The Question of Community in Deleuze and Guattari (II): After

Friendship1
Irving Goh

symploke, Volume 15, Numbers 1-2, 2007, pp. 218-243 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

DOI: 10.1353/sym.0.0019

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 general articles
THE QUESTION OF COMMUNITY
IN DELEUZE AND GUATTARI (II):
AFTER FRIENDSHIP1

IRVING GOH

The question of friendship is perhaps irresistible, if not inevitable, in

any thinking of community. It is always tempting to understand
friendship as the most amicable imminence or irreducible structure of
community. It could be said that there is no denying the force of
thinking which thinks that community follows from friendship. Even
Geoffrey Bennington, in a critique of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship,
where the question of community is apparently inadequately addressed
in Bennington’s view, writes that “a thought of community should
follow from the structure of friendship” (113). If one were to follow this
line of thought, in which community indeed follows from friendship,
then any study of the question of community in Deleuze and Guattari
must necessarily seek out those moments in their writings when
friendship figures in the course of their philosophical conceptualization.
Or, in other words, in any study that seeks to elicit a thought of
community in Deleuze and Guattari, no matter how elliptical that is, that
same study must also show that Deleuze and Guattari address the
question of friendship. As it turns out, they certainly do. Friendship is
in fact not as elusive or oblique in Deleuze and Guattari as community,

1The first part of this study on community in Deleuze and Guattari has been

published in symplokē 14.1-2. In that first essay, “Anti-Community,” the question of

community as a problematic in Deleuze and Guattari is broached by an inquiry into the
apparent silence on the term “community,” if not hostility towards it, in their A Thousand
Plateaus. The motivation for doing so stems from the observation that nomadology, a
central concept in A Thousand Plateaus, irreducibly remains a communitarian derivation.
There, I argue that Deleuze and Guattari are anti-community only to create the event of a
future thought of community or a thought of a future community beyond and without the
limits of present lived communities and present concepts or myths of communities.

© symplokē Vol. 15, Nos. 1-2 (2007) ISSN 1069-0697, 218-243.

 symplokē 219

although it is certainly no less a problematic concept in Deleuze and

Guattari than community is. It features explicitly in their What is
Philosophy?, particularly in the introduction. And in Deleuze’s own
work, his very early essay “Statements and Profiles,” his Proust and
Signs, and his final published essay “Immanence: A Life,” all revolve in
some significant ways around the topic of friendship. And yet, like the
question of community, the question of friendship, in Deleuze, and in
Deleuze’s work with Guattari, has hardly been touched upon by
deleuzoguattarian scholarship.2 So like the first essay of this study of
community in Deleuze and Guattari, this essay seeks to devote the
discussion of friendship singularly in Deleuze and Guattari, by way of
the said works of What is Philosophy?, “Statements and Profiles,” “Imma-
nence: A Life,” and Proust and Signs.
This present paper will maintain the general hypothesis of this
study, which is that there is an anti-community force in Deleuze and
Guattari only to clear a path for a future thought of community or a
thought of a future community, a hypothesis that has been unfolded in
the first essay through an explication of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic
war machine. In other words, the argument here will be that friendship
as treated by Deleuze and Guattari will reveal a certain anti-community
force. Put in yet another way: before touching on community, which is
but a touching negatively via anti-community, Deleuze and Guattari will
have already smashed from within that amicable element that would
structure community. Friendship will be invoked only to have its terrain
radically undone. For Deleuze and Guattari, there will be friendship
only if it is (already) secant. It will be something of post-friendship or after
friendship, not without a sense of violence (reminiscent of the betrayal
function of nomadology or of the rupture of alliance in becoming-
animal), and not without a post-apocalyptic inflection (as it will be
shown towards the end of this paper). But at the same time, any tearing

2Affiliation between Deleuze’s work with Derrida’s, but not affiliation in Deleuze’s

work itself, has notably been treated by Charles Stivale (2000) and John Protevi (2002). But
there is certainly the article on friendship in Deleuze by Simon O’Sullivan. Reading
through Deleuze’s Spinoza book, O’Sullivan argues that the Deleuze-Spinoza connection is
useful as “a powerful framework for thinking friendship” (2004, 20). I would not deny that
Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy could engender a thought of friendship, if not a
rethinking of friendship, since it does look towards a future possibility of “sociabilities and
communities” (Deleuze 1988, 126). But I strongly believe that this can be done through a
very specific reading of friendship (and community, and relation) in Deleuze (and
Guattari), a reading that threatens to cut across violently and, therefore, betray all the
reassurances about friendship, community, and relations that we live with, a reading that I
have proposed in the first part of this study and which I resume here. In other words, I
find O’Sullivan’s reading of friendship and encounter in Deleuze’s Spinoza too congenial,
too agreeable with the ideas of friendship that we have at present. Friendship remains for
O’Sullivan “a kind of positive regard,” “hospitality,” “a meeting of bodies “that essentially
agree with one another” (20).
220 Irving Goh Community in Deleuze and Guattari (II)

or rejection of friendship is only to look toward another form of relation,

a new understanding of relation, in which present notions like friends or
friendship will come to be revealed as anachronistic misnomers.

Lone Philosopher

Perhaps it should be stated right at the outset—just so to reset the anti-

community tenor that reverberates in the philosophy of Deleuze and
Guattari—that Deleuze himself is not really interested, at least in writing
or thought, in friends or friendship that we are so familiar with in lived
experience. As he says in the television interview with Claire Parnet, he
is not interested in “an actual friend,” 3 but the figure of the friend that
manifests in the history of philosophy in heterogeneous ways, the friend
as figure of thought appropriated by philosophy. As he will write with
Guattari in What is Philosophy?, the interesting question of friendship
would be, “What does friend mean when it becomes a conceptual
persona, or a condition for the exercise of thought?” (1994, 4). However,
one should not expect this interest in the friend as figure of thought to
take on an amicable contour. Instead, as it shall be seen, not only will
friendship or the friend be subjected to a harsh critique under Deleuze
and Guattari, but that the friend will come to emerge in its true form as a
figure of a certain violence, always cutting if not betraying friendship
already.
If in Deleuze and Guattari there is a figure of the friend, or if there is
indeed a question of the relation between philosophy and friendship, it
is not that which is commonly attributed to philosophy of the Greek
heritage. It is not that which “puts forward the friend . . . as social
relation” (79), or as Deleuze critiques in his Proust and Signs, that which
“impels us to conversation, in which we exchange and communicate
ideas” so that it “invites us to philosophy” (2000, 29). Deleuze and
Guattari will in fact argue that such a history of friendship and
philosophy from the Greeks is but mere fiction. They argue that at
bottom, Greek friendship is actually devoid of notions of harmonious
accord, intellectual conversation, and “social relation.” In truth,
according to Deleuze and Guattari, the philosopher cannot bear
friendship very much. What the philosopher desires ultimately is
solitude. The silence of solitude or solitariness is the condition for a
lucidity of thinking.4 Indeed, the image of a philosopher who stands

See “F as in Fidelity” in Stivale (2004).

