- 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 and the judgement of the Lobster God.
- 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 (god forbid) think a new thought (!), then be assured their philosophy has started working in your pathetic, territorialized and stratified body!
- When this happens, it's time to buckle your seat-belt, for there will assuredly be turbulence ahead.
Here are a few of my favourite Deleuzioguattarian quotes, beginning with what is perhaps D&Gs' most famous paragraph, at the beginning over Anti-Oedipus:
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Desiring-production...
"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) |
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“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)
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“Social production is purely and simply desiring production itself under determinate conditions.” (AO 29) 
"Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come." (TP) 
"Philosophy is not a Power. Religions, States, capitalism ... are powers, not philosophy.... Not being a power, philosophy cannot engage in battle with the powers; against them it leads, if anything, a war without battles, a guerrilla war." Deleuze, Pourparler 
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“A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.” (TP 7) 
“We’re tired of trees . . . They’ve made us suffer too much.” (TP 15) “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) 
“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)
“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) |
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"A concept is a brick.
It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” (TP) |
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