Review

Francois Dosse Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, biographie croisee Paris: La Decouverte, 2007,643 pp.

The effect

No academic, intellectual, or dilettante coulddeny the ubiquity of the Deleuze–Guattarieffect, one that was not fully registered in theirown lifetimes, but only after their tragic anduntimely deaths. The effect, like so manyacademic fads and fictions, reproduces itselfthrough institutional and discursive deploy-ments. But there is some irony here. The creationof a Deleuze and Guattari industry betrays thespirit of two thinkers who were always suspi-cious of schools, gurus, and disciples, and wentto extraordinary lengths to resist all forms ofrecuperation. In recent years the effect hasreached a fever-pitch with the proliferation ofvarious introductions to Deleuze and Guattari,Understanding Deleuze and Guattari, Deleuzeand Guattari: a reader’s guide, as well as a seriesof critical volumes and detours (Deleuze andreligion, Deleuze and feminist theory,Deleuze andgeopolitics, Deleuze and Guattari for architectsand so on). They have also seemingly cut acrossthe political and the popular spectrum, beingcited by French slam artist Abd Al Malik (2009)and even synthesised with the political philoso-phy of Joseph de Maistre by the Catholic cyber-punk Maurice Dantec (2007).

We should, of course, remain suspicious ofcultural and intellectual industries; not simplyfor the misreadings and misappropriations thatthey inevitably give rise to but for the fabricationof a field where intellectuals must regularlydeploy a series of passwords to gain entry into

certain milieux that constitute themselves as theprivileged sites of the radical. And here, in an agewhere one no longer practices philosophy, butdoes theory, access is gained through the regulardeployment of terms such as deterritorialisation,desiring machine, rhizome, and line of flight.At stake is therefore the question of how atheoretical doxa is established and the means bywhich intellectual history mutates and nor-malises all that claims radical status.

Francois Dosse’s biography of Deleuze andGuattari is less a biography than a genealogy,and a poetic one, of the development of nomadthought and the Deleuzo–Guattarian warmachine against all that segments, calcifies andrenders static; the morbid obsession with death,the creation of a subject defined by finitude andlack, the desire for abolition, the desire for one’sown repression and the transcendent. Butwhereas the epistemological, ontological, andpolitical ruptures that Deleuze and Guattariengineered in their lifetimes were certainlyshocks to the system, it is increasingly difficultto identify their thought as revolutionary orinsurgent in our current moment and, indeed,the last bastion of Deleuzianism has shown itselfto be the domain of high theory and the historyof philosophy. But the lessons that they taughtappear to have been internalised and the ethicsof schizo non-compliance that they tirelesslyadvocated seem natural to both the quotidianand the capitalist axiomatic itself. Is the post-modern not the purest form of successful schizo-phrenia? Although Dosse does not explicitly

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engage these issues, his biography is undoubt-edly an attempt to re-radicalise Deleuze andGuattari by mapping the rapport between theirpolitics and a complex cultural moment. Theepicentre of Deleuze and Guattari’s moment canunarguably be located in the events ofMay 1968,which, along with l’ apres mai, continue to besites of contestation where debates concerningthe legacy and meaning of the events are asubiquitous as Deleuze and Guattari themselves.Dosse’s book was certainly composed with aneye to these debates and, in reading these pages,one is asked to take sides, deciding whetherMay1968 and its philosophical ambassadors, GillesDeleuze and Felix Guattari, should be forgottenas anomalies of a bygone age whose radicalismsimply faded into the stupor of the bourgeois orwhether, as they themselves did, one shouldreappraise May 1968 as the beginning of a newpolitical process, the reigniting of a revolution-ary cycle.

ToDosse’s credit, he not only manages to tellthe story of this complex and turbulent epoch andits aftermath, but does so through recounting theindividual and collective journeys of two idiosyn-cratic and, indeed, equally complex thinkers who,contrary to the codes of academic life, embarkedupon the most experimental of collaborations. Inthis regard, Dosse’s biography confounds andproblematises our very understanding of intellec-tual biography and our very desire to place thoughtin context.Dosse’s narrative does not simply refor-tify their robust theoretical arsenal (although,the book does at times read like another hagio-graphic introduction to Deleuze and Guattari),but rather presents their oeuvre as that of twooften fragile figures bound by their irreverence,playfulness, conviction and deep friendship.

One cannot help being struck by a series ofcontrasts and contradictions that in fact demys-tify the Deleuze–Guattari mythos. These philo-sophers of desire and affirmation often foundthemselves in poor health and miserablydepressed – the prophets of the Dionysianschizo-overman were prone to frailty, anxietyand feelings of finitude. Philosophy was notsimply a toolbox but a therapeutic site, a line offlight itself. And, as a therapeutic site, theiroeuvre, much like the classical psychoanalyticparadigms that they rejected, remains a space ofwork, a challenge to be fulfilled and a world-view and ethics to be learned and practiced.

But the question remains whether latecapitalism has already accomplished all of thisand become more Deleuzo–Guattarian thanDeleuze and Guattari or whether it offers onlya perverted simulacrum of a Deleuzo–Guattar-ianism far removed from the source. In thisrespect, the occasion of Dosse’s biographyfunctions also as an occasion to rethink Deleu-zo–Guattarianism in the twenty-first century.

The volume avoids the pitfalls and clichesof ‘‘X: A Life,’’ in so far as it examines therelations between three figures: Gilles Deleuze,Felix Guattari and the entity that was theircollaborative enterprise; what Dosse calls theThird Man. Hence, it is also a study of asymbiosis and a writing machine that workedwith two hands. The joint oeuvre of GillesDeleuze and Guattari remains, even today, apuzzle. Who wrote what? Collaborations arerare in the world of theory and even rarer arethose that are formed, not through institutionalcamaraderie but through the mixture of chanceand the effervescence of collective upheaval. TheThird Man was a dynamism and one in which acertain generational unconscious explodedforth, worrying little about super-ego bound-aries, and becoming a machinic network ofinfinite conjunction, disjunction, breaks andflows. Yet, underneath the mystifications ofmachinic infinity that are readily invoked whenspeaking about their collaboration, Dosse’svolume reminds the reader that duets not onlyhave boundaries but are also about two peopleguided by their own self-interest. The ThirdManwas often beleaguered, unsure of his owncapacities and, at times, both over-zealous andexhausted. In confronting a hybrid entity,Dosse’s biography weaves between Deleuzeand Guattari’s individual trajectories and theirmutation into the Third Man, problematisingdialectically the degree to which the hybrid was areal synthesis or a third term that sought tosurpass its constituent parts.

Vectors of death: origins of aphilosophy of life

While Deleuze and Guattari both retained theirrhetorical, stylistic and personal singularity, theosmosis that crystallised between the rabid

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militant psychiatrist and the tempered and coolphilosopher was not simply a result of sharedintellectual passions but also of larger historicalcircumstances. Guattari, born in 1930, andDeleuze, born in 1925, both came of age duringthe Second World War and registered thetrauma of the Occupation and the perversepolitics of their epoch. But while the same couldbe said for their entire generation, this collectivewound was further exacerbated by very earlyand very personal encounters with death,scarcity, finitude and lack, all that the ThirdMan would later unflinchingly combat. Dosserecounts how the 9-year old Guattari witnessedat first hand the accidental death of his grand-father in 1939. A

‘‘brutal contact with death’’, a trauma that would take

years to confront, this early episode was a seism and

Guattari ‘‘responded with a severe crisis of anxiety, a sharp

sense of finitude, of the fatuity of people and the futility of

things (Dosse 2007, pp.36–37).

The anxiety of finitude would haunt Guattari foryears to come, engendering not only the desire toescape the real and philosophic reproduction ofdeath but also the desire for camaraderie andfraternity; plenum against lack. For Guattari,the abreaction of the trauma would take theform of intense political activity and writing. Hequickly fell under the spell of Sartre and hence,like many of his generation, was unable toclearly demarcate where philosophy ended andpolitics began. The young Guattari quicklytransformed himself into a professional militantand became a dynamic figure of the radical left.But as Dosse explains, Guattari’s moral struc-ture still remained fixed on the paternal imagoes(Dosse 2007, p.41). The first of his many lines offlight took the form of an early interest inLacanianism and the work of the young institu-tional psychiatrist, Jean Oury.

While Dosse casts Guattari as a petitbourgeois searching for a home, one grapplingwith the anxiety of death and the grip ofOedipus, ultimately to be rescued by politicalengagement and initiation into the world ofexperimental psychiatry, Deleuze’s social uni-verse, albeit distant from that of the youngGuattari, moved in parallel to it. But it was alsoone tainted by the war and an early encounterwith death. Gilles’ older brother, Georges, a

member of the Resistance was arrested by theGermans and died en route to a concentrationcamp. The martyred brother would, as Dossewrites, ‘‘disappear from the horizon’’, leaving notrace on Deleuze (Dosse 2007, p.112). But theDeleuze family, already besieged by the legacy ofthe crisis of civilisation that was the 1930s,would transform the older brother into amartyred hero, instilling something of a complexin the young Gilles who, early on, felt himself tobe mediocre. But the trace did linger in therecesses of Deleuze’s psyche and he soonconstructed a heroic vitalist philosophy repletewith a series of sur-hommes.

AlthoughDosse only subtextually describesthe nexus of trauma, death and repressivebourgeois life, it is evident that the Deleuzo–Guattarian affirmation of the forces of life, theaffirmation of desire as plenum unburdened by asuper-ego or any logic of lack, emerge asresponses to this sombre dispositif. Death is theoutside ofDeleuze andGuattari’s corpus, a tracethat is vehemently disavowed, registered andfiercely repudiated. Against the trauma of thewar and the trauma of finitude, both went on toerect overdetermined philosophical, politicaland psychoanalytic edifices that remain para-naoically on guard against the shadow offinitude that constantly haunted these struc-tures, be it in the form of the dialectic, thestructural, the law, authority or death.

Blois: the politics of madness

During the late 1950s in the French departmentof Loir-et-Cher, a psychiatric movement wasborn: the Clinique de La Borde (founded by JeanOury in 1953) and its sister clinic the Clinique deLa Chesnaie (founded by Claude Jeangirard in1956), became the veritable loci of Frenchinstitutional psychiatry and a site of the alter-native and the rather self-consciously radical.Dosse offers a vivid tableau of this newpsychiatric revolution and its place in theliberatory politics that would surge in the1960s. Guattari found himself in the midst of itall and, according to Dosse, was equally elatedand anguished by his own voyage into radicalpsychiatry.

