ON POLLINATION IN PHILOSOPHY

Peter Pl Pelbart
Translated by Wolfgang Pannek

Scripture has no other purpose: the wind...

G. Deleuze

It seems necessary to trace Deleuzes endeavor in the light of his delicious provocation:
"Desire ignores exchange, it only knows the robbery and the gift"1. That the philosopher
has plundered the history of philosophy, that he has ransacked it happily - all this, now
that the academic bewilderment has passed, seems to us less blasphemous than
laughable. Deleuze the vampire - who is not tempted to laugh in face of this image? We
cannot deny, he sucked the blood of many thinkers. In contrast, how to evaluate his
philosophical "gift"? How to track the mark left in his generation and in ours without
retracing the inventory of his vampirism? Here is my little bet: should it not be possible,
in addition to the procedures of collage or virtualization detected in his work, to capture
his journey through the history of thought as a philosophical "pollination"? If the image
of pollination suits Deleuze, it is rather that operated by the anonymous wind than that
of the industrious insect. After all, dont we have in Deleuze an approach of thought
itself as this impersonal wind that drags us while it spreads its spores everywhere?
Arent we facing the processes of "transport" of "philosophical pollen", either inside
philosophy or outside of it, in a true ecology of emissions and disseminations? The
problems arising this way would be less of the order of interpretation or reception, but
of hybridization, contamination and contagion.

Eolian typology
I start from trivial although extravagant observations, before reaching more elaborate
and speculative formulations. Here is a first example. To rebut the accusation that his
long fingernails amount to Greta Garbos dark sunglasses, turning him into a starlet,
Deleuze writes to Michel Cressole: "In any case, it is curious that none of my friends
has ever noticed my nails, considering them entirely natural, planted there by chance, as

G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, O anti-dipo, translated by Luiz B. L. Orlandi, So Paulo, Ed. 34, p. 246.

by the wind which brings the seeds and does not make anyone talk."2 Impersonal virtue
of the wind, with his dose of transport and chance, which carries the unexpected and
unknown from far and without alard. And revenges what the wind brings, like sprouting
out of nowhere, as free as inevitable, no matter if in the nails or in the loves. "We know
that many beings pass between a man and a woman, coming from other worlds, brought
by the wind."3 Because the wind carries particles from different worlds, spreading them
to his pleasure, mixing domains and shuffling genders, species, lineages and heredities.
There is always an eolian deterritorialization adjuring the pure strain: "What is
important are never the affiliations, but the alliances and links; not the heredities, not
the descendants, but the contagions, the epidemics, the wind. Witches are well aware of
this."4 For the wind, like the witches, crosses the domains, spreading grains, viruses,
bacteria, words, disseminating diseases and life, seeds and terror. It is the element of
indomitable speeds and unheard directions. More than an element, or the medium,
shouldnt the wind be a force, the very force of Earth to the extent to which it moves
the deterritorialized Earth? The Earth, say Deleuze and Guattari, "intermingles with the
movement of those who massively leave its territory, lobsters who start walking in line
at the bottom of the water, pilgrims or riders who ride in a line of celestial escape". It is
always an externality that aspires to movement. This way, the whole relation of
philosophy to the natal is put in check, as well as its sedimentation and sedentariness.
With still stronger reason this is true for the scripture, in the words of Deleuze:
Scripture has no other purpose: the wind, even when we do not move, 'keys' in the
wind for that my mind escapes the spirit and provides my thoughts with a stream of
fresh air' to extract in life that which can be saved, that which saves itself alone due to
so much potency and obstinacy, to extract from the event what cannot be depleted by
effectuation, to extract in the becoming what cannot be fixed in a term. Strange ecology:
to draw a line, from scripture, music or painting. Belts shaken by the wind. A little bit of
air passes."5
It is intriguing to follow this repeated evocation of the wind, in thought, in the event,
in impersonal processes, in love affairs, in scripture, in becomings, the haecceity. "He is
2

Gilles Deleuze, Conversaes, translated by Peter P. Pelbart, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Ed 34,
1992, p. 13.
3
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Mil Plats, v. 4, translated by.Suely Rolnik, Rio de Janeiro, Ed. 34, 1997, p.
23.
4
G. Deleuze and C. Parnet, Dilogos, translated by Eloisa A. Ribeiro, So Paulo, Escuta, 1998, p. 83.
5
G. Deleuze and C. Parnet, Dilogos, op. cit., p. 89.

