Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

How does a collection become a system? The systematic character of

the mind, of mental activity, resides nowhere if not in the imagina-

tion, in the attribution of sense to a certain landscape, to a certain

mode of functioning, to a certain rule.

This is where the problem of the subject – or rather the problem

of subjectivation – arises. What is a subject? asks Deleuze. And he

suddenly discards the transcendental presuppositions of the Kan-

tian derivation, and even the historicism typical of the Hegelian

tradition.

In Deleuze there is no subject – this word is always greeted a bit

coldly, with a certain suspicion. There is no subject, but rather sub-

jectivation, stylistic stabilization of the mind, variations around an

intention.

The depth of the mind is indeed delirium, or – same thing from

another point of view – change and indifference. (Empiricism and

Subjectivity, 23; cf. Hume, Treatise, 125)

And on the other hand, ideas are linked in the mind, but not by the

mind. There is no subjective principle connected to the mental: the

relation is not what connects, but what is connected.

‘Subjectivity is determined as an effect; it is in fact an impres-

sion of reflection’ (Empiricism and Subjectivity,26, emphasis in the

original).

The subject is the rule of construction with which the collection

of ideas (and the emission of enunciations) constitutes a world.

The process of subjectivation is one with the work of schemat-

ization, of conceptual construction of the world. And the world is

the site of psychodynamic integration of innumerable mental pro-

jections.

Does ontology then become dissolved in a game of mirrors?

Deleuze answered the question of Being ironically. Rather than

speaking about ontology, for him we should talk about eventology,

about the science of the unrepeatable, of the inconstant. The event is

the happening of experience in its singularity.

Deleuze explores this eventology through one of his visions of

empiricism, one of his definitions of the experiential given:

What is the given? ... It is movement and change without iden-

tity or law ... ‘Everything separable is distinguishable and

everything distinguishable is different.’ This is the prin-

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