Chapter 1

Events, Becoming and History

Paul Patton

Deleuze and Guattari appear to be ambivalent towards History and historians. Anti-Oedipus advocates a universalism that would retrospectively understand all history in the light of capitalism (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004: 1534). A Thousand Plateaus draws extensively on the
work of historians of Europe and Asia as well as specialised works of economic and military history, histories of science, mathematics, technology,
music, art and philosophy. On the other hand, they assert the need for a
Nomadology that would be the opposite of a history (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 23). Nomadology, like so many of the other disciplines
proposed in A Thousand Plateaus (rhizomatics, pragmatics, schizoanalysis and so on) is essentially the study of certain kinds of assemblages
(State and war-machine) and the relations between them. What is the
function of so much historical material in works of philosophy devoted
to the description of abstract machines or assemblages?
In his 1990 interview with Antonio Negri, Deleuze comments that
he had become more and more aware of the possibility of distinguishing between becoming and history (Deleuze 1995: 170). By the time of
his final work with Guattari, this distinction took the form of a contrast
between an historical realm in which events are actualised in bodies
and states of affairs and an a-historical realm of pure events, where these
are the shadowy and secret part [of an event] that is continually subtracted from or added to its actualization (Deleuze and Guattari 1994:
156). They drew a parallel distinction between Philosophy, understood
as the practice of thought that produces concepts that express these
pure events, and History: what History grasps of the event is its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience, but the event in its
becoming, in its specific consistency, in its self-positing concept, escapes
History (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 110).1 From a normative point of
view, Philosophy appears privileged by virtue of its relation to the pure