Man and World 29: 315--326, 1996. (~) 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Concept and event PAUL PATTON

Department of General Philosophy, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

A Thousand Plateaus is a bewildering text, as much for its profusion of idiosyncratic terminology as for its apparent lack of any overall structure or argument. Take for example the plateau which deals with language, "November 20, 1923 -Postulates of Linguistics": in the course of a discussion which touches upon speech act theory, the nature of indirect discourse, Stoic philosophy of language, Chomsky, sociolinguistics and a range of literary figures, Deleuze and Guattari reject a series of widely accepted postulates of linguistic theory and philosophy of language. These include the notion that language serves primarily to inform or to communicate and the notion that language is a more or less homogeneous system. In the course of their argument, they introduce a series of neologisms, including "order-word", collective assemblages o f enunciation, incorporeal transformations and processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Their purpose in doing so is not to provide an alternative linguistic theory, nor even a philosophy of language in any familiar sense of that expression. Rather, in the terms of the conception of philosophy which they outline in What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari are here engaged in the creation of a concept: language defined as "the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions or speech acts current in a language at a given moment", z This is a definition of language in terms of its effectivity or command function: language as the systematic production of utterances which express a given set of incorporeal events. In an interview which accompanied the publication ofA Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze described this book as "philosophy, nothing but philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word". 2 However, as he and Guattari show in What is Philosophy?, the underlying conception &philosophy is far from traditional. On their view, the peculiar skill of philosophers lies in the creation of new concepts, where "concept" is a technical term which serves to distinguish philosophy from science and art. Science aims at the representation of states o f affairs by means of mathematical or propositional functions. Art does not aim at representation at all but at the capture and expression in a given medium of"blocks o f sensation". Philosophy falls somewhere in between : it is like science in that it fulfils a cognitive rather than an affective function,

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but it is like art, especially modem art, in that it does not seek to refer to or represent independently existing objects or states of affairs. 3 Deleuze and Guattari assert that the concept"has no reference: it is self-referential, it posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created" (WP, 22). In their view, concepts are autopoetic or self-positing entities, defined not by their external relations to things or states of affairs but by the internal consistency of their elements, as well as their outward relations to other concepts. Concepts do not refer to things but rather express events. Understood in this manner, they belong entirely to the domain o f thought. They do not provide a truth which is independent o f the "plane o f immanence" upon which they are constructed. At one point in What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari go so far as to claim that "philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth" (WP, 82). But if philosophy does not consist in knowing, then in what sense can it be said to serve a cognitive function? And if their practice of philosophy is to be understood in these terms, then what is the use of a book such as A Thousand Plateaus? My purpose in this paper is to set out an answer to these questions and to draw some lines of connection between this conception and more familiar approaches to philosophy. I propose to examine the "syntactic" and "semantic" dimensions of philosophy understood as the creation o f concepts before turning to the pragmatics of this account. In this respect, as in others, their account of philosophy follows an orthodox schema in order to arrive at unorthodox positions. I will also defend the coherence of the Deleuzean view against the charges of some of it critics. For example, in a recent review, Jonathan R6e asserts that Deleuze and Guattari's position is "heroically incoherent": "For if they are right in defining Philosophy as the creation of concepts which do not refer to anything, then they cannot possibly be justified in applying their own philosophical concepts to Science and Art, or using them to scoff at Logic and Phenomenology, or even for that matter to praise Philosophy". 4 What R6e overlooks is that Deleuze and Guattari do not simply "apply" their own philosophical concepts to science and art where these are presupposed or pre-existing objects. Rather, they create philosophical concepts of science and art in order to contrast these with their own concept of philosophy. There is nothing incoherent about this procedure: on the contrary, it is entirely consistent with their own account of philosophy. One may of course go on to question the usefulness, desirability or even the novelty o f their concept of philosophy, but that too is entirely consistent with the pragmatism of their conception of philosophy. Before looking at Deleuze and Guattari's account of the nature of concepts, we should note the two important features of their account of the process o f concept creation. First, on their view the elaboration o f a philosophy also

