A Thousand Plateaus

A Thousand Plateaus
source
Name	A Thousand Plateaus
Authors	Gilles Deleuze; Félix Guattari
Country	France
Language	French
Subject	Philosophy
Publisher	Les Éditions de Minuit
Pub date	1980
Media type	Print
Pages	727

Contents

A Thousand Plateaus is a collaborative work by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari first published in 1980 that forms the second volume of their two-volume project alongside Anti-Oedipus. The book intervenes in debates associated with Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology, and Postmodernism, aiming to reconceptualize notions developed by figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Karl Marx. Its experimental form and interdisciplinary citations engage with intellectual institutions including École Normale Supérieure, Collège de France, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and University of Paris VIII.

Overview

The book articulates a nonhierarchical ontology that contrasts with models proposed by Georges Canguilhem, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Noam Chomsky, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bourdieu, proposing instead rhizomatic structures influenced by Botany of Deleuze and Guattari's sources and correspondences with Gregory Bateson, Norbert Wiener, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Henri Bergson, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It advances concepts such as deterritorialization, reterritorialization, assemblage, and minor literature while dialoguing with practitioners from John Cage to Marshall McLuhan and institutions like Museum of Modern Art, BBC, and The New York Times in contemporary debates about cultural production.

Deleuze and Guattari composed the book in a collaborative process that draws on the political praxis of May 1968 events in France, the clinical practice of Félix Guattari at institutions like La Borde clinic, and the philosophical lineage through Spinoza's Ethics, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Major thematic threads include deterritorialization and reterritorialization in conversation with Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno, as well as the critique of representational schemas associated with Immanuel Kant, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume. The work cross-references scientific sources such as Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Ilya Prigogine, and Claude Bernard while engaging artistic practices from Marcel Proust to James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Gustave Flaubert, and Samuel Beckett.

Originally published in French by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1980, the text followed the earlier Anti-Oedipus (1972) and emerged amid renewed debates involving Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Derrida. Subsequent paperback and hardcover runs involved publishers such as University of Minnesota Press, Continuum, Zone Books, and Columbia University Press in collaborations that mapped the text into anglophone scholarly networks at Harvard University, Oxford University Press fora, Yale University Press symposia, and conferences hosted by Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and Modern Language Association panels.

Critical reception spanned responses from proponents in Continental philosophy networks including scholars affiliated with École Freudienne de Paris, Centre Pompidou, and University of California, Berkeley to detractors among analytic circles linked to Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University. Influences appear across disciplines and practitioners such as Deconstructionists responsive to Jacques Derrida, architects influenced by Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, urbanists referencing Jane Jacobs and Manuel Castells, musicians and theorists like Brian Eno, David Bowie, and Pierre Schaeffer, as well as political movements connecting to Occupy Wall Street, Zapatista Army of National Liberation, May 1968, and Feminist movements where theorists like Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and bell hooks have mobilized related vocabularies.

Key translations include the English edition by Brian Massumi published by University of Minnesota Press, subsequent revisions and reprints by Continuum International Publishing Group and Zone Books, and translations into languages across publishing houses in Germany (Suhrkamp Verlag), Italy (Einaudi), Spain (Anagrama), Brazil (Editora 34), Japan (Iwanami Shoten), China (Commercial Press), and Russia (Ad Marginem), facilitating discourse in academic centers like University of Buenos Aires, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Peking University, University of Tokyo, and University of Cape Town.

Scholarly interpretations have ranged from close textual exegesis by commentators associated with Gilles Deleuze seminars at Paris 8 University and critics in The New Left Review to empirical appropriations in Science and Technology Studies journals and artistic curatorship at institutions like Tate Modern and Centre Georges Pompidou. Debates pivot on readings offered by scholars such as Brian Massumi, Claire Colebrook, Paul Patton, Ian Buchanan, Ronald Bogue, Todd May, and Elizabeth Grosz, engaging methods from Hermeneutics to Actor–network theory and controversies involving claims by Analytic philosophy critics at conferences like American Philosophical Association meetings and publications in Critical Inquiry and Diacritics.

Category:Philosophy books