Experiments in autogestion and polyva-lence, these chateaux were dynamic structures

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where hierarchical relations between patients(called fonctionnaires), doctors and staff wouldbe overcome through an elaborate system ofcollective work and the generation of a collectiveethos or group desire. On the level of purepractice the great intervention of institutionalpsychiatry lay in the structure and technique ofla grille: originally created at La Chesnaie andlater exported to La Borde, la grille was a systemof circulation that insured that interns, doctorsand fonctionnaires all regularly found themselvesengaged in the same tasks, rotating continuallyfrom the kitchen to cleaning duties to the atelierde l’art. La grille insured a permanent trajectoryof deterritorialisation for all involved in theclinical enterprise and, moreover, affirmed thatthe clinic was indeed everywhere and everyone,in one way or another, was a patient. Dosse alsoreminds us that the enterprise was not simplypsychiatric but also political. La Borde and LaChesnaie were anti-bureaucratic and utopian-communist interzones where manual labour andintellectual labour were accorded the samestatus, where communitarian desire eclipsedindividual will and, above all, where space, time,institutional life and the super-ego were allrendered permeable (Dosse 2007, p.59). As earlyas the 1950s the pragmatic-machinic was alreadytriumphing over structure.

Guattari joined La Borde in 1955, whilesimultaneously continuing militant politicalactivities and following the seminar of JacquesLacan. In the synthesis of Guattari’s politicalpreoccupations and his entrance into the worldof psychosis one apprehends the genesis of thediscourse of the politics of madness, which by1968 would assume a dominant function amongradical intellectuals and in the burgeoningcounterculture. Dosse describes how, withGuattari’s arrival, a flock of young militantsbegan regularly appearing at La Borde and howthe spectacle of madness was quickly trans-formed into an occasion for political theory:psychosis and schizophrenia were no longersimple maladies but components of a largerintellectual adventure that also reflected on thenature of poetry and language (Dosse 2007,p.66). Madness was transformed into a way ofspeaking about negativity, the marginalised, theminor and the aleatory. Madness was alsorevolutionary in so far as psychotics oftendisplay weak super-ego functioning, which was

understood, in this context, as a subversivedisregard for the law, structure and Oedipus. Bythe mid-1960s institutional psychiatry and anti-psychiatry would be christened as new spaces ofpolitical insurgency. It was of little importancewhether the militant had ever seen a schizo-phrenic. Deleuze, in fact, had little patience withthe ‘‘mad’’ (Dosse 2007, p.19). What wasimportant was the establishment of an outside,one that was animated by both practicalquestions of the margins and perverse romanticvisions of madness as Rousseauian paradise.Psychosis was suddenly cool and, tired of the lawand the world as it was, many wanted to gomad.

Furthermore, although the mythic age ofMay 1968’s groupuscles had yet to arrive, itsseeds had been planted. The answer to anyinstitutional dilemma or political crisis wasnaturally the creation of a group. Guattari hadalready begun using the clinic as a ground toexplore the vectors of group desire and effec-tively replaced the classical notion of transfer-ence with that of the transversality of the group.The latter, a horizontal and anti-hierarchaldynamic, understood the group not as a simplesocial aggregate but as a plane of creation, apolitical structure, a site of non-subjugation and,above all, a reservoir of desire. Collective lifewas, above all, aimed at the scouring oftranscendental structures and the bureaucratic,administrative, or fascistic will to structure orabolish. But creating the non-subjugated sub-ject-group also required the dissolution, orfluidisation, of the super-ego.

In 2001 I travelled to Blois to explore therapport between schizoanalysis and its so-calledpractice on the ground and, as a former intern atLa Chesnaie, I can attest to the radical transfor-mative effects of such intense group life and theintimacy shared with the mad. However, for allof its liberating effects, the melting of super-egoboundaries can also be drastically destabilisingand disorienting, producing a series of micro-revolutions but also opening the psychic ports tovarious forms of terror. Deterritorialisation is anart to master; the elimination of all codes canproduce a revolutionary subjectivity or lead onestraight to a crack-up. In addition, even themostexperienced and armoured of psychiatrists nevertranscends the tragic dimensions of collective lifewith the mad, one replete with violence, despair,and real pain.

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Dosse glosses over these dimensions of theinstitutional psychiatric adventure, just as Guat-tari’s own oeuvre was forever uncomfortablewith these questions. But Dosse does shed lighton how the politics of transversality found itselfconjoined with the currents of sexual liberationof the 1960s and how, for Guattari, theinjunction to dismantle Oedipus and the familialbecame its own burden and one that certainlypainfully destabilised his own family (Dosse2007, p.87). While Guattari interrogated therapport between the body, subjectivity and thenormative constructs of mental health, Deleuzehimself was occupied with similar questions butin a wholly different context. While he may havehad little patience for the mad, Deleuze’sphilosophy was also one that telescoped thequestion of good health.

Health and immanence

For Deleuze it is only the philosopher in illhealth who truly apprehends the forces of lifeand health was not only a philosophic trope forhim but also a very personal one. Sickness is, inits own way, a precondition for the philoso-pher’s own diagnoses of his times, quickeningthe depth of the gaze and the vibrancy of thedatum. Deleuze himself was forever plagued byasthma, respiratory problems and bouts offatigue and frailty (Dosse 2007, p.124) and, forthe nomad thinker who hated travelling, flightwas a sedentary enterprise, an unblocking ofthought and a question of, as Elie During hasnoted, the speed of thought (During 1999). But,unlike Michelet’s migraines, which were theheadaches of history, or Nietzsche’s dyspepsia,which was the reflux of the rising herd, Deleuze’srespiratory troubles engendered the search for atheoretical lung, one that could break free ofmetaphysical suffocation and dialectical wheez-ing and let a little air into the history of closedphilosophical systems. In fact, immediately afterdefending his thesis, Deleuze had one of his ownlungs removed (Dosse 2007, p.218). And whathad always suffocated Deleuze was the Hegeliandialectic and dialectics tout court.

In 1967, following a decisive rupture withthe celebrated French Hegelian Jean Hyppolite,Deleuze liberated himself from the dialectic andall ontology that moved by way of contradiction

and negativity. At issue was also the question ofontology and health and, as Dosse remarks, forDeleuze it was a question of replacing theHyppolitean reading of Hegel, which attemptedto decentre ontology towards being, by anontology carried entirely towards Life (Dosse2007, p.148). Life is thus not a phenomenonwrapped in the play of contradiction, negativityand sublation, but rather, according to Deleuze,the movement of infinite difference withoutcontradiction. Although the ontology of differ-ence would be the primary motor of his thesis,Difference and repetition (1969) the quest forLife, a quest that sought to definitively vanquishthe ghosts of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger andso many sick philosophers turned to death,would be themotor of his enterprise. Against thedialectic, against Hegel and against the forces ofreactivity, Deleuze would be responsible for re-introducing the subterranean tradition of vitalistphilosophy into modern thought; the triad ofNietzsche, Bergson and Spinoza would form thewar machine that would pitilessly attack the lastvestiges of metaphysics that instilled lack anddivided the world between this one and another.

Life, in other words, was pure immanence,responsible only to itself, sufficient in and ofitself and wholly sovereign, creative and infinite.In opposing Life to Being, Deleuze was alsoopposing health and vitality to interminableillness and ressentiment; he was opposing thejoyousness of immanence to the anxiety of thetranscendent. For Deleuze, philosophy was thesite of both combat and creation, comprising thepolemical function and the creationist function;the philosopher must know what he is combat-ing and construct new concepts to correct theerrors of past thinkers (Dosse 2007, p.139).Deleuze himself was combating ill health andwould fabricate a vast array of concepts thatnegated the negation and dispel with thedialectic all together, concepts that trampledover the slightest presence of sickness wherethere the priest, the tyrant or the depressivealways reigned. Hence, against Lacan, Hegeland Wittgenstein, Deleuze mobilised Nietzschethe immoralist, Bergson the virtual futurist andSpinoza, the joyous heretic.

With Nietszche et la philosophie (1962), henot only announced Nietzsche’s triumph overMarx but also announced the arrival of thesecond wave of French Left Nietzscheanism that

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continues to be a central point of reference eventoday (see, among others, Michel Onfray 2006and Aymeric Monville 2007). In Nietzsche,Deleuze found the prophet of affirmation, theanti-Hegelian who liberated and obeyed only theforces of life.’’As Dosse notes, Deluze’s readingof Nietzsche created an overmanwhowas neithertotalitarian nor brutal; he was a figure ofirresponsibility and one who could transformthe negation into an affirmation and the affirma-tion into that towards which all humanity shouldtend (Dosse 2007, p.161). With this particularreturn of Nietzsche, Deleuze, although remaininga combative thinker, abandoned the classicaltradition of critique aswell the Platonic search foressences. In a radical gesture for its time, it is inthis 1962 volume and its method that the nowstandard dismissals of identity, essence, repre-sentation, spirit and authenticity find one of theirmost powerful points of origin.

In Bergson and Spinoza Deleuze would findother kindred spirits who were on the side of life.Deleuzian immanence established Spinozansubstance as its ground, Bergsonian durationas its temporal dimension and Nietszcheanvitalism as its corporal principle and eachdimension would correspond to the conceptualdispositfs of substance/conatus, elan/duration,the will to power and the active. Ensconced in alarger matrix of affirmation, practice andpragmatism, philosophy would become a wayof life. It was also a way of life that surpassed theafflictions of the body by transposing them on tothe extensions of the mind.

Similarly, Deleuze naturally gravitatedtowards the Spinozan, where one finds the keyconcept of ontological participation. The bodyand the mind here both participate in being inautonomous and equal ways. Once again, thisproposition follows directly from the principle ofunivocity: ‘‘Corporeality and thought are equalexpressions of being, said in the same voice’’(Hardt 1993, p.81). The univocity or monism ofsubstance does not negate or contradict. Andfollowing from such amonism and the parallelismthat it provokes, ontological univocity, existenceand the will to life are recast as superior toepistemological force and the will to thought.

Deleuze’s journey and that of Guattari werethus only superficially unique; both sought toovercome structure and bring difference and themultiple to triumph over the homogenous and

the totalising. Both were suspicious of statethought, transcendence, metaphysics and codes.Both were impatient to break with the history ofphilosophy and the history of psychoanalysis.They were eager to create a new liberatoryparadigm that privileged Life. As Dosse there-fore carefully explains, the groundwork for thecreation of the Third Man was already presentbefore the encounter between the philosopherand the psychiatrist.

