When two’s a crowd

French philosophical duo Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari worked together to
dismantle the concept of ‘identity’ and the presumed importance of the individual. Why
did they do it, and where does it leave us today?

As a 39-year-old political militant and radical psychoanalyst, Félix Guattari went

looking for the respected philosopher Gilles Deleuze. On the three-hour drive to the
philosopher’s house, Guattari could never have guessed that Deleuze would become
his life-long friend and intellectual collaborator, and that the books they would write
together would go down in history as some of the most controversial polemics of their
age.

This first meeting, in the summer of 1969, must have been a strange one. At the age
of 44, Deleuze undoubtedly seemed much older; he had already published an
extensive catalogue of serious philosophical work, had held a professorship for five
years at the University of Lyon, and was currently convalescing after having one of his
lungs removed due to tuberculosis. In contrast to this reclusive old man, with a
reticence to travel or to engage in public debate, Guattari was a gregarious and
disruptive force to all that knew him. Led by an insatiable appetite for new social and
political struggles, Guattari had recently split from his previous mentor, the infamous
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, after refusing to toe the Lacanian party line.

Deleuze and Guattari had such opposing dispositions that their biographer, Francois
Dosse, found it necessary to ask: “How could two such different men, with such distinct
sensibilities and styles, pursue their intellectual agenda together for more than twenty
years (1969–1991)?”. The answer to this question, and the secret to their
collaboration, was their mutual distrust of identity and of the individual. Deleuze and
Guattari were both resolutely anti-individualist: whether it was in the realm of politics,
psychotherapy, or philosophy, the pair both wanted to show that the concept of the
individual was a kind of deception, set up to obscure the nature of reality. In their
collaborations, they argued that neither thought nor desire can be reduced to activities
of an individual. They wanted to show that political change cannot be understood from
the perspective of individuals, and that every academic discipline will fail to capture
what is vital in the world if it only examines the individuals that populate that field.

Together, Deleuze and Guattari developed various kinds of anti-identitarian thinking,

bringing together both interdisciplinarity and intersectionality, to imagine a future in
which the individual no longer reigns supreme. They argue for a progressive, Marxist-
inspired, anti-Capitalist politics of joy, which sits uncomfortably with some of the forms
of identity politics prevalent today. As we will see, instead of advocating an identity
based struggle, in which historically subjugated identity positions would be reclaimed,
Deleuze and Guattari ultimately try to find ways to dissolve the binary distinctions on
which these identitarian positions rest, and to find a mode of being that reaches
beyond the boundaries of the individual subject.

Félix Guattari’s first skirmish with the problem of the individual came from his early
education in political organizing. When the Second World War came to an end in 1945,
Guattari was only 15, but he was a member of the Student Hostel movement, which
had close ties to the French Resistance, and was already attending meetings of the
French Communist Party. He spent the rest of his adult life as a political militant,
constantly pushing at the fringes of established political programmes. He set up
Trotskyist splinter groups and edited breakaway newspapers that challenged the
Communist Party leadership. The reason for his constant agitation could be summed
up with the phrase, ‘the threat of Stalinism’. Guattari saw how the collective will of the
Russian Revolution had collapsed into the hierarchical power structure of a
bureaucratic State communism, and he saw the same process occurring in miniature
in every group he joined. No matter how communal the initial struggle, sooner or later
the collective desire of the group would dissolve into a series of individual desires,
attached to individual people, and one of these would become a leader, at the expense
of the others. Why do collaborations always collapse into hierarchies? Why does the
group get atomized into a collection of individuals, rather than retaining a collective
voice? These were the political questions that Guattari faced time and time again.

From 1953, Guattari also worked as a psychotherapist and found once again that it
was the discipline’s obsession with individuals that he couldn’t stand. He completed
his training with Jacques Lacan, one of the most influential psychoanalysts since
Freud. However, rather than remain in private practice, Guattari plied his trade in a
large psychiatric hospital, named La Borde, where he worked with institutionalized
psychotic patients. La Borde was an experimental hospital run along communist lines,
where doctors would help with manual work, and where patients and staff would work
together to run the institution. Here, Guattari began to understand how the antisocial
nature of traditional hospital life could make patients ill. He came to see psychosis not
as an individual ailment, but as a form of social alienation that could be exacerbated
by the dehumanizing activities of doctors and nurses. Consequently, he would argue
that “one could not consider psychotherapeutic treatment for the seriously ill without
taking the analysis of institutions into account.”1

While psychoanalytic techniques are designed for one-on-one conversations between

an analyst and an analysand, psychosis is generally understood to be resistant to this
therapy because those suffering from it are not able to maintain the necessary
contractual relationship with their analyst. To combat this, Guattari reformulated
psychoanalytic techniques at a group level, designing methods by which the whole
hospital could become a therapeutic instrument. This involved the use of ‘therapeutic
clubs’, such as arts or theatre clubs where patients could develop lasting relationships,
but also involved empowering patients by allowing them to take part in the running of
the hospital. Ultimately, Guattari would claim that when trying to give patients the tools
to reintegrate into society, “[t]he model of the individual… is too fragile” and it is

1 ‘Introduction to Institutional Psychotherapy’ in Psychoanalysis and Transversality, 61

therefore necessary to “build a new form of subjectivity that no longer relies on the
individual.” If psychosis is a form of social alienation then it can only be combatted with
sociability, which relies not on the formation of a strong sense of individuality, but on
an ability of a group of people to work together.

