The Politicization of the Event in Deleuze’s Thought

Abstract

This article attempts to elucidate the Deleuzian philosophy of the event between The Logic of Sense and A Thousand Plateaus, where it acquires clearly political nuances. With regard to The Logic of Sense, I show that (i) it takes up the definition of the event of Difference and Repetition, identifying it with that redistribution of pre-individual singularities or individuating differences at the level of the univocal being which defines the conditions of problems; (ii) the event is henceforth also the instance that makes possible the “communication” of the heterogeneous series of bodies and propositions from which the production of sense in language follows; and (iii) the counter-effectuation should be understood in this book as an ethics of the event. With regard to A Thousand Plateaus, I emphasize (i) the “return” to The Logic of Sense that the concept of assemblage entails, (ii) the reformulation of the notion of event that takes place in the new theoretical framework, and (iii) that of the counter-effectuation, which must henceforth be understood as a politics of the event.

1. Introduction

The definition of the event is a particularly thorny issue in the context of contemporary thought, one that keeps its relevance intact as a major philosophical problem and even renews and increases it each time social and political convulsions upset local and global balances, redistributing power and oppression, legitimacy and abuse, prosperity and poverty. This denies the audacity of those who have dared to predict the end of history for the benefit of a definitive equilibrium or hegemony [1].

François Zourabichvili has already noted that although the event is at the heart of current concerns, the diversity of opinions on the subject has not yet given rise to a philosophy ([2], pp. 54–55). Iain MacKenzie has also pointed out these difficulties, which he rightly considers to be linked to the deep roots and the multiple implications that the concept of event presents with regard to the whole history of philosophy, echoing in such customary questions as “what is the nature of change” so that its exhaustive elucidation would be a practically endless exercise [3].

In this paper, I propose to address the question again by elucidating the role that the event plays in Deleuzian philosophy after Difference and Repetition, since according to the author’s own statements, it is the core notion of his philosophy ([4], pp. 141, 143). From a Deleuzian perspective, perhaps it is the noise and heaviness of bodies that makes the task of thinking philosophically about the event so difficult, because if it is only barely distinguishable from bodies, how could bodies not eclipse it under the din of their mixtures, supplanting it every time it is assimilated to “occurrence” or “happening”? The transcendental is thus confused with the empirical, the domain of law with that of facts, the principle of redistribution of the powers or constitutive capacities of individuals with their effective individuation in time. Nor does the increasingly frequent assimilation of the event with the political sphere help. This does not mean that every event does not have a political dimension, because although the nature of the event is not immediately political, it can only end up being so. On the one hand, it is the instance that gives reason for the change or the advent of what is new or unprecedented in the most diverse spheres, including the political; on the other, from the pre-individual dimension in which the redistribution of powers that is inherent to it takes place, no distinction can be made between the individual and the collective. Deleuze states that “There are no private or collective events […] Everything is singular, and thus both collective and private […] Which private event does not have all its coordinates, that is, all its impersonal social singularities?” ([5], p. 152).

2. The Event in The Logic of Sense

In Difference and Repetition, the question of the event is raised only tangentially because it is a book focused on a different problem, namely that of the foundation of thought, which Deleuze considers that we must renounce when it is transcendent, that is, external to the founded reality. This is why he proposes that the foundation of individuals must be interior or immanent to them and, therefore, before the individuated reality (“pre-individual”), the real cause of its individuation (“genetic”) and dissimilar to it (“differential”): a differential groundlessness that identifies itself with the plane of the univocal being where individuation takes place ([6], pp. 246, 249–250).

Thus, the “atoms” whose changing distributions generate individuals are the new ground of reality, hence being is “univocal” or compartmentalized only formally and not ontologically, which is to say that the pre-individual distributions that constitute the empirical or individuated reality are changeable and never necessary. Deleuze calls them “pre-individual singularities” or “individuating differences” (about their coincidence, which is the coincidence of the transcendental field with the univocal being, see [6], p. 249). Consequently, individuals are nothing more than a simulation or a by-product of those distributions of singularities that constitute the ontology proper ([2], p. 117), and “being is difference itself” ([6], p. 64). Deleuze thus elaborates a paradoxical ontology in which being has no greater consistency than that due to the repetition or return of elements of which existence cannot be predicated in a strict sense, those pre-individual singularities or individuating differences that “‘are not’ and must not be” ([6], p. 39, see also p. 67). Therefore, being in Deleuze is the “eternal return” interpreted as the repetition of these differences that constitute the individuated reality (“being of becoming”). This repetition, in turn, selects the differences that produce it based on the creativity and affirmation they express (“being of becoming as the ‘self-affirming’ of becoming-active”) ([6], p. 42, see also note 8). Hence, Deleuze’s ontology is not only paradoxical but also selective: being is itself creation and affirmation, so that reaction or resentment in the Nietzschean sense are phenomena undermined in their very reality—or “expelled” from being by a kind of centrifugal force—which can only be understood as an empirical degradation of what it is1.

Speaking of selective ontology concerning Deleuze may be redundant since all ontology is selective for him. As Lapoujade ([8], pp. 55–56) eloquently points out, in philosophy, according to Deleuze, we ground primarily to judge, that is, to exercise a power or a selection over reality. We should not forget that, in one of his courses, Deleuze defined grounding as “to raise nature to the level of history and of spirit”, warning us that “all who propose values to us appeal to a ground” ([9], p. 16). In this theoretical framework, to select means, therefore, to shape reality in a certain way with the right that gives the ontological foundation (selection based on a transcendent principle or “pretension”) or even the very absence of it (selection based on an immanent principle or inner “power”). We will insist on this concept of selection afterward.