3

It is certainly not explicit, but do not Deleuze and Guattari set an ambience or scene
4

of lucid solitariness that would condition the arrival of the ultimate question of thinking,
 symplokē 221

alone is undoubtedly already with the Greeks. What remains of Plato’s

Symposium is an essentially solitary Socrates, solitary in thinking, and a
solitariness that does not lack companionship. This is the striking image
of Socrates that remains, an image that no doubt injures the amorous
Alcibiades. An image of solitariness that Alcibiades, enamored with
Socrates, finds unbearable:

One morning he started thinking about a problem and stood

there considering it, and when he didn’t make progress with it
he didn’t give up but kept standing there examining it. When
it got to midday, people noticed him and said to each other in
amazement that Socrates had been standing there thinking
about something since dawn. In the end, when it was evening,
some of the Ionians, after they’d had dinner, brought their
bedding outside (it was summer then), partly to sleep in the
cool, and partly to keep an eye on Socrates to see if he would
go on standing there through the night too. He stood there till
it was dawn and the sun came up; then he greeted the sun with
a prayer and went away. (Plato 60)

This image of a solitary Socrates is certainly well marked by Deleuze and

Guattari. Socrates is no doubt engaged by or drawn into forms of
dialogues or dialectical debates. But in Deleuze and Guattari’s reading,
the dialogues also at the same time mark Socrates’ gradual rejection of
those forms. Deleuze and Guattari write,

But in Socrates was philosophy not a free discussion among

friends? Is it not, as the conversation of free men, the summit
of Greek sociability? In fact, Socrates constantly made all
discussion impossible, both in the short form of the contest of
questions and answers and in the long form of a rivalry
between discourses. He turned the friend into the friend of the
single concept, and the concept into the pitiless monologue
that eliminate the rivals one by one. (1994, 29)

As if to set the record straight once and for all, Deleuze and Guattari
will say without reserve that the image of philosophy as the hospitable
scene of discussion, where anyone is free to enter into, the image that as
if conditions the progress towards philosophy, is but a myth. To
subscribe to that image is but to distance oneself from what philosophy
truly is: “Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual
discussion, as ‘communicative rationality,’ or as ‘universal democratic
conversation.’ Nothing is less exact . . .” (28). According to Deleuze and

the question of “what is philosophy?”: “The question what is philosophy? . . . is a question

posed in a moment of quiet restlessness, at midnight, . . .” (1994, 1).
222 Irving Goh Community in Deleuze and Guattari (II)

Guattari, philosophy is averse to the friend who comes to seek a

discussion. They will say, “Philosophy has a horror of discussion” (29).
Discussion among friends does not mark the activity of philosophy. In
fact, it detracts it from its proper task. The task and act of thinking do
not have time for amicable, reciprocal discussion: “philosophers have
very little time for discussion. Every philosopher runs away when he or
she hears someone say, ‘Let’s discuss this’” (28).
If the philosopher has no time for discussion with the friend, or if the
philosopher walks away from a discussion among friends, it is because
the philosopher has been hit by a force of thought, because the
philosopher has found or has been called to his or her proper task, which
is to create concepts. In Deleuze and Guattari’s argument, “philosophy
is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (2). And this
act of creation points to solitariness, for “every creation is singular” (7).
Communitarian friendship, which “impels us to conversation, in which
we exchange and communicate ideas,” distracts one from the task of
concept-creation (Deleuze 2000, 29). To focus on the latter, one must
learn to walk away from amicable communications. As Deleuze and
Guattari will say, “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we
have too much of it. We lack creation” (1994, 108). In philosophy, one
should turn away (from) the friend and follow the solitary line of flight
towards the work of concept-creation. And it is as such that philosophy
betrays itself of the fact that it is not really interested in the friend, that
real, other body that one relates to amicably in lived experience. If there
is the figure of the friend in philosophy, it is otherwise of the latter.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, it has to be recognized that “the
friend who appears in philosophy no longer stands for an extrinsic
persona, an example or empirical circumstance” (1994, 3). That has no
room for thought in philosophy. As Deleuze and Guattari note, “With
the creation of philosophy, the Greeks violently force the friend into a
relationship that is no longer a relationship with an other but one with
an Entity, an Objectality . . . , an Essence” (3). Since the Greeks therefore,
philosophy in fact has been working out a rejection of the actual friend
or actual friendship. Amicable discussion among friends does nothing
for philosophy, so much so that the Greeks have been smashing such a
notion of friendship from within. “The idea of a Western democratic
conversation between friends has never produced a single concept. The
idea comes, perhaps, from the Greeks, but they distrusted it so much,
and subjected it to such harsh treatment, that the concept was more like
the ironical soliloquy bird that surveyed . . . the battlefield of destroyed
rival opinions” (6).
The rejection of the actual friend or friendship is in fact put forth
more forcefully by Deleuze himself in Proust and Signs. Following Proust,
Deleuze will argue that friends as one knows them in lived experience,
 symplokē 223

and the amicable discussions they engender, do nothing for thought.

The force of thought that propels the philosopher to pursue the course of
creating concepts has nothing to do with friendship. In Proust and Signs,
Deleuze writes, “Thought is nothing without something that forces and
does violence to it. More important that thought is ‘what leads to
thought’” (2000, 95). And that force which leads to thought arrives from
dangerous regions of darkness, according to Deleuze, where friendship
will not be found. Friendship is critically lacking of violence, of danger,
of force, which will lead one to think, to create new concepts. Or
friendship is inadequate as a force that will lead one to thought.
Following Proust, Deleuze argues that “friends are like well-disposed
minds that are explicitly in agreement as to the significations of things,
words, and ideas,” such that these “communications of garrulous
friendship” are essentially “ignorant of the dark regions in which are
elaborated the effective forces that act on thought, the determinations
that forces us to think,” and therefore if philosophy is always about
seeking the truth, “a friend is not enough for us to approach the truth”
(30, 98, 95).5

From Pedagogy of Relations to Betrayal

No doubt, Proust and Signs radically renders the friend an

inadequate figure of thought. And it has been seen that the philosophical
task of concept-creation in What is Philosophy? sees the philosopher
walking away from all friendly conversation or discussion. But it should
be noted that the relation between friendship and philosophy in Deleuze
and Guattari is not negated in an absolute manner, such that philosophy

5It should be noted that the critique of friendship in Proust and Signs has its parallel in

the critique of “philosophy.” But this is because Deleuze is following Proust’s idea of
philosophy. The idea of philosophy in Proust has no resonance with Deleuze and
Guattari’s notion of concept-creation. In Proust’s analysis of the history of philosophy,
philosophy arrives by way of a genial love. But to Proust, this is an error for philosophy:
“The mistake of philosophy is to presuppose within us a benevolence of thought, a natural
love of truth. Thus philosophy arrives at only abstract truths that compromise no one and
do not disturb. . . . They remain gratuitous because they are born of the intelligence that
accords them only a possibility and not of a violence or of an encounter that would
guarantee their authenticity” (Deleuze 2000, 16). Philosophy as such, which is benevolent
in its movement of arrival, only traces a possibility among many. It is lacking in force that
would interest others as a contemporaneous critical necessity. In this sense of
“philosophy,” Deleuze will say, after Proust, that “the truths of philosophy are lacking in
necessity and the mark of necessity” (95). In fact, the truth that philosophy is always in
search of never arrives congenially. It arrives by way of a violent betrayal function,
through a sign emitted by something or someone other than oneself: “There is always the
violence of a sign that forces us into the search [for truth], that robs us of peace. The truth
is not to be found by affinity, nor by goodwill, but is betrayed” (15).
224 Irving Goh Community in Deleuze and Guattari (II)

