1. The Problem of the History of Philosophy

Method relates to creation from what we will call a formal point of view. We are familiar with its rules, we know how it proceeds, but we ignore its materials, the substance of that which is cut-out and intercut. Certainly, it is always about concepts. But which con¬cepts? Where do they come from? The concept of the concept and the concept of method itself have sufficiently revealed this: they are constructed on the basis of an enormous ensemble of prime matter that we call tradition for the sake of convenience. It is in the history of philosophy that method finds its materials. Already in our first chapter it was envisioned as the superposition of planes. But at that point it was a question of the constituted history of philosophy. Now we need to interrogate the constitutive history of philosophy. It no longer concerns belonging to a lineage or the consolidation of an alli¬ance, the retrospective invention of precursors and enemies, but the practice, the mechanisms through which a philosophy is elaborated, including the history of philosophy that it implies. Which history of philosophy therefore supposes the creation of concepts? How could the relation to history engender a creation?

Within the framework of the history of philosophy, Deleuze will also take some distance with respect to the concept of method: ‘As a teacher, I would love to be able to give a course as Bob Dylan organises a song, as an astonishing producer rather than an author. […] The opposite of a plagiarist, but also the opposite of a master or a model. A very lengthy preparation, yet no method, no rules, no recipes.’

It has occasionally been pointed out that Deleuze was the only one of his generation to consider himself strictly a philosopher. When he was asked in which genre A Thousand Plateaus should be categorised (among archivists, deconstructionists and anthropologists), Deleuze answered: ‘Philosophy, nothing but philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word.’ It is in the same sense that he also understands Foucault's famous prediction perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian: ‘Maybe that's what Foucault meant: I wasn't the best, but the most naive […] the most innocent (the one who felt the least guilt about “doing philosophy”).’ It's all the more surpris¬ing that some of the major sources of Deleuze's thought themselves express a certain distance with respect to philosophy – Nietzsche, who proclaimed himself a physician or psychologist of humanity; Spinoza, who so frequently attributed a pejorative meaning to the notion and who ultimately titled his magnum opus Ethics instead of Philosophy. But, on the one hand, we shouldn't forget the return of Deleuze's contemporaries to philosophy. In this sense, Foucault explains that insofar as his concern is with truth, he must consider himself a philosopher. Similarly, Derrida argues that the limit of the philosophical never comes without a certain unconditional reaf¬firmation.On the other hand, we should not ignore that Deleuze borrows the appellations of physician or psychologist, for example, whether this be on his own behalf or for the commentary of a self-proclaimed philosopher, like in the case of Hume. It's true that he's the only one to dedicate an entire book explicitly to the definition of philosophy. But perhaps this book shouldn't be examined as what distinguishes Deleuze from his contemporaries or from his sources, but as a possible explanation for a gesture that is shared by them, a gesture perhaps shared by many others, one that consists in denying the name ‘philosopher’ while at the same time maintaining it.

Today, Gilles Deleuze's thought seems to be exiled in two ways: first from philosophy and then from the university. In the best case, we find him in literature departments or departments of political science and in sociology or film studies faculties, if not in writing workshops or psychoanalytic institutions.

Of course, this involves a voluntary exile: no one encouraged the opening of philosophy to its outside and provided a philosophy for nonphilosophers more than Deleuze. Yet, in our opinion, this opening has always been conceived and practised from within by way of an unconditional reaffirmation of philosophy and a firm com¬mitment to the transformation of the academy.

This is why we have undertaken a thesis on his conception of philosophy. Why the conception of philosophy? Because Deleuze is a philosopher before all else. Why a thesis? Because it concerns philos¬ophy in the most traditional sense of the word. It is our responsibility to show the innovations he introduced into both of these fields.

But how do we appreciate them without starting there? How do we understand what becoming, the virtual, the rhizome is without beginning with being, spirit, system? One does not learn to speak another language with monolingual dictionaries. And if, according to Deleuze's phrase, a philosophy constructs ‘a language within language’, then we in fact need a dictionary that relates Deleuzian language to the language of the tradition.

