134

12

The Provisional Eternity of

Friendship

What is philosophy?

Twenty years after Anti-Oedipusand ten years after A Thousand Plateaus

there appeared What Is Philosophy?,a book that can be considered as

the recognition of the conceptual backstreets, of the tool boxes that

have been used to construct the internal fortress of language, as pulling

back the curtain on the backstage scene.

Deleuze and Guattari’s final book places all the cards on the table;

it is their least mysterious book, going straight to the heart of the

problem that is posed precisely in the book’s title: what is philosophy?

Philosophy is an activity of creation; it creates concepts, and con-

cepts are a kind of crossing bridge over the abyss of chaos. Only

friends, only people who understand each other without needing

to debate, refute, agree with each other, can walk together across this

bridge.

There is no project of reaching the truth, of realization, behind the

conceptual creation that Gilles and Félix are talking about.

Philosophy does not abolish chaos, nor does it subject it to the

definitive order of reason. Chaos is always first and last; it is the sea in

which conceptual creation swims.

A concept is a set of inseparable variations that is produced or con-

structed on a plane of immanence insofar as the latter crosscuts the

chaotic variability and gives it consistency (reality). A concept is

therefore a chaoid state par excellence; it refers back to a chaos ren-

dered consistent, become Thought, mental chaosmos. And what

would thinkingbe if it did not constantly confront chaos? ... We call

Chaoidsthe realities produced on the planes that cut through the

9780230_221192_13_cha12.pdf 10/3/08 11:36 AM Page 134