However, what is the place of the event in this approach, given that Deleuze also defines the eternal return as the “theory of pure events”? ([5], p. 178). He distinguishes three temporalities or syntheses of time that constitute three forms of repetition ([6], p. 94): a physical repetition in habit (living present), a metaphysical repetition in memory (pure past), and an ontological repetition in the eternal return (future). The first synthesis constitutes a “pretension” of every individual—persisting—, the second one deepens this pretension toward a virtual object that acts as its foundation, and the third one undoes every individual and every foundation to restart the process again on new foundations. Moreover, the event finds a temporality that is proper to it in the third synthesis ([6], p. 89; [8], p. 79). It follows that the third synthesis produces a new distribution of pre-individual reality (the ontological–transcendental or “virtual”), which entails the reconfiguration of the individuated reality that we are and with which we interact (the empirical or “actual”). And if the eternal return concerns pure events, it is because the event is precisely that redistribution of the pre-individual singularities that make up the ontological–transcendental ([8], p. 64; [6], p. 246; [5], pp. 51–52)—not for nothing, the third synthesis is relative to pure thought or “dialectical”, and dialectics is the science of problems or pure events ([5], p. 8; [6], p. 188). Thus, the eternal return is related both to “death” and to the future because death is that “evental” logic that opens the future without prefiguring it ([6], p. 181), given that it is identified with the redistributions of pre-individual singularities that are at the origin of the unpredictable succession and the very persistence of problems that weave the individuated reality ([6], p. 112).

Therefore, the logic that redistributes the differential groundlessness, which is both the univocal being and the transcendental field, is the logic of the event. Such logic is the “disjunctive synthesis” or the pure affirmation through the conjunction even of that which could not coexist in the same individual at the empirical level, that is, the incompossible (for instance, “to be circular” and “to be square”). That is also why the eternal return is the realization of the univocity of being in thought: the perpetual redistribution of the groundlessness that its logic entails not compartmentalizing being but only distributing it provisionally or formally, confirming the absence of ontological structure in reality ([6], pp. 41–42; [5], pp. 179–180).

Written in parallel with Difference and Repetition and published a year later, The Logic of Sense (1969) takes us into the realm of pure thought, where the “overcoming” of the groundlessness that took place in the first book led. Such is the status of the Stoic surface of sense ([10], p. 65). Deleuze, therefore, takes up the sensible/thought duality that assembled the transcendental empiricism in Difference and Repetition without the aid of objects and subjects ([8], p. 96)2, basing it on the Stoic division between the mixtures of bodies, on the one hand, and sense and incorporeal events, on the other. In Deleuze’s view, the reversal of Platonism carried out by Stoic philosophy lies in the fact that the characters of substances and causes fall on the side of bodies, in evident contrast to Platonism. Thus, the ideal or incorporeal has the status of the mere effect produced on the surface of bodies as a consequence of their mixtures, impassive and ineffectual extra-being that rather than existing insists: the sense-event ([5], p. 7; [2], p. 129; [11], pp. 1–2). To illustrate this, let us consider the example of “to cut” provided by Émile Bréhier ([11], pp. 11–13). One can distinguish, on the one hand, the mixtures of bodies or the action of the cutting body that arouses a passion in the cut body; and, on the other hand, there is a sense-event that follows from them as an incorporeal effect—“to cut”, more than a property or an essential attribute capable of modifying the nature of the body to which it is attributed, is a verb or an event that is added to it on the surface. Thus, more than a being in the strict sense, it is a way of being or an extra-being. Therefore, the Stoics did not understand the predicate as a judgment in which a property is attributed to a subject but as an incorporeal event insofar as it is the “pure expressed” by the verb in the predicative proposition. Stoic Mannerism follows from this as a pluralism: the logic world is a world of inextricably linked incorporeal events that discards any subject of inherence ([11], pp. 22–23).

It should not be overlooked that between bodies and propositions that express sense, there is a difference in nature or radical heterogeneity. They are divergent series whose separation must be observed in order not to fall into misunderstandings that restore the transcendence that characterized a good part of the philosophical tradition, which invested bodies of sense and referred sense to bodies ([5], pp. 36–41). Thus, a bridge is unthinkingly built between words and things, establishing the correspondence in law between the two, which the system of representation consists of. When language speaks strictly of the world, and the world refers strictly to language, it is always by virtue of a first principle or a foundation—“God is”, “The transcendental subject is”—whose transcendence is transmitted to the relationship between words and things—“The sky is blue”—, interweaving them in accordance with the logic of the judgment of attribution. That is why Deleuze affirms that all judgment is a judgment of God: Since the judgment of attribution is in itself unjustified, it always needs the assurance of an external principle ([12], p. 56). Moreover, all judgment entails compartmentalization of being or reality in the form of categories according to the system of representation.

It happens, however, that this divergence between bodies and linguistic propositions with which Deleuze avoids falling into the representation so dear to traditional philosophy—in both senses—makes the genesis of sense in language problematic. This difficulty should not surprise us, because if, in law, language does not speak of things, and things do not refer to language, it is inevitable to ask: How is it that sense is produced, in fact, in language or how is it that language “works” in the world? This is the problem that underpins The Logic of Sense, whose solution resides in the role played by the event in this new work. Deleuze, like the Stoics, postulates an intermediary between bodies and propositions: the incorporeal sense-event. Here, we have to deal with an element of an intermediate or paradoxical nature that communicates, through a necessarily irrational logic, something that, in principle, should not communicate: the heterogeneous series that are words and things.

Since this is an “unnatural” communication, it cannot but take place according to an equally unnatural logic, which must obey that “free” legality that governs the unexpected: the disjunctive synthesis or “evental” logic that affirms everything—even the incompossible—at the level of the differential groundlessness that is the plane of the univocal being. Thus, the disjunctive synthesis redistributes the pre-individual singularities or individuating differences that constitute the actual or individuated reality and consequently reactivates the succession of its changes. The logical principle of this redistribution was the definition of the event in Difference and Repetition ([8], p. 64), which is enriched in the new book with the issue of sense, if it is true that this book is about “learning something about surfaces” ([10], p. 65).

In any case, the sense-event is, at the same time, the pure expressed in the proposition and the attribute of states of affairs, a two-faced element of intermediate or paradoxical nature that communicates bodies and language because it belongs to both realms, not belonging strictly to either ([5], p. 22). Therefore, the sense-event here serves as a kind of hinge that assembles words and things in their heterogeneity, and this is because it is both an immanent effect of bodies and a pure expressed in the proposition equally immanent to language, the double outside of both phenomena that is distinguished from the exterior insofar as it is internal.

