Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

space, but never through suppression or overcoming. Rather, he

pursued a kind of overlapping and weaving of discursive planes,

intended quite truly as imaginary planes, as prospective planes, as

visions. The philosophers’ words, their books, were considered by

Deleuze as tool boxes from which one takes what is useful, what can be

used with other pieces. But tool boxes to construct what?

To construct territories, we can say, to construct planes of con-

sistency, conceptual landscapes along which one can climb in order to

project new worlds.

Precisely in 1968, Difference and Repetitionappeared, in which the

encounter with Nietzsche returns, but the nodal concept of difference

is elaborated through an enlargement of the horizon toward Hegel and

Heidegger.

The Logic of Senseappeared in 1969.

Then came the encounter with Félix Guattari and the writing of Anti-

Oedipus: all that followed can be considered the meticulous and pro-

liferating composition of a geographical map for the future, an upward

movement that allowed the flight beyond the rusted and tainted hori-

zons of the twentieth century.

The subject and the mind

‘It is the brain that says I, but Iis an other,’ we read in What Is Philosophy?

(211), that Deleuze wrote with Guattari. On this topic, Deleuze’s thought

had been prepared at length through a long reflection on experience and

the subject.

At the end of the opening paragraph of Empiricism and Subjectivity,

Deleuze constructs an idea of empiricism based on the claim of the

irreducibility of experience:

Hume’s project entails the substitution of a psychology of the mind by a

psychology of the mind’s affections. The constitution of a psychology

of the mind is not at all possible, since this psychology cannot find

in its object the required constancy or universality; only a psycho-

logy of affections will be capable of constituting the true science of

humanity. (21, emphasis in the original)

It is necessary to substitute a psychology of the mind by a psycho-

logy of its affections, says Deleuze. If we wish to study the mind, we

will never find anything constant and necessary. In this way, with a

decisive gesture, suddenly all of structuralism and all mentalist reduc-

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