Deleuze-A Thousand Plateaus

Catalog description

This course focuses on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's amazing book, A Thousand Plateaus (1980). This is one of the greatest and most influential books in the movement in French Philosophy known as poststructuralism, or postmodernism, or philosophy of multiplicity and difference. This work presents a new philosophical methodology that values multiplicity over unity, difference over identity, and becoming over essence. In a series of essays, Deleuze and Guattari analyze a very wide range of philosophical topics, from politics to language, from history to music, from the relation between humans and animals to the relation between concepts and machines. They sometime call thier method "schizoanalysis": their goal is to describe the virtual transformations and hybrid assemblages that, in their view, make up reality. In this course, we will interpret and critique the complex, brilliant, and controversial ideas in this book. Students will also make their own attempt to use Deleuze and Guattari's methods to develop their own analyses of philosophical topics. Students will develop skills both of close reading and of imaginative conceptual invention.. It is strongly recommended that students taking 400-level Philosophy seminars have completed at least two prior Philosophy courses.