Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

one, at will ...’ (Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity,52, cited in

Bergsonism, 80)

And Deleuze observes:

Here Bergson endows attention with the power of ‘apportioning

without dividing’, ‘of being one and several’; but more profoundly,

he endows duration with the power to encompass itself (Bergsonism,

80).

Multiplicity is the constitutive condition in which thought unfolds

for the simple fact that the lived is multiple.

Remember that Bergson opposed two types of multiplicity – actual

multiplicities that are numerical and discontinuous and virtual

multiplicities that are continuous and qualitative. (Bergsonism,

79–80)

Consciousness and intentionality are virtual, continuous and qual-

itative multiplicities. In the sphere of intentionality and consciousness,

actual multiplicities are ordered and interpreted.

The complex ontology that Deleuze discusses, that he saw emerging

in Bergson’s works, rests precisely on this point: Being enters into the

infinite and innumerable game of mirrors staged by time as duration.

Perhaps this is why a good reader of Deleuze is also the best possible

reader of Phillip K. Dick, even if Dick, I suspect, had never heard of

Deleuze, who instead did indeed know him.

Reality is generated by the flow of virtual multiplicities that become

actualized: consciousness, virtual multiplicity, intentionality, virtual

multiplicity, which are all actualized in memory, in imagination, and

in the projection and production of worlds of experience.

What Bergson called élan vitalis the projection of worlds, the con-

nection between the psychological and the ontological spheres.

What does Bergson mean when he talks about élan vital? It is always

a case of virtuality in the process of being actualized, a simplicity in

the process of differentiating, a totality in the process of dividing

up. (Bergsonism, 94)

The Deleuzian reading rescues Bergson’s thought, at least partially,

from the late-Romantic and vitalist context in which it is generally

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