As a political organizer and as a therapist, Guattari’s work concentrated on how to get

people to work together. His job at La Borde was to get patients, doctors, nurses and
other hospital staff to overturn the hospital hierarchy, and to create a therapeutic
atmosphere in the hospital. In similar terms, Guattari would claim that “[t]he centralist
disease of communist parties is due less to the ill intentions of their leaders than to the
false relationships they establish with mass movements.”2 His problem was never a
particular individual, be they schizophrenic or Stalinist, but the process by which
groups break up into a collection of discrete individuals, alienated from one another,
and from their lives.

When Guattari first read Deleuze’s books, he found an intellectual compliment to the
practical concerns he had about the constitution of groups. At this point, Deleuze’s
scholarly output included studies of key western philosophers, such as David Hume,
Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as two works,
Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, which outlined his own contribution to
philosophy. Deleuze argued here that the history of western thought, at least since
Plato, had been subject to a number of illusions concerning the nature of thought itself.
First, Deleuze argued that, contrary to the assumptions made by most philosophers,
thought is not representative. That is to say, thought does not function by making a
picture of the world, which can be judged as true or false depending on its level of
accuracy. In fact, Deleuze argues, thought is creative, and always connected to that
which it thinks about.

Second, Deleuze claims that because the canon of western philosophy has judged
thought on its ability to represent the world, it has taken sameness and accuracy as
paramount. In philosophical terms, an individual is normally defined as that which is
identical to itself. Consequently, the individual has been accepted as the paradigm for
truth. Plato and Descartes provide two good examples. In his philosophy of the Forms,
Plato claims that any particular entity gains its qualities by reflecting the ideal form of
that thing. A man is only a man insofar as he represents the ideal form of ‘man’. This
ideal form, which is perfectly unique, self-identical, and unchanging, is taken as the
ground of knowledge: to know what a man is, is to know the form of ‘man’. Descartes
famous phrase ‘I think therefore I am’ also champions the centrality of the individual
by claiming that the thinking individual’s ability to know itself can provide the ground
for all further knowledge of the world. In both cases, the basis for knowledge comes
from something unique, individual, and unchanging.

Deleuze argues that thought is not grounded in identity, but generated out of
difference. He claimed that, because “[r]epresentation fails to capture the affirmed
world of difference”, we need to find a new way to think, a new way to philosophise,

2 ‘Nine Theses of the Left Opposition” in Psychoanalysis and Transversality, 173

that does not take identity as its foundation.3 Deleuze explained why it was always the
individual person, and the category of the individual in all its guises, that took centre
stage. Deleuze argued in Difference and Repetition, that what appears to us in
experience as an individual – be it an individual stone or an individual person – has no
underlying essence, but gains its individuality as an effect of the combination of diverse
forces that are in constant tension with one another. The world is composed of
differences, not of individuals, but representational thought makes it appear otherwise.

In the spring of 1968, seemingly detached from Deleuze’s intellectual deliberations, a

revolutionary fervour was sweeping across France. Students and factory workers
staged demonstrations and instituted massive general strikes in response to the
destructive forces of consumer capitalism. The uprising was characterised by its
spontaneity and by the fact that it was not supported by the established leftist
institutions of the workers unions or the French Communist Party. Guattari was a
central protagonist and organiser in the protests of May ’68, but his mentor Jacques
Lacan dismissed the demonstrations as mere hysteria. For Guattari, this was a
moment of great betrayal: if the Communist Party could not recognise a revolution
happening under its nose, and if Lacan could not comprehend the force of collective
desire when it was pouring through the streets, then something would need to change.

