Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus A Critical Introduction and Guide

The sheer volume and complexity of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus can be daunting. What is an assemblage? What is a rhizome? What is a war machine? What is a body without organs? What is becoming-animal? Brent Adkins demonstrates that all the questions raised by A Thousand Plateaus are in service to Deleuze and Guattari's radical reconstruction of the methods and aims of philosophy itself.

To achieve this he argues that the crucial term for understanding A Thousand Plateaus is 'assemblage.' An assemblage is Deleuze and Guattari's answer to the perennial philosophical question, "What is a thing?" and they assert that assemblages are always found on a continuum between stasis and change. Each plateau is therefore concerned with a particular type of assemblage (e.g. social, political, linguistic) and its tendencies toward both stasis and change.

Brent Adkins is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Roanoke College.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Perceptual Semiotics

1. Rhizome

2. 1914: One or Several Wolves?

3. 10,000 bc: The Geology of Morals

4. November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics

5. 587 bc-ad 70: On Several Regimes of Signs

6. November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?

7. Year Zero: Faciality

8. 1874: Three Novellas, or "What Happened?"

9. 1933: Micropolitics and Segmentarity

10. 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible

11. 1837: Of the Refrain

12. 1227: Treatise on Nomadology-The War Machine

13. 7000 bc: Apparatus of Capture

14. 1440: The Smooth and the Striated

Conclusion: The Ethics of Becoming

Suggestions for Further Reading

Bibliography

Index