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involves the invention of particular characters or conceptual personae who speak in and through its utterances: "conceptual personae a r e . . , the true agents of enunciation" (WP, 65). For example, in the case of Descartes, the important persona in the Meditations is the simple common man uncorrupted by higher education and endowed only with his natural power of reason. His lack of intellectual sophistication is matched only by the rewards for his innocence: triumph over the Evil Demon, the attainment of certainty and the recovery of God. In the case of Nietzsche, a whole cast of personae are employed in order to work through the consequences of the death of God, including Zarathustra, his disciples and interlocutors.5 Deleuze too employs a variety of conceptual personae throughout his works: the apprentice who learns how to deal with problems, the nomad thinker, the friend of the concept where "friend" itself is a complex concept drawing upon Nietzsche and Blanchot as well as the Greek conception of friendship.6 Second, the creation of concepts implies a set of pre-conceptual presuppositions which Deleuze and Guattari call the "image of thought" or the "plane of immanence" upon which a given form of thought unfolds. Such images or planes are defined by the presuppositions which determine in principle the nature of thought. A recurrent concern throughout Deleuze's work, from Proust and Signs to What is Philosophy? via Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition, is the critique of an image of thought based upon representation and the attempt to constitute a new image of thought as creative and "problematic". Difference and Repetition provides the most sustained analysis of the classical or "dogmatic" image of thought which runs throughout much of the history of philosophy: this is the conception of thought as a natural human capacity possessed of a good will and an upright nature, where thought is supposed to have a natural affinity with the truth, such that it is error, and not right thinking which requires explanation. By contrast, thought takes on a very different aspect when construed on the basis of Nietzsche's conception of the world as will to power. Thought becomes a human capacity which has developed, not of its own accord or as a result of its own good will, but as the effect of a necessity imposed from without: "something in the world forces us to think" (DR, 139). By the "syntax" of the Deleuzean conception of philosophy, I mean the account of concepts as a particular kind of thought-object. As they are defined in What is Philosophy?, concepts are complex intensional singularities made up of other such singularities. There are no concepts with only one component, Deleuze and Guattari argue, and every concept has components that may in turn be considered as concepts. Their examples include Sartre's concept of the Other, which includes at least two components: the other person and the one to whom it is other. Or Descartes' Cogito, which is a complex concept

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which has three components: "I (who doubts) think, and therefore I am (a thinking being)". The three components of this concept- the doubting I, the thinking I and the existent I - are like so many intensive ordinates arranged in "zones of neighbourhood or indiscernibility that produce passages from one to the other and constitute their inseparability" (WP, 25). Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the order-word in "Postulates of Linguistics" exhibits the same kind of intemal complexity: among its components are the concept of a speech act, where this is understood partly in Austinian terms, partly in terms of the Stoic conception of incorporeal events which are expressed in utterances, but attributed to bodies and states of affairs. The specificity of the Deleuzean concept of the order-word or command function of language lies in the area of intersection or "zone of indiscernibility" between these two concepts. Concepts are always created in relation to specific problems: "A concept lacks meaning to the extent that it is not connected to other concepts and is not linked to a problem that it resolves or helps to resolve" (WP, 79). As a result, a concept may be modified or recast by being brought into relation to a new problem and new concepts, as Descartes' Cogito was by Kant when he distinguished between the active thinking self and the passive self as object of awareness in time. The introduction of time into consciousness effects a complete reorganization of the Cogito. Concepts therefore possess a history, which includes the variations which they undergo in their migration from one problem to another. Thus, the concept of the incorporeal event, which Deleuze and Guattari employ in their account of language as the set of all order-words current at a given moment, has a prior history in Stoic logic and ontology. "In any concept, there are usually bits or components that come from other concepts, which correspond to other problems and presuppose other planes" (WP, 18). Concepts possess a range of virtual relations with other concepts which ensure that they are "fragmentary" or open-ended wholes, since they contain the potential for links to other concepts. In the case of the order-word, the concept of the act or event as incorporeal transformation contains a link to Deleuze's concept of sense in The Logic of Sense. These virtual relations are in effect "bridges" along which the concept might be transformed into another concept. They derive from the manner in which components of a given concept enter into zones of proximity with (or indiscemibility from) other concepts. Together these zones constitute the "becoming" of the concept in question. Wittgensteinian philosophers used to call some concepts (art, democracy, etc.) open-textured in the sense that they were always open to extension or transformation: for Deleuze and Guattari all concepts are of this kind. In Descartes' case, the suggestion that among its ideas the self has an