For this reason, being an incorporeal effect of bodies, the sense-event is distinguished from them as an irreducible outside that “flies” over them on the surface (extra-being). The example given by Chrysippus in one of his paradoxes is particularly eloquent, in which he affirmed the impossibility of someone going bald by pulling out all the hairs on their head: “to go bald” is a logical attribute or an event and not the mere result of a mixture of bodies ([5], pp. 8–9). Less comical is the example of the battle that Deleuze provides: from what number of combatants or what intensity of hostilities can one say that “there is” a battle, taking good note of the proverb according to which “one swallow does not a summer make”? Therefore, there are “critical points” of the event, analogous to physical melting or boiling points, which determine whether we go bald or whether there is a battle ([5], p. 80).

However, the sense-event cannot be reduced to language either, because it inevitably returns to the side of the bodies to which it is attributed, also constituting an outside within language (insistence). We can conclude that the interiority of sense, the fourth dimension of the proposition that serves as its foundation, is not reducible in law to language because it resists any attempt to retract into the other dimensions of the proposition ([5], pp. 17–22): The sense-event insists on the inside of language, “but language is what is said of things” ([5], p. 22), the outside within of linguistic propositions, which brings us back to the side of things since it is inevitably attributed to them. The sense is, therefore, “something” (aliquid) both extra-being on the external surface of bodies and insistence on the inside of language that gives reason for the genesis of the usual dimensions of the proposition without leaving language but without reducing itself to it either, under any aspect. It is outside within language, which corresponds to the extreme object to which its transcendent use as a faculty leads: not the ineffable, but what cannot be more than said or the pure expressed, those non-linguistic visions and auditions that only language makes possible. In light of the above, it is evident that these non-linguistic “visions and auditions”, but accessible only through language, correspond in Deleuze’s thought to the purely ideal problems or events that weave the actual or individuated reality. In short, they are that which happens (to us), the great infinitives in which our lives are played out or those pure expressed in the proposition—to Die, to Think, to Fall in love—which, nevertheless, inevitably end up being attributed to bodies—I die, I think, I fall in love ([13], p. lv).

This new role that the sense-event plays in The Logic of Sense, far from being opposed to the one it played in Difference and Repetition, follows from it, complementing it, since the paradoxical nature that makes the pure event a nonsense producer of sense comes from the pre-individual or virtual sphere where it operated the redistribution of the constitutive powers of individuals. This tacitly and irremediably alters physical states of affairs, mental processes, and significations, leading us to ask ourselves “What has happened?” Everything is thus redistributed on the level of the univocal being, whose irrational logic makes the incompossible at the actual level coexist in the differential or virtual groundlessness. This logic is that of becoming itself, which, according to Nietzsche, had a different nature to constituted individuals since, given its procedural character, it could not be “something that has become” or “a becoming something” ([7], p. 47). Hence, the irrational logic of the event also communicates the divergent-in-nature series that are bodies and propositions ([5], p. 180)3. That is why Deleuze says that univocity, which asserts the pre-individual singularities of the event at the expense of the categories (specific or generic differences) of the judgment of attribution, “brings in contact the inner surface of language (insistence) with the outer surface of Being (extra-Being)” ([5], p. 180). In other words, if being has no ontological structure and is thus the object of provisional distributions but never of a dividing up, at the most elementary level of reality, the differences of nature that govern the realm of the actual or individuated do not rule, so that everything communicates with everything in the realm of the pre-individual and this includes the divergent series of words and things. It is, hence, the incessant redistribution of powers that the event causes on the univocal being that communicates divergent series, producing sense as an effect of nonsense. Thus, the event is, first, a redistribution of powers at the level of the differential groundlessness and, subsequently, a paradoxical element that goes through both divergent series on the surface, communicating them.

Therefore, in The Logic of Sense, Deleuze takes up the definition of the event of Difference and Repetition, identifying it with that redistribution of pre-individual singularities at the level of the univocal being, which defines the conditions of problems ([5], p. 54; [8], p. 64). That is why Sean Bowden defines Deleuze’s philosophy in this book as “a transcendental ontology” of the event ([14], p. 69), whose concept is, however, enriched as we have seen with the implications it entails on the surface of sense.

Finally, it should be noted that another novelty concerning Difference and Repetition is that the Stoic heritage of The Logic of Sense constitutes a whole ethics grounded in the incorporeal ([15,16]). Not in vain, Deleuze states that either ethics has no sense, or it only has one: “Not to be unworthy of what happens to us”, but “to will and release the event” ([5], p. 149). Thus, to will the event must be understood, in Nietzschean terms, as desiring its eternal return. In other words, our will must be affirmative in the face of what happens to us—even if it is unfortunate—accepting the event and not wanting things to happen otherwise. Here is the point where the Nietzschean topic of amor fati and the Stoic discipline of desire come together, safeguarding the nature of the pure event: “Amor fati, to want the event, has never been to resign oneself […] but […] to counter-effectuate the event, to accompany that effect without body, that part which goes beyond the accomplishment” ([12], p. 65). Therefore, the ethical proposal of this book consists of “counter-effectuating” the event that is realized in our body, that is, in “accompanying” with detachment its realization in the body to return it to its purely evental or ideal nature independently of our fortune and, above all, of our particular misfortune ([5], p. 161). In this way, we become capable of harmonizing our will with the event, whatever it may be, or desiring what happens to us.

Thus, Deleuze takes the license of associating the Stoic ethics of willing the event as found in Epictetus ([17], pp. 275–276, Book 2, 10.5) and Marcus Aurelius ([18], pp. 32–33, Book 5, 8.12) with the Nietzschean topic of amor fati ([5], p. 143, 149; [12], p. 65). In short, the Stoic discipline of desire implicitly contains a critique of resentment that Deleuze makes explicit in order to bring it closer to the Nietzschean proposal ([17], p. 95, Book 1, 12.20–23)4. An association that does not seem to be absurd if we take into account both Nietzsche’s most finished formulation of amor fati in Ecce Homo5 and the fact that two prestigious specialists in ancient philosophy, Pierre Hadot ([20], pp. 160–161) and John Sellars ([15], pp. 165–167), also suggested it on their own years later.

