s own research seems like the best way to start. It will resonate, for one, and there are a host of secondary sources/dictionaries that can elaborate on key concepts. I think the key is repeated exposure. There is only so much we can glean from a first read.

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3. Pingback: john protevi’s intro to reading deleuze | being-in-exodus

4. Pingback: How to Begin Reading Deleuze? A Query, a Challenge, & a Response: Nietzsche and Philosophy ! | ~ S c h i z o s o p h y ~

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