ABSTRACT
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari worked together on several books, and worked
separately on many more. Their best known work stretched across two volumes
with the title Capitalism and Schizophrenia – volume 1, Anti-Oedipus (1972);
volume 2, A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Separately Deleuze (1925-95) was a
professional philosopher, and Guattari (1930-92) was a psychiatrist and political
activist. When they collaborated, their individual voices cannot be separated out
and they seem to dissolve into one another. Sometimes the writing shifts into a
new register as a persona is briefly adopted in order to give an impression of
what the topic looks like from a particular point of view – but these points of
view can seem bizarrely idiosyncratic – the point of view of a molecule, a
moviegoer, or a sorcerer. ‘The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together,’ they
said, ‘Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd’ (Deleuze
and Guattari, 1980, 3). Personal identity here is something that is taken up, and
then dropped or reformulated, so who were they really, these slippery
characters? How would we say who they were? More importantly, why would
we want to know? And if, at some point, we felt that we knew who they were,
then what would it be that we would know? Their aim, they say, is ‘to reach,
not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of
any importance whether one says I.’ The question ‘who?’ simply will not arise;
nevertheless for the time being they have kept their names ‘out of habit, purely
out of habit’, but then disconcertingly they conclude: ‘We are no longer
mind, looking for rigorous logic while setting aside the common-sense
expectations that would normally deflect us from following the logic through to
its conclusions. There is often a role for common sense in our lives, and Deleuze
and Guattari notice themselves using it for example when they signed their
book with their own names. ‘It’s nice to talk like everyone else, to say that the
sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking’ (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1980, 3).