However, how does this interpretation take shape in Deleuze’s thought? The ethical aspect of counter-effectuation concerns the individual who “not only comprehends and wills the event, but also represents it and, by this, selects it, and that an ethics of the mime necessarily prolongs the logic of sense” ([5], p. 147). On this point, Deleuze introduces a novelty into the Stoic–Nietzschean equation: He interprets on his own that the realization of the event in our body prevents us from willing it when it is unhappy. That is why it is necessary to distance oneself from the event by performing or representing it. Thus, Deleuze considers that in the ethical dimension of counter-effectuation, it is essential to be the mime of the event that is being effectuated in our body, in order to reach the surface of the pure event, limiting the negative consequences that its effectuation could have for us and consequently allowing us to will the event. It is a matter of assuming the event that is realized in our body with the detachment of the actor playing a role. For this reason, we are mimes because our skeptical performance keeps the event at bay on the pure surface of sense without letting it penetrate the bodily depths where its realization can damage us and consequently prevent us from willing it—hence, Deleuze’s assertion that sense allows the event to be actualized “on its most contracted point” ([5], p. 149).

Therefore, this “representation”—more theatrical than metaphysical—has nothing to do with that which characterizes philosophies built on an abstract first principle or a foundation. The ethics of the mime is hence related to the “spiritual exercises” of ancient thought rather than to any re-edition of the founded or representative philosophies in their practical aspect, that is, to morality6. These spiritual exercises are “spiritual” because they involve “the individual’s entire psychism” and not only thought ([22], pp. 81–82), challenging us on an existential and not just an epistemological level, and are “exercises” because they constitute a concrete and continuous practice—not in vain, Epictetus compares them to physical exercise ([17], p. 283, Book IV, 1.112). In the case of counter-effectuation, such exercises constitute an immanent ethics or a way of life based on the incorporeal event since they are a vital practice that is continuously self-regulating without abstract or external principles, whose only requirement is to will the event, whatever it may be. In short, Deleuze criticizes abstract morality, that is, the action governed by external principles that are not sufficient to produce it (as the abstract principle of Good to which our actions must “resemble”); to this, he opposes immanent ethics or the action that finds in itself the principles that generate and govern it (as the concrete practice of responding affirmatively to what happens to us, releasing the affirmation contained even in unfortunate events and expressing it each time through our actions).

In conclusion, if Deleuze conceives in his philosophy a selective ontology that identifies being with the affirmative in the Nietzschean sense (see notes 1 and 8), the task of counter-effectuation from an ethical point of view is to bring the will of the individual in harmony with reality or events. In summary, it consists of making our will an equally affirmative reality, that is to say, free of resentment. Hence, to counter-effectuate the event means to bring the event back to its pure ideality by performing it, which allows us not to take its realization too seriously and, therefore, to will it regardless of the negative consequences it may have for us7. In other words, the ethical aim of counter-effectuation is to make the event a purely affirmative reality and, consequently, susceptible to being willed. Admittedly, “how much we have yet to learn from Stoicism…” ([5], p. 158).

Additionally, it is worth considering the following allusion contained in The Logic of Sense: “It suffices that […] we be able to be at the surface […] in order that the ‘great politics’ begin” ([5], p. 72). But what does Deleuze mean by this “great politics”, for which it is enough to remain on the surface? Does The Logic of Sense already pose the political approach to the counter-effectuation that I judged to be characteristic of A Thousand Plateaus? The expression “great politics” also alludes to Nietzsche, who used it in the context of his critique of Christian morality based on resentment. In Ecce Homo, he declares “The concept of politics will have then merged entirely into a war of spirits” ([19], p. 144). This statement seems to point to a “political” conception of ethics, in the sense of the government of the plural instincts that animate the human being toward a general economy that banishes resentment and affirms life. The posthumous fragments confirm this when he claims to be the bearer of a war between “will to life” and “thirst for revenge against life”, which is transversal to any other distinction—for instance, people, class, race, etc. ([24], December 1888–January 1889, 25.1). Likewise, he defines great politics as an enterprise of “raising” humanity as a superior whole governed by “physiology”. Great politics is thus, in Nietzsche, more ethics than politics proper—or, if you like, a “political” ethics. This is the sense in which Deleuze takes it up. Not for nothing, he alludes to this subject before The Logic of Sense concerning the Nietzschean critique of Kant’s abstract morality ([7], pp. 89–90). These statements can also be related to those in which Deleuze wonders how this “politics” can be attained ([5], p. 158), a question posed in the context of the effectuation in the body as a condition for thought ([5], p. 160), which cannot have the last word if we consider the risk of falling into the resentment that Deleuze’s Nietzschean Stoicism warns us. It is necessary to remain on the surface. But how is this achieved? Carrying out that great politics, which is part of the ethical dimension of counter-effectuation, as the government of individual instincts allows us to return the event to its ideal nature, thus remaining on the surface and avoiding resentment. Hence, “great politics” is the immanent ethics or concrete practices by which the individual constitutes themself as an affirmative reality, managing the clashing tendencies that make up the pre-individual realm. Therefore, far from disproving my thesis of an exclusively ethical conception of counter-effectuation in The Logic of Sense, these allusions to “great politics” confirm it.

