A Thousand Plateaus

A Thousand Plateaus (French: Mille Plateaux) (1980) is a book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It forms the second part of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia duo (the first part being Anti-Œdipus). This book is written as a series of "plateaus", a concept derived from Gregory Bateson, each identified by a particular date and title. Each refers to a peculiar age or date in which the state described in each plateau had a central role in the world. The book reflects Deleuze and Guattari's rejection of hierarchical (arborescent) organization in favor of less structured, "rhizomatic" growth. The nomadic war machine is opposed to the state apparatus. In the last plateau the noosphere is invoked.

The English edition was translated by Brian Massumi.

A Thousand Plateaus served as a 'model' for Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire.

See also

• Fleet in being (quoting Paul Virilio; the "fleet in being" is a "vector of deterritorialization")
• Plane of immanence
• Desiring-production
• Nomadism

External links

• April 10, 2006 article by John Philipps, with an explanation of the incomplete translation of "agencement" by "assemblage" ("One of the earliest attempts to translate Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term agencement appears in the first published translation, by Paul Foss and Paul Patton in 1981, of the article “Rhizome.” The English term they use, assemblage, is retained in Brian Massumi’s later English version, when “Rhizome” appears as the Introduction to A Thousand Plateaus.")

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