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idea of infinity provides a link to the idea of an infinite being and thus to the concept of God. Considered purely as formal constructions or assemblages of intensional marks, concepts may be defined in terms of a certain kind of "rendering consistent" of their components. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, concepts are both absolute (considered as wholes, posited all at once) and relative (to their components, to other concepts, to the problems which they are supposed to resolve). The components and their consistency in a particular concept are two distinct dimensions of the concept, but related in that the consistency is established only by means of a certain "communication" between the components. In the case of the Cogito, a common zone or area of undecidability is established between the components thinking, doubting and being. Deleuze and Guattari define these zones in terms of overlapping content and suggest that these zones or "becomings" define the internal consistency of the concept: "components remain distinct but something passes from one to the other, something that is undecidable between them" (WP, 19-20). Their language suggests a proximity with Derrida on this point. This is precisely how Derrida arrives at a concept such as writing in the general sense: he begins with the structure of the spoken sign, then observes that everything which applies to its elements also applies to those of the written sign. In other words, something undecidable emerges between the spoken and written signifier, and between both of these and the signified. This "zone of undecidability" defines the general concept of writing. Writing in the general sense includes as one of its components the concept of iterability, which is itself a paradoxical concept since it implies both the repetition of the same abstract figure and the unlimited alterability of that figure: it implies as Derrida says "the necessity of thinking at once both the rule and the event, concepts and singularity". 7 Deleuze and Guattari contrast the irregularity of philosophical concepts with the regularity of both the mathematical and propositional functions with which science is concerned. Whereas philosophy forms concepts on a plane of immanence, science establishes functions on a plane of reference. The history of science involves the construction of such planes of reference and the specification of relevant co-ordinates in terms of which functions may be determined. Logic after Frege defines a concept as a function from singular terms to truth values. In both cases, the determinate character of the resulting functions is ensured by the independence of the variables which determine a given system of reference. By contrast, the components of concepts are "neither constants nor variables but pure and simple variations ordered according to their neighbourhood" (WP, 20). Deleuze and Guattari's concepts resemble Derrida's "aconceptual concepts" to the extent that they

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are not governed by the logic of exclusive disjunction which is supposed to govern concept formation in the sciences and in all "rigorous" thought. Their concepts are "anexact" because they are susceptible to continuous variation, or iterable in Derrida's sense of the term. The "zones ofundecidability" which render concepts consistent also render their boundaries indeterminate or vague; they share the open-endedness which characterizes all rhizomatic assemblages. For Derrida, the interest of such quasi-concepts lies in their paradoxical form: the concept of iterability belongs to all conceptualization or conceptual opposition as such, but also "marks the limit of idealization and o f conceptualization". 8 Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge the paradoxical nature of philosophical concepts, but for them the interest of such concepts does not lie in their disruptive or deconstructive form, but in their content. In addition to the formal differences between concepts and functions, Deleuze and Guattari propose a semantic difference: functions refer to states of affairs, things or bodies, whereas concepts express events. Deleuze's concept of the event contains several components. Foremost among these is the Stoic conception of events as incorporeals. Events are incorporeal transformations which are expressed in statements and attributed to bodies (TP, 86). In The Logic of Sense (which might equally have been entitled Logic of the Event), Deleuze argues for the identity of sense and what he calls "pure events": that is, incorporeal entities which subsist over and above their spatiotemporal manifestations, and which are expressed in language. He relies upon the Stoic concept o f the "sayable" (lekton) in order to distinguish the sense or event expressed in a proposition from the mixtures of bodies to which these are attributed. The Stoics, he argues, were the first to create a philosophical concept of the event, discovering this along with sense or the expressed of the proposition: " . . . an incorporeal, complex and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which insists or subsists in the proposition". 9 The account o f concepts in What is Philosophy? also assimilates event and sense: concepts are described as identical with events understood as the "pure sense" that runs through their components (WP, 36, 144, 156). A further dimension of the Stoic concept of events establishes a distinctive relation to time: events are becomings. Deleuze argues that all events are incorporeal transformations: not just institutional events such as becoming a university graduate or a convicted felon, but also physical events such as being cut or becoming red. The state of being cut or being red is an attribute o f bodies, whereas the event of becoming cut or becoming red is a change of state or "becoming" which does not insist in the bodies but is attributed to them. Deleuze argues for a division within time itself, a distinction between the ordinary time in which events occur and the time of the event which cannot be identified within the former time. From the perspective of ordinary