either proceeds or is redefined without friendship, or such that

friendship will never bring about philosophy. Some sort of irreducible,
amicable relation is always needed in philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari
might have shown that philosophy turns away (from) the (actual) friend.
But that does not mean that philosophy (at its nascent stage) did not
need the friend, or that it no longer needs the friend (at its completion).
In fact, Deleuze and Guattari will not fail to explicate that it always
involves a certain apprenticeship in or pedagogy of relations in the
creation and the future of concepts in philosophy. Let us first consider
the latter. As seen already, a concept might end up looking like a
“pitiless monologue” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 29), but in its geo-
graphical nature, it remains highly attentive to its milieu. It is a constant
survey over its milieu, not at all in the senseless sense of a policing
surveillance, but a constant flying-over the existing components so that it
can be attentive to whichever components that continue to make
themselves available to the concept, or to other components that the
concept has left out, so that it can attach itself to any of these at any
moment so as to strengthen or develop itself. This is why Deleuze and
Guattari will say that “the concept is in a state of survey in relation to its
components” or that “the ‘survey’ is the state of the concept or its
specific infinity” (20, 21). A concept might stand alone, but it cannot do
so without other concepts, and certainly not without the problematic that
thought encounters and that has motivated the construction of the
concept. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “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” (79). A concept might at a
certain moment stand above other concepts, but that does not mean that
the latter are completely defeated to the point of absolute destruction.
The relation with other concepts is always needed. It is always at work,
either folding one into another or unfolding one from the other. A
concept might even need the other so as to renew itself: “In any concept
there are usually bits or components that come from other concepts . . . .
This is inevitable because each concept carries out a new cutting-out,
takes on new contours, and must be reactivated or recut” (18).
A reserve of friendship therefore remains to be critical for the future
of concepts. Concept-creation always passes through a certain pedagogy
of relations, of learning how one concept has to co-exist with another
even though it is standing above the other at the present moment, so that
it may lay claim to components that it deems critical for its further
construction. At the level of creating the concept, Deleuze and Guattari
will also not forget the other communitarian operation in simultaneity
with the solitary task of concept-creation: the exposure of the concept to
a relation with something outside of itself. According to Deleuze and
Guattari, the philosophical work of concept-creation is always doubled
 symplokē 225

by the tracing or laying out of a plane of immanence at the same time, a

plane that is a milieu of existing concepts or philosophical problems that
motivates the creation of the new concept. This plane is what is
necessarily opened to in thinking, or what thinking opens up to. And it
is on this plane that concepts will learn how to conduct relations with
one another, since this plane is a multiplicity of concepts or it “includes
all the concepts on one and the same plane” (35). These relations
sometimes certainly might be amicable, according to Deleuze and
Guattari, in the case of a “becoming” of the concept:

a concept also has a becoming that involves its relationship with

concepts situated on the same plane. Here, concepts link up
with each other, support one another, coordinate their
contours, articulate their respective problems, and belong to
the same philosophy, even if they have different histories. In
fact, having a finite number of components, every concept will
branch off toward other concepts that are differently composed
but that constitute other regions on the same plane, answer to
problems that can be connected to each other, and participate
in co-creation. (18)

This is yet another reminder of how friendship can be critical in

maintaining the future of concepts. For philosophy, and for the future of
philosophy then, Deleuze and Guattari still need friendship. They will
look for a friend. They will not fail to acknowledge that friendship
might still give to philosophy, even if it is regarding the ultimate
question of philosophy, the question of what philosophy is: “It had to be
possible to ask the question ‘between friends’” (2). But what Deleuze
and Guattari are trying to bring into critical awareness, especially after
the unveiling of the truth of the philosopher’s aversion to amicable
conversations, after the irreducible image of the lone philosopher
standing at a distance from everyone else, is that something is happening
to friendship, to the figure of the friend, in the course of philosophy since
the Greeks. Philosophy since the Greeks has had always needed
friendship, but it has had at the same time been transforming the friend
or friendship into something else. One could already say that it is not
much of true friendship that is involved here, if it concerns first walking
away from friendship, then standing aloof in solitariness, and then
reforming friendships for the sake of a future. A question of sincerity in
forming and sustaining friendship is at stake here. It seems that
friendship is always posited only to be betrayed. The pedagogy of
relations is always betrayed when the concept, at the moment of its
glorious construction, hovers over all that it has passed as a “pitiless
monologue.” What Deleuze and Guattari do then, it can be said, is to
reveal this true color of friendship in philosophy. They put to surface
226 Irving Goh Community in Deleuze and Guattari (II)

precisely the figure of betrayal at the very heart of the projected image of
the friend in philosophy.

Friend, or Le Prétendant

To see that, one must return yet again to the creation stage of the
concept. As said already, conversations or intellectual discussions
between friends do nothing for the philosophical task of concept-
creation. And if philosophy is to proceed as such, it must turn from the
tiresome scene of friendship. There must at least be “a turning away, a
certain tiredness, a certain distress between friends” (5). And concept-
creation also cannot come by way of a reception of a gift, like that which
is exchanged between friends for example. To singularly pursue the
trajectory of concept-creation, philosophers “must no longer accept
concepts as a gift” (5). Philosophy cannot wait to be presented with a
gift: “Concepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies.
There is no heaven for concepts” (5). It must be created out of the
singularity of the one who thinks it, and marked with the signature of
the latter. Concepts “must be invented, fabricated, or rather created and
would be nothing without their creator’s signature” (5). But this creative
step is not an arbitrary act. Neither does it happen in a state of idleness.
A very specific act of creation is involved here. The thinker is first
absorbed into a field of the problematic. A problem interests the thinker.
Then, he or she is struck by the possibility of addressing or resolving the
problem. Here lies the imminence of the concept, and the thinker will
seek to construct that concept. He or she will strive to put his or her
signature on that concept to come. It is in this sense that friendship
comes (back) into play in philosophy (after it has rejected the actual
friend), for the thinker must think himself as “the concept’s friend; he is
potentiality of the concept” (5). The thinker turns away (from) the
friends of conversation or discussion. But he or she must nonetheless
turn amicably towards the imminent concept. The thinker must prove
himself or herself to be worthy of the concept. In fact, the response of
desiring to create the concept is already the testimony of his or her
worthiness. The imminence of concept-creation proceeds precisely
because the concept to come has hit upon the body worthy to create it.
The concept always “refers back to the philosopher as the one who has it
potentially, or who has its power and competence” (5).
But one must never assume that there is only one philosopher
seeking the same concept or that only he or she is worthy of that concept.
The field or plane of the problem is after all open to anyone. The
problematic can interest anyone. So there is always for the philosopher a
possibility, a threat, of a competition over the concept. Combat, rivalry,
 symplokē 227

and strife, are lurking in the neighborhood, not only in rival

philosophers, but even also in his or her fellow philosopher friend or
friends. The philosopher cannot just calmly or passively be the friend of
the concept, even of his or her fellow philosopher(s). He or she has to be
more than that, has to be a little more forceful if not aggressive with
regard to the concept, almost adopting a combative stance in relation to
other rival philosophers and philosopher friends. For Deleuze and
Guattari, he or she must at most be a claimant, at least be a lover, in this
striving towards the concept, a striving which takes into account the
possible competitions or rivalries that abound in the vicinity. In Deleuze
and Guattari’s original French text, the philosopher becomes le
prétendant, the figure that names suitor, claimant, and pretender
altogether at the same time. As said, in the striving for the concept, the
philosopher cannot remain with the figure of the friend and all the
niceties that come along with such a figure. As le prétendant, he or she
can only pretend to be friend-like, while already slowly shedding away
the pretensions of friendship. The philosopher cannot allow any friend
to reach the concept before he or she does. Mistrust cuts across
friendship here. He or she must jealously watch over the imminent
concept and reach towards it like a lover or claimant to the object of
desire, meanwhile making all other philosophers his or her rivals,
leaving them in his or her trail of concept-creation. As Deleuze and
Guattari will say, in this scene of competitive concept-creation,

are we not talking of the lover? . . . Or again, is it not a matter

of someone other than the friend or lover? For if the
philosopher is the friend or lover of wisdom, is it not because
he lays claim to wisdom, striving for it potentially rather than
actually possessing it? Is the friend also the claimant then, and
is that of which he claims to be the friend the Thing to which
he lays claim but not the third party who, on the contrary,
becomes a rival? Friendship would then involve competitive
distrust of the rival as much as amorous striving toward the
object of desire. (4)

