A couple of years after I graduated from college, concerned that my ability to understand philosophy was stagnating, I spent part of a year reading A Thousand Plateaus, the inscrutable magnum opus of French continental philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. The book is hard to describe: Its chapters seem to have very little to do with each other, in turn invoking strange ideas about "rhizomes" and "war machines" and "blank faces." (The chapter I remember best spends a lot of time trying to explain the philosophical significance of the shape of lobsters.)
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