3. The Event in A Thousand Plateaus

First of all, it is necessary to briefly contextualize the remarkable theoretical shift between The Logic of Sense (1969) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980) in order to rigorously establish the continuities and discontinuities regarding the notion of the event between the two books. The need for this shift is due, first, to a reason external to theory: Deleuze’s growing interest in the socio-political field, which was undoubtedly motivated by May 1968, the atmosphere of Vincennes, and of course his meeting with Félix Guattari ([4], pp. 136–137, 170; [25], pp. 177–179, 344–361). Second, it is thanks to a strictly theoretical reason. Running through The Logic of Sense is an unresolved conflict between the two dimensions at stake or, rather, between the right over thought that each one claims ([5], pp. 82–93; [8], pp. 131–132). The new right conquered on the surface of sense is opposed to an old “corporeal” right, that of the groundlessness under whose influence Difference and Repetition is still built. The problem is posed as follows: Can thought reach reality while remaining on the surface of sense or must it, instead, descend to the depths of bodies that constitute the pre-individual ground of reality at the risk of getting lost in them? Or, in other words, is purely ideal access to reality possible, or is it necessary to experience reality for oneself in order to access it? Therefore, this is a conflict between two alternative grounds for thought that the joint work with Guattari must resolve.

Despite being its continuation, A Thousand Plateaus is also a break with Anti-Oedipus ([4], p. 9), which is characterized by a certain return to The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. The most remarkable aspects of this return are twofold: first, the reinsertion of the new book in the context of a post-Kantian problem analogous to that at stake in Difference and Repetition; and second, the nuanced recovery of the divergent series that assembled The Logic of Sense and, with it, of the prominence that language and the event had in that book. How is this transition in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought carried out?

On the one hand, when the question of the foundation is raised in A Thousand Plateaus, all depth is rejected in favor of a strict flattening, which corresponds to the earth plane and the assemblages that stratify it ([26], p. 90). The earth is the new ground of being and thought, the plane of immanence that corresponds to the realm of Nature: a pure surface, which consists of a nomadic distribution of pre-individual singularities not yet rooted in stable relations and whose characteristic operation is a disjunctive synthesis that is none other than that of the univocal being (see [27], pp. 2–3). However, as in Difference and Repetition, the ontological–transcendental or virtual reality must be actualized in the empirical one, “stratifying” that terrestrial surface or distributing the singularities that populate it into contents or material realities and expressions or expressive realities, whose assemblage constitutes the ways of life of individuated beings and the ecological, social, and technological environments they inhabit. That is to say, in order to be actualized in specific ways of life and environments (“territories”), the terrestrial surface must be distributed according to the strata, which respond to the logic of the judgment of attribution. Thus, “deterritorialization” is the movement that goes from the actual territory to the virtual earth, dismantling the distributions that shape the ways of life and environments in force, and “reterritorialization” is the reverse movement, which consequently establishes our ways of inhabiting the earth on the condition of distributing its pure surface. Therefore, if the earth plane of immanence takes over the univocal being in the socio-political field, stratification does the same with the process of actualization and designates the passage from the pre-individual ground to the empirical or individuated reality in this new sphere.

Moreover, we are speaking now of a plane and not of a surface, since the latter still presupposes a depth at whose edge it insists unlike the former, which—as a “pure surface”—allows us to locate thought in theoretical coordinates that are foreign to the foundation. Here is the new book’s solution to the unresolved conflict between surface and depth that The Logic of Sense still posed.

So if Anti-Oedipus was a response to a Kantian ambition, updated in the aim to determine the immanent syntheses of the unconscious without falling into the abstractions of psychoanalysis, A Thousand Plateaus aspires to go beyond the scope of anthropology to apprehend the pre-individual “foundation” of life on earth in a kind of political onto-ecology: “The ambition of A Thousand Plateaus, however, is post-Kantian […] It is a theory of multiplicities for themselves, wherever the multiple reaches the state of a substantive […] Multiplicities are reality itself” ([10], pp. 309–310). As in Difference and Repetition, this approach makes the radicalization of transcendental critique and ontology converge in Deleuzian thought ([4], pp. 145–146; [10], pp. 385–386). In this sense, what post-Kantian authors such as Salomon Maimon ([28], pp. 49–50) criticized Kant for was that the transcendental did not coincide with the real foundation of experience, with that which generates it, thus leading to abstraction. In summary, to think of the “foundation” of reality without falling into abstractions or transcendental illusions, it is necessary to apprehend a principle that is the effective cause of reality and not a mere ideal factor with no real implication in its genesis ([7], pp. 89–91; [6], pp. 68–69, 154, 284–285; [5], pp. 260–261). And this principle is the multiplicities or clusters of pre-individual singularities which, as such, must serve as the basis both for being or ontology and for transcendental thought or philosophy. That is why the assertion that ‘politics precedes being’ ([26], p. 203), often invoked to dismiss the importance of ontology in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, is not understood until one realizes that it is an ontological thesis: at the most elementary level of reality, what we have is a “struggle” between realities that barely exist or a nomadic distribution of pre-individual singularities, which are both the real cause of constituted individuals and the transcendental ground of thought.

Therefore, the earth plane of immanence is what takes the place of the foundation in Deleuze’s thought, once both the surface and the depth have been rejected ([8], pp. 29–30). Composed of pre-individual singularities in permanent redistribution, which we can call “free” or “unlinked”, the earth plane assumes the role of ontological principle and is related to a transcendental principle that, carrying out the distribution of the law contained in the former, makes it accessible to us and thus mediates our knowledge. This is an “abstract machine” of a virtual nature where singularities are already linked to each other in equally virtual relationships that will be actualized by the “assemblage”. Such assemblages are consequently the concrete principle of distribution of territories or environments and ways of life whose nature is already actual, destined as they are to rule over the empirical. So, we find again in A Thousand Plateaus the tripartite “structure” characteristic of both Platonism and its overturning offered by Deleuze in his books immediately preceding his collaboration with Guattari ([8], pp. 29–30): the anti-Platonic triad of Difference, repetition, and simulacrum—which replaced the Platonic triad of Idea, myth, and dialectics, respectively—takes shape again on the earth plane of immanence, the abstract machine and the concrete assemblage.

An ontological principle, a transcendental principle, and an empirical principle once again form Deleuze’s telluric philosophy, which oscillates between the law that dictates the earth and the fact that—according to it—it is imposed on the territory. If Deleuze’s ontology has always been based on the thesis of the univocity of being, realized by the eternal return in the history of philosophy ([6], pp. 41–42), we should not be surprised that his philosophy quietly takes as its model the earth and the irrevocable succession of its various territories or distributions.

