What is Philosophy ?, published in 1991, was Gilles Deleuzes last book.

This
may appear as a matter of contingency since there was a rumour, some time
before his death, that Deleuze was preparing a book on Marx. However,
contingency in this case is not interesting, because Deleuze knew he was
approaching
the
threshold.
Whoever has seen his Abcdaire, or has read A Thousand Plateaus
Apparatus of Capture, knows that the theme of the threshold is very specific
with Deleuze, as it is connected with his past experience with alcohol. There
is a conceptual difference between the limit and the threshold ( ) What
does an alcoholic call the last glass ? The alcoholic makes a subjective
evaluation of how much he or she can tolerate. What can be tolerated is
precisely the limit at which, as the alcoholic sees it, he or she will be able to
start again (after a rest, a pause). But beyond that limit there lies a
threshold that would cause the alcoholic to change assemblage () It is of
little importance that the alcoholic may be fooling him or herself, or makes a
very ambiguous use of the theme I am going to stop, the theme of the last
one. What counts is the existence of a spontaneous marginal criterion and
marginalist evaluation determining the value of the entire series of glasses.
(TP,
438)
We may find, in What is Philosophy ?, a nearly clinical description of what it
may mean to feel the approach of the limit when the demands of philosophical
creation are concerned : Weary thought, incapable of maintaining itself on
the plane of immanence, can no longer bear the infinite speeds of the third
kind that, in the manner of a vortex, measure the concepts copresence to all
its intensive components at once. It falls back on the relative speeds that
concern only the succession of movement from one point to another, from one
extensive component to an other, from an idea to another, and that measure
simple associations without being able to reconstitute any concept. (WPh ?,
214).
What I will characterize as Deleuzes last message has nothing to do with the
way he eventually crossed his last threshold ten years ago. There is no
message there, as it was not the act of a philosopher, but the act of someone
who knew that the threshold that really mattered for him had already been
crossed, that he would never be able to start writing an other last book. All
we can say is that he did not fool himself about it. Indeed his death as a
philosopher was broadcasted about one year before his physical death, with
the Abcdaire picture, filmed in 1988-1989 and broadcasted on Arte between
November 1994 and spring 1995. The explicit condition for the making of film,
as announced at its beginning by Deleuze himself, was that it would be
broadcasted
after
his
death
only.

I remember repeating again and again, when I heard his way of departing,
it is not sad. What is really sad, or pathetic, what Deleuze refused, is the
fate of those who have crossed the threshold and do not know it : those
weary old ones who pursue slow-moving opinions and engage in stagnant
discussions by speaking all alone, within their hollowed head, like a distant
memory of their old concepts to which they remain attached so as not to fall
back
completely
into
the
chaos.
(WPh?,
214)
If what counts is the existence of a marginalist evaluation determining the
value of the entire series, as a positive problem of limit, not a catastrophic
problem of threshold, Deleuzes last message is indeed this book titled What
is philosophy ?. Not a weary book at all, but an old age book, when the
point has been reached where one can finally say, What is it I have been
doing all my life ? (WPh?, 1). Before that point there was too much desire
to do philosophy to wonder what it was. The answer to the question will not
of course pass a judgement on the entire series of books and teaching, when
Deleuze was doing philosophy and not wondering what he was doing. To
determine the value of the series is not to judge, it is not to tell what was
hidden behind each term of the series, and it is not to define where the
series was leading, its aim or final truth. Determining the value is thus not
coming back to the past, in order to elucidate it. Reaching the point where
you can ask, what is it I have done all my life ? is reaching the point where
my life becomes a life, with all the terms of the series coexisting and
resonating together as they escape the times and circumstances that marked
each
of
them.
However, it is not because Deleuze did reach such a point that I feel
authorized to associate his last book with a message. The starting point for
this association was in fact my own experience when reading What is
philosophy ? Till then I had never felt like commenting or teaching a
Deleuzes book. I used his concepts only when they had become tools for my
own hand, when I would not explain them but be able to take them on. I felt
that this was what those books asked. Even when teaching, Deleuze would
never answer a question, enter into a discussion or explain himself. He would
listen and smile. Maybe what you would feel as an answer would come later,
but in an indirect way and as an event. You would never know what kind of
part, if any, your question or suggestion had played in what you received as
an answer. Here, for the first time, I felt as if I was addressed, as if
something that matters had to be conveyed to me - not to me as a person
but as somebody who would have to go on living in this world for some time.
Writing or teaching in direct reference to What is philosophy ? is not, for me
at least, a matter of explaining or of using, but of receiving and continuing.
Deleuze loved the Nietzschean image of the arrow thrown as far as possible,

