Paul Patton

Concept and Politics in Derrida and Deleuze

ABSTRACT

This paper points to significant similarities between the

political orientations of Deleuze and Derrida. Derrida’s
appeal to a pure form of existing concepts (absolute
hospitality, pure forgiveness, and so on) parallels Deleuze
and Guattari’s distinction between relative and absolute
‘deterritorialisation’. In each case, the absolute form of
the concept is a condition of the possibility of change.

KEYWORDS: Derrida, Deleuze , concept, pragmatic,

deconstruction, constructivism, forgiveness, hospitality,
deterritorialisation

The aim of this paper is to compare in certain

particular respects the philosophies of Derrida
and Deleuze. I argue, apparently against all
the evidence, that they share a certain prag-
matic conception of philosophy and a com-
mon orientation towards the possibility of
change.

Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as

the discipline that involves creating concepts:
“Concepts are not waiting for us ready-made,
like heavenly bodies. There is no heaven for

Critical Horizons 4:2 (157-175)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003
concepts. They must be invented, fabricated or rather created.”1 This is a stip-
ulative definition, bound up with the distinctions they draw between phi-
losophy, science and art. The concept, as they define it, “belongs to philosophy
and only to philosophy.” 2 This conception of philosophy is pragmatic in
Richard Rorty’s broad sense of this term, according to which a pragmatic phi-
losophy is not oriented towards a true theory of how things are but towards
the creation of concepts that enable more useful descriptions of the world.
In this sense, “ ‘more useful’ means more suitable for achieving a better
future.”3 Deleuze and Guattari state the overriding aim of philosophy as they
conceive it more cautiously, referring to its capacity to contribute to a future
which will be unlike the present: “The creation of concepts in itself calls for
a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist.”4 It is per-
haps a significant difference between their critical pragmatism and Rorty’s
more complacent pragmatism that they do not assume that the criteria of bet-
terment will remain the same.5 Nevertheless, they agree with him that the
purpose of philosophical invention is not to provide knowledge in the sense
of correspondence with how things are but to provide new means of descrip-
tion and therefore new ways of acting upon the world. It follows that, for
them as for Rorty, success or failure in philosophy is measured by the degree
to which its creations serve the overriding aim: “Philosophy does not con-
sist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like
Interesting, Remarkable or Important that determine success or failure.”6

According to Rorty, philosophy helps to make the future different from the
past by providing new means of description for social and political events
and states of affairs. As a result, pragmatic philosophers are those who “spe-
cialise in redescribing ranges of objects or events in partially neologistic
jargon, in the hope of inciting people to adopt and extend that jargon.”7
Redescription rather than argument is the only appropriate method of criti-
cism of an existing vocabulary. So too, for Deleuze and Guattari, the creation
of concepts is inseparable from the elaboration of new vocabularies. The
prodigious exercise of concept creation undertaken in A Thousand Plateaus
provides a series of descriptive vocabularies, which the authors present in
explicitly pragmatic and non-representational terms as a series of maps or
an assemblage with the outside rather than as a tracing or image of the world.8
These vocabularies include the terms used to outline a theory of assemblages,
which may be social, linguistic, affective or intellectual assemblages, and

158 • Paul Patton

which are defined by their lines of flight or deterritorialisation, their partic-
ular combinations of content and expression, their forms of stratification and
the abstract machines which they express. They include the terms employed
in the elaboration of a micropolitics of desire founded on the dynamics of
unconscious affect and the different ways in which this interacts with indi-
vidual and collective subjectivities (body without organs, intensities, molar
and molecular segmentarities). They include an account of capitalism as a
non-territorially based axiomatic of flows, as opposed to the territorial sys-
tems of overcoding characteristic of precapitalist societies, and a concept of
abstract machines of metamorphosis (nomadic war-machines) which are the
agents of social and political transformation. They include a vocabulary in
which to describe processes of becoming which Deleuze and Guattari define
in terms of minorities and their distance from the position of majority in a
given field, and so on.

By contrast, the creation of concepts is not a primary aim of deconstruction.