as unruly as the wind and very secretive about what he does at night." Deleuze asks
himself concerning the origin of the perfection of such a phrase by Charlotte Bront,
and attributes it to the dynamic with a subject with nothing but movements and rests,
speed and slowness, affects, intensities.6 The wind itself, after all, as an affect. Consider
the mention of the film Wind and Sands by Sjstrm, where the wind is like an
affection or a potency suddenly understood and faced by the character, with which he
measures himself, and in face of which he emerges renewed, reborn, in a new "mode of
being."7
It is the largest clause, as banal as it may seem, for philosophy, for scripture, for life:
a current of air needs to pass - and God knows how many kicks with the head, ravings,
impediments need to be invented and to simply transpose in order to avoid suffocating,
to receive or to let pass a whiff of air. It is a recurring theme in Deleuze, that should not
be taxable only to the author's personal physical suffering, reaching emphysema, but
that is due primarily to a necessity of thought, of life itself, expressed by Deleuze with
the exclamation taken from Kierkegaard:
"A little bit of the possible, or I suffocate." But when Deleuze takes up this
philosophical cry launching it gain to the four winds, we are far away from the thinker
posted on the mountaintop auscultating the breath of God or passing again the tablets of
the law. In contrast, few authors were able, as Deleuze, to give of themselves such
comic images, even in this eolian atmosphere: "To be a sea flea, sometimes jumping
and seeing the whole beach, sometimes staying with his nose stuck in a single grain. [...]
A whole pack in you, chasing what, a witch wind?"8
Serenity and Fury
We can already move toward the Delbos expression retaken by Deleuze. According to
it, Espinosa is "a great wind" that drags us. And Deleuze comments: "Few philosophers
have had this merit of reaching the status of a great calm wind." Why should Espinosa
be a great calm wind? Well, the explanation given by Deleuze is curious. This calm
wind, as well as a continuous layer that its thinking can accomplish, is due to the status
that he, Espinosa, assigns to the immanent cause, God or the Substance. A cause is
6

Idem, p. 109.
G. Deleuze, A imagem-movimento, Cinema 1, trad. Stella Senra, So Paulo, Brasiliense, 1985, p. 180.
8
G. Deleuze and C. Parnet, Dilogos, op. cit., p. 90.
7

immanent when the effect is in the cause itself, without degradation, distance or
hierarchy between cause and effect, as well as between God and creatures, or among
substance, attributes and modes. If cause or being are equally present in all beings or
entities, if they are equally close everywhere, if there is no distanced cause, it is because
the immanent cause was liberated from subordination to formerly limiting sequences.
This is Deleuzes hypothesis. The immanent cause existed in other authors, but always
in a restricted manner or associated with others. For example, in Plotinus the immanent
cause did not exclude the emanative cause. Thus, the Being and the One coexisted in
different sequences: in one of them the Being emanated from the One, in another they
were equivalents, in a third the One emanated from the Being. In contrast, by liberating
the immanent cause from other processes of causality to which it found itself
subordinated before, by taking it to limit of itself, risking to give up the distinction
between cause and effect, God and the World, God and the creature - the greatest of all
dangers - Espinosa inaugurates a new plane. In other words, by postulating that what
produces remains in itself, but that which it produces remains in it, the sequences are
destroyed, everything is like thrown back over the same absolutely infinite all
comprising substance - immanent cause. Deleuze says literally: Espinosa "replaced the
sequence by a true plane of immanence." And he concludes, in an intriguing jump: "It's
an extraordinary conceptual revolution: in Espinosa everything happens as if on a fixed
plane."
In the observations made in these lectures in 1980 the attentive reader will not fail to
notice the insistent presence not only of a painting lexicon (Logic of Sensation will be
published the same year), but also that of cinema. Just as in a certain moment in history,
and in the history of painting, faced with the supposed religious embarrassment of
approaching the divine, a genuine pictorial potency liberates itself, emancipating itself
from the obligation to represent things, in a sovereign conquest of lines, colors and
movements, also in philosophy occurs a kind of liberation from the concept, in a sort of
artistic potency that traverses and subverts religion, while investing in the divine.
But if the concept is free from representing the world, and God is a unique opportunity
to radicalize this movement, it, the concept, is still subject to certain sequences in which
it finds himself inserted and that ensure its sense. Conceptual sequence, cinematic
sequence. As seen earlier, however, there comes a time, in philosophy as well as in film,
despite the distance and the abyssal heterogeneity separating these two domains, in

