Deleuze & Guattari’s
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia
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C O N T E N T S : (1) Brief Biographic Sketches (2) Textual Overview & Analysis of Thousand Plateaus |
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(1) Brief Biographic Sketches
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On Gilles Deleuze (Paris, 1925-1995): Sorbonne educated contemporary French postmodernist philosopher who taught at Paris VII (1969-87) and was known for innovative (infamous) collaborative (with Félix Guattari) two-volume ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ project of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (both were politically active and close friends of Michel Foucault, these works were said to be seminal expressions of the France’s May 1968 political climate), as well as radical readings of canonical figures (Hume, Kant, Bergson, Leibniz, Spinoza, Nietzsche, etc.) and aesthetic topics & figures (two books on film, the painter Francis Bacon, Kafka, Marquis de Sade, Proust, etc.), all thoroughly cross-disciplinary (blends cosmological, geologic, cartographic registers with ethological, anthropological, psychological, with historical, mythological, socio-politico-economic, & aesthetic modes) and highlighted by ideas of intensity (immanence as ‘flux of existence’ that has no transcendental outside and is driven by forces), difference and repetition (as temporality without identity; analysis must proceed not by essence but by structural relations, yet rejection of Hegelian dialectic), and becoming (versus being; and command for creativity yet with demotion of human subject).
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On (Pierre-) Félix Guattari (Villeneuve-les-Sablons, 1930-1992): Lacanian psychoanalyst who practiced at the experimental La Borde clinic, broadly involved in radical militant politics, and equally radical innovative and intellectual collaborations with Gilles Deleuze—whom he met in the wake of May 1968 and collaborated with, beyond their two-volume ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ project, on 1975’s Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature and 1991’s What is Philosophy?. His other many volumes (innovative monographs, interviews, philosophical & clinical essays) merge unconventional and innovative psychoanalytic, political, and postmodern philosophical veins into “schizoanalysis” (a collaborative, experimental analysis building from a critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and tending toward, but unique from, Lacanian analysis) and perennially turn around the question of subjectivity, thinking it through force and flux, machine-like compositions and categories, valuative networks, and cartographic-able territories (for example: 1979’s The Machinic Unconscious to 1984’s Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry & Politics to 1989’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies to 1992’s Chaosmosis: an Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm).
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(2) Overview & Analysis ... Thousand Plateaus
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), isbn: 978-0816614028.
Textual Overview (?):
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1. Introduction: Rhizome
“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. … We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.” (3)
“The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. … We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.” (3)
- Why pay special attention to this opening? (Especially in light of the prefacing ‘Authors’ Note’ that explains the work is “composed not of chapters but of ‘plateaus’,” and that such “to a certain extent, … may be read independently of one another” (xx).)
- An “Introduction” is classically written by the book’s author(s) to more closely address the actual content within the book (versus a “preface’s” reflections upon the nature or genesis or goals of the book), yet, this Introduction bares interesting similarities to a Preface:
- This paragraph speaks (elliptically) of the authors, their prior project and current one, their influences; the following paragraph speaks on the nature of ‘a book.’
- It attunes our ear …
- From the Latin, “preface” conjoins prae-, before, and -factum/-fari, spoken or made, borrowed into the English through the Old French in the 14th c. when it mean ‘that opening part of sung devotions.’ Deleuze & Guattari’s Introduction begins with art by Sylvano Bussoti: “XIV piano piece for David Tudor 4.” Not suggesting this was an intentional demonstration or allusion to preface’s etymology, but nevertheless sparks a worthwhile wondering into the text’s musical affinities. (Cf., “Becoming-Music,” pp.299-309, in plateau 10: “1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible …”.)
- Specifically, suggesting subtly that we pay attention to names, to their names, to the pseudonyms they have given to everything near and far that they have herein put to use. In other words, read closely, read into and between lines, trace their allusions and hints. Pay attention.
- It attunes our ear …
- Anti-Oedipus:
- Deleuze & Guattari’s 1972 first volume on ‘capitalism & schizophrenia’, to which 1980’s A Thousand Plateaus is the second, exploring Freudian-Lacanian and critical notions of desire in hand with Marxist and critical notions of capitalism, the former’s rupturing into psychoses in and due the latter’s impact on and creation of societies.
