ABSTRACT
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari delineate four ‘regimes of signs’, or regular patterns of power relations that organise sign production: the primitive, presignifying regime; the despotic, signifying regime; the nomadic, countersignifying regime; and the passional, postsignifying regime. The postsignifying regime they identify as ‘the regime of betrayal, universal betrayal, in which the true man never ceases to betray God just as God betrays man, with the wrath of God defining the new positivity’. In this regime, God and prophet turn away from one another, averting their faces, and in so doing draw ‘a positive line of flight’. God invents ‘the reprieve, existence in reprieve, indefinite postponement’, but also ‘the positivity of alliance, or the covenant, as the new relation with the deity, since the subject remains alive’.1 What I wish to explore is the logic of this mutual betrayal of God and prophet, this aversion of faces that draws a line of flight, this existence in reprieve that signals a new relation. To accomplish this task, two rather lengthy divagations are necessary, one through Jérôme Lindon’s Jonas, in order to clarify Deleuze and Guattari’s account of Jewish prophetism, the other through Jean Beaufret’s ‘Hölderlin et Sophocle’, in order to explain the connection Deleuze and Guattari draw between the Jewish prophets and Oedipus. The mutual betrayal of the passional, postsignifying regime entails a positive alliance of the human and the divine, but betrayal itself, I shall argue, finally provides one a means of subverting what Deleuze refers to as the ‘doctrine of judgement’, and thereby of breaking free from the God of judgement.2
