It's a political document in a very loose sense. It is a thought experiment about what the ideal society would look like.

Another suggestion of something you could read on the opposite side of history that is pretty essential imo to understanding non marxist modern academia is foucault. Discipline and Punish for example is another book that is pretty approachable.

Just trying to think of things that are informative, but also approachable and pleasant to read.

Early greek stuff is super rewarding if you have a group or instructor. The Republic and The Apology by Plato, and portions of Nichomachean Ethics by Aristotle are the big ones I read in my philosophy class and it was very interesting. Highly recommend reading The Apology and then watching the The New Trial Of Socrates to see all the interesting historical context

thats the thing Rei turns into in End of Evangelion

Meh, every western philosopher has cringe takes post-marx, as they tip-toe around him straight into positivism/structuralism/post-modernism

Baudrillard

Then I have the perfect clip for you! Its like 10 seconds long, the lecture in itself is long and winded, but gives a good conception about Baudrillard.

For Baudrillard there are a few concepts that help in vulgar forms a lot:

• Hegelian dialectics, in the sense that a) there are only non-smokers cause smokers exist, cause else the term as social relation would be meaningless b.) the maser-slave dialectic, which means that actually the master is powerless and the slaves have the power - cause they do actually do stuff, much like workers and capitalists (it is enough to read this paragraph though) c) we ignore the thesis, synthesis antithesis things for now.

• Marxist alienation, the worker who has to labour and whose productive capacities gets exploited by the employer who only pays him a slight wage, not the full result of his work. In a very vulgar form that people feel bad, cause they don't relate to the real social relation in a way they want to and in a way that acknowledges the real relation.

• The map is not the territory, which means that if you have a map and try to navigate with it, but it leads you into a lake and you drown ( like google maps does). Though the story about the map that was the empire is important to read.

• there is a bit of Lacan's theory that helps (which doesn't mean that Lacan created all concepts of it, but it got its name and we take from him). He says there are three orders (whatever that means), there is the real which isn't what is the imaginary or the symbolic, and is alien and can never known, the symbolic which got some language elements in it and lastly the imaginary which is in parts related to movies which actually aren't a reality (except for the light on the screen). However to try to understand more and what those terms exactly mean and what Lacan is up to - turned out for me useless. The idea that you can use this linked entities was helpful though to understand parts of Baudrillard. There are three intertwined things and the real can't be known.

• Plato's cave allegory is often referenced and helps here, it also seems like an archaic version of some things Lacan and Baudrillard developed further.

• Then there is the idea that you can't know the real thing. Even if you would see the thing whose shadow is cast upon the Platonean wall, you wouldn't real see it. This is true in multiple ways. Your eyes only detect some light photons altered by it, your perception models and alters it, as does your brain and the material stuff going on, that you are. Furthermore, no exploration of the thing would reveal the thing itself (not in the idealist way, that there is a perfect thing whose shadow is projected onto the world), but that the real is an entirely different thing than your conscious, it is alien and removed from you. Doesn't matter in your day to day life much, though, you enjoy a nice cake, even when you can't get true to the real, right?

• I will ignore everything about conscious(ness).

• Then there is the thing in the digital age that differs to the time before. Today you can do free (effectively free) copies of things and their representation in a specific set of bits can be moved around your device's storage, which renders the meaning of original and copy irrelevant. There is also a division of image from audio and such, even if they are combined at a later point, they were separated at first and thus the choice to put them together is a choice and constructed. If you can play something recorded then it isn't the recorded, it is a simulation of what was recorded. It isn't the real thing what was recorded, it is something different.

• Baudrillard now says (I am wrong here, cause I don't know much Baudrillard) that we are living in a time in which there isn't a real, but also a hyperreal (fuck anti-collectivist Adam Curtis, though). It is best to read those two paragraphs about what simulation and what simulacra are. Today Baudrillard says we aren't able to see which is real, which is representation, which is simulation and which is simulacra (something simulated that doesn't even exist in reality, but it is accepted as something that is). In a sense "the map and the territory aren't the same, though it is the territory that rots and the map that is pristine and what is left".

You notice that I mentioned no female philosophers, which is a problem. Also: it is irrelevant what I wrote, philosophy isn't having the names down or having read up concepts, it is about enjoying thinking (and seeing how it relates to the world and how you can change it).

Yikes

The quote specifically comes Guattari paraphrasing Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. Saussure makes it seem simple, but there is a reason so much ink has been spilled over this. Fascinating stuff really.