/lit/ - Literature

>>17125512
Unironically Gender Trouble by Judith Butler (pbuh)

>>17125512
I'm planning on reading all of these (already read a bunch) and at this point I think I'll turn myself into a schizo if I keep doing it.

>>17125512
Wittgenstein's two main opus, which are simultaneously philosophy and anti-philsophy, to wit, cut outs to be sophistically applied contra the hoi polloi. Proving this requires Assange-level investigation

>>17125534
The thread is about philosophy books not fiction

The Hegel and Whitehead and Deleuze ones filtered me hard

>>17125587
midwittgenstein is easy

>>17125544
Read slowly and do other stuff
Deleuze and Derrida is schizo
Hegel is honestly fine, I don't really get the "hardness" in PoS, honestly i believe that its more due to people being lazy/not actually wanting to read it due to being discouraged and a legend being born around Hegel, and people that actually do read him go with a mindset "oh im not going to understand this"
Reading Being and Time turned nobody into a schizo tho

>>17125601
Those are appearances

I listened to the audiobook of tractatus logico philosophicus and it was easy

Maps of Meaning, as evidenced by the incessant talk of the charts in it here. Filters about 99.9% of /lit/ users. Guaranteed anti-pseud. You only read it if you wanna be at the bleeding edge of complex thought.

>>17125512
The Parmenides dialogue is usually considered the most difficult philosophical work.

>>17125674
This dude is JOKING

>>17125697
I would object but I'm not sure myself, at this point

Doesn’t really work op because depending on how you approach it, these works will be much easier assuming you’ve read their influences.

If you want maximum difficulty you would need to maximize the amount of required reading prior to understanding it.

Example in laruelle’s work and work based on his thought you’ll basically need to read almost everything in your image OP, then there’s stuff like structure and being which is a systemization of analytic philosophy, then there’s the Ai augmented philosophical work of Edward Zalta, or you could go in the other direction and look at people like Bertiaux and Kenneth grant who are obscuring their philosophy through humor, lies, pretending to be retarded, and applying surrealist, proustian and other fiction based techniques and would require reading of Hindus, African religion, western esotericism, ancient occultism and religion, Egyptian fragments, continental philosophy (especially Hegel ) Jung, Freud and many others.

So it really really depends on who you are, OP

>>17125512
I’d say that right now Badiou’s Logics of Worlds is the final boss of philosophy right now, on the basis that unlike every book in the original image it has no systematic commentaries, guides, or even high quality summaries. All those books are difficult, but there is an abundance of secondary literature to help you along as well as a well established consensus about what it all means.

Why do so many of these books follow the format "x & y" for the title?

>>17125954
Because life is composed by Cock & Ball

>>17125954

They’re all analysis texts on the relations of certain things or just a specific analysis of a singular subject ultimately.

>>17125512
Guenon because only non-hylics can even comprehend his writings.

>What is the all time hardest philosophy book?
The longest one.

>>17125954
They are attempting to present an entire philosophical point of view by relating two fundamental concepts.

Also it becomes kind of a convention to indicate you are doing something really important. If you name you book “x and y” you are telling other philosophers to pay attention.

Here are some other books like that:

Being and Nothingness by Sartre

Structure and Being by Puntel

Intelligence and Spirit by Negrestani

State and Revolution by Lenin

Discipline and Punish by Foucault

Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard

And many many more

Haven’t read everything, but the phenomenology blows everything else out of the water, difficulty-wise. And it isn’t because Hegel is a ‘bad writer’. With Kant, for example he builds ideas up, sentence by sentence, he says what he means with a term and it stays that way throughout the work. With Heidegger, in being and time he revises his concepts within the work, it develops, but he still does it piecemeal and systematically. Understanding Kant is like understanding architecture, Heidegger, bonsai. Understanding Hegel is like a surfer’s understanding of the waves. Everything is fluid. Yes there’s a pattern, but the pattern happens within this constant shift. It’s just so much more dynamic than any other work.

endgame tier: Logical Investigations, The Science of Logic (aka the book that PoS is merely a prelude to so plebs could acquire the necessary cognitive scaffolding for comprehension)

>>17125512
The Tractatus is legitimately not that complex, should be replaced with Wilfred Sellars

>>17125902
Badiou is a hack, stopped reading Being and Event when he started to talk about art and love as metaphysically substantial. complete brainlet tier compared to the greats of contemporary analytic philosophy like Brandom and Ladyman.

>>17125954
Because they haven't worked out how to morph those two yet

>>17125618
>Read slowly and do other stuff

Could you expand on this?

>>17126276
I agree with Brandom, I also like him a lot, but I don’t know anything about Ladyman other than Everything Must Go, what’s the deal with him?

Whitehead and Derrida are extremely difficult imo. Kant, Heidegger, and Hegel were easier for me (though heidegger’s writings on language were tough).

Aesthetic Theory by Adorno

>>17126603
It’s so fucking tedious. That said, I love what he has to say about poetry.

>>17126603
This. He just goes on and on, it's like a long ass schizo ramble

>>17126702
So just like all philosophy then

>>17125673
Link

>>17125512
by definition which ever book has the least adherents to readers ratio filtered the most people

>>17125512
Fanged Noumena

>>17125512
hegel is fucking hard

What happens to you anons when you are reading works considered difficult?

Do you have a physcial response? Brain fog? Does it dissipate after a break or does it persist for the rest of the day?

PoS had something about different gradations of intellect having different levels of difficult in reading books of increasing complexity I believe.

Why would they use one of the easier deleuzian works in the OP pic instead of this? It's not fair.