The encounter or the writingmachine

In the spring of 1968 in Paris, workers, students,poets and activists of various stripes engaged incollective yet highly self-interested revolt againstthe state, capitalism, the French academicsystem, the factory and modernity at large and,in the process, brought France to a standstill inwhat is now remembered as alternately thelargest general strike in the western world andthe last classical revolution. The climax of theevents occurred inMaywhere the government ofCharles de Gaulle came close to the brink oftotal collapse. However, it should also be notedthat what transpired in Paris during the monthof May 1968 was not quite a revolution but astreet theatre that performed a ‘‘becoming-revolutionary’’ through a cult of speech andthe play of metaphors. Graffiti and guerillatactics, barricades and wildcat strikes, a fight forpsychic liberation and a fight for a utopian socialorder – worker, student, Maoist, Trotskyist,anarchist and situationist together engaged inexperiments in surrealist collective self-manage-ment. The political had been redefined andrediscovered in a new form, a form, however,which no longer privileged direct action or themythologisation of the proletariat. The politicalthat burst forth fromMay 1968 was a politics ofdesire, a politics of the psyche and moreimportantly, as Felix Guattari claimed,

a politics of the molecular which constituted a dimension of

interrogation of the relationships between subjectivity, the

body, time, work, sexuality and the problems of daily life.

(Stivale and Guattari 1995, pp.3–4)

May 1968 thus produced and attempted tonaturalise a psychoanalytic ideology that took

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hold of intellectuals, students and ordinarypeople as well, through a series of misreadings,misrecognitions and through the distortions thatemerge from the smoke and mirrors of popphilosophy. Of all the intellectual currents thattraversed the streets and walls of Paris in 1968,Lacan’s ‘‘French Freud’’ and an anti-psychiatricReichianism were the most powerfully inscribed(often unknowingly) in the discourse of theyoung revolutionaries. For the first time in thehistory of psychoanalysis it appeared as thougha stable bridge had been constructed between theseemingly disparate universes of politics and thepsychoanalytic construction of subjectivity.May 1968, much like the aspirations of psycho-analysis, was a liberating ritual or exploration ofthe self, intent on returning the modern subjectback to a domain of unmediated desire, onewhich the students simultaneously likened to thepre-symbolic of Lacan, the Eden of Rousseauand the pre-Oedipal of Marcuse. According toElisabeth Roudinesco

for the French history of psychoanalysis, the barricades of

May played the role of the advent of the talkies onto the

great Hollywood scene, Sunset Boulevard. (Roudinesco

1990, p.481)

As the events burst forth Dosse explains howthey seeped into the clinics of Blois as well andhow a series of now classic questions came to beasked by both patients and interns:

Is madness a political phenomenon?Why psychiatry?What

are the rights of the sick, their powers? To heal, what does

this mean? (Dosse 2007, p.215).

The activists at the barricades also understoodthemselves to be sick, sick with culture, sick withthe bourgeois, sick with civilisation and sick withstructuralism. The valences of these seeminglypolitico-psychiatric questions extended farbeyond the confines of the clinic. As forGuattari, he was swept into the fervour of theevents, occupying the Odeon Theatre withamong others, Jean-Jacques Lebel, DanielCohn-Bendit, and Julien Beck), where theprinciples of the revolution would be debatedand dramatised (Dosse 2007, pp.211–212).Guattari and his colleagues would furthermorematerially aid the workers on strike, bringing toParis produce from Loir-et-Cher. However, as

Dosse points out, upon entering an automobilefactory, some of the Hispanic workers violentlyasked Guattari and his group, ‘‘what the fuckare you doing here?’’ (Dosse 2007, p.213). Thesethree moments, nonetheless, establish the nodalpoints of Guattari’s intellectual and politicalenterprise: the politicisation/problematisationof madness and its extension into the universeof normal politics, a sustained reflection on thenature of revolutionary activity and revolution-ary subjectivity and a break with classicalMarxist politics in favour of a micro-politicalpost-Marxism that inaugurated what many anorthodox Marxist would disparagingly call thecultural turn.

Deleuze, on the contrary, was no militant.During May 1968, he was rather, according toDosse, ‘‘listening to 68’’. At the University ofLyon, he was however one of the few professorsto publicly declare his support for the studentswho were protesting (Dosse 2007, p.216).Deleuze’s priority in 1968 was the completionof his thesis, which he hoped to defend in theautumn. This, too, was delayed by respiratorycomplications, as a result of which Deleuze washospitalised and forced to sit out the tumult ofMay 1968. Nonetheless, it was this event thatestablished the common point of reference forboth Deleuze and Guattari, an event whichDosse, citing de Certeau, rightly calls la ruptureinstauartrice and one with repercussions. Thequestion, as always for Deleuze and Guattari,was one of effects, not causes.

It is against this backdrop that the writingmachine, the Third Man, was built. We learnthat the catalyst of the encounter was a certainDoctor Jean-Pierre Muyard, who was bothinvolved in institutional psychiatric circles anda friend of Deleuze. Questions of schizophreniaand psychosis always remained on the horizonof Deleuze’s thought and, on some level,Deleuze understood that the ontology of differ-ence had necessarily to interrogate the shiftingtectonics of the multiple that constituted theworld beyond normal neurosis. Muyardarranged a meeting between the psychiatristand the philosopher in 1969 where the con-ceptual apparatus of Difference and repetitionand the Logic of sense coalesced perfectly withGuattari’s machinic transversality and the bur-geoning autonomous zone of La Borde. If May1968 was the rupture that spiritually bound the

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two figures, Lacan was their shared interlocutor.May 1968 thrust Lacanianism into the centre ofintellectual life and Deleuze began reflecting onhow to refashion the totalising nature ofpsychoanalysis through the ontology of differ-ence. Moreover, although he was an experi-mental psychiatrist, Guattari was a disciple (andsoon to be dissident) of Lacan and Lacanianism,and the psychoanalytic church consecratedaround the subject presumed to know, which,as Jean-Claude Polack affirmed in a personalcommunication, was not simply amovement buta religion. Deleuze and Guattari thus trans-formed themselves into brother heretics, inter-ested not simply in doing away with Lacanianorthodoxy and its fetishistic attachment to theforces of the symbolic, but rather, as they wouldoften quip, in giving Lacan a little help; ‘‘help’’would come in the form of dismantling theLacanian system while guarding its rhetoricalstrategies and discursive tremors; the book onschizophrenia was to be transparent to its object.

The alchemical operation of Deleuze andGuattari’s collaboration was not, however, apure act of glorious spontaneity. In Dosse’sprologue, where the fabrication of the ThirdMan is most vividly revealed, we glimpse theroving anxieties of partnership, the disequili-briums that always struggle to resolve themselves,the ever-present paranoia that accompaniesoffering another one’s work and how friendshipitself functions as a line of flight. Dosse tells how,at the moment of their meeting, Deleuze was notonly suffering from ill health but also descendinginto alcoholism; the meeting with Guattari,someone renowned for his dynamism andvigour, was a means out of this impasse (Dosse2007, p.14). Guattari, on the contrary, wasstruggling with a newly broken family and afractured personal life but also, simply toovercome his anxieties and assert himself onthe level of the concept, attempting to surmountthe bloc on his own flow of writing. Before theirfirst physical meeting a brief correspondencetook place where concepts and notes werereadily exchanged with both enthusiasticwarmth and gentle chiding. In May 1969Deleuze would write; ‘‘Me too, I feel like wewere friends before we had met’’. Guattariclaimed that the political frenzy post-68 wasnot the best moment to engage in seriouswriting, that one can only really write when

‘‘things are okay’’, but according to Dosse,Deleuze would attempt to convince Guattarithat the hour of his theoretical elaboration hadcome (Dosse 2007, p.15). What soon followedwas the meticulous construction of the writingmachine, an intersubjective space of assemblageand schizo-analytic arrangement before theconcept even existed. In other words, the ThirdMan was a means of putting into practice thetenets of their system; they were doing it. In yetanother letter, Deleuze established the condi-tions of the machine:

It is necessary to abandon all forms of politeness, but not

the forms of friendship which would permit one to say to

the other: you see, I don’t understand, this doesn’t work.

. . . Muyard should participate completely in this corre-

spondence. Finally, there should not be any forced

regularity. (Dosse 2007, p.16)

The aforementioned terms were a break with therituals of formality that characterised Frenchacademic life and thus also affirmed how suchrituals functioned as barriers to genuine intel-lectual friendship and collaboration. The bril-liance of Dosse’s opening here and, indeed, someof the other sections of the book, is that he doesnot simply tell us what they said, but also offersinsight into what they did and why they did it. Inreorienting his study in this direction, Dosseactually recounts the movements, instincts andconsciousness of the Third Man.

So what did they do? The universes ofmaterialist psychiatry and the philosophy ofimmanence slowly merged through in an intel-lectual complicity which was only buttressed bya deep personal bond; they would use theintimate pronoun (tu) and, while foreverthreatened by the menace of total fusion, theylearned to respect the other’s world in its puredifference. According to Dosse, this was, never-theless, no casual rapport but one defined by a‘‘very high conception of friendship’’ essential towhich was the cultivation of a ‘‘friendly dis-tance,’’ a distance that does not fix itself orbecome instituted, one defined by, as Guattariclaimed, ‘‘concentration/dispersion’’ (Dosse2007, p.17). That is, they understood that deepstates of social concentration perform a type ofviolence on the psyche and that friendships mustnecessarily oscillate. Friendship is only possiblewhen the parties involvedmay distance themselves

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from another, disperse and accumulate moreforce of pre-personal singularity. At stake forGuattari was also the arrangement of thecollective enunciation. Dosse explains that hewas somewhat anxious about the possibility ofone-on-one talks with Deleuze and even more sobecause he had always functioned en groupe,which Deleuze clearly objected to (Dosse 2007,pp.17–18). In this sense, the nature of theirpartnership and the formation of the ThirdManfunctioned as a charged experiment in intellec-tual sociality and explicitly engaged each thin-ker’s personal relationship to the group, toothers and to his own comfort zone.

But this was neither a group, nor a duo, nora partnership – what Deleuze and Guattariformed was a dispositif, an assemblage animatedby concentration and dispersion and the imper-sonal fluxes that circulated between two peoplewho were less individual subjectivities thanseismographs of the cosmos. As Deleuze pos-ited, their relationship was not purely conjunc-tive, but involved in a series of relations, whereone effects the shift from ‘‘is’’ to ‘‘and’’, and the‘‘and’’ is the space of creation and multiplicity;the ‘‘and’’ is always in between, a frontier, a lineof flight or flux and a space of becoming (Dosse2007, p.21). They formed a landscape or planethat surpassed the I and the ego in favour of anaccumulation of heterogeneity, idiosyncracyand networks. Hence, according to them, theenterprise was never about two writers whocollaborated, wrote together, or divided uptextual labour. The dispositif of Deleuze andGuattari was a process overcoming subjectivisa-tion in order to exit structure and self. They werealready decoding and decoding the primary code– the self. The process, like their works, was arisk. Dosse thusmust certainly be commended inhis attempt to write a biography of two writerswho fled from themselves, resented interiorityand biography and took great strides to effacetheir own egos in the writing machine. However,what Dosse unwittingly reveals is the degree towhich such self-imposed effacement carriedwithin it traces of deep narcissism and self andall the subjective traps that accompany suchforms. The ThirdManmay have been not only awriting machine but also a fetish, a line of flightout of individual interiority and memory, a lineof flight out of the violence, real and psychic,which one inflicts upon oneself.

