Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

to an inequality by which it is conditioned. (Difference and Repetition,

222)

The world is the proliferation of residues that derive from the imper-

fection of the divine calculations and from the interminability of his-

torical work.

Somewhere Félix Guattari wrote that ‘history is written in syn-

copation [contretemps]’. What is important in historical processes is the

emergence of something that was not foreseen by laws, something that

was not already regulated.

Difference, therefore, is not the non-being of something, or

what is opposed to the thing, negating it from the outside. Differ-

ence rather is in the heart of the thing, is the same dynamic that

permits definition and change. Definition and change, finally, are

the same; if you want to define the thing, you must tell me how it

changes. And the thing does not change through opposition to some-

thing else, but through the intimate imbalance that causes everything

to move.

Difference is understood as a positive concept, not an oppositional

concept.

If we wish to adopt the perspective of the speaker who assigns sense,

that is, if we wish to adopt the point of view of sense as production,

as that which comes from an origin, we must realize that difference

has this prospective power and not reduce it to a dialectical pole, to a

mere conceptual figure. Difference stands as the source from which

sense emanates; it is the coincidence in the dice throw and requires the

numerical configuration that derives from it. (‘Ontology is the dice

throw, the chaosmos from which the cosmos emerges’: Difference and

Repetition,199.)

Difference is the entrance to the singular ontology around which

Deleuze worked, a complex and pulsional ontology, an ontology of

innumerable points of view projecting singular worlds.

The language of the event

‘ “What is it?” I cried out with curiosity – which one is it?you ought to

ask. Thus spoke Dionysus, then kept quiet in his own special way, that

is to say, in an enticing way,’ says Nietzsche in ‘The Wanderer and

His Shadow’, cited by Deleuze (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 76; Nietzsche,

‘The Wanderer ...’, 10).

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