One surely cannot lay claim to any sincere friendship therefore in

this secant community of philosophers who have gathered around the
field or plane of the problematic, from which the concept will
imminently emerge, via one of those philosophers who hover over that
plane, and who emerges victorious in the rivalry to put his or her
signature onto the concept to come. In such a philosophical scene of
claiming to create that concept, friendship is very quickly undone, and
betrays an essential combative stance of mistrust between friends. The
philosopher is “but a friend who has a relationship with his friend only
through the thing loved, which brings rivalry” (70-71). And here once
228 Irving Goh Community in Deleuze and Guattari (II)

again, at the end of this combat over the concept, the image that remains
is the image of a lone philosopher, he or she who has laid claim on the
concept, and now stands over his or her vanquished rivals, surveying the
field of combat as le survol. In this image, “there could not be two great
philosophers” (51). There are no friends (left). This image is not shared
between friends.
Le prétendant then is the figure of a betrayal function in philosophy.
It is the a priori traitorous figure, always already undoing friendship, at
the beginning of philosophy, even before philosophy traverses the
pedagogy of relations in its work of concept-creation. Whatever
apprenticeship in relations that follows, it would already have been
marked, undone, or betrayed by the mistrust and rivalry of le prétendant.
Le prétendant: suitor, claimant, pretender—this is what has become of the
friend in philosophy, what happens to friends or friendship as a
“condition of thought,” so as to lay claim to the concept to come. So if
Deleuze and Guattari appear to reject friendship, it is only to undo all the
harmonious niceties that are attached to the notion of friendship and
only to reveal that the friend is always already the irrepressible
traitorous prétendant. One must now not hesitate to re-cognize that
friendship is always already secant. And so Deleuze and Guattari will
always trust the ultimate question of philosophy, again the question of
what philosophy is, to arrive more from a situation where friendship is
rent with distrust and mutual combat, where the friend is already re-
cognized as le prétendant. They trust the question to arrive more “as a
challenge when confronting the enemy, and at the same time to reach
that twilight hour when one distrusts even the friend” (2).
To put it bluntly then, philosophy reproduces the image of the
friend, or that some sort of semblance of friendship remains to be
deployed in philosophy, only to make use of friendship, to lay claim on
the concept. Friendship is deployed only to be made use of. The image
of the friend is appropriated so as to soften the force of the claim of the
concept, so as to make it easier to sign the imminent concept to oneself,
and certainly reappropriated so as to further develop the concept or
renew it in the future. The image of the friend is but the philosopher’s
foil to lay claim on the concept. Philosophy needs the friend. It befriends.
But friendship will be formed only to make use of the friend. The
unconcealment of friendship as such in philosophy as essentially secant:
shall this not serve as a preview to a bleak world where friendships or
relations are likewise essentially cut, betrayed, made use of? Shall it not
“serve as an introduction to an unpleasant world,” as Deleuze says in his
early “Statements and Profiles” essay (2003a, 87)?
 symplokē 229

Bleak World: Making More (Use of) Friends

If the world that Deleuze unfolds in “Statements and Profiles” is

indeed “unpleasant,” it is because one finds in that essay the nascent
unveiling of the world as essentially anti-community, as essentially
solitary, where friendship is refused, and where friendship is once again
something to make use of, for a narcissistic for-oneself. According to
Deleuze, where one is, is essentially a solitary world. An “I” creates a
subjective point of view of the world and projects this consciousness of
the world into the world as the world. But the pure and simple fact of
the existence of another being, perhaps a male counterpart, in his simple
anonymity, not yet particularized as a specific identity, and therefore a
“male-Other” that is “the a priori Other” as Deleuze calls it, destabilizes
if not de-realizes that world (2003, 87). The latter may be expressed as a
world of fatigue, as in Deleuze’s example, but the a priori Other, in his
slightest gesture of gaiety contests that world. He represents the fact that
the fatigue world “does not have an objective consistency” (87). “I”
come to see his positing himself as such then to be potentially aggressive.
“I” sees the Other as an imminent negation if not denigration of the
subjective certainty of the fatigue world. All this, however, does not
mean that the consciousness or perception of the world as fatigue simply
goes away. In fact, it begins to implode in the “I.” That consciousness
“enters into [the latter] again” (87). This time it overwhelms and floods
the “I” in his solitariness, which is hardly bearable, collapsing his body:
“[His] collapsed body stands alone” (87). In Deleuze’s analysis, this
implosive solitariness constitutes the “fundamental mediocrity” of
existence, of being (90). A “mediocre-I” is that “I” who has the revelation
that the world-as-I-see-it is precisely just that—a particular viewpoint,
and that this viewpoint is always exposed to the supplement if not
contest of another viewpoint disseminated from the body next to “I,” or
who comes before “I.” And it will be in this revelation of “fundamental
mediocrity,” in the aftermath of the encounter with another, in the
revelation of one’s existing in a field with others where one’s perception
of the world will always be already contested by another, that the trace
of anti-community begins its germination. It marks the fundamental tear
before all friendships, before any amicable communication or relation
with the other. This is because the potentiality of a violent supplement
of another worldview different from the world as fatigue only “arouses
the hatred” of the one who only likes to see the world as fatigue (87). In
other words, the first reflex of the encounter, or what quickly gives way
in the encounter, is rivalry, a scene of enmity where one “knows itself in
solitude, and knows the male-Other in hatred, without breaking with its
solitude” (87). One is always already concerned about horizons of
viewpoints, concerned whether they touch amicably or threaten to cross
230 Irving Goh Community in Deleuze and Guattari (II)

(out) one another. One quickly guards the horizons of one’s own
viewpoint. This is how the world, the “I” in the presence of others, is
becoming unpleasant, or it proves to be becoming unpleasant ahead.
But despite the primacy of a secant encounter here, and unlike
Deleuze’s outright denigration of friendship in Proust and Signs, Deleuze
argues here that friendship remains possible. As he says, “the possible
world that the male-Other reveals can also be called the offer of a
friendship” (87). If one could see past the horizons of different world-
views as edgy, if one could negotiate that, without one negating the
other, one could proceed towards a living where living in the world with
others is living as what Deleuze calls a “team,” “a sports team or a social
team” (87). And according to Deleuze, this living as a team is what
could relieve “fundamental mediocrity”: “The Team is the only way to
escape from mediocrity” (87). But the real world is not as amicable, or
that there is really not much friendship around, such that this “Team” is
easily consolidated among people. There remain “those who cannot or
do not want to go beyond mediocrity towards the Team” (88). And it is
from here that one can witness once again how friendship can be formed
only to be made use of in order “to go beyond mediocrity.” According to
Deleuze, two ways present themselves for those who are unable or
unwilling to join the “Team.” First, there is the absolute anti-community
gesture, the enclosure of oneself to oneself, completely shutting the
world off. This is where one would “internalize mediocrity,” keep to
oneself, “touches only itself,” and not let oneself be touched (88). One
refuses the violent supplement of the possible worlds of the Other. One
refuses to take them into account. One slips in between them: “She parts
herself and lets herself pass” (88).
Then, there is the endeavor to lay claim, to possess, “to acquire at
least the inner life they lack” (88). Now, the “a priori Other” creates
anxiety for one not only because of the possible world he or she
expresses, but also because of “an enormous inner life” that he or she
holds in secret reserve, an inner world that is hardly disclosed in the
world he or she expresses in the world, an inner world where the “I” can
never know for sure if “I” is included or not in that world (88).
According to Deleuze, that reserve is the secret of being, that which
constitutes the singularity of every being in all its plurality and
heterogeneity. If there is a “team,” it is sustained by the acknowl-
edgement of the “inner life” of the other and the maintenance of the
respective secrets of respective inner lives of those that come to form this
“team.” The one who refuses the “team” is one who cannot bear the
“inner life” of the other, who never approaches it (even though one will
never reach it, or touch the heart of it, even in the “team”) because he or
she is caught up with how horizons of expressed possible worlds touch.
Gradually, the “inner life” that is never shared comes to be seen as a lack
 symplokē 231