In this sense, A Thousand Plateaus is perhaps the book that ventures to extract the ultimate consequences of the theory of the univocity of being through which Deleuze removed reality from all compartmentalization and, hence, thought from the system of representation. The univocal being is, in short, a plane that supports different distributions without being reduced to any of them—“as tribes fill the desert without it ceasing to be a desert” ([4], p. 146)—, that is, by putting up an inertial resistance to any attempt to establish a definitive distribution. For this reason, it must be conceded that, with the fall of the foundation, the question of ontological–transcendental law and the fact that it entails become a telluric question, insofar as they concern first and foremost the earth plane and its successive settlements. The nature of the law on the earth is that it is not to be founded or it is never founded enough, which was already proved by Stoic cosmopolitanism ([15], p. 159), confirmed on this point by the current tragedy of migration. Therefore, in the place of the foundation, we find the “evental” earth whose immanent logic is that of the rhizome or strictly internal logic that governs the sets of singularities that constitute multiplicities without ever adding external or supplementary dimensions: “always n−1” ([26], p. 6)—note that this is a natural metaphor for disjunctive synthesis, which is opposed to the transcendent logic of the tree or filiation, whose branches represent additional dimensions. Moreover, this is a logic of permanent redistribution, according to the expression by each multiplicity or terrestrial settlement of a variable power, in the absence of a universal and thus prevailing hierarchy. In summary, A Thousand Plateaus teaches us that there is no other arkhé than the earth we walk on, of which all “footprints” or pretensions to impose a right on its pure surface tend to disappear for the benefit of others.

What does this mean? Contrary to the renunciation of selection that was the basis of negative nihilism, the reversal of Platonism in Deleuze has, as in Nietzsche, a longer shadow than is usually believed and consists of a restoration of immanence that leads to the establishment of an immanent selection ([13], p. 137; [29]). In short, the fall of the foundation that nihilism entails must not lead to relativism but to evaluating realities according to the inner power that each one expresses on its own rather than according to its participation in an external or transcendent principle. This again shapes in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze’s paradoxical and selective ontology as a nomadic or changeable distribution, which is alien to any ontological structure: As a new avatar of the univocal being in the socio-political sphere, the earth is the object of provisional distributions but never of dividing up. Thus, the new socio-political sphere whose theoretical conquest takes place in A Thousand Plateaus is governed, mutatis mutandis, by the same “principles” that governed the metaphysical sphere in Deleuze’s two major works8.

It is no wonder Deleuze claims that the ambition of this book is “to assemble ritornellos, lieder, corresponding to each plateau” or to each composition of multiplicities that constitutes the different modes of living or settling the earth, since “the principles in philosophy are screeches, around which concepts develop their songs” ([10], p. 311). In order to think and evaluate life on earth, it is necessary to follow its same itinerary. It is, therefore, required to go from the immanent “cry” of the earth that, out of step, is permanently in danger of plunging again into the chaos over which it barely rises, to the multiple “songs”, whose varied rhythms extract from the terrestrial milieu the territories that constitute its different settlements. In conclusion, we find the post-Kantian ambition of this book in the new approach it gives to the foundation, based on the idea that Kant’s Copernican revolution “puts thought into a direct relationship with the earth” ([30], p. 85).

On the other hand, there are the assemblages, empirical principles of territorial administration, which stratify the terrestrial plane by distributing it into two segments that transpose the divergent-in-nature series of bodies and propositions that were put into play in The Logic of Sense to the new theoretical framework. It is, therefore, on the concept of assemblage that the return to The Logic of Sense is based.

I will now characterize the new concept of assemblage, as well as the redefinition of the event that takes place in parallel. The stratification of the earth plane organizes forms and substances, codes and milieus which, bordering on chaos, do not yet really differ from each other. From this organization follows a doubly articulated world, the world of strata that Deleuze and Guattari identify with the “judgments of God”, for the constitutive articulation of a stratum is a double articulation since it unfailingly articulates a “content” and an “expression” ([26], p. 43). Unlike codes and milieus, the content and the expression that make up the strata differ from each other by nature ([26], pp. 502–503).

Although it is similar to the strata that articulate the terrestrial plane in territories, the assemblage does not strictly identify with them, since this empirical principle of territorial administration is both an inter-stratum and a meta-stratum. Therefore, assemblages have one side turned toward the strata established by reterritorialization movements that extract a territory from the milieu and the other toward the earth plane whose movements of absolute and relative deterritorialization make them “expire” and succeed each other ([26], p. 40). Here lies the renewed importance that language acquires in A Thousand Plateaus, since “the reason that the assemblage is not confined to the strata is that expression in it becomes a semiotic system, a regime of signs, and content becomes a pragmatic system, actions and passions” ([26], p. 504). So, there is an assemblage every time the coupling of signs and bodies is observed; hence, it is the double articulation and the reciprocal presupposition between both, which, as the simulacrum, relates the different to the different through the difference itself ([6], p. 277).

According to this, a first division is established in every assemblage: It is inseparably a “machinic assemblage of bodies” and a “collective assemblage of enunciation” or, in simpler terms, an organization of corporeal realities in a given society that coexists with the collection of statements or regimes of signs in force. Thus, the key to the distinction between the assemblage and the strata is the opening to the pure “evental” character of the earth plane raised by language in the anthropomorphic strata ([26], p. 502), where for the first time, expression becomes a system of signs giving rise to the assemblage. This establishes an unprecedented relationship between its two segments beyond the mere separation characteristic of content and expression that divides the strata:

“There is a new relation between content and expression that was not yet present in the strata: the statements or expressions express incorporeal transformations that are ‘attributed’ as such (properties) to bodies or contents. In the strata, expressions do not form signs, nor contents pragmata, so this autonomous zone of incorporeal transformations […] does not appear.”

([26], p. 504)

We already know that the assemblage differs from the strata thanks to the opening to the event that language produces in the anthropomorphic strata. However, how do Deleuze and Guattari understand language and the event in a sphere—that of the socio-political—that no longer responds to the dictates of structuralism? And, above all, what does the assemblage consist of, and how are its variations and relays produced, ultimately constituting socio-political change?