which the daring consists in getting free also from the sequences, a turnaround whereby
sequences yield to the fixed plane.
The fixed plane, as the film shows, especially the book The Time-Image, is not
immobility, but precisely the coexistence of all micro-movements, molecularity stirring
in a single plane, as Espinosa throws back everything over a single plane, the plane of
immanence: "An extraordinary fixed plane that is no way a plane of immobility, for all
things move." It is the continuous layer, the univocity of being, the plane of immanence,
the calm wind. Deleuze insists, moreover, on the importance of the geometric method as
the preferred operator, able to "fill the fixed plane of absolutely infinite substance."
And he says: "In my view it is the most fundamental step attempt to provide a status of
univocity of being, an absolutely unequivocal being." In short: the great calm wind, the
fixed plane, univocity, the plane of immanence. Here, we have a surprising series from
Duns Scotus to Spinoza, from the eolian to the cinematic dimension, which would seem
to solve the mystery of these jumps. But why such insistence on this plane as a calm
wind if not to indicate that in Espinosa there is another plane, more turbulent, that of
scholia, where the philosopher abandons the serenity of demonstrations and reveals,
says Deleuze, aspects of aggression, of violence, as if the affections were designed
there, while the concepts had been developed in the demonstrations from where comes
this passionate practical tone?9 Another timbre is perceivable there, Deleuze insists,
another pace, another speed, it is the broken line, more agitated and furious. And it is
only in Book V, he says, that both lines compose or cross, where Espinosa "reaches
unprecedented speeds, shortcuts so effulgent that one cannot talk but of music, tornado,
wind and strings."10 In this respect, we cannot fail to be amazed with the last paragraph
of "Spinoza and Us", where the referred contrast reappears in full: "Many commentators
loved Espinosa enough to evoke a wind when talking about him. And, indeed, there
exists no other comparison than that to the wind. But is it the great calm wind to which
Delbos compared the philosopher? Or the gust of wind, the witch wind, mentioned by
'the man of Kiev', the non-philosopher par excellence, the poor Jew who bought Ethics
for a kopek and without grasping the whole?"11

G. Deleuze, De las velocidades del pensamiento, 2/12/1980, available in <www.webdeleuze.com>

G. Deleuze et F. Guattari, O que a filosofia?, op. cit., p. 66.
11
G. Deleuze, Espinosa. Filosofia Prtica, translated by Daniel Lins and Fabien Pascal Lins, So Paulo,
Escuta, 2002, p. 135.
10

Deleuze concludes precisely with this duplicity, as if the two timbres, the two winds
would complete, alternate with or need one another. On the one hand, the grandiose and
celestial movement of propositions and demonstrations, the fixed plane, the plane of
immanence, the calm wind, the Individual whose relations of speed and slowness never
cease to vary in an informed matter; secondly, the series of affects, the drives, the gusts,
tornadoes, the infinite speed, the intensive state of particles and thought. It is not the
concept on one side and life on the other since they are inseparable in both planes. But
Deleuze suggests that the book itself (Ethics, in this case) requires these two readings,
the systematic (the idea of a set) and the affective (that cannot be grasped as a whole, as
the reader from Kiev says). The "white sun of substance" and "the fiery words of
Spinoza", according to Romain Rolland. Serenity and fury. Dont we have here, equally,
a portrait of Deleuze's thought, with its double affective tonality, or, following the two
readings he asks for, simultaneously?

