a copy, is clear: the task of the philosopher of history is to periodise; the
content of the periodisation varies. Finally, I will have more difficulty showing
that their conception of temporality approximates to that of Marxists: rather
than concepts of conjuncture and moment, we find syntheses of times in
Deleuze that owe more to Bergson than Marx.
The harvest is even richer when we pass to the six broad theses. Although
preoccupied by the personal dimension of the political, Deleuze and Guattari,
who have a decided contempt for Anglo-American philosophy (in an effusive
moment in Abécédaire, Deleuze even treats Wittgenstein as an assassin of
philosophy^21 ), do not succumb to methodological individualism. For them,
the origin of utterances is not the individual speaker, but the collective
assemblage of enunciation. This term, which displaces the study of language
from the result – the utterance (fetishised into an object of scientific study) –
to the process of enunciation (a stance they share with the linguists of
enunciation, Benveniste and Culioli), also effects a shift from the individual
to the collective: the individual speaker is dislodged from her habitual central
position. In fact, Deleuze is one of the philosophers who pushes the relegation
of the concept of the subject furthest: in his work, the subject is not quartered
to the four corners of a schema in the shape of a Z; it is not the result of a
process of interpellation; it is absent. In its stead, various concepts do the same
philosophical work: the collective assemblage of enunciation, haeccity,
impersonal, non-individual, non-subjective singularity (a haikuand a shower
of rain are examples), the body without organs. We are no longer in the sphere
of the personal subject, centre of consciousness and source of action; we are
in the machinic assemblage and what Deleuze and Guattari call the socius.
And, if we no longer need interpellated subjects, we do not need an
interpellating ideology either. In its Althusserian version, the concept is
explicitly rejected. But it is replaced: collective assemblage, with its ontological
mix of bodies, discourses and institutions, performs the same role. Relegating
the subject, Deleuze and Guattari refuse any form of transcendence: they are
very far removed from idealism and decidedly close to the pan-somatism of
the stoics, which informs Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. Closer, therefore, to the
strict materialism of the pre-Marxist tradition than the expanded materialism
of the philosophy of praxis: we find no materialism of institutions in them,
Continuations • 123(^21) See Deleuze and Parnet 1997, ‘W, c’est Wittgenstein’.