Deleuze, Gilles (1925–95)

2. Collaborations with Félix Guattari

In 1969, Deleuze met Félix Guattari, a practising psychoanalyst and political activist. They collaborated on explosive and radical books of philosophy: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Capitalism and Schizophrenia), L’Anti-Oedipe (Anti-Oedipus), Mille Plateaux (A Thousand Plateaus) and Qu’est ce que la philosophie? (What is Philosophy?). In this collaboration, an assemblage was constructed: ‘Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd’, and the geography of the encounter was practised: ‘We are no longer ourselves’, ‘We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.’ Anti-Oedipus is less an argument against the idol of psychoanalysis than a demonstration of the relation between, on the one hand, the herd instinct and the desire to be led that motivates those who profess their faith in Oedipus or in the state; and on the other, state fascism and the fascism we all carry with us.

Deleuze and Guattari address the key question posed by Wilhelm Reich: ‘How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?’ They hypothesize that fascism is lying in wait wherever the judgment ‘He is evil, so I am good’ is made and wherever what they call lines of escape or deterritorialized flows of desire, have been reduced to state, family or religious hierarchies. In the first case, we recognize what Nietzsche condemned as base valuations that can end only in nihilism. In the second, we find state institutions, hierarchies committed to binary thinking and dedicated to limiting or breaking the connections that allow for the construction of the multiplicity known as the assemblage, as well as heading off encounters between assemblages.

A Thousand Plateaus operates on many planes at once. Thus it serves as an embodiment of the open whole, which Deleuze and Guattari now call the ‘rhizome’. Each chapter or ‘plateau’ of this book can be read independently of any other, and each is accompanied by a date, though in no particular order and not always of importance in any traditional history: the date of Freud’s analysis of the Wolf-man, the date the Reichsmark was declared to be no longer money, the date of the destruction of the Jewish Temple, the date of vampires. These dates or events take their place in various semiotic systems, some of which are linguistic and some not. But they never appear in the despotic linguistics of the signifier-signified relation, wherein all aspects of life are reduced to language. For, even when Saussure’s linguistics released the signified (concept) from any constant relation to the word or sound image, it did so only by elevating the signifier, insofar as the relations between signifiers always determine the value (meaning) of any signified (see Saussure, F. de).

If meaning-events are the effects of bodies, then an entirely different relation between bodies and linguistic systems has to be established. If, following Nietzsche, a thing has as many meanings as there are forces capable of seizing it, and if each force consists of a complex of other forces, then in place of the old dualism of substance and form Deleuze and Guattari assert two substance/form complexes: one of content and one of expression. These two assemblages of forces cannot be separated from one another. A distinction between form of expression (an order and organization of functions) and form of content (an order and organization of qualities) can only arise for purposes of analysis: for example, in the encounter between a nomad war machine (form of expression) and itinerant metallurgy (form of content). Nor is the encounter necessarily or even primarily linguistic – linguistics is merely one of many semiotics, and not the most important.

The role of language and the task of philosophy regarding language are also crucial to What is Philosophy?, the end of the experiment between Deleuze and Guattari, an end sealed by Guattari’s death in 1992. In this book, the Stoic treatment of bodies and events implicit throughout A Thousand Plateaus re-emerges forcefully, as Deleuze and Guattari argue that the task of philosophy – as opposed to science – is the creation of concepts, the extraction of events from beings and things so as to create a plane of immanence, a plane of consistency. For philosophy does not seek an external plane of reference or truth, as science does. The distinction between bodies and events is important here, for while philosophical concepts are constituted from immanent variations of consistent events, scientific functions refer to states of affairs or mixtures in bodies. Thus, while philosophical concepts are enunciated by conceptual personae (the friend, the stammerer) that are not the philosopher, but that trace out the line of becoming that is the concept, scientific functions are enunciated by the scientific observer situated within the perspective of a particular state of affairs (the relativity traveller).