Pollen society
Now we propose a leap into our most burning actuality. Maurizio Lazzarato and Yann
Moulier-Boutang showed up to which point, tendentiously at least, that from which
cognitive capitalism benefits and which it explores is not restricted to the "honey"
collected during hours of contracted work, but mostly expands itself beyond formal
employment, i.e., the complex network of exchange of information, knowledge, skills,
cooperation and social, affective and collective interaction, the immeasurable swarming
that densifies, nourishes and conditions production and social reproduction.12 The
source of wealth has shifted from the strict scope of work, overflowing to the time of
life as a whole, including that of leisure, entertainment, artistic creation, affective
relationships, even that of dream. What is in question is the force-invention
disseminated everywhere and at all times, not only in laboratories or universities, but
12

Y. Moulier Boutang, Labeille et lconomiste, Paris, Carnets Nord, coll. Essai, 2010. Such a
perspective has been developed by M. Lazzarato, Lavoro imateriale. Forme di vita e produzione di
soggettivit, Verona, Ombre Corte, 1998; Gabriel Tarde, un vitalisme politique, in G. Tarde,
Monadologie et sociologie, v. I, Paris, Institut Synthlabo, 1999; Puissances de linvention, Paris, Les
empcheurs de penser en rond, 2002; As revolues do capitalismo, Rio de Janeiro, Civilizao
Brasileira, 2006; Y. Moulier-Boutang, Le bassin de travail immatriel (BTI) dans la mtropole
parisienne: mutation du rapport salarial dans les villes du travail immatriel, Paris, LHarmattan, 1996
(with Antonella Corsani, Maurizio Lazzarato and Antonio Negri); Le Capitalisme Cognitif. La nouvelle
grande transformation, Paris, Amsterdam, 2007. As far as concrete pollination is concerned: Recent
statistics reveal that bees are essential to pollination of 80% of species and 84% of crop species.

also among the unemployed, the artists, the intermittent, the cognitariat and precariat of
all kinds. In short, the "multitude" is the place and the source of collective intelligence,
the reservoir of cognitive and affective production.
Therefore, it is precisely the activity of pollinating social relations of the multitude
that determines the degree of innovation of the current virtual economy. How to
measure, mark out, quantify this pollination tout azimut given its aspect at the same
time singular, collective, intangible? A pollen society is precisely that which rests upon
this circulation, spread, contamination, activity in principle for free, but that, contrary to
the mode of production and measurement and Fordist appropriation, requires other
mechanisms of remuneration and distribution of goods, including that of intellectual
property. Therein the authors insist: innovation and production depend increasingly on
positive externalities (infrastructure, education levels, institutions, public services,
common goods, quality of life, safety, relationships), so that it becomes increasingly
difficult, as Moulier-Boutang says, "to establish the participation of each in the final
result, and the more it goes toward an economy of innovation and relationship, of
cultural creations and services, the more indirect or 'non-productive' labor becomes
essential it is the pollination of society by all sorts of activity, free or exterior to
work." It is another kind of logic, therefore, announcing itself within capitalism, overall
contrary to market economy. Obviously, here we cannot accompany all the multiple
aspects drawn in this productive and theoretical mutation, all the risks and biopolitical
promises embedded in such a process and approach.
We will just propose this hypothesis: a certain philosophical practice witnessed
similar inflections, comparable to a regimen of social pollination. As Villani formulated
concerning Deleuze: philosophy no longer depends on essence, but on the swarm (ne
dpend plus de lesse mais de lessaim13). If Deleuze was an active experimenter in
such a mode of thought, such as pollination or swarming, is because in his work and his
generation, the author, the work, the economics of production and the regimen of the
circulations of concepts underwent a remarkable modification. Here we can indicate
only rhapsodically some clues about these points, giving a glimpse of up to which
extent the movement of a thought anticipates that which, in its time, requires to happen.