1. Its Function

The description of the concept in What Is Philosophy? begins in a manner that is as simple as it is intuitive: the concept is a way to order ideas. ‘[F]rom Plato to Bergson, we find the idea of the concept being a matter of articulation, of cutting-out and intercutting. […] Only on this condition can it escape the mental chaos constantly threatening it […].’ We do not yet know what chaos is, what order is, and how to reach it, but it isn't necessary to know this to accept the sufficiently obvious starting point according to which the concept is a sort of ordering.

And yet if we remain on this level of simplicity and intuitiveness, philosophy's element, the concept, cannot be distinguished from the element of science, the function, nor from the element of art, the affect or percept. Indeed, ‘[w]hat defines thought in its three great forms – art, science, and philosophy – is always confronting chaos.’ The difference between the elements appears when we ask how the concept confronts chaos. But, at the same time, the defini¬tion becomes extremely technical: the concept ‘refers back to a chaos rendered consistent’; it ‘gives a consistency to the virtual’. How is the concept distinguished from the function? If the first gives a consistency to the virtual, the second gives ‘a reference to the virtual, which actualizes it’. On its side, the element of art realises sensation in the material and makes the material pass into sensation.

We would like nothing more than to forgo this foreword to the reader and disappear behind the transparency of this text, portraying a fantasy best left to a bygone era in which translators might still claim to be objective and disinterested in what they attempt to carry across. An ideal translator would hide her choices, her compromises, her flaws and faults, and herself, seamlessly becoming-imperceptible and vanishing without a trace into that heavenly abode and tower of Babel in which all languages are black. However, perhaps the translator most of all is libidinally interested and invested in the production of texts, fated to echo the repetitions of a difference, self-sufficient in the serenity of its solitude, that is indifferent to her. But if the words are originally not her ‘own’ and if the efflorescence of the logic motivating them is in a reciprocal differential relationship with what has come before, then it's quite fortunate that she never has the last word and merely contributes to reverberating her reflective voice in the continual chorus of scholarly voices.

A book on the paradoxically systematic and methodical crea¬tion of concepts, cutting across and interweaving the history of philosophy while splicing together the old with the new, requires a concatenated rehandling of language. A book on Deleuze all the more so, insofar as it bears witness to incursions into the arena of philosophy's history with the goal of achieving the maximum of difference in the most rigorous of repetitions.

1. The Agent of Philosophical Enunciation

‘Concepts are not deduced from the plane. The conceptual persona is needed to create concepts on the plane, just as the plane itself needs to be laid out. But these two operations do not merge in the persona, which itself appears as a distinct operator.’ Between the plane and the concepts, a distinct operator completes the theory of elements. This is the conceptual persona. How is it defined? It is ‘the true agent of enunciation’. Like the narrator in a novel, the conceptual persona in philosophy is the one who says I. In this sense, it will be the object of the theory of creation and, more precisely, of the theory of philosophical discourse. However, the philosophical enunciation certainly differs from the literary enunciation. This is why we should distinguish the conceptual persona from the literary character. But first and foremost, what is the meaning of the one who says I in philosophy, what does it mean that the agent of enunciation is a persona and not, against our expectations, the philosopher?

In a novel, a story, a play, even if they concern different genres, we would never say that it is the writer or author who speaks. We observe without difficulty that speech is related to characters and that they often do not necessarily express the author's ideas or opinions. Yet even when they do, how can we confuse them with the author? The character will always be a character, with their own psychol¬ogy, their own memories or without memories, the finite number of words that constitutes them. What happens, for example, in the essay, a genre that brings us closer to philosophical enunciation? We could suppose that it's the author who speaks directly to the reader. But why do we lay out this difference with the other genres? Why do we short-circuit the persona? Due to the simple absence of the name, due to the fact that the text doesn't mention it? In the case of the essay, we may indeed consider that there is a single persona that speaks to the reader: the narrator.

1. Postulate of Commencement: The Principle of Cogitatio Natura Universalis

When do we start to think? The answer of the first postulate is that we begin to think when we decide to and due to the fact that our faculties are good by nature, i.e. because their structure coincides with the structure of the real. Thought would naturally be in a condition to know the real. This is why it suffices for the thinker to make the decision, to have the will to do it. Deleuze will support this thesis by citing the tradition, thereby proving the philosophical nature of the postulate: ‘“Everybody has by nature the desire to know”’; ‘“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed.”’

