Has anyone read these books? I am having some trouble fully comprehending everything Deleuze is putting forward. I understand that he relies heavily on Henri Bergson. Which Bergson books should I read to further my understanding of Deleuze? Or should I just read Deleuze’s Bergsonism?
Also I am really not familiar with any film theory so I’m not sure how Deleuze’s books compare.
Bergsonism is a good choice. Also if you want to read Bergson try The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics.
I have it as an ebook, may get around to it eventually. Just remember he was an anticapitalist Neo-Marxist, like most of those poststructuralist/postmodernists. I read his Nietzsche and Philosophy in 1992, and, it is a real chore.
Definitely read Bergsonism. There are also some useful shorter pieces in Desert Islands and Two Regimes of Madness. For a really basic introduction, there’s a book on Deleuze in the Contemporary Thinkers Reframed series that has just come out, while in a similar vein Claire Colebrook’s volume in the Guide for the Perplexed series is excellent. This is also quite a good introduction to Deleuze and has a brief precis of his views on cinema, although don’t let that be any substitute for reading the texts themselves.
To dismiss Deleuze as “an anticapitalist Neo-Marxist” is a shocking reduction of a philosophical oeuvre of quite astounding diversity.
I’m sure if Deleuze ever thought that someone like you (I’m assuming on the undergad level) would be able to “fully comprehend” him, so as to be able to effectively put him inside of a box, then he would have shot himself a long time before his seventieth birthday.
He was extraordinarily, unrepentingly French.
Deleuze’ (this seems more appropriate than “Deleuze’s,” for some reason) ultimate point is that identity is grounded in difference, and not the other way around. This, of course, presupposes some sort of difference between identity and difference.
This is where I would part ways. The identification of a thing is always a process whereby differing sensations are “sorted out.” After much sorting out, the sense-stuffs, in our minds, gain a kind of enduring, transcendental unity that can be called an “identifiable object.”
For some reason, the term “identity” has been conflated with the notion of “undifferentiated flim-flam” or “matter” or “Substance” or the like. But this term is completely meaningless without understanding the importance of the process of identification or the quality of identifiability that already inhere within it.
R.I.P.
Deleuze
Deleuze was cool. But yeah, you gotta be a fucking genius to understand much of what he wrote. His work is often verging on unbelievable (a crown I’ve thus far only placed upon parts of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra). His book Negotiations provides good light refreshment, however. 
Urm, no. Postmodernism (in its original form, the word has been bastardised) has its roots in Neo Marxism but it is most certainly not Marxist itself. Go read Lyotard, or Foucault.
Post structuralism is closed to Marxist philosophy since it’s mostly written in response or developed out of Structuralist Marxist writings, but I wouldn’t call it Neo-Marxist. They both turn on a profound rejection of Marxism.
However, I’ve not read Deleuze in any great detail so I don’t know about him.
The two volumes of Capitalism & Schizophrenia can probably be seen in a “neo-Marxist” spirit in much the same way as texts like Dialectic of Enlightenment or Spectres of Marx and it draws significantly, particularly in Anti-Oedipus, on Freudo-Marxism, but that hardly warrants encapsulating Deleuze himself as such (and the very idea of scholastic labels is anathema to the thrust of his philosophy).
Since the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ is one of my favourite texts (although I’m not sure I understand large parts of it 
) you’ve intrigued me. Which is annoying. Does anyone else ever feel that there’s just too much to read out there? Bah.
However, to clarify (I’m not saying you’re saying this but I’m just re-iterating my point) Neither of those disciplines are inherently Marxist and Adorno does not belong to either the post Structuralist nor post modern movement, although his texts have been influential on both. Derrida is just Derrida 
. He’s really not a fair example of either tradition.
Oh, and I made a rather serious misspelling in the previous post; “Post structuralism is closed to Marxist philosophy since it’s mostly written in response or developed out of Structuralist Marxist writings” closed should be ‘closer’, that rather changes the meaning. The last line also more true of post modernism.
I’m getting off topic; do people (By this I kinda mean Americans ) include Habermas in the post-structuralist school? Personally, I wouldn’t (more structuralist than post structuralist) and whilst they is a certain amount of cross pollination, I generally, loosely regard the two terms as belonging to French philosophy (as a term of categorisation rather than a term of self reference) rather than German / Frankfurt school ideology. I need to read his newer stuff too… Bah…
Whatever you want to call it, I am truly suffering “Why we are not Nietzscheans”, right now. My problem with these compilations of pedants, is that you can’t draw a bead on one of these will o’ the wisps, without the next one leading you into an even more convoluted labyrinth.