The war machine

Among the most salient theoretical points oforigin for the creation of the Third Man was anearly essay by Guattari entitled ‘‘Machine andstructure’’. As Dosse suggests, the piece couldhave easily been titled ‘‘Machine against struc-ture’’, and it is there that one locates the germs ofthe war machine, the movements of whichsought to shatter the signifier, the representa-tion, the symbolic, and the static and ossified.The machine would let loose the play ofdifference that rumbled under the perceivedstability of these forms and outline a differentialposition, mobile and contingent (Dosse 2007,p.269). The escape from various internalimpasses that was the line of flight was also anescape from various impasses of thought: pan-linguistics, classical semiology and the logic ofthe referent, structuralism and the prisons ofpsychoanalysis: to Lacan’s l’objet a (the object a)Guattari would oppose l’objet-machine a (theobject-machine a) (Dosse 2007, p.270).

May 1968 thus provided the motion for aseries of crystallisations, not simply betweenGuattari’s machines and Deleuze’s ontology ofdifference, but between the idea and the real.The reality of the idea would impose itself in theidea of reality. While the idea crystallised withthe event, the larger project of schizoanalysiswould be to systematise, elaborate and distill theevent. In other words, as Dosse suggests, ‘‘it wasa question of learning something from May1968’’ and asking ‘‘how to reactivate therevolutionary machine?’’ (Dosse 2007, p.270).Furthermore, with the reinvention of the poli-tical as the cultural, the bodily and the desiring,the war machine was not merely a rebellion onthe streets but rather something that functionedon a series of fronts; the libido, the law,geopolitics, the unconscious, the minoritarian,the perverse, madness and language. The warmachine not only opposed machine to structurebut equally rhizome to tree, the line of flight todialectics, schizoanalysis to psychoanalysis, themolecular to the molar, micro-politics againstpolitics, political anthropology against politicalscience, the supple to the segmented and thenomadic to the sedentary.

The first deployment came with Anti-Oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Anchored

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in the spirit of May, it appeared in 1972 and wasat once a critique of capitalism, an attack onpsychoanalytic dogma and more specifically amanifesto for the arrival of the new schizo-culture. Schizoanalysis, as Deleuze and Guattaricalled it, was to be a politico-libidinal analysis ormodus operandi that would examine the invest-ments of desire in the social field and point theway to a liberation of desire through a successfulschizophrenia. For Deleuze and Guattari,l’apres-mai was not to be a period of mourning,trauma or retraction. On the contrary, the daysof the red front lived on and the energy thatreached a crescendo in May was, in the hands ofthe two partners, to be moulded into a sustain-able critique of the Lacano–Freudian plagueand reorganised as a pragmatics for futurerevolutionary practice. Anti-Oedipus anarchi-cally absorbed and regenerated the collectivehopes of an aborted revolution. The text was aspiraling vortex of machinic writing thatattacked with its fragmentary discourse whileseducing the reader with a virtuosity thatsynthesised a plethora of universes and pointsof reference. Dosse’s rendering of its tumult andchaos is nonetheless poised and precise and at nomoment do we seeing him becoming entangledin Deleuze and Guattari’s own system, a trapthat far too many succumb to.

This proves no easy task, in so far as Anti-Oedipus did indeed reflect and refract its objectand could only truly be understood if readers putdown their critical tools and rushed headlonginto the schizo-cacophony of the desiringmachines. The unconscious was not the spaceof a Greek theatre but a machinic factoryinvolved in incessant production: Deleuze andGuattari understood this, however, as neither areturn to Marx, nor a Freudian-Marxism. Onthe contrary, the imperative was to affirminexhaustible desiring production and, as theywrote,

the fundamental idea is perhaps this: the unconscious

‘‘produces’’ . . . at the heart of desire, one no longer

discovers lack, the law, but the will to produce, to affirm

singularity, its force of being. (Dosse 2007, p.238)

Moreover, it should be noted that the termmachine signifies nothing mechanical, routine orsystematised. On the contrary, Deleuze andGuattari insist on a fundamental distinction

between the machinic and the mechanical. To bemechanical suggests a structural organisation ofparts that interlock harmoniously for thepurpose of work. The machinic, on the otherhand, is built on heterogeneous fluxes, partialobjects, particles, becomings and conjunctions;an assemblage, the centre of which is alwaysmobile. The machine can never be mechanical inso far as it is not governed by laws and can neverbe apprehended in terms of a Gestalt or under-stood as a composition of parts forming aworking whole. It is immanent and its produc-tion is a becoming, not the production of anobject defined in terms of use-value. Further-more, the machine, although charged by thefluxes, is simultaneously that which breaksthem.

Hence, political economy and libidinaleconomy are brought together to imply thatdesire is productive and to suggest that it takesthe form of an incessant process, not based onconsumption but rather organised around estab-lishing connections and alliances with the fluxesthat traverse the socius. A flux – designatingeverything from the flows of blood in the vesselsto the schizophrenic movement of capital – isintensive, mutating and immediate, and recyclesitself through its constant conjunction withother fluxes. May 1968 was the ultimate releaseof collective desiring production and illustratedthe fundamental co-extensiveness of socialactivity and the unbound, free elan vital, or fluxof desire. Libidinised production served tochallenge existing social aggregates and subvertall Marxist distinctions between production,distribution, exchange and consumption. InMay 1968 Deleuze and Guattari saw how theinvestment of desire into the social field couldbecome indistinguishable from the socio-politi-cal apparatus at large and how active, positivelines of flight could unleash a becoming ofrevolutionary desire that could radically refa-shion everyday life. A groupuscle had thepotential to activate a deterritorialising flowthat could potentially grow in proportion andescape the axiomatic of State Oedipus.

There are some assumptions here: likepsychoanalysis, the state apparatus is under-stood to plant lack inside of desire and confuse itwith need. The unconscious thus only becomesneuroticised when the Oedipal triangle is fas-tened to it and likewise, the market economy

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creates an insatiable subject through definingsubjectivity through lack:

lack is created, planned and organized in and through

social production . . . the deliberate creation of lack as a

function of the market economy is the art of the dominant

class. This involves deliberately organizingwants and needs

amid an abundance of production; making all of desire

teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s

needs satisfied. (Dosse 2007, pp. 26–35)

The modern state is wholly complicit with late-capitalism and its own Oedipal axiomatic, anaxiomatic of release and capture, a plan ofimmanence where desiring flows are liberated inall of their frenzy only to be recuperated by theOedipal centre. The question was, therefore,how to accelerate the process and bring thedeterritorialised fluxes to outbid the Oedipal siteof capture.

While creating no shortage of confusion,Delezue and Guattari posited schizophrenia asat once amalady, the state of the system and alsoa revolutionary strategy. As Dosse notes, toschizophrenise was to refashion life as ‘‘general-ized decoding’’ where the schizophrenic andrevolutionary flows topple the paranoic-fascis-ing territorialisation (Dosse 2007, p. 245). As astrategy, however, it was global, and as Dosseposits, schizoanalysis does battle with threepowerful heroes of the code: Luther, whodisplaced the object of faith to interior con-science, the economist Ricardo, who reterritor-ialised the means of production through privateproperty, and Freud, who folded back desire inthe strict frame of the private individual (Dosse2007, p.245).

What schizoanalysis attempts to do isessentially restore to the fluxes of desire andtheir free and deterritorialising potential, apotential that surfaced and legitimised itself inMay 1968. Psychoanalysis and Marxism haveboth, in one form or another, registered therapid transformations of the fluxes, yet bothceased to be effective in so far as the fluxes beganto move too quickly, spilling over and out-bidding the scientisms of both Marx and Freud;that is, it became fundamentally impossible totheoretically engage the fluxes as they cannot becontrolled or apprehended in their totality.Hence, even traditional Marxist analysis wasscoured of its potency. The fluxes actually

dissolve all categories of class and hierarchyand the movement of capital transcends anyMarxist critique of class struggle. In a societywhere all exchange is mediatised and where alldifferences are constantly being negotiated andre-entrenched in the various channels of com-munication, Deleuze and Guattari deemed itessential to go beyond both Marxist politics andpsychoanalytic constructions of subjectivity.Capitalism is generalised inter-changeabilitywhere no real law of equivalence exists. Itembarks on an ever-proliferating decoding anddeterritorialisation of desiring production andsocial production. However, while no generalprinciple of equivalence or value may exist, thefallout from such a process is the unification ofeverything into the flow of capital and theveritable oneness of its economy. Indeed,nothing resists its unitary over-coding and all isintermingled. In May 1968 what Deleuze andGuattari saw in the initial deterritorialisingeffects of capitalism was pure revolutionarypotential. In other words, the Marxist dialecticwas simply too cumbersome and the rawmaterials for revolution rested within the stateand the capitalist machine itself, which need notbe necessarily surpassed. As opposed to embark-ing on a resistance to power, which re-enters arecuperative logic, revolution was to utilise whatwas closest at hand and become molecular; itshould take the form of a flexible process, whosenature was malleable and affected by theprocesses of its constituents – it must begin ona small scale and be localised. The initial studentrumblings at Nanterre were molecular revolu-tions that grew through a process of contagion.The molecular encouraged multiplicity andcreation, and embarked on the perpetualattempt to escape the interpretative categoriesof the dominant order and discourse. In otherwords, a strategy of evasion – evade the Otherand do not brazenly challenge them.

The geopolitical or micro-political turnwould be elaborated in the second volume ofCapitalism and schizophrenia, the dense butmorecontrolled, Mille plateaux. Released in 1980, itwas not an immediate best-seller and, as Dossenarrates, also went against the current of thedominant modes of thought of 1980. This wasthe golden age of the nouveaux philosophes, whowould launch their own war machine againstDeleuze and Guattari, and the triumph of their

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new humanism was a harbinger of the manyanti-soixante huitard discourses that would soonproliferate. Times had changed. The studentprotestors of May had grown older, cut theirhair and hung up their leather jackets. Whilesome remained anti-Oedipal in spirit, they hadnonetheless joined the bourgeoisie that theyonce disdained, taken up desk jobs and acquiredmany gadgets.