without knowing who will pick it up, who will become a relayer. His last book
addresses relayers, or more precisely puts them in the position of feeling
addressed
as
eventual
relayers.
However, the book has also produced a completely different reaction. For
many readers it was a great disappointment, even a betrayal. They had
associated Deleuze and Guattari with the affirmation of productive
connexions, the creation of deterritorializing processes escaping fixed
identities, transgressing boundaries and static classifications, destroying the
power of exclusive disjunction, that is the either/or alternatives. They
anticipated a joyful celebration of experimentations that subvert the very
identity of philosophy, that undermine the very persona of the philosopher.
Instead, they got exemplifications from so-called great philosophers, Plato,
Descartes, even Kant. As if, when the question what is philosophy ? was
directly at stake, Deleuze had chosen to side with his great forerunners and
forget his deterritorization allies. As if philosophy itself, as the work of Dead
White Males, was suddenly innocent of any connection with power issues,
gender issues, the disqualification of trouble makers of all kinds, cultural
imperialism,
and
so
on.
This feeling of a catastrophic regression in the professional territory of great
philosophers has been all the more vivid because this was a Deleuze and
Guattari book. We do not know when Guattari came to be associated with
the project. Those who have seen the Abcdaire know that at the time of its
filming, Deleuze was preparing this last book. Some of the main themes of
the answer to the question what is Philosophy ? were already spelled out,
for instance the contrasted characterization of philosophy, science and art. At
that time he did not associate Flix Guattari with this project however.
I will thus begin with this aspect of Deleuze last message, not interpreting
but emphasizing the importance of this last association, of this decision that
this book - a book Deleuze knew quite well his colleagues philosophers would
read and quote - would be co-signed together with Felix Guattari. I take it as
a first aspect of the message, the most obvious one, addressed to all those
philosophers who nicely separate Deleuzes own books and the
DeleuzeandGuattari ones, which they prefer to ignore. You will not part us,
you will be obliged to type down this name, Felix Guattari, that you would
so much prefer to ignore, each time you will refer to What is Philosophy ?.
I am not claiming at all that this was the only reason. It may well be that
when we read that the question had to be asked between friends, or as a
challenge when confronting the enemy, both Deleuze and Guattari knew
very precisely other necessary reasons why Guattari would co-author this
rather obviously Deleuzian book. I can just testify for my own joy when I

discovered that the answer to this question - an answer that had to

determine its moment, its occasion and circumstances, its landscapes and
personae, its conditions and unknowns (WPh?, 2) - would include the
affirmation of an effective togetherness , which Gilles Deleuze explicitly
challenged
anybody
to
deny
or
denigrate.
This message, however, is not only addressed to Gilles Deleuzes colleagues,
as it could then be reduced to social psychology, or to an operation in the
landscape of professional evaluations and judgements. Deleuze allying
himself with Guattari when answering the question what is it I have been
doing all my life ? is also a double affirmation. First, that the answer is not
a matter of reflection, of I, Deleuze, reflecting on my own activity. It is a
matter of creation. Second, that the part Guattari played in Deleuzes life as
a philosopher was a vital one, something which belongs to the very question
what
is
philosophy
?
We read in What is philosophy ? that the non philosophical is perhaps closer
to the heart of philosophy than philosophy itself (WPh ?, 41). The negative,
non philosophical, does not designate any lack. It designates heterogeneity,
positive divergence and contingent reason. It designates the need for an
encounter that does not explain but produces - what Deleuze and Guattari
called an heterogenesis, something new created in between two terms who
keep their heterogeneity. The very birth of philosophy is referred to
encounter and contingent reason in What is philosophy ? : What we deny is
that there is any internal necessity to philosophy, whether in itself or in the
Greeks (and the idea of a Greek miracle would only be an other aspect of
this pseudonecessity). Nevertheless philosophy was something Greek
although brought by immigrants. The birth of philosophy required an
encounter between the Greek milieu and the plane of immanence of thought
() The encounter between friend and thought was needed. (WPh?, 93)
The encounter is never between two persons. More precisely it is not
between two persons as they would be able to communicate and agree. The
encounter between Deleuze and Guattari was the encounter between two
lines that contingently discovered that they needed each other, not to
cumulate knowledge or exchange experience, but to cross a threshold - a
distinct one for each probably, but one both needed in order to escape
suffocation.
If we refer to the common title of Deleuze and Guattaris two main books,
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, it could be said that Deleuze vitally needed
the encounter with Guattari because his problem as a philosopher was an
exercise of thought that would positively affirm that we no longer live in the