13

A. Villani, La gupe et lorchide, Paris, Belin, 1999.

1- On private property in philosophy

It is the whole problem that occupied the 20th century: who thinks? From Nietzsche
passing through Artaud, Blanchot, Lacan, Foucault, the identity of the author and the
patent on his production was called into question. The author-function has been
questioned, as well as the attribution of thought to the subject of knowledge, to
consciousness or its derived figures. Thus, it is always a multiplicity that talks or thinks.
The dissolved I, the larval I, the contemplative I, the passive I, multiple Is, I is another,
or the known formula by Deleuze: "There is always another breath in mine, another
thought in mine, another possession in what I possess, a thousand things and a thousand
beings implicated in my complications: every true thought is an aggression. What is in
question are not the influences that we suffer, but the insufflations, fluctuations that we
are, and with which we confuse ourselves."14 In Deleuze there are many examples, in
addition to his writing together with Guattari, of the degree of depersonalization
required by an author to open up himself to "the multiplicities crossing from side to
side."15 We have no scruples, in this case, to evoke even the schizophrenic, in the
distance he overflies between male and female, human and animal, the living and the
dead, and that "opens up himself, like a bag full of spores, releasing them as so many
other singularities he kept unduly closed, among which he intended to exclude some, to
retain others, but which now become sign-points, all affirmed in their new distance.16
Whence comes the right to use such an image for a philosopher? Also, in him something
opens up, something loosens, something crosses, a distance is traveled in an absolute
overflight. Even the loneliness of the creator or thinker, strongly advocated by Deleuze,
is the completely opposite to an internalization or a closing about himself - the desert is
precisely the condition to be traversed by various "tribes", voices, becomings,
intensities, haecceities - the most populated loneliness, the most solidary solitude. It is
not just, say, the abolition of intellectual property, but of the very power an author
would intend to have over the destiny of his work, of the presumption to legislate over
14

G. Deleuze, Lgica do Sentido, translated by Luiz Roberto S. Fortes, So Paulo, Perspectiva, 1982, p.
306.
15
G. Deleuze, Conversaes, op. cit., p. 15. About this matter cf. E. Grossman, Langoisse de penser,
Paris, Minuit, 2008, especially the chapter La sortie de soi.
16
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, O anti-dipo, op. cit., p. 110.

its consequences and meaning, of the "monarchy of the author", as defined by Foucault
in his preface to the second edition of the History of Madness: "I wish this object-event,
almost imperceptible among many others, would recopy, fragment, repeat, simulate,
unfold, finally disappear without the one to whom it occurred to write it ever being able
to claim the right to be its master, to impose what he wanted to say, or to say what the
book should be. In short, I wish a book not to ascribe to itself the condition of text to
which pedagogy or criticism knows how to reduce it, but have the boldness to present
itself as discourse: simultaneously battle and weapon conjunctures and vestiges,
irregular encounter and repeatable scene."17 It's a different economy of circulation,
dissemination, proliferation, dispersion. And that prefigures (or just clarifies) a certain
unfinished (anti)economy, already underway in the intangible domains of knowledge
and language, since long ago, well before reaching the level of explicitness named
copyleft. It was Gabriel Tarde who elaborated the perhaps most suggestive theory of
social transmission chains, showing the extent to which the invention and circulation of
gestures, beliefs, desires and ideas relies on an

anonymous logic of sharing and

contagion, on a molecularity of dissemination pulverizing the category of authorship, or

subject.18

2- On the status of the work

One cannot dissolve the subject or the author without at least questioning the status of
the object or work. Blanchot went very far in that direction, he who already approached
the work to its downfall - desoeuvrement, ineffectiveness - insisting that which speaks
in the author is that he is no longer himself, he is already nobody anymore: not the
universal, but the anonymous, the neutral, the outside. Deleuze says it in his way: a
work, whether literary, plastic or philosophical, only has value through its relation to
externality it is relationship with the outside, its sense comes from outside and takes it
beyond itself. It is all a question of connection, electric transmission, machining, usage the famous toolbox mentioned by Guattari and retaken by Foucault while designating
the meaning of theory in the present. By this occurs no volatilization of thought itself,
but the liberation of matter-thought from the closure imposed by the form-book as the
17

M. Foucault, preface to the reedition from 1972 of History of madness, translated by Jos T. Coelho,
So Paulo, Perspectiva, 1978.
18
M. Lazzarato, Puissances de linvention, op. cit.