It was around this time that Guattari first read Deleuze’s work and, spurred on by the
events of May ’68, immediately wrote a review of both Difference and Repetition and
Logic of Sense, titled ‘Machine and Structure’. In this essay, he turned Deleuze’s
arguments against Lacan in an attempt to describe what was really happening in the
streets. While Lacan had defined a set of structural rules, apparently determining the
relationship between any individual and their object of desire, Guattari aimed to show
that desire is not primarily linked to the individual at all, but is a collective and
productive force. In contrast to the traditional psychoanalytic understanding of the
unconscious as a kind of theatre, where the desires of the individual are staged,
Guattari took up the image of the machine, claiming that the unconscious is more like
a factory, constantly producing desire. Recognising Guattari’s article as a threat to his
authority, Lacan tried to stop it being published. Unperturbed by his master’s snub,
Guattari sent the article directly to Deleuze and it was on this basis that the meeting
at Deleuze’s house was arranged.4

Deleuze and Guattari had an instant rapport. The initial months of their friendship
produced a wild array of original ideas, connecting the pitfalls of both psychoanalysis
and philosophy with the current state of political affairs. The notes from these first
meetings formed the basis of their first book, Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972. Here,
the philosopher and the militant psychoanalyst set out to explain the relationship

3Difference and Repetition, 67

4There are at least two, slightly different, versions of this story given in the literature, the first by Jean-
Pierre Faye (2000, 91-99) and the second given by François Dosse (2010, 71). The latter includes the
additional information that Guattari initially promised the article to Roland Barthes journal
Communications, only for Lacan to insist on having the article himself and then later changing his mind
and rejecting it. For more on these two positions, see Janell Watson’s account of the story (2009, 39-
40, 189).
between desire and reality. They wanted to show how desire interacts with the material
world and how it relates to the question of politics. Specifically, they wanted to answer
a set of closely related questions: Why do revolutions fail? Why do people fight for
their own servitude as if it was their freedom? Why do mass movements end up
damaging the interests of the masses? Ultimately, their aim was to explain not only
the events of May ’68, but also the causes of the Second World War, which had ripped
through Europe thirty years previously.

Because Hitler and Mussolini both came to power through mass populist movements,
Deleuze and Guattari argued that to understand fascism we must explain why, at a
particular moment, people desired fascism. We must recognise that “Hitler got the
fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused.”5
For Deleuze and Guattari, traditional Marxist discourse had failed to account for these
moments of collective action because it did not understand the mechanics of desire.
In one way, then, Anti-Oedipus can be read as a Freudian critique of Marxism, aiming
to reinvigorate Marx’s historical materialism by introducing the Freudian concept of
desire. However, the book simultaneously cuts in the reverse direction, as a Marxist
critique of Freud, aiming to rejuvenate psychoanalysis with Marx’s historical
understanding of labour. The resulting Freudo-Marxism is a form of psychoanalytic
anthropology named ‘schizoanalysis’, which narrates the history of desire, as a
productive and impersonal world-creating force. Central to Deleuze and Guattari’s
argument is the claim that desire is not individual; desire runs through people, and
drives people, but is not always aligned with the self-interest of those individuals.

Freud was the first to successfully describe desire, but his work focussed on the
individual maladies of individual patients, so he failed to recognise the importance of
historical and economic factors. He could not see that his patients’ neuroses were as
much a product of their historical conditions as their family situation. For Deleuze and
Guattari, desire is not necessarily aligned with the individual, however capitalist society
does its best to make all desire run by way of the individual. The neuroses that Freud
had analysed, and which continue to plague society in the 21st Century, are not
ahistorical constants, but products of the way that capitalism constrains and orders
desire into a restrictive set of patterns. Capitalist society does this because it needs
passive individual subjects, who will turn up to work, obey their boss, compete with
their neighbours, and consume an endless stream of commodities. Deleuze and
Guattari claim that it is the nuclear family that creates these people via a process of
Oedipalization, in which children are taught to direct their desire at a love-object,
namely the mother, which is constantly kept out of reach from them by a powerful law,
embodied by the father. The institution of psychoanalysis then plays the role of the
police force of capitalism, tracking down anyone who deviates from the sanctioned
activities of desire to reform them in the image of the good child and the good worker.

The book ruffled a lot of feathers. Lacan was furious and outlawed any discussion of
the text in his seminars. Many political leftists, though sympathetic to Deleuze and
Guattari’s aims, admonished their recklessness and their heterodoxy. Despite, or

5 Anti-Oedipus, 322
perhaps because of these criticisms, the book was a popular success, selling out in a
matter of days and attracting a two-page review in Le Monde.

