Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

remembering, from the viewpoint of experiential intensity rather than

that of the object.

Now we see, through the reading of Proust, that the dimension in

which experience occurs is the experience of time, and that knowledge

is inseparable from it.

On the other hand, the position in which the subject of experience

posits itself is that of interpretation: the signs come to be interpreted

through the singularity of recollection, through the singular unfolding

of intensity:

One must be endowed for the signs, ready to encounter them, one

must open oneself to their violence. The intelligence always comes

after; it is good when it comes after; it is good only when it comes

after ... There is no Logos; there are only hieroglyphs... The essences are

at once the thing to be translated and the translation itself, the sign

and the meaning. They are involved in the sign in order to force us

to think; they develop the meaning in order to be necessarily con-

ceived. The hieroglyph is everywhere; its double symbol is the acci-

dent of the encounter and the necessity of thought: ‘fortuitous and

inevitable.’ (Proust and Signs, 101–2, emphasis in the original)^3

Duration, memory, vital impetus (élan vital) are central concepts of

Henri Bergson’s thought in the Deleuzian perspective. Bergson did not

limit himself to delineating a psychology, but established the bases for

a ‘complex ontology’, an ontology able to encompass multiplicity and

becoming:

Duration seemed to [Bergson] to be less and less reducible to a psy-

chological experience and became instead the variable essence of

things, providing the theme of a complex ontology. (Deleuze,

Bergsonism, 34)

How does one manage to understand reality? Proust said: by deci-

phering signs through the internal instruments of intuition and emo-

tional interpretation, following the interpretative line of memory in

time. Not with an investigation of the object, but an investigation of

the way in which we experience it. This is how reality is understood.

When we are sitting on the bank of a river, the flowing of the water,

the gliding of a boat or the flight of a bird, the uninterrupted

murmur of our deep life, are for us three different things or a single

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