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time, the event is "eternally that which has just happened or that which is about to happen" (LS, 8). From the perspective of events themselves, their inner complexity and temporal rhythm are indiscernible from the point of view of ordinary time, from whence it appears that nothing is taking place. Deleuze cites P6guy's notion of the "aternal" as the best expression of this dimension of events: "There are critical points of the event just as there are critical points of temperature: points of fusion, freezing and boiling points, points of coagulation and crystallization..." (DR, 189). The Stoic conception of the incorporeal, along with this temporal dimension of events, leads to another component of Deleuze's concept, namely the distinction he draws between its incarnation in bodies and states of affairs and the pure event which is "immaterial, incorporeal, unlivable: pure reserve" (WE 156). Historical events are good illustrations of this point: the events which establish a given form of society are in themselves pure abstractions: neither the social contract, nor colonization or the revolution in favour of universal rights of man are reducible to their actualizations in different societies at different times: "what History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self-positing concept, escapes History" (WP, 110). t~ At the semantic level, there is thus a twofold difference between philosophical and scientific statements, bearing upon both the nature of their respective objects and the relation to those objects. The independent variables of a given scientific plane of reference enable the determination of a state of affairs, such as a particle with a given position, energy, mass and spin. The components of a concept determine the boundaries of an event. The difference between concepts and functions is a difference between extensional and intensive multiplicities, where this encompasses both their formal character and their relation to their respective objects. The objects of scientific functions and propositions are states of affairs, things and bodies; they refer to these supposedly independently existing bodies and states of affairs. The objects of philosophical concepts are events; their relation to events is not referential but expressive: concepts express, or in their words "speak", events. Descartes' Cogito speaks "the always renewed act of thought" (WP, 24). It is this difference in the relation to their objects that Deleuze and Guattari express by claiming that concepts are "self-referential": philosophical concepts do not determine states of affairs or bodies on a plane of reference. Their objects are given all at once by the concept concerned. There is an internal relation between the concept and the event expressed. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari claim that "the c o n c e p t . . , has no reference: it is self-referential, [in the sense that] it posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created" (WP, 22),

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By contrast, scientific functions and propositions are referential in the sense that they designate bodies or states of affairs supposed to exist independently of the functions concerned. The independence of the variables establishes an external relation to the object. Propositional functions and formalized sentences of ordinary language further entrench this referential relation. In this case, the independence of the objects which constitute the extension of the concept is given by their being considered the referents of the singular terms which serve as arguments. In the context of their discussion of the logical conception of concepts and sentences, Deleuze and Guattari assert that "sentences have no self-reference, as the paradox "I lie" shows" (WP, 137). Now, Jonathan R6e suggests that they "speak with a confidence that exceeds their authority" and proceeds to point out what "anyone can see, surely", namely "that paradoxes like that of the liar, far from demonstrating that sentences cannot refer to themselves, actually prove that they do. (They would not be paradoxical otherwise.)''~t However, R6e misunderstands the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari claim that sentences lack self-reference. They are not seeking to deny that sentences can refer to themselves. The liar's paradox does indeed depend upon the fact that a sentence can refer to itself, either directly as in "this sentence is false" or indirectly as in the case of the speaker who says "I lie". Rather, they are pointing to a difference between the concept, propositional function and sentence as defined in logic and their own concept of the philosophical concept: the difference is between the external relation to objects in the former case and the internal relation to events in the latter. In other words, what Deleuze and Guattari mean here by self-reference is the "autopoetic" character of the concept as they define it. In suggesting that sentences are not self-referential in this sense, Deleuze and Guattari are on safe logical ground, since they reaffirm the fundamental premise of logical semantics after Tarski. Sentences may of course refer to themselves, but they do so as though they were independently existing things, and in doing so give rise to paradoxes such as that of the liar. I suggested above that Deleuze and Guattari vacillate on the question of the cognitive status of philosophy, suggesting both that philosophy does not involve knowledge and that "the concept is obviously knowledge - b u t knowledge of itself, and what it knows is the pure event" (WP, 33). This apparent contradiction vanishes once we allow that the form of intelligibility or knowledge afforded by philosophy differs from that provided by science. Among the precedents for a distinction of this kind, perhaps the most important for Deleuze is Kant's distinction, between what it is possible to know and what it is necessary to think. In Deleuze's earlier work, philosophy was presented in overtly Kantian terms: the objects of philosophy in Difference and Repetition were not concepts but Ideas or problems, in the sense that Kant described

