ABSTRACT
In a theoretical context marked by such an obsession with multiplicity, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (DaG) are exemplary. This chapter attempts to bring out DaG's complicity with Romanticism. Taking off on the basis of a suggestion of Lovejoy's - that Romanticism involves an unprecedented meditation on diversity - it traces DaG's own interests in this regard back through Henri Bergson, and ultimately to an emblematically Romantic contestation of the Kantian critique. The chapter demonstrates the 'organicist aestheticism' of the notable intellectual lineage, and shows how this tendency underwrites DaG's hostility to 'State philosophy'. Romantic philosophy - unable to discuss the institutional conditions of its practice without finding itself immediately destituted by the uncircumventable exigencies of nihilism - thereby also forbids itself any directly positive form of ontological saying. Philosophy has recourse to negation and paradox; it ultimately finds that only aesthetics can provide it with an acceptable solution to its dilemma.
