Deleuze and Guattari appear to be ambivalent towards History and historians. Anti-Oedipus advocates a universalism that would retrospectively understand all history in the light of capitalism (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 153–4). A Thousand Plateaus draws extensively on the work of historians of Europe and Asia as well as specialised works of economic and military history, histories of science, mathematics, technology, music, art and philosophy. On the other hand, they assert the need for a Nomadology that would be ‘the opposite of a history’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 23). Nomadology, like so many of the other disciplines proposed in A Thousand Plateaus (rhizomatics, pragmatics, schizoanalysis and so on) is essentially the study of certain kinds of assemblages (State and war-machine) and the relations between them. What is the function of so much historical material in works of philosophy devoted to the description of abstract machines or assemblages?

In his 1990 interview with Antonio Negri, Deleuze comments that he had become ‘more and more aware of the possibility of distinguishing between becoming and history’ (Deleuze 1995: 170). By the time of his final work with Guattari, this distinction took the form of a contrast between an historical realm in which events are actualised in bodies and states of affairs and an a-historical realm of pure events, where these are the ‘shadowy and secret part [of an event] that is continually subtracted from or added to its actualization’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 156).