The dissolution of a desiring community inaugurates the painful
spreading of chaos, of an absence of sense. It is ‘kipple’, Philip Dick
would say, cosmic garbage, what remains of the world when lovers are
lost and friendship dies out.^6*****Let me be absolutely clear: the desiring community has nothing to do
with a community of origins, with a people, an ethnicity or a nation.
A community of origins is grounded in a ‘belonging’: differences are
nothing, all that counts is identity. Quite to the contrary: in the desir-
ing community there is no belonging, but only the encounter of sin-
gularities. This encounter cannot be structured in a stable way; it is
constantly reborn out of the pleasure derived from the common enter-
prise of conceptual projection.
And we have known very well the desiring community. We have
known it in the sunny mornings, when a friendly body came to wake
us up stroking our body under unexpected sheets.
We have known it in the street barricades, among the burned cars,
trying to prevent the advance of the military vehicles.
We have known it, screaming with joy, in the sudden encounters in
train stations submerged by the fog.
We have known it in the nocturnal sound of a flute accompanying a
small crowd stopping while waiting for the last subway ride.
Anti-Oedipusis the manifesto for the provisional and nomadic desir-
ing community.
With Anti-Oedipus, modernity’s conceptual machine arrives at the
point of catastrophe.
The desiring community and philosophical activity camp out under
the same tent.
In the introduction to What is Philosophy?the authors say:What does friendmean when it becomes a conceptual persona, or a
condition for the exercise of thought? Or rather, are we not talking
of the lover? Does not the friend reintroduce into thought a vital
relationship with the Other that was supposed to have been
excluded from pure thought? (What is Philosophy?, 3–4)At a certain point in our lives and in the history of the Anti-Oedipus
generation, which is the generation of 1968 – and there is no better
way to define it – a movement of dispersion was unleashed.12 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_03_cha02.pdf 10/3/08 11:32 AM Page 12