"form of interiority". One realizes the extent to which all this favors another kind of
circulation and connectivity of philosophical thought - and Deleuze referred to the
yearning that concepts should circulate as a currency, streaming throughout the flow of
the world - without diminishing in any way the singularity ceaselessly elaborated by the
philosopher himself. It is, indeed, a paradoxical position, which led some to suspect - on
notions such as desiring machine or machinic assemblage - of an abject complicity with
the capitalism that was claimed to combat. It is clear that what seems to disorient many
readers in this philosophical practice, among others iek, for example, is the absence
of "negativity" (dialectic, of course!), which would allow a more "discriminate"
relationship with the totality one wants to criticize. With this, the dimension of
infiltration and coalescence between thought and the energy of the present plus the
resulting de-totalization, entirely escape him. From singularity, difference, molecularity,
individuation, the gradual connection (de proche en proche) up to concepts at the limit
of anti-production as the body-without-organs, or even the notion of exhaustion, passing
the vindication of vacuoles of silence, everything speaks against a supposed "entire
positivity" or "adherence to acceleration" that some attribute to him. As Guattari says, in
his own way: "A world only constitutes itself under the condition of being inhabited by
an umbilical point, of deconstruction, of de-totalization and deterrritorialization [...].
This vacuole of decompression is at the same time nucleus of autopoiesis 19 What
Deleuze already detected in the idea of the Whole in Bergson, and that he resumes in his
conception of cinema, applies to every work - there is always a point or a line whereby
everything escapes and flees. More: the very line of flight is primary. "One should not
understand this primacy of lines of flight chronologically, neither in the sense of an
eternal generality. It is rather the fact and the law of the intempestive; a non-pulsated
time, a haecceitas a rising wind, a midnight, a noon."20

3- On encounter
When a philosopher like Deleuze "touches" another, what is it that is actually being
produced? Is it a loving or even a perverse encounter between two thinkers, as his
description makes believe? We are not sure that such an image, as provocative as it may

19

F. Guattari, Caosmose, translated by Ana L. de Oliveira and Lcia C. Leo, So Paulo, Ed. 34, 1992, p.
102.
20
G. Deleuze and C. Parnet, Dilogos, op. cit., p. 158.

be, exhausts the complexity involved - to bugger or to be buggered, to breed monstrous

children or to watch a conception from the back.
We feel the comicality at stake. Yes, a double becoming, arguably, as in the case of
the bee and the orchid, an a-parallel evolution, where the encounter itself drags both in
a third direction, and "reveals" to those who would have met what they "could" be ,
therefore, what they were virtually.21. Or, according to another perspective, we could
say: at every encounter there is excess production, precisely where, as repeated by
Deleuze, the relation exceeds its terms. Or: to encounter means always to affect and to
be affected, but it also means the involvement of the terms of the encounter, the
appropriation of their strength without destroying them ... Or, action at a distance, or
overflying distance. More than to a buggering, it would be necessary to pay attention, in
the comic phrase of Deleuze, to the reciprocal decentralizations, the production of secret
emissions. We eventually desert from historical succession and its constraints to slide,
in the space of thought, into other logics, where historical time and its possible markers
(of causality, influence, retroactivity) overflow, guaranteeing each resulting spark an
"autonomy" toward the self-positing of the concept. Even Borges seductive image,
where each philosopher creates his precursors, seems insufficient, even if the retroactive
lineage produced by Deleuze has not yet exhausted its fruits, and has not lost any of its
interest. In any case, Deleuze insists on renouncing the before and the after, considering
a "time of philosophy" instead of a "history of philosophy. In this stratigraphic time we
have superpositions, not sequences, where "the names of philosophers coexist and
shine, whether as bright spots that make us go again over the components of a concept,
whether as the cardinal points of a layer or as the foliate that never ceases return to us,
like dead stars whose light is more alive than ever. Philosophy is becoming, not history;
it is coexistence of planes, not succession of systems.22 It is the inverted Bergsonian
cone, the Memory-world, with its twinkling points and the always reinvented relation
between them, as in the experience of the baker mentioned by Deleuze.
We will aggregate three elements of a theory formulated by Simondon that might
help conceiving this set of perspectives on the encounter or the relationship. First, the
philosopher of ontogenesis did not get tired to show that being is inconceivable except

21

A. Villani, La gupe et lorchide, op. cit., p. 13: the correct sequence is not from being to encounter,
but from encounter to being.
22
G. Deleuze e F. Guattari, O que a filosofia?, op. cit. p. 77.