Greek milieu, an exercise of thought that would escape guilt, negativity or

nostalgia for this lost Paradise. In between Deleuze and Guattari this exercise
of thought stopped being a theme for thought, with reference to Spinoza and
Nietzsche, and turned into an effective experimentation, and a schizoid one
indeed, since the very figure of one author, or of two authors coming into an
agreement, has been disarticulated into what they later characterized as an
ongoing process of capture, robbery, hijacking and negotiation without
mutual
intersubjective
understanding.
A famous theme of Deleuze and Guattaris writing is the theme of the
symbiotic relation between wasp and the orchid, an unnatural nuptials,
they wrote, outside the logic of lineage, a double becoming, each becoming
an organ for the other. That thought would grow by symbiosis and
asymmetric captures may have been already the case in the Greek city, but
it belongs to the era of Capitalism, destroying all codes, all settled territories,
all natural or civic laws, to unleash what it cannot master : not the revelation
of what was hidden but, in this case, an experimental actualization of what it
means to cross the threshold when thinking is no longer the natural activity
of
a
thinker.
It is not that Deleuze would have been defined, before this encounter, by an
academic tradition. His Logic of Sense, book is haunted by Malcolm Lowry
and Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and it is even dominated, through Antonin
Artaud, by the schizophrenic onslaught on perverse surface thought, when
the body is depth only, carrying away and engulfing all sense. However, in
Logic of Sense, Deleuze wrote that Artaud and Lewis Carroll, the master of
the logic of sense and the art of surface, do not meet. Only the commentator,
he wrote, can have them meeting by a thought operation, freely changing
dimensions, that is contrasting with impunity the mastery of the logic of
sense and the monstrous depth that destroys all sense. And this, Deleuze
adds, is the commentators - or the philosophers - weakness, the sign that
he inhabits none of these dimensions, that he is thinking by proxy (LS,
114).
In Logic of Sense, it is already the very question what is philosophy ? that
is at stake. Deleuze denounces what he describes as Leibnizs shameful
declaration, that philosophy should create concepts but at the condition of
not attacking the established ways of thinking (LS, 141). But condemning
Leibniz may not be sufficient to escape the shame to be a philosopher. The
question insists again with the famous sentence, when Deleuze affirms that
he would not give one page of Antonin Artaud in exchange for the whole
work of Lewis Carroll, (LS, 114) You cannot read Logic of Sense without
feeling the haunting question : how to be a philosopher after Antonin
Artaud ? How not to think by proxy ?, how not to remain on the surface ?

This was a question Deleuze left unanswered even when he invoked an

humoristic art of the surfaces, that of the Stoic thinkers of the event. The
last page of Logic of Sense asks to imagine someone who would be one third
Stoic, one third Zen, one third Carroll, and who would masturbate with one
hand while, with the other, writing on the sand the magic words of the pure
event. But this is still imagining, and the feeling of guilt is not exorcized.
One way another, when Deleuze did encounter Guattari, the problem did
change. The philosopher is no longer thinking by proxy but together with
what Americans call an activist, the untiring actor, thinker, cartographer and
connecter of collective processes of deterritorialisation, of creations of
collective assemblages of enunciation, that are less against capitalism than
produced in an affirmative experimental process of escape from both the
plane of capital and the plane of subjection. Thinking with Guattari excluded
the subjective, depressive complaint - how to be a philosopher in front of
solitary heroes, whose ordeal, beyond the limits of sense, may inspire shame
to the one who remains on the bank, commenting. Indeed the point was no
longer, could no longer be, how to rejoin Artaud, just as Artaud himself, for
whom writing was writing for the illiterate, for the agonizing rat, or the
slaughtered calf, did not mean he identified himself with an illiterate, a rat or
a calf. The point is becoming and a becoming is always double. The agony of
a rat and the slaughter of a calf remains present in thought not through pity
but as the zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of
one passes into the other. This is the constitutive relationship of philosophy
with
nonphilosophy.
(WPh?,
109)
The event of the Deleuze and Guattari encounter is associated with their
famous Anti-Oedipus. What is less often underlined is that, as all encounters,
it produced its own questions, its own learning process following the first
shock, the publication of the Anti-Oedipus and its instant celebrity. How to
avoid any confusion between passing into and exploding boundaries ? How
to convey that the zone of exchange has to be produced, that the transition
from separated, stratified, organized spaces, to a smooth nomadic space is
not a matter of destruction, but of creation ? Those are questions that will
resonate again in What is Philosophy ?, as I will try and show. Correlatively,
it can be said that what I called Deleuzes last message is indeed a Deleuze
and Guattari message, something that cannot be dissociated from what they
learned
together.
It is important to emphasize first that Anti-Oedipus was not a triumphalist
book. It was written after May 68, when everything that had got opened was
closing down, when the masterword, it was but a dream, let us go back to
reality was already encoding the event as a past memory. Anti-Oedipus
gave voice to the trust, an ontological, enacted trust, that this so-called