In A Thousand Plateaus, they move from the problems of the proposition to those of the statement, leaving behind the metaphysical theory of language that The Logic of Sense articulated. With a view to extending his previous research to the social field, Deleuze, together with Guattari, carries out an ambitious critique of linguistics, which reclaims the primacy of pragmatics and has the concept of “assemblage of enunciation” as its guiding thread ([4], p. 28). Understanding, therefore, that the elementary function of language is the transmission of orders–words, with the order–word being defined as the relationship between statements and incorporeal acts that are performed in them ([26], pp. 79–80), they redefine the event or logical attribute within the framework of the assemblage as an act or an instantaneous and incorporeal transformation that, realized in the statements, is nevertheless attributed to the bodies of a society ([26], p. 80)9.

Thus, these inquiries lead to the completion of the concept of assemblage, which is formed by two perpendicular axes that divide it into four parts.

The horizontal axis divides it into the form of content or “machinic assemblage of bodies” and the form of expression or “collective assemblage of enunciation”. This is a division whose two segments render, as I have said, the Stoic duality between the mixtures of bodies and propositions that expressed events, making it land in history and forming the stratum of knowledge. As knowledge accumulates or is stratified in history, it proceeds by assembling bodies and signs insofar as it manages both the perception of the material reality of each epoch (“it makes us see”) and the statements that can be uttered in this context with a given effect, whether it is desired or not, on this material reality (“it makes us speak”). This organization of the visible and the articulable determines the evidence of each historical epoch, that is, its particular a priori. Thus, the heterogeneous series of The Logic of Sense are brought down to the earth’s surface, giving rise to the form of content and the form of expression, which remove both the Platonic height of the Idea and the pre-Socratic depth of the body, and even the Stoic surface of sense, in favor of the earth plane of immanence and its pure stratified surface ([26], p. 43).

The vertical axis corresponds, however, to the becoming from outside of the stratum to which the assemblage is exposed: movements of reterritorialization, which establish it, and movements of deterritorialization, which destabilize it, either to destroy it or to transform it. And by virtue of this second axis, all assemblages present a double “molecular-molar” nature that takes on the ambiguity inherent to this two-faced instance, which “looks” at both the strata and the earth plane ([26], p. 145). We can therefore say that an assemblage is predominantly molar or molecular, closer to the domain of the actual established reality or to that of desire, depending on whether reterritorialization or deterritorialization movements predominate in it, respectively.

Let us summarize the above. In the first place, there is, on the one hand, a symbiosis of bodies constituting a machinic assemblage that is always social before being technical, like the feudal assemblage consisting of the cession of land in exchange for serving on horseback, which “selects” the tool of the stirrup. On the other hand, there is a collective assemblage of enunciation, like the feudal oaths, constituting a regime of signs that also prevails over the use of language ([12], p. 70; [26], pp. 90, 398–406). Secondly, there are movements from outside the stratum to which the assemblage is subject, movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

Faithful to the Stoic tradition by which it is inspired, the distribution of the historical stratum of knowledge in the two segments that make up the horizontal axis of the assemblage should present a rigorous observance of heterogeneity or difference in nature: Between expressions and contents, discourse and states of affairs, there is an insurmountable abyss, a demand both for the univocity of being and for the consequent rejection of the representation system to which Deleuze’s philosophy has been committed from its beginnings. Additionally, this is in such a way that one does not speak of what is seen, and one does not see what is spoken of; hence, all language refers only to the language itself and is, therefore, indirect discourse or transmission of orders–words ([26], p. 77). However, the independence between the forms of content and expression, rather than their mutual exclusion, implies their reciprocal presupposition in a joint genesis that refers to the diagram as a transcendental principle close to the ontological principle ([2], pp. 147–148). Therefore,

“In expressing the noncorporeal attribute, and by that token attributing it to the body, one is not representing or referring but intervening in a way; it is a speech act […] the functional independence of the two forms is only the form of their reciprocal presupposition, and of the continual passage from one to the other.”

([26], pp. 86–87)

The articulation of the form of content and the form of expression is carried out by movements of deterritorialization that bring them closer to the diagram and, ultimately, to the pure “eventality” of the earth plane from which they originate—that is, to the multiplicities or incessant redistribution of pre-individual singularities. As in The Logic of Sense, the irrational logic that governs the pre-individual sphere is in charge of communicating the actual or individuated realities that differ by nature; in this case, the two segments of the assemblage, infecting them with the becoming that constitutes reality at the most elementary level and making them evolve in history.

In more technical terms, the distribution of the free singularities that populate the earth plane in the diagram, whose nature is also virtual, ontologically precedes the actual distributions of the forms of content and expression in the historical stratum of knowledge (they are desire, impersonal affections that are neither subjective nor objective). Thus, it generates them and determines their organization. Hence, the diagram is the outside of the stratum where the stratified forms of knowledge—in which desire becomes cognoscible—communicate by disjunctive synthesis. The opening to the event of the assemblage lies, therefore, in its communication with the diagram and, through it, with the very earth plane whose becoming secretly animates its history.

But how does this communication take place, or in other words, how does socio-political change occur according to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy? The communication between the two segments of the assemblage takes place through movements of relative deterritorialization that make the historical stratum of knowledge evolve and, consequently, translate into the actual domain the alterations that becoming produces at the virtual level, favoring in the assemblage the intensive or molecular pole ([26], pp. 87–88).

Such communication is anticipated and promoted in the event, now understood as an act or an instantaneous and incorporeal transformation that is expressed in the statements and which, nevertheless, is also attributed to the bodies of society, and not to represent them but to intervene in them. Therefore, there is a precedence of the form of expression whose statements realize in the new theoretical framework the incorporeal transformations that the event consists of.

Thus, in A Thousand Plateaus, as in The Logic of Sense, the event is an element of an intermediate or paradoxical nature that relates two heterogeneous “series”, the two segments of the assemblage, according to the irrational logic of the disjunctive synthesis ([12], p. 71). The event then inaugurates a way of inserting the expression in the contents and intervening in them at the level of the diagram, making the assemblage change—that is, determining that the movements of deterritorialization and the molecular nature predominate in it.

