Deleuzioguattarian philosophy is often aphoristic: It is intended to shock, make us laugh, or at least to help us feel something. . . anything . . . besides the deadness of a sad, overcoded existence under capitalism. If you are offended or amused by their philosophy, if you feel joy, but don't know why, if you experience a new feeling, or happen to think a new thought, then be assured their philosophy has started working in your territorialized and stratified body!
Here are some of my favourite quotes (arranged by date of the original, French publication date):
Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity [1953] (2001).
“Isn’t this the answer to the question ‘what are we?’ We are habits, nothing but habits—the habit of saying ‘I.’ Perhaps, there is no more striking answer to the problem of the Self.” (ES x).
Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text [1964] (Continuum, 2008).
“There is no apprentice who is not ‘the Egyptologist’ of something. One becomes a carpenter only by becoming sensitive to the signs of wood, a physician by becoming sensitive to the signs of disease. Vocation is always predestination with regard to signs. Everything that teaches us something emits signs.” (PS 5)
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition [1968] (Columbia University Press, 1994).
“There is a force common to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche....Each....in his own way, makes repetition not only a power peculiar to language and thought...: they all oppose repetition to all forms of generality.” (DR 5).
"Job is infinite contestation and Abraham infinite resignation, but these are one and the same thing. Job challenges the law in an ironic manner, refusing all second-hand explanations and dismissing the general in order to reach the most singular as principle or as universal. Abraham submits humorously to the law, but finds in that submission precisely the singularity of his only son whom the law commanded him to sacrifice." (DR 7)
According to Deleuze, objects are signs because the virtual is part of an object, or, rather, the object points to its virtual aspect which is it objective dimension: “Every object is double without it being the case that the two halves resemble one another, one being a virtual image and the other an actual image. They are two unequal odd halves.” (DR 209-10)
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, [1972] (University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
Desiring-production: "It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breaths, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to ever have said the id. Everywhere it is machines -- real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by machines, with all necessary couplings and connections." (AO 1)
“Machines attach themselves to the body without organs as so many points of disjunction, between which an entire network of new syntheses is now woven, marking the surface off into co-ordinates, like a grid.” (AO 12)
"Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire is autoproduction of the unconscious. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression.” (AO 26)
“Social production is purely and simply desiring production itself under determinate conditions.” (AO 29)
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus [1980] (University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
“We will never ask what a book means, as a signifier or signified . . . we will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed . . . ”. (TP 4)
"Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come." (TP 4)
“Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it’s all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produced . . . Whenever desire climbs a tree, internal repercussions trip it up and it falls to its death; the rhizome, on the other hand, acts on desire by external, productive outgrowths.” (TP 5)
“A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.” (TP 7)
“Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. … There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines.” (TP 7- 8)
“We’re tired of trees . . . They’ve made us suffer too much.” (TP 15)
“Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or foundation—all imply a false conception of voyage and movement . . . But (there is) another way of traveling and moving: proceeding from the middle, through the middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing.” (TP 25)
“Your only choice will be between a goat’s ass and the face of the god, between sorcerers and priests.” (TP 116)
“The Hebrews had a nomad past, a continuing relationship with the nomad numerical organization that inspired them, and their own particular becoming-nomad; their line of deterritorialization owed much to the military line of nomad destruction.” (TP 122)
“Let consciousness cease to be its own double, and passion the double of one person for another. Make consciousness an experimentation in life, and passion a field of continuous intensities, an emission of particles-signs. Make the body without organs of consciousness and love. Use love and consciousness to abolish subjectification.” (TP 134)
"A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” (Brian Massumi, "Preface," TP, xii)
Deleuze with Claire Parnet, Gilles Deleuze from A to Z (L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, recorded 1988) [1997] (2007).
“The refrain (ritornello), for me, is absolutely linked to the problem of territory, and of processes of entrance or exit of the territory, meaning to the problem of deterritorialisation. I enter in my territory, I try, or I deterritorialise myself, meaning I leave my territory." ("R for Resistance movement [Résistance]").
“But Philosophy isn’t a Power. Religions, states, capitalism, science, the law, public opinion, and television are powers, but not philosophy....Not being a power, philosophy can’t battle with powers that be, but it fights a war without battles, a guerrilla campaign against them. And it can’t converse with them, it’s got nothing to communication, and can only negotiate. Since the powers aren’t external things, but permeate each of us, philosophy throws us all into constant negotiations with, and a guerrilla campaign against, ourselves.” (Neg. i).
Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? [1991] (Columbia University Press, 1996).
"La question de la philosophie est le point singulier où le concept et la création se rapportent l'un à l'autre." (Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ?, 16)
“To think is always to follow the witch’s flight” (WP 41).