in the mediocre-I. And he copes with this apparent lack through “the
acquisition . . . of an inner life . . . of the secret” (88). It takes the form of
“pedastry,” which the translator of Deleuze’s essay notes as “either
homosexuality among men or the love of young boys by men” (93n).
That there is something Greek about this is not difficult to elicit, since
Deleuze’s example of “pedastry” is set in the context of a lycée, a place of
learning. And in Deleuze’s analysis, there is also “something intellec-
tual” of “pedastry” (88), hence a strong reminiscence of homosexuality of
the philosophical, Greek kind as is often read in Plato’s Symposium,
where one sees Alcibiades desperately seeking to elicit the secret or some
sort of “inner life” from within Socrates.
In “pedastry,” the mediocre-being makes the other invest an “inner
life” in him. But he has to first create a hint of an “inner life.” Thinking
he lacks one, he turns “fundamental mediocrity” into “the secret,”
turning the solitariness of “fundamental mediocrity” into “the sign of an
abject and painful independence” (88). And he “shares [this] with the
child,” making the child charmed by such a secret, obsessing him with
creating further “an enormous inner life,” which is only in the end “what
seemed . . . to be an inner life” (88, 89, my italics). Subsequently, the
desperation of a need for an “inner life” comes to be disseminated to the
“mediocre adolescent” (89). The “mediocre adolescent” in turn desires
an “inner life,” which he understands he can derive from the one he
loves or who loves him. And it is here that friendship becomes instru-
mental, where it is useful only to fulfill a lack in oneself, the apparent
lack of an “inner life.” It is here that one begins to look for the friend, so
as to overcome one’s “fundamental mediocrity” while at the same time
not approaching the offer of friendship given by way of the “Team.”
Friendship is needed here to set up a scene of love, so that one can
witness the beloved investing an “inner life” in oneself. Deleuze’s
explication must be quoted at length here:

The statement of the mediocre adolescent: I have never

conceived of the confession of love except in the form of
insults. And when I dream a little, . . . it is always the same
thing. I am hidden in a cupboard at a friend’s house. A young
girl comes in, and cries: “Pierre (or Paul, or Jacques, and finally
my name) is a dirty bastard, a revolting, stinking pedarast . . . ”
So I come out of the cupboard, and say “It’s me.” What follows
is of little importance, since I know how to make her confess
her love, by untying her injury like a complicated knot. But
there it is: it is of absolutely no importance that the girl exists;
it is much more important that a cupboard is really, effectively,
in the room of one of my friends . . . and without a cupboard I
could never have given my dream any priority over fixed
objectivity. Will I find one? I am looking for a friend. (89)
232 Irving Goh Community in Deleuze and Guattari (II)

This instance of “I am looking for a friend”: does it not recall Derrida’s

critique in his Politics of Friendship of the deployment of friendship in the
history of philosophy, whereby friends are critical only for a general for-
oneself narcissistic purpose, which in the case of Deleuze’s critique here,
friendship is the relation through which one makes use of the Other to
create an “inner life” for oneself so that one has someone else to
embellish one’s “fundamental mediocrity” with outlines of an “inner
life”?

Homo Tantum

After the image of the lone philosopher standing like the solitary
soliloquy bird over its vanquished rivals, after the image of le prétendant,
and now reading this bleak or “unpleasant” world where the amicable
“Team” is generally refused, and in which friendships are formed once
again only to make use of the friend in a for-oneself function, the shadow
of an anti-community world, a world that begins from secant
friendships, seems to be unveiling itself in greater clarity. One perhaps
remains in this world as homo tantum, as Deleuze writes in his
“Immanence: A Life . . .” essay, or only human, not only in the sense of
being simply human but also solitary human, the condition in which
human must come to terms with and must learn to dwell in. And
Deleuze and Guattari are not the only ones who sense this bleak
condition of the world. If friendship for Deleuze and Guattari is but
secant, rent, torn, betrayed, if not almost absent, they are only
reaffirming a Nietzschean line of thought, which again Derrida in his
Politics of Friendship does not fail to point out. This Nietzschean thought
on friendship is not only the unveiling of the enemy figure at the very
heart of friendship, that there is always “an enmity within the very
intimacy of friendship,” but also the assertion of the fundamental truth
of living in the world in which “solitude is irremediable and friendship
impossible,” and that “an untimely being-alone” is always an irreducible
moment in life (Derrida 174, 54, 55).
So there is the general refusal with regard to a gathering towards the
“Team.” Perceived rivalry of competing possible worlds, which usually
precipitates into hatred of the one who expresses the different
worldview, always already cuts across any relation between one and
another. But love also sidesteps the construction of a “Team.” Love
lures one to reject the “Team.” As Deleuze writes, not only is the
“Team” undone because of rivalry or where “many have only been able
to choose rancor,” but also because of “love [that] expels them from the
Team” (2003, 87). But does love then bring one to another commun-
itarian structure otherwise of the plural or more-than-two “Team” such
 symplokē 233

that here lies a salvation or another form of escape from a worldly

solitude or solitariness? Does love not always promise some sort of
communion of two, a union with another? Or as Bennington suggests,
does not love promise to “tend towards a fusion of the parties to it”
(112)?
Yet in Deleuze, love will not be an amorous, communitarian respite
from a world of secant friendships that progresses towards an anti-
community world. Love takes one away from the “Team,” but it does
not lift one from the depths of solitariness. Love will instead sink one
further into that abyss. Love will be the passage, precisely the appren-
ticeship towards the revelation of a world where relations are always
already secant and where solitariness or solitude is indeed “irreme-
diable.” This is the lesson of Deleuze’s Proust and Signs. Deleuze in this
book follows Proust to give preference to love over friendship, even if it
is the slightest or shortest of all loves: “a superior mind or even a great
friend are worth no more than even a brief love” (2000, 31). But the
lesson love offers regarding always already secant relations in the world
is harsher than in friendship. One can always refuse friendship, refuse
the “Team.” One can always prejudge an offering of friendship with
mistrust, sully that offering with a hue of perceived competition, and
therefore surpass friendship with rivalry or hatred. Standing before
friendship, one can choose to keep oneself in solitariness. But in love,
one is lured by the promise of a union with another; one chooses to enter
into a union with another, to affirm a relation with the other, to enter
into a world where the two bodies in love are always present to each
other. It is not a solitary world that one looks for or even expects in love.
That will be the disappointment of love. And yet love will remain to
reveal the irreducible or irremediable secant condition of relations,
whether of love or friendship or community, in the world.
Love begins by an allure of the Other, the beloved, whose secret of
her “inner life,” an entire secret inner world, draws the lover to her. The
beloved emits a sign of this allure. It draws the lover with a desire to
unlock or unveil that inner world, to elucidate that world completely
without remains, so as to know it, so as to be shared as a common
property between the lovers, and so as to have no more secrets between
them. “The beloved appears as a sign . . . ; the beloved expresses a
possible world unknown to us, implying, enveloping, imprisoning a
world that must be deciphered, that is, interpreted” (7). And it is in this
work of love to unravel the secret or truth of the inner world of the
beloved that “love is to try to explicate, to develop these unknown worlds
that remain enveloped within the beloved” (7). But the moment the task
of interpretation in love proceeds, the lover gradually comes to realize
that the beloved’s inner world of “unknown worlds” is impassable. It is
what a secret is, impenetrable. Instead of an elucidation of the inner life
234 Irving Goh Community in Deleuze and Guattari (II)