as becoming, that is, as a delay in relation to itself. In his formulation, "the becoming is
the being as present insofar as it delays actually into past and future." That is, it
overflows itself, extrapolating its unity or identity. 23 If the dialectic still preserves the
externality of modifications in relation to what is modified, here the becoming itself is
thought as ontogenesis: "The being as being is given entirely in each of its phases, but
with a reserve of becoming." 24 Following this idea, we can ask: what is a work, an
author, a thought, if not also a "reserve of becoming"? Isnt it precisely this virtual facet
that circulates outside itself, even more than its current facet? Wouldnt its forces be
virtualities, disseminating secret emissions, more than the very terms that carry them,
with all their risks to freeze into clichs and slogans of order? Secondly, borrowing
from psycho-physiological theory of perception the term disparate, indicating the
mismatch between the left and right image of eyesight, and the extent to which such
disparate invokes a supplemental third dimension, but not of mere superposition, in this
case depth25, Simondon turns this procedure into an operator of invention in which a
background incongruence between two singularities, that is, a difference of potential or
voltage, or intensity, calls for a "resolution", a new "individuation" which, however,
does not abolish the tensions within a stable equilibrium. Couldnt we conceive the
encounter between two authors, within the distance that separates them (as in the
distance between the images retained by the left and the right eye), as a process of
"triggering" of this order, where what is created is necessarily a new plane, a
supplementary "individuation", with its "internal resonance", without being able to
conceive it as a synthesis that would abolish the tensions, the singularities or the
original inconsistencies? At the bottom it is the theory of knowledge with which
Simondon concludes his magisterial study of individuation: knowledge does not consist
in the relation between a constituted subject and a given object (e.g., the subject
Deleuze, reader of the object Nietzsche); knowledge would still less be a relation
thought as adequation, representation, reflection on.26

Knowledge itself is an

individuation and, therefore, irreducible to the terms that it involves, entwines and
reconfigures. So when Simondon states that his goal is to follow the being in its genesis,
it also means "to perform the genesis of thought while the genesis of the object is being
23

G. Simondon, Lindividuation la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation, Grenoble, Millon,

2005, p. 31.
24
Idem, p. 318.
25
Idem, p. 205, note 15.
26
Cf. G. Simondon, Lindividuation la lumire..., op. cit., p, 321:.But nothing proves that knowledge is
a relation, and particularly a relationship in which the terms pre-exist as individuated realities."

performed."27 The one who best formulated such a move in Deleuze, despite his
particular understanding concerning the idea of genesis, and even with his reticences,
was perhaps Jean Luc Nancy, writing that Deleuze's thought has not the "real" as its
object, it has no "object": it is another effectuation of the "real", or in other words "he
does not judge or transform the world, he effectuates it differently, as a 'virtual' universe
of concepts."28 The third point of Simondon is the relationship between the seed and the
mother liquid in the process of crystallization as he describes it. Given a certain liquid in
a state of superfusion (i.e. in metastable equilibrium), in conditions of temperature and
pressure, here's a uniqueness that suits him as a starting point for crystallization.
"Everything happens as if the metastable equilibrium could not be broken except by the
local input of a singularity contained in the crystal seed to break the metastable
equilibrium; once attracted, the transformation propagates, because the action initially
exerted between the crystalline seed and the metastable body is then gradually exerted
between the already transformed parts and the parts not yet transformed."29 And
Simondon explains that physicists usually employ a term borrowed from the vocabulary
of biology to describe the action of bringing a germ: they say that the substance is sown
by a crystalline seed. Couldnt we use this image of the seed to return to the question
formulated at the beginning? A thinker not only "steals" from an author in which he
plunges, but he also brings him "a crystalline seed", a singularity that triggers, in the
metastable field of the studied work (as little as it may be conceived in this sense), a
reordering, de proche en proche, as Simondon and Deleuze like to say - Deleuze and his
seed Spinoza in Nietzsche, the seed Nietzsche in the work of Spinoza, Deleuze himself
as a singularity. Doesnt Deleuzes course, in its relation to the works he touches and in
its way, dramatize this variety of operations so well described by Simondon, the delay,
the disparate, the crystalline seed? If these logics seem unusual in the field of thought, it
is because they overflow historical time and its possible markers, as already mentioned,
namely, the notions of causality, influence, even retroactivity, operating a transversal
reproduction.