dream we were asked to forget was reality, and that nothing would stop it.
As such, yet, Anti Oedipus was denounced as responsible the catastrophic
trajectories of many young people using drugs and self-mutilation as if they
had wished to demonstrate the validity of Deleuze and Guattaris trust and
reach Antonin Artauds body without organs that Anti-Oedipus had made
famous. In A Thousand Plateaus, Artaud and the body without organs are
still there, but the important question is now : How do you make yourself a
body without organs ?, how do you fabricate an escape line from the
Judgment of God that steals your organs and submits them to the law of
an organism ? Deleuze and Guattari do not recant, or admit responsibility.
Why would they, since what happened was indeed not a result of their book,
but, rather, a consequence of the suffocating closure that crushed all escape
lines after 68 ? But they point instead to a technical problem they had not
anticipated in Anti Oedipus, the confusion between experimentation and
precipitation. Why such a dreary parade of sucked-dry, catatonicized,
vitrified, sewn-up bodies, when the Body without organs is also full of gaiety,
ecstasy, and dance ? () Emptied bodies instead of full ones. What happened
? Were you not cautious enough ? Not wisdom, caution. (TP, 150).
The distinction between wisdom and caution is a crucial one. It means that to
the question What happened ?, to the accusation that Anti-Oedipus made
many victims, the answer will not be sorry, we feel responsible for the many
who were defeated in this battle, now we are wiser and sound the retreat
from the battle ground. Deleuze and Guattari do not address those who
would anticipate regrets and excuses anyway. They do not discuss with
them. They address only those to which the need must be conveyed for
caution, for affirmative, step by step, productive experimentation, against
the temptation of precipitation. How can we convey how easy it is and the
extent to which we do it every day ? And how necessary caution is, the art of
dosages, since overdose is a danger. You dont do it with a sledgehammer,
you use a very fine file. () You do not reach the Body without organs by
wildly destratifying. That is why we encountered the paradox of those
emptied and dreary bodies : they had emptied themselves of their organs
instead of looking for the point at which they could patiently and
momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call the organism.
(TP,
160).
The affirmation that the making of a Body without organs is indeed
dangerous, that it needs caution, may be connected with many other themes
in A Thousand Plateaus, and everywhere it means do not proceed in the
name of anything, even of Artaud. Especially not Artaud ! Make connections,
fabricate, be meticulous, beware of any precipitation, do not confuse
consolidation, the gain of consistency, with stratification. Consolidation is

creation.
Staying stratified organized, signified, subjected is not the worst that
can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into
demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us, heavier
than ever. This is how it should be done : Lodge yourself on a stratum,
experiment with the possibilities it offers, find an advantageous place on it,
find potential lines of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience
them, produce flow conjunctions here and there (TP, 161) Even Antonin
Artaud did proceed with caution. When writing, he was not a wild
schizophrenic, he did weigh and measure every word, and wrote about the
danger of false sensations and perceptions. Not only he experienced such
sensations and perceptions, but sometimes he did believe in them.
Those are very relevant advices, even in an academic job like teaching
philosophy. Obviously it may happen that one deals only with what Deleuze
and Guattari designated as the worst : the worst is the way the texts of ()
Artaud have ended up becoming monuments, inspiring a model to be copied
() for the artificial stammering and innumerable tracings that claim to be
their equal. (TP, 378). But it also happens that you feel the proximity of
what is named, in A Thousand Plateaus, a black hole, or the presence of
what Deleuze and Guattari characterize as a central point that moves across
all of space and at every turn nourishes a certain distinctive opposition
when the entire opposition at the same time resonates in the central point.
(TP, 292). All you can say to a student is then please, slow down; it is not
that you are wrong, it is that you risk precipitating yourself into the point
when everything begins telling the same story, when everything has become
obvious.
Those two same correlated themes, danger and caution, are quite present in
What is philosophy ?. The exercise of philosophy, the art of forming,
inventing and fabricating concepts (WPh?, 2), may be dangerous, is
dangerous. But what comes first now is the relation between the illusions
that threaten this exercise, and the concept of the plane of immanence, the
plane that the creation of concepts presupposes, requires and institutes.
Illusions get listed as they make the history of philosophy as distinct from
the becoming of philosophy. There is the illusion of transcendence, which
surrounds any affirmation of immanence, as soon as immanence is made
immanence to something; the illusion of universals, arising as soon as we
think that the universal explains, whereas it is what must be explained, the
triple illusions of contemplation, reflection and communication, and then the
illusion of the eternal, when it is forgotten that concepts must be created,
and the illusion of discursiveness, when propositions are confused with