Deleuze and Guattari, although speakingvery little of schizoanalysis, remained faithful tothe tenets that they had developed throughoutthe 1970s and would more forcefully andseriously outline the principles of the warmachine with an array of new concepts andcategories. Here one finds the rhizome, the bodywithout organs, becoming-animal, the ritour-nelle and the treatise on nomadology. A geo-philosophy of the political, the central conceptofMille plateaux was that of agencement, whicheffectively replaces the desiring machines, aconcept that allows one to escape the domainof psychoanalysis to open up more connections,even with those of the non-human; it could be abee and an orchid, but also a horse, a man andthe stirrup, or again, the horse-man-animal arc(Dosse 2007, pp.300–301). Opening up desiremeant, therefore, opening up the possibility of amultiplicity of agencements and rendering thelines that composed bodily, psychic, and poli-tical cartography more supple. What is privi-leged is the movement of subjects through space,how they traverse and transform throughvarious planes and grids of intensity. Navigationrequired the clear perception of various lines andtheir respective densities and volume. The linesof an individual or group are threefold: the lineof rigid segmentation (sedentary), the line ofsuppleness (migrant) and the line of flight(nomadic). The three lines exist within anassemblage in a relationship of chiasmus,perpetual union and breaking away, meetingand dividing. The nomadic line of flight, theultimate break with identitarian segmentarity,would challenge not only mommy-daddy-mebut the structural consistency of life and the ego.When the ego endeavours to identify withmodels of structural unity, what results is anact of aggression. The ego lapses into its ownmachine of terror, which is forced to constantlygenerate mechanisms of propulsion and repul-sion in order to ward off that which attacks it

(which, in the system of capitalism is, of course,ever huge and vast). So better to be on the move,on the line:

leave one’s territory. It is the operation of the line of flight.

There are very different cases. Deterritorialization may be

overlaid by the compensatory reterritorialization obstruct-

ing the line of flight: D is said then to be negative. Anything

can serve as a reterritorialization, in other words ‘‘stand

for’’ the lost territory; one can reterritorialize on a being, a

book, an apparatus or a system. . . . For example it would

be a mistake to say that the state apparatus is territorial: it

in fact performs a deterritorialization, but one which is

immediately overlaid by reterritorializations on property,

work, and money (clearly, that land ownership, public or

private, is not territorial but reterritorializing). (Deleuze

and Guattari 1987, p.508).

The line of flight, aside from being ensconced inthe assemblage of any individual or group, is tobe found all around us. Radical openings tosomething else, something more creative andmore radical, were everywhere. As its phraseol-ogy implies, the line of flight is established as anyavailable means of escape from the totalisingforces of any segmentation or territorialisation.Lines of flight disrupt the territories and, asDeleuze and Guattari suggest,

Territorializations, then are shot through with lines of

flight testifying to the presence within them of deterritor-

ializations and reterritorializations. (Deleuze and Guattari

1987, 55)

The line of flight can, nonetheless, easily deviateinto a line of self-destruction if followed too far(death or fascism). That is, it is not a cure in anysense of the word, but rather a bridge to creatingnew experimental alliances, to proliferatingunique connections and engaging multiplicitiesas opposed to constructing or falling under thesway of more arborescent, rigidified structures.It is a becoming-rhizomatic and, as Deleuze andGuattari further write: ‘‘One will bolster oneselfdirectly on a line of flight enabling one to blowapart strata and make new connections’’(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p.54).

Through such travels one rediscovers therhizome, the plant network that does notsingularly develop from one root system, astrees do. The rhizome is multiply spawned froma larger rhizome network that connects withother rhizome networks. To cut the rhizomedoes not kill the plant.Moreover, inDeleuze and

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Guattari’s imaginary botany (Mille plateaux isnot a gardening book), any of several rhizome-plants may belong to the same undergroundnetwork without bearing any apparent resem-blance to each other. They appear disparate, yetare all connected in a hidden arena. Hence, therhizome network holds together that whichapparently cannot be held together. But all ofthis has little to do with plants in the end; therhizome is invoked in opposition to the tree orroot, which comes to signify the dominance andhegemony of stratified, segmented thinking andwhich, in its sociocultural forms appears as atyrannical and restricted economy and a dis-course or structure of power that sustains itselfthrough oppression. Hence,

arborescent systems are hierarchical systemswith centres of

significance and subjectification, central automata like

organized memories. In corresponding models, an element

only receives information from a higher unit, and only

receives a subjective affection along pre-established paths

. . . the channels of transmission are pre-established: the

arborescent system preexists the individual, who is

integrated into it at an allotted place. (Deleuze and

Guattari 1987, p.16)

The conceptual image of the rhizome containslines of flight and is a model which seeks toliberate the subject from the structures of powerthat shut down desiring production. Mostimportantly, however, like the unconscious(which is also constructed rhizomatically), themultiplicity is something that must be pragma-tically constructed; a rhizome, as a politicalstructure, must be made.

Finally, we enter here into a space ofbecoming that may unleash torrents of wild-erness. Thus, as Delezue and Guattari remark,state formations consciously guard themselvesagainst the animal, the pack, the demonic andthe monstrous:

There is an entire politics of becoming-animal, as well as a

politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages that

are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the

State . . . becoming animal in the war machine, wildmen of

all kinds (the war machine comes from without, it is

extrinsic to the State, which treats the warrior as an

anomalous power); becoming-animal in crime societies,

leopard-men, crocodile-men (when the State prohibits

tribal and local wars); becoming-animals in riot groups

(when the Church and the State are faced with peasant

movements containing a sorcery component, which they

repress by setting up a whole trail and legal system designed

to expose pacts with the devil) . . . becoming-animal in

societies practicing sexual initiation of the ‘‘sacred deflo-

werer’’ type, wolf-men, goat-men, etc. (who claim an

Alliance superior and exterior to the order of families;

families have to win from them the right to regulate their

own alliances, to determine them according to comple-

mentary lines of descent, and to domesticate this unbridled

power of alliance). (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p.247)

These various pack-formations, war machines,andman-beast hybrids are all imagined to exist onthe horizon of state apparatuses. The domestica-tion of the animal is then a process of politicalweakening, pacification, Oedipalisation andabsorption; house pets are not properly animalin so far as they are treated as members of thefamily, nor are cattle, which are used for humanlabour and also eaten., ‘‘Domestication’’ and‘‘socialisation’’ are corollaries, respectively refer-ring to the taming of the appetites, the humanisa-tion of desires, and the general processes by whichone becomes docile or ‘‘broken in to society.’’ Thedomestication of the animal is also a domestica-tion of projected human negativity.

However, the festive, as an inversion ofsocietal norms and taboos, can be read as a returnto the horde, a regression or metamorphosis thatpurports to strip the body of its anthropocentriccodings. But, on the other hand, it can also be theoccasion for a symbolic rapprochement with theanimal, which (contrary to Deleuze and Guattariand their mystification of the transgressive ani-mal), represents not the negativity of the social,but the social itself; the animal conceived as anemblem of social itself, the clanmember conceivedof as the animal – Durkheim’s ‘‘I am Kangaroo’’.Here, the animal is not a war machine or limit ofthe social, but its inner core. But, for Deleuze andGuattari, this core was nothingmore than anothera perverse territorialisation.

Nonetheless, Mille plateaux claimed tohave formulated a political pragmatics’’wheremicro-politics, the construction of lines of flight,privileges modes of becoming over historicalteleology (Dosse 2007, p.318). But, in terms ofeffects, the two volumes of Capitalism andschizophrenia also gave birth to a new dominanttheoretical paradigm that would soon flourishoutside France. ‘‘French theory’’ or post-struc-turalism would be a decidedly Deleuzo–Guat-tarian pastiche of semiotics, anthropology,philosophy and psychoanalysis. In this new

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paradigm, disciplinary and intellectual barrierswere broken, but a new laisser-aller set in as well.Rigour was no longer necessary and theorycould be used as mere embellishment (‘‘asDerrida said’’, as ‘‘Nietzsche claimed’’).Furthermore, the total relativism of intellectualvalues opened up a world where everything fromBritney Spears to the beer you drank wascultural and political, and worthy of beingtreated as signs that required new semiologies.A new church would indeed be erected and theheretics would morph into gurus; one could onlyfunction intellectually if one were on the side ofthe war machine or risk being called old orconservative. In other words, one had to playmachine against structure, rhizome against tree,line of flight against dialectic, plenum againstlack and the molecular against the molar or riskbeing marginalised as yet another priest, tyrantor depressive. While absorbing the lessons of 68,schizoanalysis and rhizome pragmatics wouldactually be displaced to the ghettoes of culturalstudies and theory, where a new breed of leather-jacketed dilettantes would become Deleuzo–Guattarian and lament that the revolution hadalready passed them by. How to compensate?Dosse subtextually raises these issues only toevade them, but the subtext persists under thestory of the Third Man who by the late 1970sand early 1980s had grown exhausted or, atleast, impatient. He also moved to the USA.

America and terror

Deleuze andGuattari cast their eyes to the USA,but their gaze was certainly not complex anddiffered little from many a Frenchman’s obses-sion with the US mythos: Kerouac on the road,transparency, the lack of depth, flight, nomad-ism and speed, a refusal of the dirty little secretand the tragic, and, of course, good oldfashioned US know-how and pragmatism.Sylvere Lotringer claimed that Americans werealready Deleuzo–Guattarian without knowingit; they were already too hands on, already onthe move, and already a bit schizo, incessantlyrescrambling codes and dismantling and recreat-ing their identities on a regular basis. Lotringerwould go on to found Semiotext(e), that otherwarmachine which, in its irreverent, iconoclasticand punk pages, introduced America to Deleuze

and Guattari and ‘‘French theory.’’ Semio-text(e), those little black books that you couldput in your pocket, was not simply anotherscholarly journal, but an anti-academic explo-sion that found itself in complete synchronywiththe burgeoning counterculture of the USA(Dosse 2007, pp.549–554). Once this counter-culture had faded, a new generation of French-obsessed hipsters, graduate students, artists andbohemians would insure that French theoryeffectively conquered the west.

