Reminds me of The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han. It's difficult to succinctly state the premise of the book, but in a way, I think its about structuring time and attention vertically on top of itself instead of horizontally across moments and subjects
What serendipity! The latest episode of "Philosophize This!" is titled "The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism - Byung Chul Han".[0] I'd never heard of him before. Apparently his book "The Burnout Society" is recommended reading.
Philosophize this has been on such a cool track out of western canon and through more mystic/nondual flavored stuff, in a way that builds off of itself. I got Deleuze-pilled a few years ago, and have had fun listening to the whole progression lately. Interesting dovetails with the Alan Watts marathon I did for like a year or two haha
tl;dr read it with friends or drugs, or as a drug. Wild shit.
I was with a group of a couple friends who loved A Thousand Plateaus - we would read bits of it allowed together and laugh and generally have a good time talking about it. Probably the best way to have approached it.
Also on the advice of one of these folks, I read just the intro to ATP and then went for a walk outside without my phone or anything and stared into the woods while that clusterfuck of a concept-tangle just bounced around in my head. Then I slept on it, and later we started doing the group readings. Especially together with Guattari, it's almost more of a hallucinogenic substance than it is a book, and approaching it from all sides with a light heart is somehow helpful. Deleuze really doesn't seem interested in objections in ATP, he just wants to throw another concept at you and see if that one sticks instead.
Off-topic: have you enjoyed "The Disappearance of Rituals"?
I went on a binge of Byung-Chul Han last year, reading "The Crisis of Narration", "In The Swarm", "Psychopolitics", and "The Burnout Society". Really enjoyed all of them, and given how dense it can be I set myself to read them at least twice which I'm just finishing, was on the lookout for what else to read from him and was thinking about "The Disappearance of Rituals" as the next one.
Given your interest in BCH, you may enjoy Non-places: An Anthropology of Supermodernity by Marc Augé. BCH draws on a lot of Augé's ideas from this book in Psychopolitics. It is obtuse and either poorly-translated or badly-written but the ideas are excellent.
> The conflation of suicide rates with forced sex here seems at best highly misleading. The sexual frequency number is rather obviously a reflection of two years where people were doing rather a lot of social distancing. With the end of that, essentially anything social is going to go up in frequency, whether it is good, bad or horrifying – only a 27 percent increase seems well within the range one would expect from that. Given all the other trends in the world, it would be very surprising to me if the rates of girls being subjected to forced sex (for any plausible fixed definition of that) were not continuing to decline.
If you look at the data from the cdc [0] there's no dip during quarantine like that paragraph would suggest leading to this sudden surge in comparison. Theres just an increase
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