concepts (WPh?, 49-50). Philosophy is not what would avoid those illusions.
Those illusions are rather the specific illusions that surround philosophy, that
arise from its very exercise. The philosopher cannot avoid them, as he or she
would avoid mistakes, and cannot deliberately oppose them, as such an
opposition would become the central point, where the entire opposition
against the illusion would resonate at the same time. Caution is the only
advice because it is not the content of thought that is threatened by illusion,
but the very regime of thought as it is affected by the plane of immanence.
It is thus the plane of immanence that illusions surround, as if by a thick fog.
They arise when the thinker cannot bear any longer what this plane both
causes and requires, as it affects thought : speeds of the third kind. Illusions
arise as soon as the thinker tries to get back to a knowledge of the second
kind, to ascertain a sound relation with communicable matters of fact or to
answer questions that are no longer ingredients in the process of creation
but act as stopping points : What is it that I am doing ?, How to define
and
justify
?,
How
to
explain
?.
To think is always to follow the witchs flight (WPh?, 41). The witch is an
interesting figure if we remember that her broom had no motor, that it was
flying because of forces that she was able to invoke and convoke, but not
define as her own, as her property. If the witch is not cautious, if she thinks
that what makes her fly belongs to her, if she ignores or forgets the required
protection
formulas,
she
will
be
swept
away.
This may be related to the characterization of the plane of immanence as a
section of chaos. A section of chaos is not chaos, as chaos undoes any
consistency and engulfs those thinkers who have not learned that setting up
the plane of immanence, consolidating a section of chaos, is not siding with
chaos against what would repress it. Philosophical thought is able to invoke,
convoke and even inhabit a section of chaos, but it must proceed by an
immanent process of discovery. The crucial point that links the creation of
concepts as they answer problems, and the plane of immanence, is that the
problems appear in the very process of creation of concepts answering other
problems. The plane of immanence manifests itself in the experience that
each conceptual solution is a creation that cannot be separated from the
production of new unknowns, as if you were exploring a moving landscape.
As if you were dealing with something that destabilizes any appropriation,
that resists any identification into a set of related propositions to be
discussed and defended. The very reality of the plane of immanence is the
sort of permanent groping experimentation it demands (WP?, 41).
There is a deep affinity between this pragmatic of creation and William James
writing in Some Problems of Philosophy (p. 230) that we can and we may,
as it were, jump with both feet off the ground into or towards a world of

which we trust the other parts to meet our jump. This, Deleuze and Guattari
would add, may include measures that are not very respectable, rational, or
reasonable, as they belong to the order of dreams, of pathological
processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness and excess (WP? , 41) but
those measures all imply the art of dosage. Indeed, whatever the measures,
they are needed to sustain, not to produce, and what they sustain may be
called belief or trust, in William James meaning of those terms. Belief, or
trust, is what is needed to resist the lethal oscillation between fear and
wilfulness, fear that if there is no rule, no standard, nothing will oppose
subjective arbitrariness, and then wilful despotic affirmation exploding the
fear and bringing it along. Any weakness leads to illusion. The philosopher
must trust what James would call an immanent process of verification, the
groping possibility to evaluate problems and solutions in the very process of
their
construction.
As for James, the immanent criterion for this evaluation is not validity. The
plane of immanence, as it is both required and instituted by the creation of
concepts, is not a transcendental condition, that would communicate with
justification, when conditions are fulfilled. No condition can determine the
satisfaction of categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important (WPh?,
82). Those categories require a pragmatic evaluation in terms of success or
failure, and success or failure cannot be known, or, more precisely, cannot be
tasted, in advance, before being constructed, only as we go along. When
Nietzsche constructed the concept of bad conscience he could see in this
what is most disgusting in the world and yet exclaim, This is where man
begins
to
be
interesting
!
(WP,
83).
I recalled William James because he is the very example of the AngloAmerican way of doing philosophy that is celebrated in What is Philosophy ?
as knowing how to nomadize on the plane of immanence, treating it as a
movable and moving ground, a field of radical experience, not to lay
foundations like the Germans or to erect conceptual building like the French :
the English inhabit. For them a tent is all that is needed (WPh?, 105) A
matter of trust again. But I also recalled James because for Deleuze,
following Jean Wahl, he is the most eloquent witness for the Anglo-American
philosophy as it was assassinated. William James knew and fought those who
would kill him not physically, but as a philosopher -, he analysed their hate
for trust, that they despised as credulity. As such, his voice is at the very
heart
of
What
is
Philosophy
?
We arrive here, at last, to the very peculiarity of Deleuzes last book that
allows me to speak about a message. The concept of concept, together
with the mode of existence of the immanence plane, were created in order to

