Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

mechanical or bare repetitions (repetitions of the Same) would find

their raison d’êtrein the more profound structures of a hidden repeti-

tion in which a ‘differential’ is disguised and displaced. (Deleuze,

Difference and Repetition, xx)

Once again, as in the book on Nietzsche, the concept of difference is

proposed in a framework that explicitly diverges from that of Hegel.

The process of becoming is not understood in a finalistic direction; the

event cannot be overcome by a totality that encompasses it – rather,

the event can only be understood as untimely.

Following Nietzsche, we discover, as more profound than time and

eternity, the untimely; philosophy is neither a philosophy of

history, nor a philosophy of the eternal, but untimely, always and

only untimely – that is to say, ‘acting counter to our time and

thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of time

to come’. (Difference and Repetition, xxi; citation from Nietzsche,

Untimely Meditations, 60)

The temporal perspective within which we can understand the event

is that of an uninterrupted discontinuity that cannot be totalized because

it can only be represented from within.

Eternal return cannot mean the return of the Identical because

it presupposes a world (that of the will to power) in which all

previous identities have been abolished and dissolved. Returning

is being, but only the being of becoming. (Difference and Repetition,

41)

Identity can no longer be understood as the first principle, but

as a principle in becoming, as the metamorphosis of the different

that reflects on itself by means of a provisional process of self-

identification:

God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never

work out exactly, and this inexactitude or injustice in the result,

this irreducible inequality, forms the condition of the world.

The world ‘happens’ while God calculates; if the calculation were

exact, there would be no world. The world can be regarded as a

‘remainder’, and the real in the world understood in terms of frac-

tional or even incommensurable numbers. Every phenomenon refers

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