/lit/ - Literature

>In his writing, Gilles Deleuze drew on a vast array of source material, from philosophy and psychoanalysis to science and art. Yet scholars have largely neglected one of the intellectual currents underlying his work: Western esotericism, specifically the lineage of hermetic thought that extends from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance through the work of figures such as Iamblichus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. In this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics, and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition.Identifying key hermetic moments in Deleuze's thought, including his theories of art, subjectivity, and immanence, Ramey argues that the philosopher's work represents a kind of contemporary hermeticism, a consistent experiment in unifying thought and affect, percept and concept, and mind and nature in order to engender new relations between knowledge, power, and desire. By uncovering and clarifying the hermetic strand in Deleuze's work, Ramey offers both a new interpretation of Deleuze, particularly his insistence that the development of thought demands a spiritual ordeal, and a framework for retrieving the pre-Kantian paradigm of philosophy as spiritual practice.

What do you guys think about this? Was Deleuze an obscurantist? Have any of you read the book?

Also /deleuze/ general if there is any interest.

>Language is not made to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience newspapers, news, proceed by redundancy, in that they tell us what we ‘must’ think, retain, expect, etc. language is neither informational nor communicational. It is not the communication of information but something quite different: the transmission of order-words, either from one statement to another or within each statement, insofar as each statement accomplishes an act and the act is accomplished in the statement.
Was he right?

So I'm reading Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy but I am not grasping his understanding of Eternal Return. Any actually understand his interpretation?

>mfw other philosophers can't conceive of difference in itself

I am interested in film-making and films and I am reading Deleuze's two books about cinema.
I have read segments of his work here and there but then i stumbled upon this video that apparently is based on Deleuze's books:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=720Kx3NdDig

The video criticizes what it calls the networked control society.
What I am wondering about is what is the ideal? What should society aspire to?
Does Deleuze actually critique in his books or simply analyze?