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Transcendental Ideas as problems for which there is no solution. However, the relationship between Ideas and the scientific knowledge of nature in Deleuze's account differed sharply from that suggested by Kant. Far from being confined to an external and regulative role in relation to empirical knowledge, Ideas for Deleuze were both the highest form of thought and the intellectual expression of virtual reality anterior to the empirical. In What is Philosophy?, an echo of the Kantian distinction between knowledge and thought remains in the differences between scientific functions, philosophical concepts and their respective objects: the differences between, on the one hand, bodies, states of affairs, and the complex systems in which these interact, and on the other, pure events, imply a distinction between the scientific and philosophical apprehension of reality. However, in contrast to the distinction between Ideas and concepts in Difference and Repetition, this does not take the form of a hierarchical distinction with regard to the ontological status of what is known. Art, science and philosophy each construct their own distinctive planes as means of creating and imposing order upon chaos. Deleuze and Guattari are no less constructivist with regard to science than they are with regard to philosophy: science constitutes and modifies its fields of reference just as philosophy transforms its plane of immanence. Contrary to the views of some critics, this does not commit them to a "positivist or operationalist" conception of science which would deny the reality of its objects. 12 In maintaining that science creates functions which "actualize the virtual on a plane of reference and in a system of coordinates", Deleuze and Guattari can equally maintain that this actualized virtual is what defines our empirical reality. Reality or chaos itself is both partially captured by, and irreducible to, the different planes of reference: in relation to science, philosophy or art, it occupies a role akin to that of the Kantian thing in itself. By contrast, philosophy creates concepts which "express an event that gives consistency to the virtual on a plane of immanence" (WP, 133). Ultimately, Deleuze and Guattari argue, it is not the same virtual which is actualized in scientific functions and which is expressed in philosophical concepts. The difference is not a difference in ontological status but rather a difference in the type of object (or multiplicity) involved, and in the nature of the plane on which each is defined. Deteuze and Guattari provide a striking illustration of this difference when they contrast the scientific characterization of a bird, which refers to species and genus and distinguishing features, and the philosophical concept which comprises "the composition of its postures, colours and songs" (WP, 20). In A Thousand Plateaus, they contrast two modes of individuation of things: a differentiation of bodies by genus and species and their differentiation by affects and the relative motions of their

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parts. The latter is the mode of individuation of haecceities or events, and it is a philosophical thesis of this book that individuation of this type is primary: all things are individuated in the manner of events. The bird as a singular assemblage of movement, sound and colour is the bird as event or haecceity, and this is what is expressed in the philosophical concept. In part what is at issue here, in the terms of Plato's metaphor, is a different manner of carving up the world. Deleuze and Guattari's realism with respect to events is a necessary presupposition of the ethical and political dimensions of their conception of philosophy. They acknowledge that, in a material sense, events are indistinguishable from the bodies and states of affairs in which they are effectuated. What philosophy achieves when it extracts an event from the clashes of bodies and things is the "counter-effectuation" of the event: the elaboration of an event enables us to become conscious of the dynamics in which we are engaged, and to act in awareness of the becomings to which we are subject. "Every concept shapes and reshapes the event in its own way. The greatness of a philosophy is measured by the nature of the events to which its concepts summon us or that it enables us to release in concepts" (WP, 34). However, it is not just any event which philosophy seeks to extract but those hitherto unconceptualized events which shape our present reality: the task of philosophy is to create new concepts, and when it extracts an event from bodies and states of affairs it is "always to give them a new event" (WE 33; emphasis added). From Nietzsche and Philosophy onwards, Deleuze aligns his conception of philosophy with that of Nietzsche on two points: opposition to those whose ultimate aim is the recognition of what exists, and preference for an untimely thought which seeks to invent new possibilities for life. Hence his approval of Foucault's conception of philosophy as the diagnosis of the becomings, points o f fracture and transformation in the present. Ideally, the events to which a great philosophy gives expression are those which are at work in the present but which point towards a different future: "the concept is the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come" (WE 32-3). Finally, it is not for philosophy itself to decide which concepts express events of this kind. While philosophy involves the determination of events and their attribution to bodies and states of affairs, the value of such thought lies outside itself. The adequacy or inadequacy with which it performs this task is not assessible in terms of truth and falsity but in terms of categories such as "interesting" or "important". Philosophy can offer guidelines for well-formed as opposed to flimsy concepts, but it cannot offer criteria for judging the importance of events, nor rules for the attribution of events to states o f affairs. In this respect, philosophy is no different from art or science