- A pdf. copy: https://libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/#AntOed
- Deleuze & Guattari’s 1972 first volume on ‘capitalism & schizophrenia’, to which 1980’s A Thousand Plateaus is the second, exploring Freudian-Lacanian and critical notions of desire in hand with Marxist and critical notions of capitalism, the former’s rupturing into psychoses in and due the latter’s impact on and creation of societies.
- Pseudonyms: Consider what a pseudonym can reveal against its object’s anonymity.
- § Whether it is the medieval and especially Neoplatonist inclination--e.g., Pseudo-Dionysius as preeminent example of he who wrote the treatise Divine Names, yet withholds his own, to their general adoption, as remarked upon by the scholar McGinn: “Pseudonymity … indicates a belief that revelation lies in the distant past and is fixed in written texts, and it also implies that those who sought to identify themselves with the heroes of Israel’s past felt that they could claim an equally inspired authority for writings issued in the seer’s name” (Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, vol. 1, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 13)--(which hearkens connection to the Lacanian insight that: “The humanistic conception of mankind assumes that the subject exists from the beginning” (Juliet Mitchell’s Introduction I, collected in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: W.W. Norton and Pantheon Books, 1985), 4))--or Kierkegaard’s infamous many and varied adopted names for his philosophical works. Pseudo-Dionysius and Kierkegaard are purposeful examples; both demonstrate the importance of form’s interconnection to content (aesthetic attention, necessity of passion) and its dramatic implications for thinking as a transformative practice. Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: dialectical lyric is penned by Johannes de silentio—silence as theoretically incommensurate with being an author as is its content’s central paradox of religious language versus ethical language in use for what Abraham was willing to do. Seeing the interconnection of content and form is an invitation akin to how Pseudo-Dionysius’ mysticism transforms the epistemic yield (sensory apprehension and its rational categorization) into a spiritual exercise that discovers and cultivates character by building from beauty’s sensible perception to erotic desire’s generation to an ecstasy permitting divine reunion—his union of theory and practice communicates a call to reunion. In his person, the irony of an anonymous pseudonymous model gives way to reveal its repetition of his method of doing as being. The irony primed us for something incommensurate: anonymity frees us from reliance on the known and consequent bias to interpretation of meaning, while pseudonymity guides us by precisely by the known and biases, be it profoundly evoking symbolic meaning or mischievously invoking data of historical record or literary canon. But just as his epistemology is too his lived project, the differences between free and guided thought are compatible, in fact, necessarily compounded.
- § Whether it is the medieval and especially Neoplatonist inclination--e.g., Pseudo-Dionysius as preeminent example of he who wrote the treatise Divine Names, yet withholds his own, to their general adoption, as remarked upon by the scholar McGinn: “Pseudonymity … indicates a belief that revelation lies in the distant past and is fixed in written texts, and it also implies that those who sought to identify themselves with the heroes of Israel’s past felt that they could claim an equally inspired authority for writings issued in the seer’s name” (Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, vol. 1, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 13)--(which hearkens connection to the Lacanian insight that: “The humanistic conception of mankind assumes that the subject exists from the beginning” (Juliet Mitchell’s Introduction I, collected in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: W.W. Norton and Pantheon Books, 1985), 4))--or Kierkegaard’s infamous many and varied adopted names for his philosophical works. Pseudo-Dionysius and Kierkegaard are purposeful examples; both demonstrate the importance of form’s interconnection to content (aesthetic attention, necessity of passion) and its dramatic implications for thinking as a transformative practice. Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: dialectical lyric is penned by Johannes de silentio—silence as theoretically incommensurate with being an author as is its content’s central paradox of religious language versus ethical language in use for what Abraham was willing to do. Seeing the interconnection of content and form is an invitation akin to how Pseudo-Dionysius’ mysticism transforms the epistemic yield (sensory apprehension and its rational categorization) into a spiritual exercise that discovers and cultivates character by building from beauty’s sensible perception to erotic desire’s generation to an ecstasy permitting divine reunion—his union of theory and practice communicates a call to reunion. In his person, the irony of an anonymous pseudonymous model gives way to reveal its repetition of his method of doing as being. The irony primed us for something incommensurate: anonymity frees us from reliance on the known and consequent bias to interpretation of meaning, while pseudonymity guides us by precisely by the known and biases, be it profoundly evoking symbolic meaning or mischievously invoking data of historical record or literary canon. But just as his epistemology is too his lived project, the differences between free and guided thought are compatible, in fact, necessarily compounded.