answer the question what is philosophy ?, but not as the answer to a

general question. The what is question, the quest for the right definition,
designates what Deleuze, as a philosopher, always fought, because it leads
right to the illusions of contemplation, reflection and communication. If I
dare to speak about Deleuzes last message, it is because what is produced,
as a definition of philosophy, is like an arrow, thrown with the trust that it
can be picked up by others he will not know : maybe later, maybe quite
elsewhere. It is thrown with the knowledge that philosophy has already been
assassinated in many places and could well be eradicated everywhere. Just
as the witches have been burnt, eliminated away, and by the same kind of
people, the ones that think that thought is made for reasoning and brooms
for
cleaning
the
ground.
Paraphrasing Nietzsche in What is Philosophy ?, I would propose that when
Deleuze constructed the concept of the probable assassination of philosophy,
he could see in it the most disgusting triumph of la btise there is no word
to translate btise, I will thus use the usual translation, stupidity, but I
must recall there is no stupor in la btise, and that for Deleuze la btise
is active, enterprising, malicious, enjoying its own destructiveness. And yet
maybe he exclaimed This is where the question of philosophy as such begins
to
be
interesting
!.
The book opens with an evocation of old age, as the time for speaking
concretely (WPh?, 1). What does it mean, to speak concretely ? Here we
come to the accusation of betrayal that I already have noted. Speaking
concretely would mean siding with the Dead White Males, the usual great
philosophers like Plato, Descartes or Kant. When old age came, Deleuze
would have announced that it was time to stop joking and playing with
interlopers. The time would have come to speak concretely, that is to claim
not only that philosophy is a creation of concepts, but that the concept
belongs
to
philosophy
and
only
to
philosophy.
(WPh?,
34)
However, to speak concretely also means that, when old age came, it was
time for Deleuze to become a witness for what made him a philosopher. The
problem is no longer an abstract one, how to be a philosopher ?, as it was
in Logic of Sense. With Guattari, Deleuze has become able to affirm that
philosophical creation has nothing to do with commenting by proxy. The
concrete problem is that of the probable destruction of philosophy.
In the Abcdaire, Deleuze recalls his own first encounter with concepts, at
secondary school, when he heard for the first time about Platos ideas. After
this first philosophy lesson, his life was decided. In other words he had
encountered Platos propositions not as objects of thought but as conveying

what those propositions could not define, the efficacy of concepts that signals
that, together with them, comes the experience of the plane of immanence
as it affects thought. This personal memory is all the more interesting
because he would later be described as a radical anti-Platonist philosopher.
The point is not that Deleuze would finally admit a personal debt to Plato, as
the one who initiated his becoming philosopher. The point is the lack of, and
vital need for, what is called, in What is Philosophy ?, a pedagogy of
concepts, as the only safeguard against absolute disaster (WPh?, 12).
If philosophy is threatened by an absolute disaster, it not as an innocent
victim. To affirm that the concepts belong to philosophy, and to affirm a vital
need for a pedagogy of concepts, imply that the killers would not be able to
kill without an internal weakness, a lack of resistance. It is this lack of
resistance that the book addresses. Philosophers have not been able do
defend and honour what made them philosophers, hiding it away behind
false representations that produced the vulnerability of philosophy. Even
Descartes had his dream (WPh?, 41) but he presented himself as grounding
valid reasoning on certain foundations. Socrates was presented by Plato as
freely discussing with friends, but Socrates constantly made all discussion
impossible () He turned the friend into the friend of the single concept, and
the concept into the pitiless monologue that eliminates the rival one by one.
(WPh?,
29).
Deleuzes last message includes what could be a pedagogy of concepts, as it
conveys what made him a philosopher, the encounter that decided that his
thinking life would be philosophy. It is not a question of debt at all, rather a
matter of relays. It may be what Deleuze, at the beginning of What is
philosophy ? called a point of non style. Pedagogy is not faithful
transmission. Plato, Descartes or Kant are not faithfully portrayed. But the
impossibility or vanity of faithful transmission is not to be identifier with the
freedom to grasp and steal. Stealing, or grabbing whatever you like, is not a
problem as such. The problem would be to derive grabbing and stealing as a
new general model, mobilizing against the dead conformity of transmission.
This conformity is a ghost anyway. We certainly never know what we
transmit because what is meant to be transmitted never explains its own
transmission. This is what makes a relay interesting. Relay transmission
implies both taking over and handing over. The take over is always a
creation, but the act of handing over also requires a creation, the creation of
an arrow, conveying and honouring what produced the one who hand over,
and
will
produce
others.
The feeling of betrayal this last book did cause may then be part of the
problem. Maybe those who felt betrayed needed to believe that it was in