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and certainly not superior to either. Deleuze and Guattari insist upon the utopian vocation of philosophy: at one point they claim that the creation of concepts in itself calls for "a new earth and a people that do not yet exist" (WE 108). The fact that this is unconvincing as a descriptive claim only suggests that it should be understood as entirely stipulative, like Deleuze's claim in Difference and Repetition that to think is to create. Moreover, it is for this reason that Deleuze describes the act of thought as a dice-throw. Thinking is a form of experimentation, where the aim is to determine concepts of the events which determine our fate. The only criteria by which such concepts may be assessed are those of "the new, remarkable and interesting that replace the appearance o f truth and are more demanding than it is" (WE 111; also 82). The utopian vocation of philosophy is thus linked with a pragmatic response to the question o f the value o f philosophical concepts. A principal theme o f the Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus is the idea of the book as assemblage with the world rather than an image or representation of it. In the earlier version published separately as Rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari invoked Foucault's conception of a book as a tool-box and Proust's conception of a book as a pair o f spectacles in support o f their stated aim of producing "a functional, pragmatic book", t3 The characterization of language as the set of order-words current in a given milieu at a given time provides an example of conceptual invention and of its value. The concept of the order-word enables Deleuze and Guattari to redescribe the relationship between language and the world in terms of effectivity rather than representation. One consequence of this approach is to highlight the profound interrelations between language and the social and political field. In all language use, Deleuze and Guattari argue, there is one kind of effectivity which flows from the expression of the events or incorporeal transformations current in the linguistic community, and another kind which resists, disrupts or otherwise modifies those events. If the "normal" use o f language actualizes the command function of language, the conceptualization of the order-word and its deployment against the postulates of linguistic theory is the counter-effectuation of that function.

Notes

1. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 79, hereafter cited as TP. 2. "8 ans apr6s: Entretien 1980", L'Arc 49: Deleuze (revised edition) 1980, p. 99. 3. "The followingdefinitionof philosophycan be taken as beingdecisive: knowledgethrough pure concepts", What is Philosophy?, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 7, hereafter cited as WE On the aim of a conception of philosophy as non-representational thinking, see Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994), p. 276, hereafter cited as DR: "The theory of

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thought is like painting; it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image". 4. Jonathan R6e, "Philosophy for Philosophy's Sake", New Left Review No.211, (May-June 1995), p. 110. 5. "'Zarathustra is conceived entirely within philosophy, but also entirely for the stage",

Difference and Repetition, p. 9.

6. For the apprentice, see Difference and Repetition, pp. 164---6;for the nomad thinker see A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 374~0; for the philosopher as friend of the concept, see What is Philosophy?, pp. 1-12. 7. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 119. 8. Derrida, Limited Inc., p. 119.

9. The Logic of Sense, tr. by Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 19; hereafter cited as LS. See What is Philosophy?, p. 127, where Deleuze
suggests that it is the Stoics who develop furthest the fundamental distinction between mixtures of bodies in which events are actualized, and "incorporeal events that rise like a vapour from the states of affairs themselves". Another example which Deleuze frequently uses to illustrate this difference is Blanchot's distinction between death as a realizable event towards which 'I' may have a personal relation, and death as impersonal and inaccessible event towards which 'I' can have no relation. On Blanchot, see The Logic of Sense, pp. 151-2; and Difference and Repetition, p. 112. Ree, "Philosophy for Philosophy's Sake", p. 109. Pascal Engel, "The Decline and Fall of French Nietzscheo-Structuralism", in Barry Smith, ed., European Philosophy and the American Academy (La Salle, I11.: The Hegeler Institute/Monist Library of Philosophy 1994), p. 30. Rhizome, tr. P. Foss and P. Patton, I & C, No.8, (Spring 1981), p. 67.

10.

11. 12.

13.