gilles deleuze: a philosophy of immanenceimmanence with the concepts themselves, nor to make it the concept
underlying all concepts, but to understand it as an infinite and absolute
horizon making possible the consistency that thought requires. It is
infinite and absolute because it is not the relative horizon of a subject
(which can only be posited as, precisely, a concept), but the horizon
of movement as such: “it is the horizon itself that is in movement: the
relative horizon recedes when the subject advances, but on the plane
of immanence we are always and already on the absolute horizon”
(WP, 38).
A first point of interest for us here is that Deleuze, at least to begin
with (and this is certainly no coincidence, but a vital order), does not
define the plane of immanence against or even in relation to its tradi-
tional counterpart: transcendence. This relation will certainly play an
important role — and how could it not? — and I will return to this in
short. However it appears that at this point, this relation will be one
of consequence rather than a dichotomous pre-condition. In the text
where Deleuze, together with Guattari, elaborates the notion of im-
manence and its absolute value, the term that constitutes its first coun-
terpart or, more accurately, its conterweight, is chaos: if im manence is
what makes possible the consistency (that is, securing some aspects of
infinite movement while keeping it infinite), chaos is precisely what
has no consistency, and that which constitutes a continuous dissolu-
tion of consistency; flashlightnings of speeds that dissolve, transform,
disappear before they can be thought or grasped; to understand in
analogy with what a not-yet formalized will to power would be for
Nietzsche (power/force without direction). Chaos is perpetually
present, is a continuing origin, where nothing has yet taken form nei-
ther as thought nor nature, and that in the same way threatens to
dissolve once again all that is formulated and wrought into form:
“Chaos is not an inert or stationary state, nor is it a chance mixture.
Chaos chaotizes and undoes every consistency in the infinite” (WP,
42, transl. mod.) It is from this background, and still continually im-
mersed in this chaos that thought begins precisely by the instituting
of the plane of imanence that, in Deleuze’s words, constitutes a section
of chaos, a sieve retaining or rather selecting a certain number of cha-
otic determinations, but at the same time requires them to be retained
as absolute movement: “abstracted of all tempo-spatial coordination,