order to escape the dreary stratification of thought that is named philosophy

that Deleuze had become a nomad, and maybe they needed to believe that
to become a nomad means freely grabbing in a smooth space without
boundaries between musicians, scientists, movie makers, novelists or
schizophrenics. But smooth, or nomad spaces, like bodies without organs,
are to be made, linkage by linkage, step by step. The joy of productive
connexions cannot be betrayed, it will proceed as it must, and needs no
model, no master thinker. It does not need the togetherness of a mobilized
group against en enemy, what it produces is rather a wild bunch, with
diverging singular paths resonating with each other, each becoming more apt
to resist because of the delocalized co-presence of others. It cannot be
confused with the global law of the market plus a principle of freedom
meaning that everyone can grab whatever the or she feels like.
Becoming the witness for a threatened practice is a task that tolerates no
economy. It demands making explicit the specific vulnerability the enemy
must be exploiting since he (or it) does not need to use violent, repressive
means, just the gentle admonishing to behave and accept being bound by
the rules of public argumentation and evaluation. Such a vulnerability must
be produced against any mobilizing generality. The philosopher must speak
concretely, that is, situate his or her practice among other threatened
practices, each from the point of view of its own weakness and eventual
capacity to resist. When calling for the seemingly modest task of a
pedagogy of the concept as the only possibility to avoid absolute disaster,
and not for a mobilization against a general enemy, Deleuze speaks
concretely, speaks about his practices own specific bad will, what forces
the practitioner to think and create, as opposed to good will, to being allowed
to think by consensual evidence, even the consensual evidence that our time
demands
a
general
subversion
of
identities.
This leads me finally to the most intriguing aspect of Deleuzes last message,
the fact that his answer to the question what is philosophy ? implied also
answering the question of what is science and what is art, furthermore
adding to this double definition what sounds like a true prohibition. Thou
shall not mix : scientists should not ask philosophical questions about their
results, and philosophers should not intervene when scientists are at work,
or are facing new troubling questions, even if it may seem obvious that the
elucidation of philosophical presuppositions could play a role, and even if it
seems quite desirable that scientists experiment with new philosophical
possibilities. Philosophy can speak of science only by allusion, and science
can speak of philosophy only as of a cloud. If the two lines are inseparable it
is in their respective sufficiency, and philosophical concepts act no more in
the constitution of scientific functions than do functions in the constitutions

of concepts. It is in their full maturity, and not in the process of their

constitution that concepts and functions necessarily intersect, each being
created
only
by
their
specific
means.
(WPh?,
161)
Correlatively, both science and art receive what may appear very classical
definitions. Science, as the creation of functions, looks like the Royal science,
the producer of theorems and static categories that was typified against
nomad sciences in A Thousand Plateaus. As for art, not only the term is not
deconstructed or debunked, but Deleuze and Guattari are clearly speaking
about oeuvres dart, not about post-modern cultural production.
Composition, composition is the sole definition of art. Composition is
aesthetic, and what is not composed is not a work of art (WPh?, 191).
Composition is not grabbing and freely patchworking, the problem of art is
the creation of blocs of sensation, that is to say, compounds of percepts and
affects, with the sole law, that the compound must stand up on its own
(WPh?, 164). Even if the material lasts for only a few seconds it will give
sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself in the eternity that
coexists with this small duration. So long as the material lasts, the sensation
enjoys
an
eternity
in
those
very
moments
(WPh?,
166).
From my own experience as a philosopher who begun learning how to be a
philosopher working with a physicist, Ilya Prigogine, I can but agree with the
prohibition. Prigogine struggled with what may indeed appear as a
philosophical problem par excellence, the problem of time, the identification
between complete physical description and an explicit equivalency between
past and future. His lifetime work resulted in what he considered as an
achievement of major importance, the creation of a well-defined relation
between an irreducibly probabilistic time-asymmetrical mathematical
representation and the class of those dynamic systems for which this
representation is necessary. In order to follow what I would call Prigogines
passionate experimentation with functions, philosophys specific means were
of no relevance. My own participation in his work was a matter of putting it
into historical perspective, of following how the paradoxes and blind
generalizations implied in the so-called fundamental laws of nature, acquired
their strange, quasi-metaphysical authority. But it was a complete surprise
and even a shame to discover the many references in philosophical and
cultural studies that were made to Prigogine and Stengers theory of
irreversible time. The very association of our two names was displaying a
complete misunderstanding of the demanding character of physical
mathematics
own
specific
means.
When I came to use philosophys specific means in order to situate the
question of the order of nature, I could refer to Prigogine only by allusion,

because the time had come for me to think with Alfred North Whitehead
concepts, concepts that, from the start, take for granted the absurdity of the
authority of the laws Prigogine spent his whole working life to disarm.
Specific means do not refer to an hegemonic authority but to each
practices own specific way to diverge, that is the specific difference each
practice is making between a failure and an achievement, and its specific
evaluation of what it means for a solution to be Interesting, Remarkable, or

