The Deleuze and Guattari Speedrun

Hey y'all,

Alan has provided the topic for us this week. The Deleuze and Guattari Speedrun (which is, if you missed last week's event, the host's attempt at concise and speedy overview of a particular philosopher / philosophy, followed by a discussion).

Here's the write up for next Tuesday:

What is schizoanalysis and what does schizophrenia have to do with capitalism? What are desiring machines? What is a rhizome? What are lines of flight? How does one become-woman? What is the War Machine? And what the f[redacted]k is a Body Without Organs? Foucault once called Deleuze and Guattari’s work Capitalism and Schizophrenia ‘an introduction to the non-fascist life,’ yet for most there is nothing introductory about the terms they conceive. To many, D&G are symptomatic of the postmodernist impermeability of the French left. And yet there is something there, something alluring about their work that hooks you in and makes you want to understand them in their terms. Much of the difficulty reading Capitalism and Schizophrenia, especially the second book A Thousand Plateaus, gets erased once we stop looking for a grand consistent narrative in their text (after all what ‘postmodernist’ author would pay tribute to a grand narrative?). Instead what they offer us is a toolbox, or a toybox, for us to do with their concepts what we will. In this speedrun, we will understand the context in which they write their magnum opus, and an incomplete number of concepts they introduce that might make new readers shy away from the text. As Deleuze once said: “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window”