ABSTRACT
With Thousand Plateaus (1980), the schizoanalytic enterprise comes to an end, at least in its collaborative guise. The second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Thousand Plateaus takes up many of the themes of Anti-Oedipus (volume one of Capitalism and Schizophrenia), but in ways that do not so much complement as complicate the elaborate schemata of the first work. In place of the opposition of molar and molecular in Anti-Oedipus, one finds a triad of molar, molecular and nomadic, to which correspond three ‘lines’: ‘the molar or hard segmentary line, the molecular or supple segmentation line, [and] the line of flight’ (MP 249). Instead of a single body without organs, one encounters three bodies without organs, or rather the body without organs and its two doubles, the suicidal, empty body and the cancerous, totalitarian and fascistic body (MP 204). The neat sequence of primitive, barbaric, and capitalist social machines is disrupted by the addition of a nomadic machine and a passionate-subjective machine (with indications that still other machines could be isolated). The minor motif of becoming and the nomadic subject, developed somewhat further in the concept of becoming-animal in Kafka, occasions an extended section on various ‘becomings’ – becoming-intense, becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becomingimperceptible (Plateau 10, 284-380). Besides these thematic recapitulations and variations, Thousand Plateaus also offers detailed elaborations of several new concepts, including strata, regimes of signs, faceness (visagéité), the refrain (la ritournelle), smooth and striated space, maps, diagrams and abstract machines.
