Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

inserted. The Bergsonian concept of time-duration comes to be rethought

in light of an ontology that becomes the background for Heidegger’s

thought, for the ontological perspective of Dasein, and the reflection

contained in Being and Time.

Bergson conceived of time as the singular vibration of a different

duration within which Being can be seen and from which it can be

founded as temporality and as the development of an intensity in

time.

Psychology is now only an opening onto ontology, a springboard

for an ‘installation’ in Being. No sooner are we installed than we

perceive that Being is multiple, the very numerous duration, our

own, caught between more dispersed durations and more taut, more

intense durations ... Everything happens as if the universe were a

tremendous Memory. (Bergsonism, 77)

The key to Deleuzian thought derives from this: the discourse on

Being is above all a discourse of intensity since sense is the vibration

and the variation of intensity that memory or imagination produces in

consciousness.

The universe is made up of modifications, disturbances, changes of

tension and energy, and nothing else. Bergson does indeed speak

of a plurality of rhythmsof duration; but in this context he makes

it clear – in relation to durations that are more or less slow or fast

• that each duration is an absolute, and that each rhythm is itself a
  duration. (Bergsonism, 76, emphasis in the original)

Singular ontology

In 1968, Difference and Repetitionappeared; in 1969, Logic of Sense, two

texts that develop premises that we can find in Nietzsche and

Philosophy. The first takes off from the question of the eternal return,

the second from the problem of genealogy and interpretation as the

source of sense.

Two lines of research lie at the origin of this book: one concerns a

concept of difference without negation, precisely because unless it is

subordinated to the identical, difference would not extend or

‘would not have to extend’ as far as opposition and contradiction;

the other concerns a concept of repetition in which physical,

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