Yet we cannot, Deleuze reasons, think these phrases in fact, because ‘“Everybody”’, he repeats, ‘knows very well that in fact men think rarely, and more often under the impact of a shock than in the impulse of a taste’. This is why he argues that we should understand this determination of thought, of the commencement of thought, in principle, as a determination of pure thought.

1. Philosophy's Inauguration

1.a. Image of Thought and Matter of Being

In the second chapter of What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari assert that if philosophy commences with the creation of concepts, then the laying out of a plane constitutes its inauguration, that if the creation of concepts is the commencement of philosophy, then there is a prephilosophical plane. What is this plane, and what is its relation with concepts? Why is it a plane of immanence? What is the difference between the commencement and the inauguration of philosophy?

According to Deleuze and Guattari, the plane of immanence is the ‘image of thought’ and the ‘matter of being’, Nature and Thought, Physis and Noûs. What does this mean? We in fact have to recall this distinction that the authors themselves make when they define the plane as the ‘unlimited One-All’. The plane of immanence is what the philosopher is given from the start as totality. From the start – and it will be necessary to understand what the order of this anteriority is – the philosopher is given a conception of the whole, an ontology. This is the conception of being, the configuration of the world. If each philosophy constitutes an experience that corresponds to it, if the concept is a way to order chaos, then in Deleuzian metaphilosophy the plane of immanence is the notion which signifies the constitution of the whole, the delimitation of the margins of this experience. With this in mind, we have to note that when the notion unfolds, we do not say being and thought, but matter of being and image of thought. How should we understand these expressions to preserve their precision?

It's true that we find several definitions of philosophy in Deleuze's work. But if we have privileged one of them, that is not because it appears with the first publication by Deleuze in 1956,1 runs through the entire corpus2 and reaches completion in 1991.3 It is because in a certain way all the other definitions are deduced from our central formula. First, to the extent that this formula presupposes a theory of the concept, it allows us to define philosophy as the theory of what we do (the concept gives a consistency to the virtual4), counter-effectuation of the event (the concept constitutes it), practice in itself (the concept is itself an objective reality), theory of multiplicities (the concept is connected to affects and functions5), vision of the invisible (the concept is inseparable from a percept). It is then the second element, the notion of the plane of immanence, that allows us to define philosophy as an enterprise of demystification (because myth is assimilated to transcendence) or a cult of life (because imma¬nentism is identified with vitalism). Lastly, the other definitions are deduced from the theory of creation or from the ethical image of thought: the denunciation of foolishness presupposes the substitution of the important for the true; the diagnosis of civilisation, a discourse which erases the boundary between the caregiver and the patient; untimely critique, a calling into question of allegedly given problems and allegedly eternal values, as well as a method which is confronted with the tradition on every level. Of course, it is possible to deduce, for example, the critical and clinical aspects of philosophy from the concept of untimeliness. But what about all the definitions that depend on the theory of the concept?

1. Philosophy of Language and Philosophy of Literary Art

The method and history of philosophy constitute the form and matter of creation. However, they do not exhaust it because creation requires certain instruments which have not been examined yet: words. Indeed, the creation of concepts is deployed in the milieu of language and by resorting to a whole ensemble of discursive strategies that must complete the theory of creation. How does the creation of concepts involve a linguistic activity? And how does this activity help characterise a creation which has already been defined as the singularisation and connection of the conceptual components that come from the tradition? Doesn't belonging to the language, even the language of a tradition, to the jargon of a discipline, hinder the process of invention? And conversely, isn't the linguistic com¬munity, the fact of sharing the same language or the same discourse, one of the strongest criteria of identity, such that this kind of a break would imply the erosion of the tradition? On the other hand, we are coming closer than ever to the suspicion of aestheticism: philosophy, creation of concepts by means of theatre personae, would involve a literary labour. Would it be a branch of fantasy literature, as Borges wanted? This is indeed what the preface of Difference and Repetition anticipates: ‘A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction.’ In the same way that the history of philosophy Deleuze con¬structs cannot be understood without addressing the philosophy of history, in order to understand the theory of philosophical discourse we have to begin with a study of literature and the philosophy of language.

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