Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

ciple of difference ... (Empiricism and Subjectivity, 87; Hume,

Treatise,18)

Thus from start to finish, Deleuze addresses difference, that is, the

emergence of novelty, of the given, and not identity, constants, laws,

what has permanence.

We must begin with this experience, because it is theexperience. It

does not presuppose anything else and nothing else precedes it. It is

not the affection of an implicated subject, nor the modification or

mode of a substance. (Empiricism and Subjectivity,88, emphasis in

the original)

The mind is singular. To speak about the mind, we must speak about

one mind, about a route through the events that make the subject:

events-affections (climatic agents, as it were, of the status of the mind)

and event-actions, cognitive and practical projections of the mind in

the surrounding world, the movement of groping exploration and the

following of maps.

Dialectic and genealogy

Deleuze’s empiricism is the way through which eventology can be con-

structed. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, he faces this problem in all its

breadth. In this book, Deleuze traces the philosophical landscape from

which his notion of the event emerges. Nietzsche’s thought constitutes

the line along which he proceeds in order to move beyond the abyss

that opened with the collapse, with the disappearance of God, with the

disappearance of an ontological foundation of values. In this book,

Deleuze says that Nietzsche’s thought should be understood as an

answer to the dialectic. The relationship between Nietzsche and Hegel,

although apparently marginal in the text, is in reality of the greatest

importance.

Contrary to what many maintain, there are many reasons to suppose

that Nietzsche thoroughly knew Hegel’s thought. In fact, according to

Deleuze, we are bound to understand very poorly the ensemble of

Nietzsche’s work if we don’t understand against whom his fundamen-

tal concepts are directed.

It is sufficient to say that dialectic is a labor and empiricism an

enjoyment [jouissance]. And who says that there is more thought in

Deleuze and the Rhizomatic Machine 51

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