Nothing really held the key thinkerstogether except for the fact that they wereFrench, but, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari,Derrida, Lyotard, Virilio and Foucault (amongothers), soon came to constitute the only meansof thinking through politics, the social, the bodyand the self. The effect began to take place in theUSA. A disappearing act for Lotringer, Semi-otext(e) delineated a cultural sensibility, acertain milieu and certainly a particular cachet.Deliberately marketed towards non-academics,or rather academics who secretly desired tobecome ‘‘non’’, Semiotext(e) offered a veneer ofsubversion, a new vocabulary and set of slogans.The translations would begin to accumulate andby the early 1990s Deleuze and Guattari hadbeen integrated into the sprawling universe ofUS academia and French theory had ascendedto what appeared to be an impermeable hege-mony. With the birth of theory, thought nolonger had a pure object, nor did it need one;thought no longer adhered to method, but thiswas not necessary either. Theory was theprovocation, a way to remain subversive in theinstitution through appeals to the war machine,Chaosophy, Nomadology, andChaosmosis. Butthis posturing aside, the appeal of Deleuze andGuattari went far beyond the pretensions of theordinary theory-head. According to Dosse, themultiple uses of Deleuzo–Guattarianism in theUSA realised Deleuze’s dream of a pop-philo-sophy that privileged practices:

the strong harmony between the conceptually advanced

theses and American civilizational singularity confirm the

intuition of Sylvere Lotringer according to which Deleuze

andGuattari do not speak to Americans, but speak already

about America. (Dosse 2007, 567).

However, for all of their Americanism, Deleuzeand Guattari were notoriously blind to the

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rawness and potency of the US New Left of thelate 1960s and early 1970s. It may have been tooraw, too practical and too unstylised. It wassimply too American, and Americans had hadenough of themselves. The stage was set foranother French revolution.

But was this revolution serious or was thisjust another instance of clever hipness claimingto be something ground-breaking? French the-ory’s presence in America campuses certainlytook the form of a type of terror; one had tochoose either to become the rhizome or to beshut out of the discourse. The older people wereeither alienated or forced to demonstrate theircomplete incapacity to explain the works of theFrench invasion. Dilettantism, however, neverfelt so good and, as Camille Paglia lamented

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by theory,

well-fed complacent leather-coated, dragging themselves

through the Caucasian campuses at dawn looking for an

angry signifier.

What fun. Things seemed to enter into a haze;what were we really theorising or should werather have had a conversation about what istheory? Were those leather-jacketed hipstersbeing patronised without knowing it? Who wasgetting duped? Would we be reading this stuff in100 years? Was it able to open up to the outsideeven more, after it had been recuperated into USacademia? Part of Dosse’s agenda is to respondyes to the last two questions. He cites the never-ending stream of publications and cyber-textthat continues to appear on Deleuze andGuattari, particularly in the USA, as definitiveproof that the effect will endure regardless ofwhat form it takes and regardless of its integrity.

But many arrive late. At Semiotext(e)’s1998 conference on Deleuze and Guattari atColumbia University, ‘‘Deleuze and Guattari‘On the Edge’’’, Lotringer confessed to me thathe was not sure how long the Deleuze–Guattarieffect would endure and wondered if indeed wehad already reached its moment of apogee, if therecuperation had been too strong. And hereallow me to come clean: I was a card-carryingDeleuzo–Guattarian for many years, Semio-text(e) in back pocket and dazed by the schiz-fluxes that were New York City. I now under-stand this as nothing more than a folie dejeunesse, but a folly that has left indelible traces,

some welcome, others discomforting. But it isresoundingly clear that while we spoke ofaffirmation, we were all dialecticians at heart.We were always not good enough Deleuzo–Guattarians.

Nonetheless, September 11 provided adifficult intellectual moment. There was nothingin Deleuze and Guattari’s toolbox that could bereadily applied to this entrance of the real. Infact, it seemed that the event had outbid theoryand, in a strange reversal, the real was challen-ging theory, as opposed to being the site wherethose assumptions were grafted. And among themany hidden tropes that vibrate under Dosse’sbiography is the relationship of Deleuze andGuattari to both terror and terrorism.

As already mentioned, the push of schizoa-nalysis to the outside inherently carries the risksof terror, a terror that comes with perpetualdecoding and deterritorialisation. Here there isthe risk of infinity, of formlessness, of badinfinity. There is also the risk of morally injuringthose around you in your strict adherence to theprinciples of schizoanalysis. Furthermore, thereis, indeed, the risk of deterritorialisation itselfbecome a paranoid-fascist construct, a dogmaticrush to the outside, or the orthodoxy of theschiz-flux. Hence, Bernard-Henri Levy’s liken-ing of the Deleuzo–Guattarian dispositif to alibidinal fascism, an ideology of desire that wasnothing more than a new form of barbarism.Dosse engages in the standard (and entirely just)mockery of BHL (as Levy is almost invariablycalled in France), the brand-name in theunbuttoned white shirt, but in the missiveagainst the often clownish institution of BHL,he neglects to flesh out the consequencesof schizoanalysis as fascism. In these finalmoments, of Dosse’s biography, one also getsthe impression that, although 1977 was the yearof all combats where the legacy of 68 was firstplaced on trial, the debate continues and Dosseis certainly extrapolating from French intellec-tual history to comment on the stakes of present.To the charges of terror, Deleuze would respondthat the work of the nouveux philosophes wassimply nulle and that such nullite could beexplained by their rolling back of Deleuzo–Guattarianism and the resurrection of theterritorial concepts such as law, power, themaster, the world, and the rebellion (Dosse2007, p.444). We should not forget, however, the

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terror is a broad concept including both state-sponsored violence and anti-state insurrectionsas well. Respectively, there is a delicate gradientthat runs from the terror of Oedipus to the terrorof anti-Oedipus.

However, terror was not only a philosophi-cal or libidinal issue for Deleuze and Guattari.On the contrary, both figures found themselvesat one point or another confronted by questionsof real terrorism. Dosse describes a series ofinterventions by Deleuze and Guattari forPalestinian liberation. We learn how Guattariarranged for a secret meeting of Palestinian andIsraeli personalities in 1976 and how, during thepreparation of Mille plateaux, Deleuze andGuattari were both thinking through the pro-blem of the war machine against this particularpolitical backdrop. Deleuze himself pennedarticles in support of a free Palestine and YasserArafat (Dosse 2007, pp.308–310). In fact, theinfamous, but little understood, break betweenFoucault and Deleuze can actually be explainedby a dispute over the politics of terror. As Dossenarrates, Klaus Croissant, a German lawyerrepresenting the Baader-Meinhof group, arrivedin Paris in 1977 in search of political asylum.German authorities immediately demanded hisextradition, understanding him to be an agent ofBaader. He would be arrested by French policein September and extradited in November. Apetition soon began to circulate protestingagainst the extradition of Croissant. Accordingto Dosse Foucault refused to sign the petition,which contained the names Deleuze and Guat-tari, as he deemed it to be too uncritical of theterrorists of the Red Army Faction. And duringthe same year, Foucault would support thenouveaux philosophes who were Deleuze’s betenoire. To the disagreements over the nouveauxphilosophes and the Croissant affair, one canalso add the dispute over theMiddle East. Dossecites an interview between Edward Saıd andJames Miller, where Said contends that theconflict in the Middle East was one of the majorcauses of Deleuze and Foucault’s falling out,something thatDeleuze himself affirmed.Hence,while Deleuze exalted Arafat, Foucaultdenounced the UN resolution that claimed thatZionism was a type of racism (Dosse 2007,pp.373–375). And their theoretical pathsdiverged as well: to Deleuzo–Guattarian desire,Foucault would oppose bodies and pleasure.

While Deleuze and Guattari revelled in theimmanence of the outside, Foucault remainedinterested in the limit and the means by whichthe limit constructs and forges subjectivity andthe inside. To desiring production Foucaultopposed neo-Bataillean transgression. Andfinally, while Deleuze and Guattari insisted onthe dissolution of interiority and the self,Foucault’s work veered to a reappraisal ofvarious technologies of the self and the ethicalparadigms used by the Greeks to assure humanflourishing. This was not, contrary to howDeleuze often described it, a simple misunder-standing or a case of two friends who had grownapart. Rather, the issue of violence, real, textualand philosophical, was at the heart of therupture.

Guattari, something of a self-styled pro-fessional militant, was himself by no meansabove the fray. During the course of the 1970shis relentless search for new molecular revolu-tions and micro-political modes of resistancesituated him in various political milieux asso-ciated (often fictitiously) with acts of terror. InItal, he was not only involved in pirate radiobut also began a fruitful collaboration withAutonomia and Antonio Negri. Negri himselfwas later charged and cleared of leading theBrigades and participating in the assassinationof Aldo Moro, but nonetheless, he wasimprisoned for insurrection. The same ques-tions that haunted Negri would come to hauntGuattari: recent charges made, once again byBHL, further claim that Guattari had aweakness for terrorists, and stooped to debatewith assassins. As Dosse notes, Guattari didnot publicly condemn either the Red Brigadesor the Red Army Faction and his silenceattested to his desire to dissuade terroristsfrom committing errors rather than condemn-ing them. Jean Chesneaux adds that Guattari’sdissuasion was actually an attempt to convincemembers of these groups to stop buildingMolotov cocktails and rather place themselveson the psychoanalyst’s couch (Dosse 2007,pp.351–352).

The psychoanalyst’s couch, not the schi-zoanalyst’s machine? One wonders if the makersof Molotov cocktail had any real need for linesof flight, deterritorialisations, fluxes, decentredselves or war machines. If Americans werealready Deleuzo–Guattarians, perhaps terrorists

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were too. There are, indeed, many strikingrhetorical and theoretical parallels betweennomadology and the practice of terror. In hisrecent book review of Brynjar Lia’s Architect ofglobal jihad: the life of al-qaida strategist AbuMusab al-Suri, Adam Shatz (2008) writes:

Just as weirdly familiar is al-Suri’s celebration of nomadic

fighters, mobile armies, autonomous cells, individual

actions and decentralisation, which recalls not only

Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux, but the idiom of

‘‘flexible’’ capitalism in the age of Google and call centres.

His vision of jihadis training themselves in mobile camps

and houses, presumably from their laptops, is not so far

removed from our own off-site work world. Guerrilla life

has rarely seemed so sterile, so anomic, so unlikely to

promote esprit de corps. The constraints of the NewWorld

Order make jihad a rather grim, lonely crusade, a form of

private combat cut off from the movement’s – mostly

imagined – following.