"If we are looking for the originality of the Greek world we must ask what sort of territory is instituted by the Greeks, how they deterritorialize themselves, on what they are reterritorialized – and, in order to do this, to pick out specifically Greek types." (WP 68)
“The role of conceptual personae is to show thought's territories, its absolute deterritorializations and reterritorializations. Conceptual personae are thinkers, solely thinkers, and their personalized features are closely linked tothe diagrammatic features of thought and the intensive features of concepts.” (WP 69, original emphasis)
“But, on the new plane (of immanence),…it is possible that the problem now concerns the one who believes in the world, and not even in the existence of the world but in its possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence,…It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today.” (WP 74-75)
"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....A solution has no meaning independently of a problem to be determined in itsconditions and unknowns; but these conditions and unknowns have no meaning independently of solutions determinable as concepts." (WP 79, 81)
Art is concerned with the creation of percepts and affects, which are together sensation: "All that is needed to produce art is here: a house, some postures, colours, and songs–on the condition that it all opens up onto and launches itself on a mad vector as on a witch’s broom, a line of the universe or deterritorialization...” (WP 184-85).
Deleuze with Claire Parnet, Dialogues II [1997, 1996] (Columbia University Press, 2002).
“Philosophy is the theory of multiplicities, each of which is composed of actual and virtual elements. Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images. This cloud is composed of a series of more or less extensive coexisting circuits, along which the virtual images are distributed, and around which they run. These virtuals vary in kind as well as in their degree of proximity from the actual particles by which they are both emitted and absorbed. They are called virtual in so far as their emission and absorption, creation and destruction, occur in a period of time shorter than the shortest continuous period imaginable; it is this very brevity that keeps them subject to a principle of uncertainty or indetermination. The virtuals, encircling the actual, perpetually renew themselves by emitting yet others, with which they are in turn surrounded and which go on in turn to react upon the actual: ‘in the heart of the cloud of the virtual there is a virtual of a yet higher order... every virtual particle surrounds itself with a virtual cosmos and each in its turn does likewise indefinitely.’ It is the dramatic identity of their dynamics that makes a perception resemble a particle: an actual perception surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images, distributed on increasingly remote, increasingly large, moving circuits, which both make and unmake each other. These are memories of different sorts, but they are still called virtual images in that their speed or brevity subjects them too to a principle of the unconsciousness.” (Deleuze and Parnet, Dial. II, 148-9)
"“It is by virtue of their mutual inextricability that virtual images are able to react upon actual objects. From this perspective, the virtual images delimit a continuum, whether one takes all of the circles together or each individually, a spatium determined in each case by the maximum of time imaginable. The varyingly dense layers of the actual object correspond to these, more or less extensive, circles of virtual images. These layers, whilst themselves virtual, and upon which the actual object becomes itself virtual, constitute the total impetus of the object. The plane of immanence, upon which the dissolution of the actual object itself occurs, is itself constituted when both object and image are virtual. But the process of actualization undergone by the actual is one which has as great an effect on the image as it does on the object. The continuum of virtual images is fragmented and the spatium cut up according to whether the temporal decompositions are regular or irregular. The total impetus of the virtual object splits into forces corresponding to the partial continuum, and the speeds traversing the cut-up spatium. The virtual is never independent of the singularities which cut it up and divide it out on the plane of immanence. As Leibniz has shown, force is as much a virtual in the process of being actualized as the space through which it travels. The plane is therefore divided into a multiplicity of planes according to the cuts in the continuum, and to the divisions of force which mark the actualization of the virtual. But all the planes merge into one following the path which leads to the actual. The plane of immanence includes both the virtual and its actualization simultaneously, without there being any assignable limit between the two. The actual is the complement or the product, the object of actualization, which has nothing but virtual as its subject. Actualization belongs to the virtual. The actualization of the virtual is singularity whereas the actual itself is individuality constituted. The actual falls from the plane like a fruit, whist the actualization relates it back to the plane as if to that which turns the object back into a subject.” (Dial. II, 149-51)
Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974 [2002] (2004)
"It would be interesting to do an anthology of all the versions of the dead God, all the dramatizations of this death…. In Nietzsche alone, we could find a dozen versions, the first of which is not at all found in The Gay Science, but in The Wanderer and His Shadow, in the admirable text on the death of the prison-guard. But whatever the case, the death of God for philosophy means the abolition of the cosmological distinction between two worlds, the metaphysical distinction between essence and appearance, the logical distinction between the true and the false. The death of God thus demands a new form of thought, a transmutation of values." (Deleuze, Desert Islands, 74)