of the beloved, the lover is met with worlds “reflected from a viewpoint
so mysterious that they become virtually inaccessible, unknown
landscapes” (8). The promise of a world shared between two, a world
the knowledge of which is absolutely grasped by two, begins to fade as
love progresses. In fact, love repeats the despairing image of a solitary
self under the sign of “fundamental mediocrity” in the sense that one
realizes that others have existed before oneself, that a multiplicity of
heterogeneous worldviews are always already out there, and that one’s
worldview is never for certain shared or taken into regard by the other.
As Deleuze writes, “We cannot interpret the signs of a loved person
without proceeding into worlds that have not waited for us in order to
take form, that formed themselves with other persons, and in which we
are at first only an object among the rest” (8). The will-to-beginning of a
world shared between two is essentially denied. A fundamental exclu-
sion or fundamental secant relation, therefore, comes to be revealed, no
matter the lover’s demands for a suture:

The lover wants his beloved to devote to him her preferences,

her gestures, her caresses. But the beloved’s gestures, at the
moment they are addressed to us, still expresses that unknown
world that excludes us [my italics]. The beloved gives us signs of
preference; but because these signs are the same as those that
express worlds to which we do not belong, each preference by
which we profit draws the image of the possible world in which
others might be or are preferred. (8)

Further, the mistrust that haunts friendship (as in the case of le

prétendant) will be unconcealed in love too. Mistrust here will be
reminiscent once again of the betrayal function, a mistrust that is derived
from the beloved’s lie in concealing the fact that a world remains in her
that nonetheless excludes the lover, the beloved’s lie that all is shared
between the lovers and that no secret or reserve remains. But this time,
unlike in the nomadological or becoming-animal moment, the betrayal is
without conscious or deliberate intent, “not by virtue of any particular ill
will on the beloved’s part” (9). “Indeed, it is inevitable that the signs of a
loved person, once we ‘explicate’ them, should be revealed as deceptive:
addressed to us, applied to us, they nonetheless express worlds that
exclude us and that the beloved will not and cannot make us know” (9).
In this fundamental exclusion—an inevitable anti-community or anti-
communion force from within the “inner life” of the beloved before the
lover—the lover is only left with a solitary condition, a “fate . . .
expressed in the motto: To love without being loved” (9). Love in Proust
and Signs, therefore, unveils without reserve the condition of living in the
 symplokē 235

world as solitary homo tantum no less, even when friendship has already
been rejected.6 The world certainly cannot be any bleaker.

From Sending a Letter of Friendship to the Aesthetic

Encounter

And yet having witnessed that friendships are formed only to make
use of friends, that love always leaves one in an irreducible homo tantum
condition, one must continue to love, to offer friendship. For Deleuze,
one must keep on loving because one has not yet learned to love
properly. One has not learned to love the Woman that the beloved is.
According to Deleuze, Woman is not quite the same as the beloved. The
beloved is an individualized identity in the eyes of the lover. The
beloved as Woman herself, as “the secret she is,” or “an essential secret”
is a little unbearable for the lover (2003, 88; 2002, 23). One must not
forget that the lover is very likely a mediocre-being who cannot bear the
secret of the inner world of another. The beloved, therefore, must be
reduced by the lover into an Other expressing a worldview, another
possible world, whose horizons do not cut roughly against the lover’s,
like a friendly male-Other. This is how Woman as beloved cannot
remain as herself, as a being who “does not express a possible world . . .
[but] expresses only herself” (2003, 18). Instead, Woman comes to
“reveal a possible external world” like the male-Other who is always
particularized as “a possible exteriority” (2003, 88; 2002, 18). According
to Deleuze, Woman as such “no longer concerns woman in her essence;
it simply concerns a particular woman—the beloved . . . . The mediocre
person experiences joy, and no longer hate, in seeing her express an
external world” (2003, 88). The regard for the essence of Woman, even
though it is untouchable or absolutely elusive as a secret,7 comes to be

6In a more apocalyptic tone, Deleuze’s reading of Proust will also reveal that love only

seeks its own end. Unlike Bennington’s popular reading of love as the endeavor of lovers
to construct a shared world that is eternal, Deleuze will follow Proust to negate this
sentiment. Not only that the protestation for such eternal love is “not essential . . . and that
it is neither necessary nor desirable,” Deleuze will argue that “love unceasingly prepares its
own disappearance, acts out its dissolution” (2000, 31, 19). There is neither forever love nor
“forever friends” (to use Bennington’s titular phrase) in Proust and Signs. Following Proust,
Deleuze will also in fact develop a theory of “transexual love.” This is not the space to
elucidate this theory, but very briefly, it argues that love ultimately points to homosexual
love, not of the Greek kind but of “the Biblical and accursed variety” (106). “Homo-
sexuality is the truth of love,” as Deleuze will write (81). And this love will reveal a greater
anti-community force, a deeper tearing of relation between the sexes: “The truth of love is
first of all the isolation of the sexes” (80).
7In Deleuze’s analysis, “The essence of the feminine life is this: to be within my reach

and yet out of reach” (2002, 23).

236 Irving Goh Community in Deleuze and Guattari (II)

neglected by the lover. The beloved is but only “an individual, she is a
particular woman, and a pure presence and not an essence” (88). This is
something to be learned still in love: to regard the essence of the beloved,
but without desiring to penetrate that essence and to possess it. And this
is where an offer of friendship must be made. A letter of friendship must
be sent, so that one may begin to love, properly.
At the end of Deleuze’s “Statements and Profiles” essay, it is the
sending of a letter of friendship that will restore, albeit indirectly,
Woman at the heart of the beloved. It will be an anonymous letter sent
to the lover, as an act of friendship: “The letter is written by a ‘friend,’ or
rather it is given as an offer of friendship (this is for your own good,
from someone who wishes you well)” (88). But the content of the letter
will slander the beloved. The reading of the letter reveals to the lover
that the perception of his beloved is precisely only that—his particular
perception, which is not necessarily shared by the rest of the world: “The
anonymous letter reveals to me a possible world in which the beloved
appears as beloved only through me, and no longer as lovable but on the
contrary as reprehensible” (88). The letter then potentially threatens the
amorous relations between the lovers. The anonymous friend knows
something of the beloved that the lover does not. The lover begins to
suspect a guarded secret within the beloved that is not shared, or
inaccessible, in the world of communion between them. And the lover
soon becomes jealous of this secret. But it is precisely jealousy, with its
suspicion of the beloved as secretive or as the secret, that restores the
Woman, who “is the secret,” in the beloved (2002, 18). “Jealousy will be
the revelation of the woman at the very heart of the beloved,” as Deleuze
writes (2003, 92).
Perhaps such learning to love should have a parallel in friendship.
Perhaps this is how one should treat the friend too, as Woman, not at all
in the sense of a gendered being or even the transformation of the
friend’s gender especially if one is speaking of a male friend, but in the
sense of regarding the friend with his or her secret, if not as secret.8 One
has not learned to regard the friend as such yet. One is always reducing
the friend into a particularity, a particular subject, which one is always
identifying with the possible world the friend expresses. And we
demand that the friend respond to us as such, in that particularity
constructed by the subjective consciousness of ourselves. And in this
correspondence with the friend, one only expects that subjective

