Gilles Deleuze and the vocabulary that outran its arguments
Rhizome, assemblage, deterritorialisation, lines of flight: the words are everywhere and the metaphysics that made them mean something is largely gone. Three decades after his death, a reckoning with what Deleuze actually argued, what his critics actually alleged, and why three pages he wrote in 1990 still describe 2026.
A rhizome: Zingiber officinale, from Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen (1887). The botanical figure Deleuze and Guattari took as a model of non-hierarchical thought · Wikimedia Commons
There is a kind of philosophical afterlife in which the vocabulary survives and the arguments do not, and Gilles Deleuze has it worse than almost anyone. "Rhizome" turns up in management consultancy. "Assemblage" has become a respectable term of art in archaeology and urban studies, where it does real work, and a synonym for "a lot of things happening at once" in cultural criticism, where it does none. "Lines of flight" is now a compliment you pay to anything you approve of.
Some of this is not the borrowers' fault. Deleuze wrote hard books, several of them hard on purpose, and the two that made his name abroad were written with a collaborator whose prose resisted editing even in French. The words got loose; the machinery stayed behind.
He was born in Paris on 18 January 1925 and died there on 4 November 1995. He passed the agrégation in 1948, taught in lycées and provincial faculties for two decades, and from 1969 until his retirement in 1987 taught at Vincennes, the experimental university founded after May 1968. What follows tries to put the arguments back underneath the words.
Difference comes first, and identity is what it leaves behind#
Difference and Repetition (Presses Universitaires de France, 1968) was Deleuze's principal doctoral thesis and remains the book everything rests on. Its claim is a reversal, easy to state and hard to hold on to.
On the standard account, difference is a relation between two things that each already have an identity: there is x, there is y, and then we observe that x differs from y. Aristotle's specific difference works this way, dividing a genus already given. The machinery of what Deleuze calls representation keeps difference respectable by four constraints — identity in the concept, analogy in judgement, opposition between predicates, resemblance in perception — and difference may appear only where one of those has already fixed what is being compared.
Deleuze inverts the dependence, so that difference comes first. Identity is real, but it is a product: what a process of differentiation deposits when it settles, the way a sandbar is what a current deposits. The line announcing this in his second chapter is flat and unglamorous, which is unusual for him:
That identity not be first, that it exist as a principle but as a second principle.
That is page 41 in Paul Patton's translation; the word "second" does everything.
Three things follow, and the first two get lost most often. The question "what is this?" stops being fundamental, since every answer describes a stabilisation rather than an essence; the questions become how, under what conditions, and for how long. Then — and this is the part popular accounts wreck — Deleuze is not celebrating flux. Undifferentiated flow would be as useless to him as fixed essence, because flow explains nothing. He builds an apparatus instead: virtual Ideas with a differential structure, fully real but not yet determined; intensive processes that mediate; and actualisation, in which the virtual produces something that does not resemble it. The virtual is not the possible waiting its turn. The possible is modelled on the real and adds nothing; the virtual is real already and has to be worked out.
Richard Rorty asked philosophy to stop pretending it could underwrite science, morals and politics, and to settle instead for making cruelty harder to ignore. Thirty years on, with the strongman passage from Achieving Our Country quoted in every election, the question is whether his liberal ironist can still hold the line.
Third, the negative goes. For Hegel, difference finds its truth in contradiction, and the dialectic runs on the energy of the negative. Deleuze's charge is that contradiction is difference already flattened into a shape identity can digest. Whether he manages without negation is a live question, and his chapter one is more assertion than demonstration.
The other pillar is univocity, taken from Duns Scotus by way of Spinoza: being is said in a single sense of everything that is, and what it is said of, univocally, is difference. Which is why Deleuze thought of himself as a metaphysician rather than a postmodernist. He had no interest in the end of grand narratives; he was building one.
He read other philosophers by taking them from behind#
Before any of that came the monographs: Hume in 1953, Nietzsche in 1962, Kant in 1963, Bergson in 1966, Spinoza in 1968. Deleuze's own account of them is less polite. Writing in 1973 to Michel Cressole, in a letter later collected in Negotiations, he described how he had coped with the weight of his discipline:
to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous.
The quotation is usually deployed as evidence that Deleuze read badly on principle. It says the opposite. The offspring has to be the author's own — everything attributed to him must actually be in the text — and it has to be monstrous, because a reading that merely repeats its source has produced nothing. The 1963 Kant book is the test: Deleuze had little sympathy for Kant, yet the book is a dry and scrupulous account of how the critical system works, its monstrosity structural, not textual.