Anomic terrorists. Imaginethe rest of us

The fact of the matter is that terrorism is notguerilla life and is none the worse for it. Butwhile the homeless flexible and anomic andnomadic terrorist battles global anomie throughthe fetishisation of form, representation and law,the Deleuzo–Guattarian war machine runsroughshod over these gross abstractions in thename of the rhizome and the line of flight.Schizoanalysis, in valorising asignifying signifi-cation, is firmly against representation. Repre-sentations can certainly produce and inflictviolence, but they can also quell violence. Thecollective representation opens individuals andfrees them from the torpor of delimited profanesubjectivity, a liminal passage that can only becomprehended and become nourishing andcreative when mediated by symbolic life; whenthe symbol reciprocates the energies transferredinto it. Explosions of collective emotion mustattach themselves to a symbolic form or risk theincommensurability that can potentially annihi-late subjectivity. The liquidation of symboliclife, the rhizomatic aform that never returns tothe tonic note, lapses into terror (if terror beunderstood as the annihilation of all form, amoment that is both ecstatic and harrowing).More troubling is the fact that societies that lack

a collective symbolic life are at pains to revealthe moral tissue of their organism.

The winter years

Whereas the 1960s and 1970s can be read as hotyears of political effervescence and hyper-praxis,the 1980s were typified by a winter cooling.Within the circles of Deleuzo–Guattarians it iswell-known that the early 1980s signalled a darkmoment for Guattari – a serious bout ofdepression that should also be read as a responseto the first fractures of radical politics (what inhindsight we now generally refer to as the deathof the revolutionary left). The hope that wasFrancois Mitterrand (Socialist President ofFrance from 1981 to 1995) became the sterilityand malaise of Mitterrandism. In addition, thevelocity of the spectre that Guattari calledintegrated world capitalism had begun to accel-erate out of control. But where were therevolutionary deterritorialisations? The appara-tus of capture seemed to have won the game andthe reterritorialising recuperation had envelopedthe fluxes that challenged it. While Guattaristrained to remain an active force in the SocialistParty, the anti-racist movement, ecologism anda host of other sites of molecular politics, by themid-1980s his energies began to wane. Onceagain feeling orphaned, Guattari found himselfunable to transform his own anxieties into thefoundations for critique and political project.Once unstoppable, he was now in a catatonicstate, slumped before the television, a pillow onhis stomach as if to protect himself from theaggression of the external world (Dosse 2007,p.499). Ailing health and political depressionwere also coupled with conjugal territorialisa-tion.

Guattari’s catatonia was a symptom of thelarger political catatonia that set in with the1980s. Although he would resurrect himself andcontinue the micro-political battle, the stakeshad changed and the world was suddenly a verydifferent place. As the war machine of integratedworld capitalism (now called globalism andempire) expanded, the left was forced to engagein a moment of deep reflection concerning thefuture of revolutionary politics, the party andthe nature of militancy itself. The enemy wasno longer oppressive Oedipal power, but a

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decentred apparatus of flows that deterritoria-lised in the same manner that Deleuze andGuattari previously prescribed. Catatonia mayhave been the result of the sad enlightenmentthat arose from the realisation that schizoana-lysis, which originally challenged the system,was actually the truth of the system itself. Inother words, Deleuze and Guattari did not somuch challenge capitalism as mimic its work-ings. In the end, integrated world capitalism,too, was more Deleuzo–Guattarian thanDeleuze and Guattari, decoding itself, lettingloose revolutionary fluxes, while simultaneouslyfortifying its centre and pressing infinitely acrossthe universe. The system was more radical thanthe revolutionary theory that opposed it. In itsmighty immanence it beat them at their gameand the schizo-revolutionary flux was revealedto be exactly what capitalism produced anddesired. The final recuperation was the recup-eration of Deleuze and Guattari into the fluxesof capitalism itself. This thus raises of thequestion of their unconscious collusion withcapitalism itself, which Dosse recognises butagain skilfully circumvents.

Guattari would rebound and resume hisactivities. But in rereading the oeuvre of the1980s and early 1990s (The winter years, 1986,Schizoanalytic cartographies, 1989, Chasmosis,1995, and so on), one clearly senses the fatiguethat looms under the revolutionary optimism.More importantly, the texts now appear dated,vestiges of a political past that shares little withthe concerns of the actual moment but, for all oftheir shortcomings, we must cherish Guattari’swork for its most resounding error, preciselythat of incurable optimism.

Deleuze also found himself de-radicalised,or rather, perhaps realised, as Badiou suggested,that he was never that radical to begin with.During the 1980s Deleuze went to the movies,wrote several important studies on cinema andbegan a serious reflection on the nature ofartistic, literary and philosophical creation: thevirtual. Dosse suggests that Deleuze

worked with creators in order to better understand the

phenomenon of creation. For Deleuze, as for Guattari,

aesthetics is not a separate domain, and his artist-

philosophy accords a privileged and nodal status to the

creative act. Explorations of Anglo-Saxon literature, the

painterly, and the whirling ambient guitars of Richard

Pinhas, would be the new spaces for the line of flight: ‘‘Art

is the domain of affects and percepts which differ from

affections and perceptions by their capacity to be conserved

. . . it is the function of art to make possible this

conservation and transmission beyond the finitude of

existence and its lived experience. . . . Artistic production

and philosophical production share the same origins and if

the philosopher creates concepts, the artist creates percepts

and affects. (Dosse 2007, p.543)

These are the theses that would resonatethroughout the final collaborative endeavoursigned Deleuze and Guattari. In What isphilosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1981) thebattle against finitude and determinism shiftedto the domain of the aesthetic, the constructivistand the artistic-philosophical. It is in thevirtuality of the creative act that one nowglimpses the hidden plan of immanence thatmust constantly be reawakened through crea-tion to ward off the temporal exhaustion of theexperiential. But in all of this mystic-creation-ism, the political becomes fused with thepainterly line, the guitar loop and the movingimage.

What is philosophy? remains an anomaly inthe Deleuzo–Guattarian corpus. It is a wearytext that does not buzz with desiringmachines orglide through thresholds and frontiers. On thecontrary, the book is a return to classicalphilosophy, littered with traces of Kant andDescartes and the litany of metaphysicians thatone imagined Deleuze and Guattari to beattempting to overcome. In other words, onesenses again the presence of yet another recup-eration: Deleuze and Guattari, aristocraticphilosophers after all, who now transposeddesiring production and connective synthesesto the art of philosophy itself. Gone are theprovocations and the radical imperatives ofmicro-politics. Instead, here one reads a philo-sophical manual about how to do philosophy.The questions are surely connected withDeleuze’s health and his reflections on agingand the book appears to be the final distillationof the philosophical life, which was also theaesthetic life, one where the eternity of creationbrushes away the pangs of the finite. Many pointto the thematic continuity between Anti-Oedi-pus, A thousand plateaus, and What is philoso-phy?, but prefer to identify the common threadas that of production, creation and an empiricalpragmatism. But underneath the proliferation of

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concepts always lurks the shadow of the finiteand the anguish that arises upon recognisingthat nature does not mirror the philosopher’screation of concepts. Here, philosophy is the lastrefuge and molecular revolutions are no longerwaged on the streets but are rather the provinceof the philosopher, artist and scientist. But onewonders if something vital had disappeared in1991.

The ThirdMan was born of those hot yearsof the 1960s and 1970s and Deleuze andGuattari were writers embedded in a veryparticular political moment; one that, in hind-sight was not only transgressive and revolu-tionary but also luxurious. Looking back, theovercoming of subjectivity through the estab-lishment of the dispositif and the line of flightappears as a luxury that could have only beenfully indulged in those optimistic days. WhileDeleuze and Guattari exhort that we all dissolvethe ego in the frenzy of collective desire, we mustrecall that others dissolve their egos not throughelaborate acts of decoding but rather throughbeing rendered less than human. Not everyonecan deterritorialise and take the line of flight, letalone move. We should therefore demand how acertain luxury of social conditions participates ina certain luxury of thought that seems to makeliberty look so easy. We should also ask to whatdegree post-Marxism’s cultural turn itself parti-cipates in a type of domination by averting itseyes from the real sites of social domination,exploitation and reification. Orwell once claimedthat pacifism was just as serious an offence asunbridled aggression. While Deleuzo–Guattar-ians will never cease to laud the many petitionssigned by the two and the incessant and certainlyadmirable militancy of Guattari, something intheir oeuvre resonates with a passivity thatsimply takes the form of a metaphorical hero-ism. The schizo, after all:

knows how to leave: he has made a departure into

something as simple as being born or dying. But at the

same time his journey is strangely stationary, in place. He

does not speak of another world, he is not from another

world: even when he is displacing himself in space, his is a

journey in intensity, around the desiring machine that is

erected here and remains here. For here is the desert

propagated by our own world, and also the new Earth, and

the machine that hums, around which the schizo revolves,

planets for a new sun. . . . But such a man produces himself

as a free man, irresponsible, solitary, and joyous, finally

able to say and do something simple in his own name,

without asking permission; a desire lacking nothing, a flux

that overcomes the barriers and codes, a name that no

longer designates an ego whatsoever. He has simply ceased

being afraid of becoming mad. (Deleuze and Guattari,

1983, p.131)

A luxury indeed and one whose ease disappearedas political heat became political chill and flightwas definitively thwarted.

Forget Deleuze and Guattari?

In 1977, against a rising backlash of criticism,Deleuze claimed that Deleuzo–Guattarianismwas the minoritarian. More than 30 years later,however, one witnesses the triumph of Deleuzo–Guattarianism, not only in the intellectual fieldbut in almost every crevice of the hyper-modern.In other words, Deleuze and Guattari are doxaand in order for them to successfully function asdoxa there must inevitably exist a transparencybetween the theory and the dominant ideologyof the moment. Deleuze and Guattari were notrecuperated by late capitalism. On the contrary,they themselves were already immanent to latecapitalism and, as the fluxes of the globalaccelerate, the Deleuze–Guattari effect becomesnaturalised. Those anarcho-desiring machinesno longer scramble the codes or dismantle molaraggregates. Rather, late capitalism is the parox-ysm of the revenge of the desiring machines. Themistake, however, is to think that they did notknow, that they could not have foreseen howtheir theoretical toolbox could be used in serviceof homogenised difference and not, as they werewont to believe, as a war machine of radicaldecoding. The revolutionary schizophrenic, thenomadic deterritorialiser, is the privileged sub-ject of the market – its ultimate product andmost precious consumer.Deleuze andGuattari’svisions of the new earth to come have beenfulfilled by the mass anomie that constituteshyper-consumptive societies. And while many aDeleuzo–Guattarian might claim that such acritique simply points to amisreading ofDeleuzeand Guattari and a lack of philosophical rigour,Slavoj %i(ek rightly notes that ‘‘the roots ofmisappropriations are to be sought in the‘original’ thinker himself’’ (%izek 1994, p.296).

