Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

only in the large aggregates that they constitute through a link draw-

ing of elements, a partial dependence, and a superposition of relays. It

is not a matter of biologizing human history, nor of anthropologizing

natural history. It is a matter of showing the common participation

of the social machines andthe organic machines in the desiring-

machines. At man’s most basic stratum, the Id: the schizophrenic cell,

the schizo molecules, their chains and their jargons. There is a whole

biology of schizophrenia; molecular biology is itself schizophrenic – as

is microphysics. (Anti-Oedipus, 289, emphasis in the original)

Truth and history in Hegel

On the plane of ideological representations, ’68 conceived of itself as the

realization of truth in history, according to a Hegelian kind of interpreta-

tive schema. But beyond ideological representations, this movement initi-

ates the essentially postmodern process of liberating truth from history

and of promoting truths in proliferation, or rather of autonomous and col-

lective processes of enunciation. Little by little, from 1968 until today, we

have recognized that there is no truth to be realized in History because

truth does not lie in the adequacy of history to thought, nor of thought to

history.

In this mutation of perspectives that was traced in the successive

decades since 1968, the Heideggerian influence plays an important

role. Heidegger suggested that truth is the institution of the World in

the sphere of Language and of Technology. Once we realize this, there

begins the long, perhaps interminable march of liberation from Hegel,

as Michael Hardt showed in his book on Deleuze (Gilles Deleuze: an

Apprenticeship in Philosophy, 1993).

*****

Deleuze’s thought can be seen, on the same line as Nietzsche’s and

Heidegger’s, as a withdrawal from the logocentric universe constructed

by Hegel.

Where can one find the exits from this circle of circles of circles that

is the Hegelian system? We must seek them in a field that is neither

metaphysics, nor its overcoming. The exit exists in the emancipation

from historical thought and from history itself, understood as totality,

or rather as process of totalization.

The exit is located in the vision of a rhizomatic proliferation of

singularities.

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