Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

of fluxes, the exchange processes of life. This is in fact the outcome

of Deleuze’s thought, and it is strongly suggestive of a return to

Bergsonian vitalism, a constant source of inspiration for his work.

(Gianni Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, 145–6)

The complex ontology of Bergson

The Search for lost time is in fact a search for truth. If called a search

for lost time, it is only to the degree that truth has an essential rela-

tion to time. In love as much as in nature or art, it is not pleasure

but truth that matters. Or rather we have only the pleasures and

joys that correspond to the discovery of what is true. The jealous

man experiences a tiny thrill of joy when he can decipher one of

the beloved’s lies, like an interpreter who succeeds in translating a

complicated text, even if the translation offers him personally a dis-

agreeable and painful piece of information. Again we must under-

stand how Proust defines his own search for truth, how he contrasts

it with other kinds of search – scientific or philosophic. (Deleuze,

Proust and Signs, 15)

Reading Proust, Deleuze slowly brings to light a new thematic field, a

new point of view: the relation between intensity and truth. In the

Recherche, what is in question essentially is intensity, variations of per-

ception, of memory, of pleasure. And the sphere of this reconstruction

of truth is the sphere of time, which unfolds through the flow of

memory.

Time wasted, lost time – but also time regained, recovered time. To

each kind of sign there doubtless corresponds a privileged line

of time. The worldly signs imply chiefly a wasted time; the signs

of love envelop especially a time lost. The sensuous signs often

afford us the means of regaining time, restore it to us at the heart of

time lost. The signs of art, finally, give us a time regained, an ori-

ginal absolute time that includes all the others. But if each has

its privileged temporal dimension, each also straddles the other

lines and participates in the other dimensions of time. (Proust and

Signs, 24)

Already in his study of Hume, we saw that, for Deleuze, empiricism

is to be understood as a theory of knowledge that places itself in the

perspective of experience, of imagination, of the learning process, of

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