Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

ment of different wills: the will that projects values, constructs worlds

of reference; the will to power is a hermeneutic force, a force of inter-

pretation, the attributions of differential sense, the differential posses-

sion of the world.

‘There is always a plurality of senses, a constellation, a complex of

sensations but also of coexistences which make interpretation an art’

(Nietzsche and Philosophy,3-4).

The problem of truth is connected to the theme of the mask. If the

very foundation of metaphysics is removed with Nietzsche, if meta-

physics as foundation of the history of the world is corroded, and

the history of the world is revealed – following the improvised con-

ceptualization of nihilism – as a voyage without purpose and with-

out foundation, in which the consciousness of the death of God

predominates, then there remains no possibility for founding truth

metaphysically.

Hence, truth must be thought in singular terms, as a gamble

(and here is the departure point of modern existential reflection)

and as will to power. Truth cannot be placed only in a sphere of

singular subtraction, of singular creation of new values, and thus

in the sphere of an affirmation of power, and not of subjugation,

of belonging, of dependence. Truth and will to power are thus

on the same plane, the plane that Deleuze defines, in his lan-

guage, as the plane of the event’s singularity and of the singular

event.

The concept of difference

When one understands it correctly, the concept of the eternal return

goes right to the heart of the question of the event as difference. But

the notion of difference lends itself to all sorts of misleading interpre-

tations, and the political use of this concept can result in dangerous

identitarian effects.

What does difference mean? Does difference perhaps mean remain-

ing as close to oneself as possible, protecting something that does not

want to be rendered homologous or the oppositional affirmation of

one’s being? But if we understand it this way, difference means iden-

tity and then difference becomes a principle of identification which

allows us to recognize and individuate.

On the contrary, the concept of difference really must be taken in

the opposite direction, in the direction of becoming and not of being,

of drift and not of identity.

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