Spinoza is the pivot. Spinoza et le problème de l'expression (Minuit, 1968), the complementary thesis submitted alongside Difference and Repetition, is where the later apparatus gets assembled under cover of commentary. Expression gives Deleuze a relation that is neither emanation from above nor causation from outside: substance expresses itself in attributes, attributes in modes, nothing lost or added in the passage. Immanence with no remainder, univocity with a working model, and an ethics of capacity, not obligation, organised around a question he never stopped repeating — what can a body do? Nobody knows in advance, which is the point.
Félix Guattari was a militant and a psychoanalyst, trained in Lacan's orbit and working at the La Borde clinic, where the institution itself was treated as part of the therapy. They met in 1969.
L'Anti-Œdipe (Minuit, 1972; English translation 1977 by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen Lane) attacks psychoanalysis at the level of its founding scene. The Freudian claim, as Deleuze and Guattari present it, is that the material of the unconscious is the family: child, mother, father, and the drama between them. Their counter-claim is that desire produces rather than lacks — it makes connections and produces the real — and that it invests the social field directly. What you want is not a displaced version of what you wanted from your mother; it is bound up with money, work, geography, machinery and states. Oedipus is thus an apparatus for shrinking a political field into a domestic one, and the body without organs, taken from Antonin Artaud, names the surface on which production registers before organisation is imposed.
Michel Foucault's preface to the English edition, written in 1977, proposed that the book might be titled Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life, and described it as "a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time". Fascism here means the appetite for domination that lives inside the people who oppose the regimes.
Mille plateaux (Minuit, 1980; translated by Brian Massumi in 1987) supplies most of the vocabulary now in circulation. The rhizome is set against the tree: a tree has a root, a trunk and a branching hierarchy, so that any two points connect only through a higher node, while a rhizome — ginger, couch grass, iris — joins any point to any other, survives being cut, and offers no centre to capture. The plateaus are borrowed from Gregory Bateson, who used the term for "a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities", and the book invites you to read them in any order but the last.
Two candid things need saying. Much of the difficulty in these books is unproductive: passages of real analytic precision sit beside passages of rhetorical performance, with no reliable signal to tell them apart. And they are period documents, written after May 1968 by two men arguing with the French Communist Party, with Lacan's institutional authority, and with a psychoanalytic establishment that held a position in France it never held in Britain or America. The account of how capitalism organises what people want has aged extremely well. The enthusiasm for schizophrenia as a figure of liberation has not.
One accident of translation shaped everything. English readers met Deleuze backwards: Anti-Oedipus in 1977, A Thousand Plateaus in 1987, Difference and Repetition only in 1994, twenty-six years after publication. The rhetorical books came first and the metaphysics last, which is much of why the vocabulary travelled without its arguments.
The essay that has done the most work is the shortest. "Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle" appeared in the first issue of L'autre journal in May 1990; the English translation ran in October 59 (Winter 1992), pages 3 to 7, reprinted in Negotiations in 1995.
Deleuze starts from Foucault's disciplinary societies, which organised people by moving them through a series of enclosures — family, school, barracks, factory, sometimes hospital or prison — each beginning again from zero. His claim is that those enclosures are failing. "We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure — prison, hospital, factory, school, family," he writes, and what replaces them is a different physics of power:
Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other.
For three pages written before the public web, the consequences he draws are startlingly specific. The factory gathered workers into a single body; the corporation, he says, is "a spirit, a gas", running on salary modulation, contests and perpetual internal competition. The examination gives way to continuous assessment and schooling to perpetual training, because control never lets go. The disciplinary subject was identified by a signature, marking the individual, and a number, marking his place in the mass. In control societies "what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password." And what passwords address is not a population of persons: "Individuals have become 'dividuals,' and masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks'." He reports a scenario of Guattari's: a city where an electronic card raises the barriers and a computer records where each person is, and whether the movement was permitted. "Man is no longer man enclosed," the essay says, "but man in debt."
The dividual is the term that has done the most work since, because it names what a recommendation system or an advertising exchange actually handles. Such a system does not model you. It holds a set of scored attributes, any of which can be detached from you and recombined with attributes belonging to other people, and what it optimises against is the recombination, not you. Credit scoring works this way, and so does algorithmic management.