>>17128187
Why do you think hegel is hard?

what happens when you read and understand one of these books?

>>17125512
There are only two philosophers in that pic.

>>17128891
Brain get bigger, might make you less hylic.

Anything to do with math and I mean hardcore math, it immediately filters 99% of the philosophy community and 99.99% of the world as such.

>>17125674
You’re right, but there are certain sections that are 100% pseud filters. I recorded what’s probably the most profound part of Maps of Meaning, I want some feedback from other /lit/izens:

https://voca.ro/15zJrAKTHArw

>>17128899
Based, I've ordered On Grammatology and Difference & Repetition

>>17125534
its easi

>>17125512
Why should it matter? Difficult to understand =/= correct.
>no bro, I just read philosophy books to feel smart
So you're a pseud.

Spinoza: ethics was too much for me

This work has so much depth.

I'm gonna read Aquinas and Averroes commentaries on it next month.

>>17128985
The most difficult works of philosophy generally have a nonsense premise that they try desperately to cloak in obtuse jargon. Levinas is a prime example of this.

Infinite Jest

>>17125512
Maybe im just a pleb but i couldn't get through Aristotle's Metaphysics. After like 100 pages i realized that i understood like 10% of what i just read and i stopped.

The Contributions.

The problem with complex works isn't reading them. It's remembering and integrating what you've read, to be able to mobilize it. And if you don't do that, you've lost your time and efforts.

>>17126260
>aka the book that PoS is merely a prelude to so plebs could acquire the necessary cognitive scaffolding for comprehension
PoS isn't necessary for plebs, it's necessary for anyone. It's even necessary for all of humanity, as it's the life of the Geist leading to the complete Science. Hegel didn't disparage PoS.

>>17129359
He's very technical, for me it really helped watching a few lectures on Aristotle just to get a general grip on where hes coming from and why. a few professors upload their undergraduate classes on youtube.

>>17126260
>the anagram for Hegel’s main work is literally ‘piece of shit’
Lol

>>17129411
which ones did you find the most helpful?

>>17129420
Adam Rosenfeld and good ol' Gregory B. Sadler where the two i mainly used, but there's a lot of other stuff floating around.
Do note that both of them somewhat simplify the content, but theyre great introductory primers.
As a general rule of thumb avoid the videos with cute animations and slick slides and whatever because they usually oversimplify or misrepresent the content completely.

>>17125587
Plural is opi.

>>17125512
Of the books in your pic the first three are probably the hardest in terms of the author’s style. The other ones you really need deep context in order to understand, so when people with no background pick them up they come off as difficult.

>>17128992
That work is outdated as fuck. It's not that I think that the soul doesn't exist, it's that Aristotle touches upon certain stuff which is now explained through the neurosciences so this work of his falls apart.

>>17129502
>Aristotle touches upon certain stuff which is now explained through the neurosciences so this work of his falls apart.
Low-tier bait

>>17129522
well memed

honestly although he writes very dryly, Kant is incredibly easy to understand

Isn't Libidinal Economy considered to be hard to read?

>>17129548
Guess it depends. If you’re not familiar with how the frogs wrote in the second half of the 20th century then yeah it is. Compared to some of the other French theorists it’s not too hard.

>>17129570
>Compared to some of the other French theorists it’s not too hard.

Interesting. I only recall hearing some claim it was one of the harder works to comprehend.

>>17129573
That whole movement is filled with hard to read books. He engages with Lacan, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, and I think Badiou and Baudrillard in that book. Even getting a handle on who he’s reacting too is rough, let alone knowing them well enough for Lyotard’s engagement.

>>17125674
Normally I’d laugh at the funny bait but I’ve seen you sincerely defend benzoman before. Tripfags should be gassed at any rate

>>17129414
It's acronym anon, anagram is when you mix the letters in a word up to get a new word.
Still funny tho.

>>17125512
>hardest =/= worth reading
In fact the relation is quite the opposite.

>>17128838
Have you tried reading Difference and Repetition? It's not an easy text. A Thousand Plateaus isn't that difficult in comparison. Most chapters can be summarized in a couple paragraphs at most, each chapter will circle around one basic idea again and again.

>>17128800
It's that you read a sentence and while you've understood all the individual words, the sentence itself doesn't come together to form a coherent sum of its words.

Consider this sentence that opens the second section of Julia Kristeva's Approaching Abjection:

>If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject.

Or this sentence from Judith Butler:

>The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relationships in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

I can give you a definition for every individual word in both those sentences, but both you gotta read a couple of times to really get your head around what exactly they are trying to say.

And then once you get that, you are trying to mentally connect one sentence to the next in a paragraph and within a chapter.

A book like Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism you can just read and comprehend with relative fullness upon first reading, without having to re-read many (if any) passages. A book like Heidegger's Being and Time requires the reader to take it one sentence at a time, re-read each sentence, refer to a second translation and the original German to track the use of keywords, and attempt to make notes, all before moving on to the next sentence.

In my experience Hegel PoS, Kant's CPR, and Deleuze's DR are all books that require something like that level of attention to really grasp what's going on. Badiou's BE has major sections which are like that, but a lot of the book is far less dense. Wittgenstein is difficult, but his writing is also vastly more lucid than anybody else on that chart, and it's far more likely the reader will just need to take lengthy breaks to think through sections, rather than puzzling over the first order meaning. I don't have first hand experience with the other ones.

>>17129607
How do you reconcile calling my post bait if you know it's sincere? Sounds like cognitive dissonance. Also big fucking discovery, the Peterson shill shills Peterson.