27

Idem, p. 34.
J.-L. Nancy, Dobra deleuzeana do pensamento, in . Alliez (org.), Gilles Deleuze: uma vida
filosfica, So Paulo, Ed. 34, 2000, p. 114.
29
G. Simondon, Lindividuation la lumire..., op. cit., p. 78.
28

4- On transversal reproduction
It is, as Deleuze says: "The vampire does not affiliate, it infects. The difference is that
the contagion, the epidemic brings into play fully heterogeneous terms: for example, a
human, an animal and a bacterium, a virus, a microorganism. Or, as for the truffle, a
tree, a fly and a pig. Combinations that are not genetic, nor structural, inter-realms,
participations against nature, but nature only proceeds this way, against itself. We are
far from affiliative production of hereditary reproduction."30 The implications of such a
theory of transversality, especially in the context in which genetic determinism reigns,
are considerable. We know to what extent, for example, Deleuze and Guattari criticized
the dogma and mythology of DNA, by refusing to compare it to a language, considering
that there is precisely no translation, but rather successive reorganizing syntheses:
metabolism, natural selection, reproduction, viral transfer. As shown by Keith Ansell
Pearson, in Deleuze we find, instead of a cosmic evolutionism, a deterritorialized dance,
rhizomatic relations.31 The theory of biology of complexity holds that molecular
mechanisms follow a versatility, a fluidity such that the accent should be placed more
on the dynamic field of forces than on physical essence. The naked DNA doesnt
replicate itself, it requires a complex assemblage of protein enzymes." So instead of
genealogies with an evolutionary life model, Pearson insists on transversal assemblages,
where genes cross borders. In this direction, Deleuze and Guattari would have made a
molecular reading of Darwinism, molecularization of the population - the capacity of a
code to propagate itself in a given medium in order to create for itself a new medium
where each modification is made in a process of population movement.
Change not conceived anymore as the passage of a predetermined form to another, but
as the decoding process. Modern theory of mutations, according to which a code enjoys
a margin of decoding that offers supplements capable of variation. Surplus value of
codes, lateral communication. Why wouldnt that be equally pertinent to conceptual
migrations in the field of thinking, to the disruptions of a philosophical code, as well as
to its dissemination under a viral or epidemic mode?
***

30
31

G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Mil Plats, v. 4, op. cit., p. 23.

K. A. Pearson, Germinal Life, London/NY, Routledge, 1999.

We cannot aspire to a conclusion, taking into account the two vectors evoked here,
eolian movement and transversal pollination. In any case, we dare to say that it is in A
Thousand Plateaus that their crossing takes place in the most interesting way, with the
elaboration of concepts such as flat space, nomadology, body-without-organs,
assemblage, ritornello, as well as with the cartography of becomings, haecceities,
deterritorializations. If the wind, the gusts and the free exercise of pollination in
Deleuze could acquire such potency in this book, which he confessed to be his favorite,
it is because there the plateaus of intensity explicit a contemporary plane of immanence.
This way, new velocities and variations, mixtures, short circuits, new forces and matters
were liberated, dragging away conjointly our life and our thinking.
Now, it is not obvious to a life, as much as it pretends itself to be philosophical, to
sustain such a bet. For any form of life, from the point of view of eolian speed,
constitutes a kind of stop, or even a stop in the image, as said in the movies. "As
whirlwinds of dust raised by the passing winds, the living circle over themselves,
pending from the great breath of life. They are, therefore, relatively stable, and come to
imitate so well immobility ... "32 exclaims Bergson, quoted by Deleuze.
It is that the living cannot coincide entirely with the speed of what impels it, overflows
it, and escape it: the big blow or breath or wind. Whether you call it the virtual, the notgiven-all, the plane of immanence, apeiron or the outside, it is always departing from
this wind and the tiny particles it carries, that the whirlwind of circulating difference, in
this mixture of chance and necessity, is decided.

32

H. Bergson, A evoluo criadora, quoted by Deleuze in Bergsonismo, translated by Luiz B. L. Orlandi,

So Paulo, Ed. 34, p. 84, note 147.