File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1998/deleuze-guattari.9806, message 181


Date: Thu, 18 Jun 1998 10:03:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: Alexander Glage <glage-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: RE: academia







---Richard Scott <richard.scott-AT-umist.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> 
> Deleuze comments about AntiOedipus:
> 
> "I'm struck by the way its the people who've read lots of other
books, and
> psychoanalytic books in particular, who find our book really
difficult...
> those on the other hand who don't know much, who haven't been addled
by
> psychoanalysis, have less of a problem and happily pass over what
they don't
> understand... there are you see two ways of reading a book; you
either see
> it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it
signifies...
> And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about
the
> book, and so on and so on. Or there's the other way: you see the
book as a
> little non-signifying machine and the only question is "Does it
work, and
> how does it work?" How does it work for you... There's nothing to
explain,
> nothing to understand, nothing to interpret... This second way of
reading's
> quite different from the first because it relates a book directly to
what's
> Outside. (Negotiations pp. 7-8)
> 
> This is it in a nutshell I think. 

Well, I can buy this concerning AO, even perhaps ATP, but what about
the books that I actually referred to (if you look back, you'll see I
made a point of *not* talking about any of the works Deleuze did with
Guattari)?  Do you really think that people with no philosophical
training are going to be able to do much with a book like *Difference
and Repetition* or *Logic of Sense" or the books on Leibniz and Kant
and Foucault?  I know I personally did not understand such works (even
though I found them exciting in their style) when I tried to read them
as a young and inexperienced student--there were too many references,
too many allusions, too much vocabulary that I just couldn't figure
out.  But what about you: you mean to tell me that you had no problem
with those texts? that you just joyfully skimmed over anything you
weren't sure about?  I personally could never be satisfied with that
kind of reading--at least, *not for very long*.  That kind of reading
can indeed be exhilarating and even liberating (and in fact, the
experience/idea of the *obscure* as something imbued with its own
radical positivity is something I've been working on for a very long
time now--I hope to publish my essay on "the obscure" sometime in the
next year or so)--but it could never be the *only* kind of reading I
would want to do.  Eventually, I would start asking myself questions
that I could not answer on my own.  I would want to find out, say,
what all this tallk about "propositions" referred to, where terms like
"transcendental" get used and in what ways, who are these "Stoics"
anyway...  I would always want to learn more about where Deleuze was
coming from.  This is a point I tried to make in my last post: I can't
imagine myself ever reading Deleuze and just ignoring everything that
I wasn't sure about.  And I don't think that this is some evil,
tyrannical need to master or dominate the Deleuzean text: rather,
chalk it up to plain old curiosity--and love for wisdom.


> I am amazed at your obedient linearity - and the narrowness of the
tradition
> which you see Deleuze as existing in. 

All I can say to this is that, if you think the tradition is "narrow,"
then you're not working with the same tradition I am.


Alexander




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