When Gilles met Félix

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari met in the summer of 1969. Deleuze says of their meeting that Guattari was the one who sought him out, that at the time he didn't even know who he was. Evidently their meeting went well because Deleuze suggested they work together (Nadaud 2006: 12). A lot of ink has been spilled speculating about how their collaboration worked in practice, all too often with the nefarious motive of sorting out who wrote what. It seems to me, however, that Deleuze says it all when he says that they each thought that the other had gone further than they had and therefore they could learn from each other. In conversation with Claire Parnet, Deleuze described his way of working with Guattari as a ‘pick-up’ method, but then qualifies it by saying ‘method’ is not the right word and suggests ‘double-theft’ and ‘a-parallel evolution’ as perhaps better alternatives. (Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 18)