Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

tions are swept away. The empiricism of which Deleuze speaks is an

empiricism of experience, not of something dead, but an empiricism of

the experiential event that punctually, singularly and uniquely influences

the act of cognition. This act is singular, it happens here and now, within

determinate existential conditions, in the presence of an unrepeatable

object. This is even a distinctive trait of Deleuzian style: a passion for the

singular.

In his book devoted to Leibniz [The Fold], published in 1988, Deleuze

says what he considers to be the most passionate problem for philo-

sophy: ‘Not how to attain eternity, but in what conditions does the

objective world allow for a subjective production of novelty, that is, of

creation?’ (79).

The event is the occurrence quaexperiential singularity. How does

an event arise? Here is the principal cognitive problem, the one that

Deleuze approaches in discussing empiricism. Reading David Hume’s A

Treatise of Human Nature, Deleuze undertakes the discovery of some

concepts that suddenly become connected:

The mind ... is given as a collection of ideas and not as a system.

It follows that our earlier question can be expressed as follows: how

does a collection become a system? The collection of ideas is called

‘imagination’, insofar as the collection designates not a faculty

but rather an assemblage of things, in the most vague sense of the

term: things are as they appear – a collection without an album,

a play without a stage, a flow of perceptions. (Empiricism and

Subjectivity, 22–3)

‘We have the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are

represented, or of the materials of which [the place] is composed,’

Hume says in the Treatise(253). And Deleuze observes:

The place is not different from what takes place in it; the repres-

entation does not take place in a subject. Then again the question

may be: how does the mind become a subject?How does the imagina-

tion become a faculty? (Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23, emphasis in

the original)

Representation does not reside in a subject in as much there is no

subject without there being mental activity or a cartography of the

world: memory, imagination, perception, representation, projection.

All of this activity does not belong to the subject; it isthe subject.

Deleuze and the Rhizomatic Machine 49

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