8One could also perhaps interpret Deleuze and Guattari’s constant call for a

becoming-woman for all as this maintaining of the respective secret in all. This would of
course constitute a different reading from Protevi’s, an equally loving reading that reads
becoming-woman as devenir la jeune fille or becoming-young-girl, a being disarticulating the
organization of gendered beings into a strict opposition between an adult female and a
male, in which characteristics of each shall never cross over to the other.
 symplokē 237

consciousness to be reflected in the friend. As Deleuze argues, one is

always seeking to bring the friend into “reciprocities, communications,
communions,” so as to elicit a “reciprocity of consciousness” from the
friend. But this would only render the friend to “simply be another ‘I’
that has its own structures only in the sense that it is itself a subject” like
us in our subjectivities (2002, 17). This is why Deleuze in “Statements
and Profiles” suggests that we only have a particular male-Other in the
friend, and never the anonymous “a priori Other.” We cannot let the
friend be in his or her secret a priori Otherness. We cannot not know the
friend—a terrible will to knowledge. We cannot let him or her just be, in
his or her silence. In friendship, we have not learned to accept, let be, or
regard with respect “the mute existence of an indeterminate and general
Other next to me” (2003, 92). All these are intensely paradoxical for
friendship: the demands to befriend another without knowing the other,
to befriend another who may not respond or reciprocate in any form of
amicable communication, to befriend another whose worldview he or
she expresses potentially rivals that of our own. And yet all these might
just be the challenge, Deleuze and Guattari’s challenge, for a friendship
to come.
So once again, one must not negate the arrival of an encounter with
another, whether of friendship or of love, even though one would have
re-cognized by now that most relations or encounters in the world are
already secant. The question is how one deals with the encounter. One
could absolutely reduce or delimit it purely into a scene of nihilistic
rivalry, where the preeminence of one’s worldview over the other’s is
seen to be what is at stake and that it should be preserved at all cost, at
the cost of denigrating the other. In such an encounter, we never really
approach the friend in its ontological a priori Otherness. The other way
to deal with the encounter is to understand it as the essence of a pure
and simple coming-together-of-two-bodies, perhaps even as the essence
of a relation to come, be it friendship or community, or even a secant
relation of a “coexistence of asymmetric and noncommunicating parts”
(Deleuze 2000, 117). In Proust and Signs, Deleuze will also say that
“essence is never to be confused with an object but on the contrary brings
together two quite different objects” (47). In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy,
Deleuze would say that it would be best if the encounter arrives without
decision, “immediate, unprepared,” like a shock (quite unlike the
formation of conventional friendships, where both parties always
prepare to approach each other, always determining the form of the
relation already before it happens) (1988, 129). The shock element of an
encounter is in fact already called for in Proust and Signs, except Deleuze,
following Proust, is looking for a shock of the aesthetic kind. In that
book, the encounter, if one takes into regard the essence motivating the
encounter, is already something of art. “Essence is always an artistic
238 Irving Goh Community in Deleuze and Guattari (II)

essence,” as Deleuze will write there, because the re-cognition of the

encounter as essence of a coming relation requires an act of interpre-
tation (2000, 50).
Love must also give way to an aesthetic encounter if one is to love
properly, to love the beloved as the Woman that she is. The lover must
become something of a sculptor, an “amorous modeler,” so as to learn to
caress the beloved (2002, 23). In this very specific caress, which is a
“tracing [of] a delicate and subtle curve” and “not to be confused with
groping,” one is close to touching without touching the secret of the
beloved (23). Now, the secret of Woman is essentially without volume—
“the secret without thickness” (23). In fact, in the Woman, “there is
nothing to know; the secret is inviolable, because there is nothing to
violate except a body” (23). But the caress is precisely that which “denies
all thickness,” and so it restores the secret of the Woman in the beloved:
“Woman also has need of a lover—a lover who caresses her, and that is
all” (23).
Perhaps everything as such will lead to the invitation of a
philosophy of the Other, not so much as alterity (radical or not), which
still brings the presence of a subjective consciousness into such a
philosophy because “alterity” is always constructed after a subjective-I.
Instead, it would be a philosophy of a Pure Other, in which the
singularity of being is sensed without the subjective-I claiming to possess
it in a captive and comprehensive knowledge, but sensed as that which
brings about the relation or encounter between two beings, and in which
the relation is re-cognized as the maintaining of the secret or essence of
the other. In this sensing of the invitation to relation, one avoids
reducing the Pure Other to a category or form of subject or object. The
Pure Other would just be a “pure and simple singularity” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994, 20). The philosophical torsion of friendship will be
instrumental to this relation with the Pure Other, as Deleuze and
Guattari acknowledge in the form of the rhetorical question: “Does not
the friend introduce into thought a vital relationship with the Other that
was supposed to have been excluded from pure thought?” (4). Passing
through secant relations as elucidated throughout this essay, or after
friendship in other words, perhaps one will learn to sense the “pure and
simple singularity” of a life of the Pure Other. One might say that this
would be a philosophy of a life, after Deleuze’s “Immanence: A Life” essay,
where a life is pure and simply “pure immanence, neutral, beyond good
and evil,” “the singular immanent life of a man who no longer has a
name, though he can be mistaken for no other,” a life that opens and is
opened to all around it (2006, 387). Or as Deleuze says in his Spinoza:
Practical Philosophy, “The important thing is to understand life, each
living individuality, not as a form, or a development of form” (123).
 symplokē 239

Conclusion: After Friendship

The question of friendship in Deleuze and Guattari, therefore, is

perhaps ultimately a question of surviving relations that are always
already secant, relations that are always cut by an irreducible desire for
an irremediable solitude by one. Relations are always a little
schizophrenic. Sometimes they tend towards amicable connections.
Sometimes they tear apart, in rivalry or even hatred. Sometimes they
depart, quietly, without tension, without reproach. Sometimes they tend
towards amorous communions. And yet sometimes, even within such
communions themselves, one party slides into his or her own world of
solitude, without the other knowing, without the other participating in
this little solitary escapade that is careless of friendship or of love. The
point, for Deleuze and Guattari, is to live through these plural, hetero-
geneous, schizophrenic trajectories of relations, never to repress any of
them, even though they might risk certain violence against oneself or the
other. The point is to survive through them, or in a Derridean way of
putting it, sur-vive—from the French sur-vivre—them, not only to
overcome but also to over-live or out-live them. And one certainly must
traverse them without itinerary, like a nomadological movement. This
traversing is also the task of thought for Deleuze and Guattari. Only
living through the shadows or darkness of already secant relations in the
world can one pave the way towards the unveiling of new relations,
which are free from any present forms, conditions, determinations,
definitions, or performativities.9 This is also how homo tantum is not
necessarily a destructive and implosive solitariness. In Deleuze’s
recalling of Dickens’ tale of the Rogue, the intolerable homo tantum Mr.
Riderhood, it is in the remains of Mr. Riderhood’s life, “between his life
and death,” that a life is sensed by all around him. A “spark of life
within him [which] is curiously separable from himself now” affects all
around him such that some sort of community emerges, in the
emergency of the disappearing of Mr. Riderhood’s life (Dickens 439). In
Deleuze’s reading, there is “an urgency, respect and even love for the
dying man’s least sign of life” (2006, 386). In Dickens’ text, “everybody
present lends a hand, and a heart and soul” (Dickens 439). Even homo
tantum, therefore, if it is survived through, potentially reveals a
friendship or community or love previously unthought of.

