This chapter studies the expression of Nietzsche's untimely within a Deleuzian philosophy of history. The concepts of immanence and the outside form a relation throughout Deleuze and Guattari's work that leads to their radical conception of the event, and in particular the historical event. As we see in What is Philosophy?, in conjunction with Foucault's actual and Péguy's aternal, the Nietzschean untimely provides a touchstone for Deleuze and Guattari's explanation of creativity in the historical event: the unhistorical is located as both the force and the site from which the sedimentations of history emerge. But while Deleuze and Guattari share in Nietzsche's attempt to facilitate creations counter to our historical present, it cannot be said that they explicitly mirror (or indeed faithfully recount) Nietzsche's analysis of history, its terms, and its effects in society. By tracing the various uses of the untimely throughout Deleuze's work, a differential ‘becoming/history’ materialises that simultaneously enhances aspects of Nietzsche's thoughts on the untimely whilst conflating others.

This conflation can be located on both sides of the differential: while the forces that form Nietzsche's untimely topology – the ahistorical and the suprahistorical – are transformed into synonyms of ‘becoming’, ‘history’ also undergoes a transmutation that effectively attaches to it forms of historicism to which Nietzsche was opposed. The result of these conflations is the replacement of Nietzsche's project of developing a history for the future with a Deleuzian philosophy of the future, and consequently a hostility towards the figure of history.