Microsoft Word Deleuze, Guattari- a thousand Plateaus

T

RANSLATOR'S FOREWORD □ xv

 

concept that is particularly to your liking and jump with it to its next 

appearance. They tend to cycle back. Some might call that repetitious. 

Deleuze and Guattari call it a refrain.

 

Most of all, the reader is invited to lift a dynamism out of the book 

entirely, and incarnate it in a foreign medium, whether it be painting or 

politics. The authors steal from other disciplines with glee, but they are 

more than happy to return the favor. Deleuze's own image for a concept is 

not a brick, but a "tool box."

26

 He calls his kind of philosophy "pragmatics" 

because its goal is the invention of concepts that do not add up to a system 

of belief or an architecture of propositions that you either enter or you 

don't, but instead pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand 

envelops an energy of prying.

 

The best way of all to approach the book is to read it as a challenge: to pry 

open the vacant spaces that would enable you to build your life and those of 

the people around you into a plateau of intensity that would leave afterim-

ages of its dynamism that could be reinjected into still other lives, creating 

a fabric of heightened states between which any number, the greatest num-

ber, of connecting routes would exist. Some might call that promiscuous. 

Deleuze and Guattari call it revolution.

 

The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts 

does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possi-

ble to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body?

 

The answer for some readers, perhaps most, will be "none." If that hap-

pens, it's not your tune. No problem. But you would have been better off 

buying a record.

 

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Notes on the Translation

 

and

 

Acknowledgments

 

AFFECT

/

AFFECTION

.

 

Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment 

in Deleuze and Guattari). L 'affect (Spinoza's affectus) is an ability to affect 

and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage 

from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an 

augmentation or diminution in that body's capacity to act. L'affection 

(Spinoza's affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between 

the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its 

broadest possible sense to include "mental" or ideal bodies).

 

DRAW

.

 

In A Thousand Plateaus, to draw is an act of creation. What is 

drawn (the Body without Organs, the plane of consistency, a line of flight) 

does not preexist the act of drawing. The French word tracer captures this 

better: It has all the graphic connotations of "to draw" in English, but can 

also mean to blaze a trail or open a road. "To trace" {decalquer), on the 

other hand, is to copy something from a model.

 

FLIGHT

/

ESCAPE

.

 

Both words translate fuite, which has a different range 

of meanings than either of the English terms. Fuite covers not only the act 

of fleeing or eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the 

distance (the vanishing point in a painting is a point de fuite). It has no rela-

tion to flying.

 

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N

OTES ON THE TRANSLATION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS □ xvii

 

MILIEU. In French, milieu  means "surroundings," "medium" (as in 

chemistry), and "middle." In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, 

"milieu" should be read as a technical term combining all three meanings.

 

PLANE

.

 

The word plan designates both a "plane" in the geometrical sense 

and a "plan." The authors use it primarily in the first sense. Where both 

meanings seem to be present (as in discussions of the, plan d'organisatori) 

"plan(e)" has been used in the translation.

 

POWER. Two words for "power" exist in French, puissance and pouvoir. 

In Deleuze and Guattari, they are associated with very different concepts 

(although the terminological distinction is not consistently observed). 

Puissance refers to a range of potential. It has been defined by Deleuze as a 

"capacity for existence," "a capacity to affect or be affected," a capacity to 

multiply connections that may be realized by a given "body" to varying 

degrees in different situations. It may be thought of as a scale of intensity or 

fullness of existence (or a degree on such a scale), analogous to the capacity 

of a number to be raised to a higher "power." It is used in the French trans-

lation of Nietzsche's term "will to power." Like its English counterpart, it 

has an additional mathematical usage, designating the number of elements 

in a finite or infinite set. Here, puissance pertains to the virtual (the plane 

of consistency), pouvoir  to the actual (the plane of organization). The 

authors use pouvoir in a sense very close to Foucault's, as an instituted and 

reproducible relation of force, a selective concretization of potential. Both 

puissance and pouvoir have been translated here as "power," since the dis-

tinction between the concepts is usually clear from the context. The French 

terms have been added in parentheses where confusion might arise, and in 

occasional passages where puissance is rendered as "potential."

 

PROCESS

/

PROCEEDING

.

 

The authors employ two words normally trans-

lated as "process." Processus in their usage is the more general of the two, 

covering both the stratified and destratified dimensions of an occurrence. 

Proces pertains only to the stratification. In standard French, proces also 

means "trial" (as in the title of the Kafka novel). Deleuze and Guattari 

exploit this polysemy as a way of emphasizing the role of organizations of 

social power and regimes of signs in operations constitutive of the subject, 

or proces de subjectivation. Proces is usually (once again, there is slippage in 

their usage) translated as "proceeding," despite the occasional awkward-

ness this produces in English, in an attempt to preserve both associations: a 

process, or way of proceeding, and a legal proceeding, or trial. Processus is 

always "process."

 

SELF. Both Moi and Soi have usually been translated as "Self," with the 

French in brackets. Soi  is the self in its broadest sense, but as a neuter 

third-person pronoun implies an impersonality at the basis of the self. 

Moi is a

 

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