ABSTRACT
The French noun agencement is an everyday word. It can be mean, among other things, organization, construction, combination, arrangement, and layout. It refers to both the action of, as well as the result of, putting together, combining, arranging, or laying out. The term assemblage was conceptualized as a means of disrupting a tendency in psychoanalytic and philosophical practice and reflection to stifle and impede the ensembles, connections, arrangements that desire, action, and speech can produce. The notion of assemblage (agencement) gradually took shape over a decade of thinking between Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and indexes multiple ways of working within ensembles. Laurence Anne Tessier has recently drawn on the concept of assemblage as a means of approaching her anthropological inquiry into the medical and scientific practices at stake in the diagnosis of the neurological disorder Fronto-Temporal Dementia.