The logical sequence of socio-political change is thus as follows: First, there is an event as an act or an incorporeal transformation that goes unnoticed and extracts an assemblage of enunciation that realizes it, so the form of expression anticipates the form of content—as in the example of the statement “workers of the world, unite!”, which announced the constitution of a proletarian body still in its infancy ([26], p. 83). Secondly, this event–assemblage gives rise to a new subjectivity—following the example, the proletarian subjectivity—that establishes equally new relations with all spheres of life, removing itself from the power relations and forms of knowledge of the present assemblage, so that what used to be quotidian becomes intolerable ([10], p. 234). Finally, there is the need to “counter-effectuate” the event, that is, to create new assemblages that respond to the new subjectivity, placing individuals and societies at the height of what is happening to them. It is in these unprecedented assemblages where the subjectivity that inspired them by anticipating their forms will be reinserted—hence, interpreting Foucault, Deleuze suggests that the lines of subjectivation are “the extreme edge” of an assemblage, which “trace the passage” from one assemblage to another ([10], pp. 234, 341).

From this, it follows that counter-effectuation is now understood as a politics of the event, deepening toward politics its ethical conception. Although it may seem that the concept of counter-effectuation has become unrecognizable from The Logic of Sense to A Thousand Plateaus, in both cases, it is a test of will that calls upon us to accompany the event up until its ultimate consequences, including those that involve an often-painful corporeal effectuation. Let us remember that in the ethical dimension of counter-effectuation proposed in The Logic of Sense, it was essential to be the mime of the event that was being effectuated in our body to reach the surface of the pure event. Conversely, in A Thousand Plateaus, we are also called to be mimes but of the assemblages that make up the stratified surface of the earth—“mimic the strata” ([26], p. 160)—, which constitute a kind of effectuation. We also must do this in order to reach the surface but that of the earth plane, whose mutations vary our environments and ways of life according to the deterritorializing logic of the pure event.

Here, we discover the sense of the political dimension of counter-effectuation: It consists of rising from the effectuation in the stratum up to the earth plane in favor of an effectuation to come, which is more “untimely” or opposed to the status quo of the present society than simply future. It is now society, therefore, that must respond to the incorporeal event, willing it even in the effectuation in the stratum of which it is the cause, insofar as its action on us is limited through the constitution of assemblages that demand the new subjectivity and the event itself as a future effectuation10. Henceforth, the creation of new modes of being is the immanent criterion of selection regarding the assemblages (see note 8); hence, in the political variation of counter-effectuation, it is about creating new collective lifestyles that place us at the height of what happens to us as a society.

4. Conclusions

We can draw the following general corollary from the argument developed in this article: Deleuze’s thought gives a remarkable consistency to the event, constituting the strictly philosophical concept that Zourabichvili was missing, based on the notion we use in everyday life.

Let us summarize the conclusions that can be drawn from each point of the argument. First, in Difference and Repetition, the event refers to the logical principle of the redistribution of pre-individual singularities at the virtual level of the univocal being, which transforms the actual or individuated reality and gives rise to the new. Thus, it mediates our relation with reality as a transcendental field and establishes a new way of thinking about individuals, which relates each individual with a constituent otherness in ecological relationships rather than with the pure identity of a fixed essence. Secondly, The Logic of Sense enriches the concept by drawing its implications in the new realm of the surface of sense. The aberrant or paradoxical logic of this groundlessness that affirms everything at the pre-individual level—disjunctive synthesis—now makes the communication of the divergent-in-nature series that are bodies and propositions possible, producing sense in language as an effect of non-sense. Thirdly, A Thousand Plateaus transfers the event to the socio-political sphere and redefines it in the framework of assemblages as that paradoxical instance that communicates their two segments, infecting them with the becoming that constitutes reality at the most elemental level and consequently determining the succession of its changes. In all these cases, the vicissitudes of Deleuze’s technical concept do not overlook the quotidian—but profound—sense of the event, which is always that paradoxical logic that governs the unprecedented or the untimely in the real.

Finally, let us now reconsider the other question I posed at the beginning: What should be understood by “political event” according to Deleuzian philosophy? From A Thousand Plateaus on, every event is political in a different sense to that of The Logic of Sense: This political nature no longer resides in the indistinctness of the individual and the collective, maintained by a metaphysical theory of being and language that places its “grounds” in the realm of the pre-individual with a view to overcoming the transcendent character inherent to every foundation—even if this indistinctness persists. Instead, this “politicity” resides in the new domain to which the question is moved: the field, socio-political in itself, of terrestrial settlements. Therefore, in the second book, the event is immediately political because it is defined as an instantaneous and incorporeal act or transformation that, realized by the statements of a collective assemblage of enunciation, is attributed to the bodies that form the society in a machinic assemblage. Thus, on the one hand, the essential relationship with language persists, but language is now a statement necessarily integrated into the regime of signs of a social context, while, on the other hand, both the attribution to and the effectuation in the body also persist, but such a body no longer refers to any metaphysical depth but to a geopolitics where the different social alliances that constitute the very diverse modes of settling the earth are established.

It is still questionable whether there are events of greater political relevance than others. Let us conclude that in Deleuze’s philosophy after A Thousand Plateaus, an event is eminently political when the redistribution of powers that it produces in the virtual domain makes, at the actual level, the present assemblage “expire” in favor of an assemblage yet to come; in short, when it manages to create a new way of being or lifestyle at both the individual and collective level. Therefore, the event remains the very logic of change in reality or the becoming expressed by the infinitive verb, which abolishes the present of constituted individuals to permanently divide time into “already-past” and “still-future”, even when what is at stake in this passage are the forms of life and environments condemned to disappear in favor of new ones in the making. The latter are always anticipated by a speech act and a new subjectivation. Deleuze put it eloquently: “The event is always resistance, between what the speech-act seizes and what the earth buries” ([33], p. 256).