9I am certainly with O’Sullivan here in understanding the notion of encounter in

Deleuze, an encounter that is essentially secant already. Here is O’Sullivan: “The

encounter . . . produces a cut, a crack. However, this is not the end of the story, for the
rupturing encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world,
in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently. This is the creative moment of
the encounter that obliges us to think otherwise” (2006, 1).
240 Irving Goh Community in Deleuze and Guattari (II)

The beginning of this paper has shown that the question of

friendship in Deleuze and Guattari is one that turns not so much
towards the living friend or friendship that unfolds in lived experience,
but rather one that is interested in how philosophy has folded the image
of the living friend into itself as “a condition for the exercise of thought.”
However, one must be vigilant that the treatment of friendship in
philosophy ultimately has no difference with the treatment of friendship
in life. This eventual non-distinction or continuum between philosophy
and life can already be seen in Deleuze’s following of Spinoza, in which
he would seek a point where “there is no longer any difference between
concept and life,” or vice versa, where “a body can be anything; it can be
an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea” (1988, 130, 127).
Friendship in philosophy, or rather what remains of friendship after
traversing through philosophy, can be what remains of actual friendship
too, in spite of Deleuze having said that he is not interested in the actual
friend as quoted earlier in this essay. Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari’s
critique of philosophical friendship is not without regard of the
conditions of friendship as they are lived in the real world, without
thought of how actual friendship may be transformed, challenged, of
how the limits of present actual friendship may be overcome. If
friendship in Deleuze and Guattari has an anti-community trace, or that
it is secant friendship or friendship of distrust and rivalry, it is also
because it takes into account the real history of relations between
humans after Auschwitz, which is but the shame of a nihilistic anti-
community power that humans are always already capable of, “an
ordeal that is too powerful, an inexpressible catastrophe” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994, 71). (That is certainly not the philosophical anti-
community force that this study is elucidating, which despite projecting
a certain combative force through its manifestation as the nomadic war
machine, is never nihilistic in the sense of being exterminatory of the
other. Philosophical anti-community, unlike that real anti-community
power, is also always about constantly renewing relations in unlimited
and infinite ways.) Actual friendship after Auschwitz is a post-
apocalyptic friendship, in which one cannot avoid to distrust the friend
(to pursue the course of, or advocating, yet another fascistic nihilism), in
which one cannot trust oneself either (to not do likewise), and in which
one looks at the friend with a certain fatigue from bearing the actual
historical trace of nihilistic anti-community violence. As Deleuze and
Guattari say, “It is not only our States but each of us, every democrat
who finds him or herself not responsible for Nazism but sullied by it.
There is indeed catastrophe, but it consists in the society of brothers or
friends having undergone such an ordeal that brothers and friends can
no longer look at each other, or each at himself, without a ‘weariness,’
perhaps a ‘mistrust’” (107).
 symplokē 241

But despite this “mistrust” or fatigue, one should not say that this is
the end of friendship. As Deleuze and Guattari will say, “mistrust” or
fatigue between friends “does not suppress friendship but gives it its
modern color and replaces the simple ‘rivalry’ of the Greeks. We are no
longer Greeks, and friendship is no longer the same” (107). The critical
point is to take into account “mistrust” and fatigue in friendship, as
Deleuze and Guattari do, and go beyond it. Unveiling “mistrust” and
fatigue is but the condition for moving towards a new contour of
friendship by rejecting present friendship, which still holds on to the
archaic and perhaps naïve ideals of amicable relations, harmonious
conversations, etc., “based on the community of ideas and sentiments”
(Deleuze 2000, 29). A new contour of friendship is certainly what
Deleuze and Guattari are seeking to bring to surface ultimately, through
their critique of friendship, through their unveiling of the shame and
despair of post-apocalyptic friends. One must overcome the latter such
that it only gives way to a philosophical “resistance to death, to
servitude, to the intolerable, to shame, and to the present,” and,
therefore, “forms a new right of thought” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994,
110, 71).
Returning to What is Philosophy? once again, one sees such an
exercise of thought there. As seen already, the creation of concepts
passes through rivalry. And even as concepts, Deleuze and Guattari
tend to profile them more as having secant relations with other concepts,
non-communicating, non-relating relations, or rent relations that always
resist a harmonious totality. They are marked by tendencies or desires to
depart from one another rather than having any sense of cohesiveness.
They are like friends who do not talk to each other. They seek refuge in
their respective reserves of silences, and that resolve to silence always
seems to project the desire to walk away from each other, but all this
without reproach. In Deleuze and Guattari’s words, concepts “freely
enter into relationships of nondiscursive resonance” (1994, 23). Nothing
quite holds together in this resonance: “they all resonate rather than
cohere or correspond with each other. There is no reason why concepts
should cohere” (23). Instead, the concepts are always tending to break
off in heterogeneous trajectories: “[Concepts] do form a wall, but it is a
dry-stone wall, and everything holds together only along diverging
lines” (23). They share rough edges with one another, “their edges do
not match up,” always already on the edge of rivalry or contest so that
each may be a cutting-edge concept (35). And yet such a secant
friendship in philosophy is but its vitalism, its force of life, its élan,
through which concepts renew themselves or new concepts are created:
“philosophical thought does not bring its concepts together without
again being traversed by a fissure that lead them back to hatred or
disperses them in the coexisting chaos where it is necessary to take them
242 Irving Goh Community in Deleuze and Guattari (II)

up again, to seek them out, to make a leap” (203). Deleuze and Guattari
will even postulate that through this edgy relation of concepts, there
remains the simultaneous emergence of a new, future community or
friendship: “The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a
new earth and people that do not yet exist” (108).
This “new earth and people that do not yet exist” perhaps concerns
those who are at ease with the fact of always already secant relations,
those who are no longer fatigued by the fact that relations are potentially
tearing all the time. They would perhaps be those always seeking
without reserve to think and experience what new relations would come
after present ones, without deciding on what arrives. They would be at
ease, without fatigue, without the need for discussions or reciprocities,
and without the will to decide, at “that threshold of proximity at which
every thing disintegrates and again becomes nebulous” (Deleuze 2000,
125). Perhaps they would be those partaking in a philosophy of a life as
discussed above,10 which implies that one goes beyond the “mistrust”
and fatigue that haunt present post-apocalyptic friendship. There will be
(a) life, friendship, after post-apocalyptic friendship. One does not self-
destruct, nor negate life or any encounter, in the despair and mistrust of
post-apocalyptic friendship. Instead, one must leap over that mistrust
and despair so as to create everything anew. The progress of philosophy
will be marked by this “succession” of or surviving through and beyond
secant friendship and to let emerge a renewed “incommunicable
novelty” or an event that is “neither foreseen nor preconceived,” like
new relations that have no need for or rather free from the present
conditions, determinations, or definitions of community or friendship
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 203, 204). The “shadow of ‘the people to
come’” lurks after friendship (218).

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

10 This essay has argued that a philosophy of a life would cross an aesthetic encounter, or

that it would make aesthetic an encounter. So if a philosophy of a life concerns this “new
earth or people that do not yet exist,” there would be no surprise that the latter would pass
through an encounter that is aesthetic in some way. For Deleuze and Guattari, this would
be the encounter of philosophy and art. To get a glimpse of “the shadow of the ‘people to
come,’” there must be at least the meeting of philosophy and art (1994, 218). As they write,
“Art and philosophy converge at this point: the constitution of an earth and a people”
(108).
 symplokē 243

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