Be exact about what the essay is. It predicts nothing and offers no evidence; Deleuze was generalising from what was visible in France in 1990 — flexible contracts, consumer credit, corporate culture — and from Guattari's speculations. The record has also embarrassed one part of it. The enclosures did not dissolve: prison populations in the United States and Britain rose steeply through the very decades in which control was supposed to be displacing confinement, and the poorest people now live under both regimes at once. Byung-Chul Han presses a different objection, that power today works by enticement more than constraint, so that the subject exploits itself voluntarily.
The cinema books are metaphysics with a projector#
Cinéma 1. L'image-mouvement (1983) and Cinéma 2. L'image-temps (1985) are usually shelved as film theory, though Deleuze insisted they were a taxonomy of images and signs, not a history of the cinema. The movement-image is the logic of classical narrative film: perception leads to affect leads to action, time inferred from what moves. The time-image appears after 1945, in Italian neorealism and then the New Wave, in Ozu and in Welles: characters who can no longer act on what they see, situations that go nowhere, time showing itself directly instead of being read off a chain of movements. The engine underneath is Bergson's Matter and Memory. These are books about duration that take their examples from film.
Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (1981) does the same for painting: Bacon isolates the figure from narrative so that the canvas acts on the nervous system and not the understanding. Whether Bacon would have recognised the account is not the relevant question. This is philosophy conducted through art rather than about it, a defensible practice and a licence many have abused since.
The scientific vocabulary. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Impostures intellectuelles (Odile Jacob, 1997), published in English as Intellectual Impostures and in America as Fashionable Nonsense, gives its ninth chapter to Deleuze and Guattari. The allegation is that they import mathematical and physical terms without regard to their technical content. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze builds an argument on the differential calculus and the status of infinitesimals, questions Sokal and Bricmont say Cauchy settled in the early nineteenth century. In What is Philosophy? the pair define chaos "not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes", which the physicists say runs quantum field theory together with the behaviour of supercooled liquids and slides between metaphorical and technical senses without warning. Their method is mostly quotation at length; they expected the passages to convict themselves.
The defence is better than the reputation of these disputes suggests. Val Dusek, reviewing the book, showed that the ellipses in the calculus passages remove Deleuze's references to Maimon, Wronski and Albert Lautman, so that a reading situated in a real tradition of philosophy of mathematics appears as free association; and that Abraham Robinson's non-standard analysis, developed in the 1960s, gives rigorous sense to infinitesimals, which makes "Cauchy settled it" too quick. Dusek's verdict is measured: "Deleuze is no mathematical virtuoso, but his treatment... is far more detailed, informed and serious than Sokal and Bricmont let on." The physicists, for their part, restricted their claim to the use of science and disclaimed any judgement of the philosophy.
The passwords. A more damaging objection is that the concepts are never defined, only used, so no procedure exists by which anyone could be shown to have got one wrong. A reader can write "assemblage" and commit to nothing; the vocabulary then works as a credential, and the signalling is the content. Deleuze's reply is a programme, stated in Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (1991): philosophy creates concepts, and a concept is judged by what it lets you do, not by correspondence to anything. That is a genuine standard, and it has produced results in fields from geography to media theory. It is also loose enough to account for a great quantity of unfalsifiable prose written in his name.
The politics, from both directions. One objection holds that a vocabulary built around escape — lines of flight, nomadism, becoming-imperceptible — flatters a politics that never has to win. Exodus drafts no legislation and keeps no hospital open. The opposite objection comes from the accelerationists. Anti-Oedipus urges that the answer is "not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to 'accelerate the process', as Nietzsche put it", and Nick Land took this, from the 1990s onwards, as an endorsement of capital's own dissolving power. That is a plausible reading of the sentence and a poor reading of the book: Deleuze and Guattari distinguished relative from absolute deterritorialisation, and were explicit that capitalism dissolves with one hand while re-fixing identities with the other. But the distinction is easier to state than to apply, and after four decades in which industries, unions, livelihoods and attention spans have been dissolved on schedule, the enthusiasm in those books is hard to read without flinching.
Deleuze had been ill for most of his adult life. Tuberculosis cost him a lung around 1968, and by the early 1990s writing was difficult and oxygen constant. On 4 November 1995 he threw himself from the window of his Paris flat. The last thing he published was a short essay called "Immanence: A Life".
The words will keep circulating whether or not anyone reads the books; they are too useful as ornament. The argument for reading them is narrower. Every one of those terms was built to do a specific job: to describe how a thing that looks settled is being held in place, and what it would take for it to stop being held. That is a question with teeth, and it is not asked by the sentence "the assemblage is rhizomatic".
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