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In his foreword to A Thousand Plateaus, on the pleasures of philosophy, and of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy in particular, Brian Massumi writes:   [A] plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax The heightening of energies is sustained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can be reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive states between which any number of connecting routes could exist   The trick to reading Mille Plateaux is that you can drop in anywhere and read for a while; though ideas accumulate and diversify across its pages, the book doesn’t require a chronological or teleological reading experience   Maria Gainza’s is-it-a-novel Optic Nerve can also be read either way The book is comprised of discrete, self-contained chapters that resemble short stories, or essays There is no plot, only narrative, only motifs If you were to read Optic Nerve start to finish, you would observe how skilfully Gainza braids together the narrator’s musings on life, the self, family, friends, and, above all, art But once you’ve read it straightforwardly, I recommend going back and reading it unstraightforwardly You could dip in anywhere and still get something out of it Like Mille Plateaux, it is a root-book   The narrator, Maria, is an Argentinian art historian (she shares a name and an occupation with her author), and much of the text is given over to her ruminations on art and the preoccupations of artists that drove them to make the work they did The work she considers is mostly pre-twentieth-century, with the exception of Mark Rothko, and mainly to be found in the museums of Buenos Aires, as the narrator is afraid of flying (‘Buenos Aires, they say, only has second-rate work: great artists, yes, but none of their great works’) The person who really knows how to look at art doesn’t need to look at the acclaimed works; she can find the masterpiece in