Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

And from Bataille’s laughter emerges Jacques Derrida’s deconstruc-

tion, who in ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism

without Reserve’ in Writing and Difference, wrote the following:

To laugh at philosophy (at Hegelianism) – such, in effect, is the

form of the awakening – henceforth calls for an entire ‘discipline’,

an entire ‘method of meditation’, that acknowledges the philo-

sopher’s byways, understands his techniques, makes use of his ruses,

manipulates his cards, lets him deploy his strategy, appropriates his

texts. (252)

The concept of difference – as it is elaborated by Deleuze – cannot be

understood without referring to the whole development of its dis-

course; that is, it cannot be understood without reference to the

concept of deterritorialization, of desire. Deleuzian difference, in fact,

is not the positing of an oppositional alterity differentiating itself from

something else: in the final analysis that would mean identity.

Difference is the process of becoming different from oneself.

*****

To understand the formation of the concept of difference throughout

Deleuzian thought it does not suffice to refer to Nietzsche and to the

lineage of German thought that confronts the themes of ontology,

metaphysics and history. Rather, our visual field must extend to under-

standing a lineage that can be associated rather with scientific thought,

to organicism and vitalism: in short, to Henri Bergson. In fact, if we

limit ourselves to considering Nietzsche, we do not succeed in under-

standing the genesis of energetic and organicist concepts such as desire,

or flow, that are essential for seizing the specifically Deleuzian curvature

of the concept of difference.

Deleuze’s polemic against psychoanalysis and Marxism is again a

variation of the interpretation of difference as a purification of the

simulacrum from all structural reference. What has happened to dif-

ference here? Is there any sense in which we can still apply the

phrase ‘philosophy of difference’ to a philosophy of the simulacrum

that glorifies the duplication operated by a libido with no canal-

ization or code on a ‘body without organs’? Perhaps so, but only

on condition that difference becomes a question of pure energy

assimilable to that inequality of forces which creates the possibility

Deleuze and the Rhizomatic Machine 59

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