2025 marks the centenary of the birth of Gilles Deleuze. Throughout the year, we have explored the impact of this towering figure in twentieth-century philosophy.
To wrap up our celebrations, we have two final blogs from leading Deleuze scholars. This month, Chantelle Gray offers a vivid tribute to Deleuze and Guattari’s radical becomings, calling for creative resistance and world-making.
Find out more about our centenary celebrations.
By Chantelle Gray
Lesson 1: Deleuze and Guattari never happened. Thought is safe from all that riotous, sensuous, promiscuous becomology. No aberrant nuptials forced on unsuspecting orchids, there but for the male wasp’s pleasure. No amorphous animal becomings of vegan legions and their never-ending demands. Not to mention the becomings-imperceptible of those black bloc and anteefa types. Love and anarchy gone wild – an absolute surveillance disaster!
Yet there they are, a decentralised and leaderless movement becoming capable of acting, becoming worthy of the event. Concrete revolutionary practices, transforming the emerging subjects, changing the intensity of the very conditions from which these practices and subjects emerged. Barely imperceptible but decreed a domestic terrorist organisation. Lesson 2: It makes no difference what you see – the event is inside that which is happening.
Deleuze and Guattari never happened. There is no love in the time of war machines, no endless minoritarianisms and fluid nomadologies. No, there is no crushing of the State apparatus and its money-eating, muscle-flexing maritime, military and police forces. They are still gleefully capturing leaky social flows and processes for the sedentary, docile and reproducible ends of the neoliberal capitalist machine. No need to fear or hope then: a revolution isn’t likely to be recorded in the history annals of the societies of control. As in history, so in philosophy classrooms, still suffocatingly pretentious as ever, shrouded in transcendent norms and morals as they are, a burial ground befitting royalty.
It’s true, we did not inherit them as we did Descartes and Kant and Russell. They are not institutions, they are not institutionalisable. Try as we might – and we have – they always find an escape route, the slightest fissure in the rock formations of geologies and morals and men. Yes, men. Like May ’68, they are just beneath the pebbles of thought, a beach uncovered but not yet found. Lesson 3: It’s not enough to find a place in this world, we have to make it anew. Like the Zapatistas and the Kurdish Freedom Movement, we have to call forth the unconditioned future to prefigure our actions in the present. Lesson 4: Prefigurative politics is a plane not a programme.
Deleuze and Guattari never happened. Surely not in linguistics. Yet there it is, the “missing” chapter, an entire dictionary of Chomskyan order-words and grammatical trees; of Labovian abstract machines and imperial signifiers and a defendant’s incorporeal transformations; of the translative movement proper to language: indirect discourse > machinic enslavement > social subjection.
Learning rarely happens in classrooms anyway. 16 June 1976 – now that was a lesson. Imagine 20,000 black students protesting in the streets of the Soweto township in Johannesburg, South Africa. Hear them chanting NO! to the language of the oppressor, the order-word of apartheid. Walk the dusty streets with them, watch what they see as their classmates are gunned down and killed by police officers. Lesson 5: We are never signifier or signified, we are stratified. Lesson 6: We must shed our coffin-shaped shells, all the time listening to the cosmic rhythms for mystical gate-openings, all the time looking for new weapons.
Deleuze and Guattari never happened. Never has a mouth uttered something as useless as a Body without Organs, the judgement of God is still firmly in place. And though there might be fascisms of every kind popping up in every corner of the world, there has, thankfully, never been a fascism of the potato installed and proliferated by the rhizome industrial complex. Botanical thought has not yet made compost of us all.
Only refrains, said Boulez, are like seeds you plant in compost that out of nowhere start proliferating like weeds, like floating music you can’t interpret. The weed’s is the most satisfactory of lives after all. It grows in between, to the beat of its own catchphrase, along customary melodies – its territorial assemblages, and lines of drift – marking passages of flight. Right there in the devil’s garden: potatoes and couchgrass and little ditties. Lesson 7: Build a modular synthesizer! Take the limited materials you have and weave the universe through them in continuous variation. Lesson 8: Forget Boulez, it’s time for deep listening with Oliveros.
Deleuze and Guattari never happened. No gender fluidity, prithee! It’s like Lobster Daddy said: we need societal hierarchies; we need traditional gender roles. The are natural and biological – don’t come to me with your horizontal constructs please! Yes, Dear, you can keep your heels on. Wink-wink. No bastards or mixed-bloods either, said he. Free speech for everyday biggots! Airtime for hate talk and calls to war! Let’s enshittify the whole damn thing.
And in that silence they rose as one. Bastards and mixed-bloods, queens and queers. But Face, my love, how I love your face. Your two-face, keep a straight face, save face or lose face. Tell me, face to face, do you love my face too? Am I a landscape or a face? A face or a factory? A factory or a fascist? Does it matter? Lesson 9: We are all Palestinians, we are all Israelis; we are all antifa, we are all fascist; we are all Lobster Daddies and Mommies (Professors Challenger), we are all probeheads. Lesson 10: Every undertaking matters. It’s is not enough to replace the One and the Many with multiplicities. It is not enough to dream. It is not enough to become molecular. It is not enough, even, to escape – order-words, faces, overcodings. We must invent with love, we must destroy what we love most.
Find out more about our Deleuze centenary celebrations