However I had a true difficulty with Deleuzes last message. Why, among
divergent creative practices, did Deleuze and Guattari have to select art and
science to produce a contrast with philosophy ? Why what appears as a
partition of creation into three divergent fields, and only three ? Was it not a
ratification of the destruction or downgrading of the many divergent
practices, which has marked Europe before being exported everywhere ?
Were not Deleuze and Guattari stealing the dead witches brooms, for
instance, and encamping philosophy as what came to legitimately supersede
them ? In short, was it not a progressive perspective, ratifying the modern
tale that science, art and philosophy define human creation at last purified
from the illusions and false perceptions that would have parasitized it ?
I found my way out of this difficulty when I understood that the point was
not partitioning but, again, resisting. The definitions of art and science do not
express the philosophers sovereign position, his or her ability to define
human creation as such. Both art and science get defined from a double
interrelated point of view. That is, on the one hand, from the point of view of
their own need to resist, that is of their own internal weakness, and, on the
other hand, from the point of view of the way this weakness is threatening
philosophy. In other words, the definition is not a sovereign one but a call to
resist. It is a vital need for philosophy that both art and science resist against
their own specific weakness, affirm themselves in their own creative
divergence.

I will speak about art only briefly and hesitantly because my experience is
limited. I will just underline that by emphasizing composition the point is to
resist any direct link between art and any kind of ineffable revelation,
transcending words, demanding meditation and a sense of sacredness akin
to negative theology. Such a link is strongly related to the theme of the end
of philosophy, to the dual partitioning between rationality, on the one hand,
as ruling the realm of experience where humans may come to agree about
matter of facts, and, on the other, what situates itself beyond words, when
men face ultimate questions and follow meditative paths that lead nowhere.
About science I may also be brief, but this time because I feel allowed to be
sharp. If, to my initial astonishment, Deleuze and Guattari seemed to forget
about nomad, itinerant sciences, whose problems are local, following the
singularity of their terrains, it is because those sciences are not threatened
by an internal weakness, just by stupidity, arrogance and pseudo-scientific
definitions, eliminating away what should be a cause for knowledge creation.
They are threatened by the same blind generalization of functional
description, that threatens philosophy, by the same forgetting that a
scientific function is a creation, that is an event in the history of science.
In What is Philosophy ? such a generalization of functional description is
related to logicism, as distinct from the formal science called logic. Logicism
happens when a matter of fact is not produced together with its function, but
preexists as a socially stabilized state of affairs. The function is then making
explicit the categories of the affairs, as they have acquired consensual
authority, allowing those who define them to feel that they know what they
are describing. We deal then with what Deleuze and Guattari name functions
of the lived (fonctions du vcu) : functions the argument of which are
consensual perceptions and affections. Those functions need or entail no
creation, only recognition, and they arm those who wish to transform
philosophy into a serious academic business when you can agree on some
well-defined lived situation, and then progress towards agreement about the
propositions
this
situation
authorizes.
But such a generalization may also lead to what I would call pseudo-science
leading to false philosophical problems. When somebody, who sometimes
calls himself or herself a philosopher, proposes for instance to start from the
idea that rationality imposes that the brain be defined in terms of the state
of the central nervous system, this is an insult against science, exploiting its
weakness, exploiting the fact that scientists may indeed promote a so-called
scientific vision of the world, and hide away the high feat and event that
corresponds to the co-creation of a matter of fact and a scientific function.

Then follow happy busy days for philosophers, and many publications in
serious refereed journals. The convergence of science and philosophy around
great problems such as the mind/body one, heralds the kind of arrogant
stupidity that seems to accompany the adventure of science like its shadow,
but today it also makes perceptible the probability of a collapse of this
adventure
of
thought
that
was
called
philosophy.
This would then be Deleuzes last message, his call to resist addressed to
philosophers, but also to scientists, and to artists, all conceived as equally
threatened by a menace that may be common, but that takes for each of
them a specific form. It may be that scientists and artists can survive as
exotic, protected minorities that may be useful, the first ones because
scientific events are a resource for innovation, the second ones because
artistic creations are a resource in the art market. But nobody would lack
philosophy and its very memory may become a dead memory when all
interstices have closed down between consensual knowledge, confirmed by
the facts, and ineffable, ultimate but also ready-made questions.
As I already told What is Philosophy ? is like an arrow thrown at a time when
Deleuze experienced an insistent marginalist evaluation announcing a
threshold. An arrow demands to be picked up, and this is what I have done
when producing the reason why it did belong to the question what is
philosophy ? to designate as its correlate the affirmation of art and science
as creations, against their reduction to complementary aspects of human
experience. The survival of philosophy as a creation of concept may well look
like a futile question when considering the massive problems of the future.
However learning how to pick up the arrow, at a time when all marginalist
evaluations seem to point towards a threshold beyond which stupidity will
prevail, is also learning how to resist the wisdom that would propose to
renounce trust, to renounce believing in this world, in this life.