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Hence, it is an error to believe that the schiz-flux simply lagged behind market accelerationand was eventually absorbed by it. That is, it isan error to think that their theory was ever thatrevolutionary at all. As early as 1972 RobertLinhardt warned not only of Deleuze andGuattari’s misreading of the proletariat but alsoof the potential for authoritarianism and tota-litarianism that lay embedded in the exhilarationof desire (Dosse 2007, p.250). But Linhardt mayhave been going too far: they were never astotalitarian as they were bourgeois and theschizo-revolution was simply another bourgeoisrevolt. Yet, in all of their attempts to do battlewith the violence of state power and Oedipalapparatuses, they produced a theory that wascomplicit with the violence of the market, thespectacle and those supposedly creative fluxes.One wonders if Guattari’s group were oustedfrom the factory because they talked aboutdesire while the workers spoke of wages. But thismight only be part of the story: what workersreally dislike about intellectuals is their narcis-sism and perhaps, when Guattari spoke ofdesire, they understood him to be simply talkingabout himself.

Marxist theoretician Michel Clouscardrecognised in 1973 that Deleuze and Guattariwere advocates of a syncretic and confusionistphantasmagoria, believing that the problems ofthe state could be resolved through desiringrevolution. In Neo-fascisme et ideologie du desir(1973) Clouscard exhorted us not to be tooeasily seduced, as the repercussions of such aseduction would not be emancipatory butwould rather constitute a phlegmatic descentinto the mundane, a mundanity that leaves themarket in all of its glory unaffected andstrangely intact. For Clouscard, Anti-Oedipusmarked the passage to neo-capitalism, a spaceof transgressive emancipation, and defined‘‘neo-capitalist mundanity as the productionand consumption of the model of transgressiveemancipation’’ (Clouscard 1973[1999], pp.95–96). As monolithic power recognises its ownpaucity and enfeeblement it mimics the struc-tures of the global and the hyper-modern andbecomes anarchic itself. Its strategy then turnsschizophrenic. As the initial dynamism of thewarmachine grows exhausted and as the marketitself becomes smooth space, little resistanceremains. The line of flight is now an imperative

mandate, a lifestyle. The desiring revolutionfizzles into a mode of banality and inertiacharacterised by its inability to locate resistanceand by its own absorption into the status quo.The practice of desire is therefore the practice ofthe mundane and even the metaphysical andtranscendent codings of desire as immanencehave little effect against the immanence of themarket, which is wholly transparent to its ownnon-telos and pure constructivism. Hence, theschizoanalytic strategy, the rhizomatic con-struction and the creation of a body withoutorgans are the immanent functions of latecapitalist banality, an ideology of the mundanemasked by the pseudo-synthesis of Marx,Freud, Nietzsche and Spinoza; Anti-Oedipus isthe pure ideology of the cultural bourgeoisie.The schizophrenic revolutionary, the represen-tative of populist desire is, therefore, theNietzschean last man and the Durkheimiananomic who, while appearing decoded, are themost calcified segments of the code.

Mille plateaux also colluded in its own way.Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiappello, for instance,find in Deleuze and Guattari’s text a handbookfor the advent of the new managerial posturethat came to dominate the workplace andquotidian life after 1968. They claim in Thenew spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello1999) that the conceptual universe of Milleplateaux, its rhizomes and nomads, should beinterpreted not as a political theory per se but asa series of new micro-management techniques,ideal tools for corporations, tools that couldhelp them in creating rhizomatic managementstrategies in their various enterprises. The planof immanence was thus a means of thinking notsimply about desiring production and theaffirmation of life forces, but also production,and the affirmation of new corporate networks.(Boltanski and Chiappello 1999, p.160). Incollapsing the Freudo-Marxian problem, desir-ing production actually becomes contiguouswith commodity production. Nomadism is,moreover, perfectly suited for a managerialand socio-cyber universe obsessed with net-works, speed-dating, aleatory encounters andthe never-ending search for new techniques ofmicro-management. Deleuze and Guattari thusappear thoroughly depoliticised in so far as onecannot effectively launch a molecular revolutionagainst a network of molecular power.

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As for What is philosphy? Jean-JacquesLecercle also recently suffered a moment ofuncanny incongruity. In ‘‘The pedagogy ofphilosophy,’’ he describes an encounter with ayuppie reading Deleuze and Guattari’s What isphilosophy?:

The incongruity of the scene induces a smile – after all, this

is a book explicitly written against yuppies. . . . Your smile

turns into a grin as you imagine that this enlightenment-

seeking yuppie bought the book because of its title . . .

Already you see the puzzled look on the yuppie’s face, as he

reads page after page of vintage Deleuze. (Lecercle cited in

%izek, 1994, p.1)

%i(ek goes on to comment on what may haveactually transpired:

What, however, if there is no puzzled look, but enthusiasm,

when the yuppie reads about impersonal imitation of

affects, about the communication of affective intensities

beneath the level of meaning (‘‘Yes, this is how I design my

publicities!’’), or when he reads about exploding the limits

of self-contained subjectivity and directly coupling man to

a machine (‘‘This reminds me of my son’s favorite toy, the

action-man that can turn into a car!’’), or about the need to

reinvent oneself permanently, opening oneself up to a

multitude of desires that push us to the limit (‘‘Is this not

the aim of the virtual sex video game I amworking on now?

It is no longer a question of reproducing sexual bodily

contact but of exploding the confines of established reality

and imagining new, unheard-of intensive modes of sexual

pleasures!’’). There are, effectively, features that justify

calling Deleuze the ideologist of late capitalism. (%izek

1994, p.1)

Deleuze and Guattari are fun, easy to use, and aseemingly wonderful salve to the bitterness ofbourgeois devirilisation.More importantly, theyoffer a means of making the bourgeoisie feelradical, avant-garde and transgressive, when infact this is simply the space of the mundane.Hence, Deleuze andGuattari, like the capitalismthat they mimic and which mimics them,conspire in the camera obscura of the hyper-modern; they invert the real conditions ofcapitalist homogenisation and massification byinfecting it with a feeling of pseudo-romantic,pseudo-revolutionary transgression that servesonly to mask the anomic core of the mundane.As bourgeois ideologists, Deleuze and Guattariestablish the conditions for the anomic processeswhile wrapping them in the veneer of micro-politics that makes an appeal to the outside of

the virtual (while also disregarding the purevirtuality of the real itself). It is not, therefore,without irony that one recognises how Deleuzeand Guattari’s revolutionary theory actuallyprecludes the possibility of revolutionary prac-tice. They emphasised the need to create revolu-tionary subjectivities, but how do we come toascribe such status or becoming to the afore-mentioned yuppie? The revolution itself hasbeen absorbed into the virtual immanence of thecapitalist field and the only outside that remainsis evinced in so many adolescent ‘‘cutters’’, theanorexic, the depressive and the suicide. Adesiring revolution or the fallout of passivenihilism? How can one be so alone, if lack is buta fantasy manufactured by institutional life?Dosse, insisting on the permanence of theDeleuze and Guattari effect, does not followtheir own lines to the end, where one is notemancipated, or on the move, but stultified in agiddiness that is actually melancholic.

And herein lies yet another paradox. Themarket implants not somuch a lack, but actuallythe sensation of immanence and infinity. Itcharges desiring machines and implores themto circulate, break, cut, reconnect, and eat andshit with ever growing intensity. The liberatedschizo, the ultimate symptom of the rupture ofthe social and all previous order, is post-historicand beyond all forms of eschatology. Theschizo’s question is rather how to maintain aconstant euphoria and tangible happiness; he isthe legitimisation of a personalised and narcis-sistic hedonism freed from social, political andpsychic resistance. Neither romantic, reaction-ary nor revolutionary, these individuals’ soleconcern is with their well-being, and thepositioning of their life-style in the largerconsumer field and the nexus of the marketand its imperative to pleasure. They envision nofuture utopia, nor are they burdened with thetask of creating a new man. They are the instantthat may dabble in a bricolage of past tradition(decoding/recoding), but are repelled by holism,and integrity. They have faith, in the form ofcynical reason and they believe it, even thoughthey know it’s not true (temporary territorialisa-tions).Moreover, mired in relativism and a lumpof liberal good feeling, everything and everyoneis of infinite value (perspectivalism). In latecapitalism, moreover, the party never stops andthe new Dionysus is not necessarily a tragic god,

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but rather what one finds at the love parade, anincarnation that Philippe Muray described as‘‘homo festivus’’. The schizo is pure aporia – thisinterstitial creation (nomadic) is not active, butanaesthetised in the nether regions of post-modern laiser-aller. Here, schizo-overmen couldchoose to be all the races of the world (multi-culturalism) and all the names in history as theywere transparent to the release of difference inthe capitalist social field. The result is a hyper-massification or proletarianisation where all onehas to offer is one’s own body without organs.

We are thus not mediated through objectsbut through the paroxysm of the reified objectitself, pleasure’s objects. We are immanent – theschizophrenic strategy is complete in all of itsmicro-political glory. Resistance to reification isdeprivation, solitude and non-participation ininfinity. Resistance to reification means being onthe side of the monolithic One and not themultiple, a cardinal sin.

It is precisely these issues that Dosse’sbiography rhetorically raises; the rigour of hisbiography of the Third Man ultimately poses thequestion of the long shadow of his own reificationand the robbing of his once subversive politicalpassions. One wonders if Dosse’s biographyshould be read as a continuation of the effect orrather as its culmination. Dosse’s brilliant bookforces the reader to ask ‘‘where do we go fromhere?’’ and whether the response to this questionis found in the flows of the Third Man or

elsewhere – whether another paradigm forintellectual collaboration and politics needs toultimately be forged. The ultimate value of thismassive text is found not only in its gracefulportraits of two complex thinkers, but in its owneffects, amongst which one finds the need to re-assess Deleuze and Guattari’s legacies and thelegacy of those hot years in one of themost glacialof political climates. The reigniting of politicalpassions cannot, however, be affected by a simplereturn toDeleuze andGuattari or by any attemptto reimpose the theoretical frames they devised intheir epoch on our contemporary moment.

In hindsight, one could say that Anti-Oedipus was a fantastic text for those whosuffered from puritanical tendencies. But now, itappears that this book, like others in theDeleuzo–Guattarian oeuvre, is a simple mani-festo for radical capitalism and its Buddhistdrift. Deleuze and Guattari may be doxa butthey are doxa that opens up onto a cultural andtheoretical void. And while voids are not easilyfilled, conquered or traversed, in the end shouldwe engage in a sustained critique of Deleuze andGuattari, the philosopher and the militant whowere so allergic to critique? No, perhaps, itsimply a question of fabricating new conceptsand opening a new toolbox. In this sense, Iremain a faithful Deleuzo–Guattarian.

S. Romi MukherjeeInstitut d’Etudes politiques de Paris

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