Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

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RANSLATOR'S FOREWORD D xi

 

bondage of the institutionalized patient in the conventional State hospital. 

He came to occupy the same position in relation to psychoanalysis as he 

had all along in relation to the parties of the left: an ultra-opposition within 

the opposition. His antihierarchical leanings made him a precursor to the 

events of May 1968 and an early partisan of the social movements that 

grew from them, including feminism and the gay rights movement.

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Anti-Oedipus  (1972),

u

 his first book with Deleuze, gave philosophical 

weight to his convictions and created one of the intellectual sensations of 

postwar France with its spirited polemics against State-happy or pro-party 

versions of Marxism and school-building strains of psychoanalysis, 

which separately and in various combinations represented the dominant 

intellectual currents of the time (in spite of the fundamentally anarchist 

nature of the spontaneous popular uprisings that had shaken the world in 

1968). "The most tangible result of Anti-Oedipus was that it short-circuited 

the connection between psychoanalysis and the far left parties," in which 

he and Deleuze saw the potential for a powerful new bureaucracy of 

analytic reason.

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For many French intellectuals, the hyperactivism of post-May gave way 

to a mid-seventies slump, then a return to religion (Tel Quel) or political 

conservatism (the Nouveaux Philosophes) in a foreshadowing of the 

Reagan eighties. Deleuze and Guattari never recanted. Nor did they sim-

ply revive the polemics. A Thousand Plateaus (1980), written over a 

seven-year period, was billed as a sequel to Anti-Oedipus and shares its 

subtitle,  Capitalism and Schizophrenia. But it constitutes a very different 

project. It is less a critique than a positive exercise in the affirmative 

"nomad" thought called for in Anti-Oedipus.

 

"State philosophy" is another word for the representational thinking 

that has characterized Western metaphysics since Plato, but has suffered 

an at least momentary setback during the last quarter century at the hands 

of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and poststructuralist theory gener-

ally. As described by Deleuze,

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 it reposes on a double identity: of the thinking 

subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own 

presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subject, its concepts, 

and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a 

shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Rep-

resentational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspon-

dence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of 

judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of the three terms 

is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought 

its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are 

limitative distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties 

possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and

 

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xii □ TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD

 

hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a 

term's self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or 

gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = noty. Iden-

tity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for 

order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally 

been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the 

State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth cen-

tury with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become 

the model for higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. 

The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by 

Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the "spiritual and moral training of the 

nation," to be achieved by "deriving everything from an original principle" 

(truth), by "relating everything to an ideal" (justice), and by "unifying this 

principle and this ideal in a single Idea" (the State). The end product would 

be "a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society"

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—each mind an 

analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the 

State. Prussian mind-meld.

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 More insidious than the well-known practi-

cal cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning mili-

tary funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the 

form of representational thinking itself, that "properly spiritual absolute 

State" endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social 

fabric. Deconstruction-influenced feminists such as Helene Cixous and 

Luce Irigaray have attacked it under the name "phallogocentrism" (what 

the most privileged model of rocklike identity is goes without saying). In 

the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe it 

as the "arborescent model" of thought (the proudly erect tree under whose 

spreading boughs latter-day Platos conduct their class).

 

"Nomad thought" does not immure itself in the edifice of an ordered 

interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose 

on identity; it rides difference. It does not respect the artificial division 

between the three domains of representation, subject, concept, and being; 

it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds. 

The concepts it creates do not merely reflect the eternal form of a legislat-

ing subject, but are defined by a communicable force in relation to which 

their subject, to the extent that they can be said to have one, is only secon-

dary. They do not reflect upon the world but are immersed in a changing 

state of things. A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of 

reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the 

brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain 

encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a 

juncture? All and none of the above. What is its object? The window? The 

edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power relations

 

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