But Anti-Oedipus was not only a critique of individualism, and Deleuze and Guattari
also provide a positive account of a non-individual, or pre-individual, political
revolution. Much of this work is heavily conceptual. For example, drawing on Deleuze’s
earlier writings, the pair develop the concept of the ‘multiplicity’. They try to show that
in our everyday use of the terms, the concept of the ‘many’ is always subordinated to
the concept of the ‘one’, because we tend to think of a group as being made up of a
number of individuals. In contrast to this, Deleuze and Guattari develop the concept of
the ‘multiplicity’ to describe a multitude which cannot be reduced to a group of
individual entities. They will argue, for example, that when you try to analyse the way
that desire functions in large groups, you see that the desire of the group is neither
unified nor easily divisible into a number of individual desires. This leads them to argue
that it is “only the category of multiplicity… that can account for desiring-production”
because desire is essentially “an affirmation that is irreducible to any sort of unity.”6

In practice, the activity of the schizoanalyst is somewhere in between that of the

psychoanalyst and the political revolutionary, decoding the unconscious processes of
desire and identifying the revolutionary potential in these desires. Briefly put, Deleuze
and Guattari advocate a three-stage practice for bringing about political change: first,
find those processes of desire that deviate from capitalism, then follow each of these
practices to allow them to escape from the restrictions of capital, and finally align these
different processes to create a “molecular revolution”. Deleuze and Guattari took a
broad view of who could be involved in such a revolution. Rejecting the traditional
Marxist idea that it was the working classes that would drive such a change, Deleuze
and Guattari advocated a kind of intersectionality that would align the revolutionary
potential of all marginalised groups. Because the structural oppression of women,
people of colour, and those with non-heterosexual forms of desire are all part of the
same machinery of despotic and imperial capitalism, it is only through an alignment of
all of these ‘minoritarian’ groups that an anti-capitalist revolution will succeed. Because
the philosophical image of the individual is based on the apparently autonomous figure
of the white male subject, it is through a process of becoming-woman, and of
becoming-minoritarian, that the spectre of individuality will be banished.7

To grasp Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-individualism, it is useful to look at how they

wrote, as well as what they wrote. Because their words were written, edited, and
rewritten in a dialogue between two friends, their books speak in a multitude of voices,
not easily reduced to the voices of either of the two authors. They begin A Thousand
Plateaus, the sequel to Anti-Oedipus, by looking back at the methodology of their first

6 Anti-Oedipus, 45
7 Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments in Anti-Oedipus are not unproblematic and there has rightfully
been much discussion of the applicability of their politics to contemporary political struggle. Most
famous of these is probably Gayatri Spivak (1988), who argues that Deleuze fails to recognise the
way in which subjectivity is conditioned by colonial practices. To my mind, the clearest analysis of
Anti-Oedipus, which shows the positive potential contained in the text, is given by Guillaume Sibertin-
Blanc (2016).
book: “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there
was already quite a crowd.”8 By writing in this way, they aim to combat the tendency
towards individuality in a practical, as well as a theoretical, sense. A Thousand
Plateaus contains fifteen chapters that range over a dizzying variety of topics, from
geology to linguistics, and from molecular biology to painting, poetry and political
economy. Here, their critique of identity splinters into a thousand smaller critiques,
where they show how each academic discipline suffers from the same tendency
towards individualising essences previously identified in psychoanalysis and in
capitalism. Instead of treating these different fields of inquiry as cut off from one
another, Deleuze and Guattari identify all of the places where one discipline seeps into
another, eventually mapping out a web of connections between these fields and
challenging the centrality of any one of them. Ultimately, they aim to open thought onto
its outside, combatting the tendency for theoretical work to close in on itself.

Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus were not Deleuze and Guattari’s only
collaborations, and they each continued to work on their own projects. Together they
wrote about the literature of Frantz Kafka and took up the vexed question of, What is
philosophy? Deleuze also wrote extensively on the potentials of cinema, and on the
philosophies of Leibniz and Foucault, among others, while Guattari argued for a new
kind of ecological thinking that could explain the interactions between our psychic
ecology, our political ecology, and the ecology of our planet. What the two thinkers
shared, and what brought them together in the first place, was an attempt to get
outside of the straightjacket of the concept of the individual. Their mutual distrust of
individuality can be seen throughout their collaborations and it is their anti-
individualism, and their joy in making inter-individual connections, that typifies both
their philosophy and their politics.

Bibliography:

Deleuze, Gilles. 2004a. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton.

London: Continuum.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. 2012. Anti-Oedipus. Translated by Robert Hurley,
Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. London: Continuum.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brain
Massumi. London: Continuum.

8 A Thousand Plateaus, 3
Dosse, François. 2010. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. New York:
Columbia University Press.

Faye, Jean-Pierre. 2000. “Philosophe le plus ironique”. In Tombeau de Gilles

Deleuze, 91-99. Edited by Yannick Beaubatie. Tulle, France: Mille Sources

Guattari, Félix. 2015. Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955-
1971. Translated by Ames Hodges. New York: Semiotexte.

Sibertin-Blanc, Guillaume. 2016. State and Politics: Deleuze and Guattari on Marx.
Translated by Ames Hodges. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e).

Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. In Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture, 271-313. Edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.

Watson, Janell. 2009. Guattari's Diagrammatic Thought: Writing Between Lacan and
Deleuze. London: Continuum.