Indeed, since the relation to concepts is so different in each case, it may seem
that the project of comparison is doomed from the outset. Derrida’s decon-
structive practice of philosophy initially took the form of analyses designed
to destabilise established concepts or conceptual hierarchies such as those
between speech and writing, literal and metaphorical language use, the in-
auguration and preservation of institutions, all in the interest of a larger
campaign against the idea or ideal of presence which has dominated the
philosophical tradition since the Greeks. However, the undeniable differences
between the deconstructive enterprise and Deleuze’s philosophical con-
structivism should not be allowed to mask the similarities between them.

In the first place, especially in its so-called affirmative phase, but even before
then, Derrida’s deconstructive practice of philosophy is no less pragmatic in
Rorty’s precise sense of the term. It does not aim at truth but aspires to be
consequential, that is to engage with events and transformations already
underway in a manner that contributes to making the future different from
and in some sense ‘better’ than the past.9 Contrary to the suggestion that
he is an anti-Enlightenment thinker, Derrida affirms his belief in progress: “I
am for the Enlightenment, I’m for progress, I’m a ‘progressist’.”10 Deconstruc-
tion is progressivist in a non-teleological sense, not unlike Foucault’s char-
acterisation of an ethos of enlightenment according to which the sense or

Concept and Politics in Derrida and Deleuze • 159

direction of progress can only be negatively defined in terms of freedom from
past constraints which, consciously or unconsciously, limit available ways of
thinking or acting. In “Psyché: Invention of the Other,” Derrida addresses
the widespread negative perception of deconstruction as it was initially prac-
tised by asking in what sense can the movement of deconstruction “far from
being limited to the negative or destructuring forms that are often naively
attributed to it, be inventive in itself, or at least be the signal of an inven-
tiveness at work in a sociohistorical field?” His unequivocal reply — “Decon-
struction is inventive or it is nothing at all” — rules out the possibility of
any simplistic contrast between deconstructive analysis and philosophy as
the invention of concepts.11

In the second place, there is a sense in which even the early practice of de-
construction involved the production of a whole series of novel ‘concepts’
such as writing-in-general, the trace, the supplement, différance, generalised
metaphoricity and so on. Moreover, there are a number of formal or struc-
tural similarities between these ‘aconceptual’ concepts or non-concepts, as
Derrida calls them, and the philosophical concepts that Deleuze and Guattari
define as the object of philosophical invention. Derrida refers to ‘aconceptual
concepts’ to signal that they are not concepts in the commonly accepted sense
of the term, but rather successive versions of his attempt to think ‘beyond
the concept,’ or to think the process of concept formation in terms other than
the classical logic of disjunction and inclusion. He accepts the ordinary logic
of concept formation according to which a concept only exists when there is
a distinction between what falls under the concept and what does not. However,
he notes that, since no two particular objects or occurrences are identical,
there is always variation between one instantiation of a given concept and
the next. Moreover, since a concept is only completely determined by the
potentially infinite series of particular instances to which it applies, it is never
fully present on a given occasion. It follows that a more rigorous logic of con-
cept formation would take into account this variation that occurs from one
case or one occasion to the next, as well as the variation that is involved in
the passage from universal to particular. ‘Iterability’ is his name for the com-
plex relationship that includes both recurrence or repeatability of the same
and ‘alterability’ of this idealised same in the singularity of an event. Iterability
is thus a paradoxical concept which “entails the necessity of thinking at once
both the rule and the event, concept and singularity.”12 It is a deconstructive

160 • Paul Patton

‘concept’ which points not only to the distinguishing features of all concepts,
but also to the limits of concept formation understood as the specification of
necessary and sufficient conditions for a certain class or kind of thing.
Considered as ideal objects defined in terms of the deconstructive logic of
iterability, concepts lack the determinacy associated with the traditional con-
cept of concepts. The non-present character of the ideal totality, which deter-
mines the meaning of a given concept, implies a necessary openness or
indeterminacy at any given moment.

Deleuze and Guattari not only define philosophical concepts in a manner

that reproduces some of the formal characteristics of Derridean ‘aconceptual’
concepts, they also invent concepts that exhibit these formal characteristics.
They propose a rhizomatic image of thought in which concepts are never sta-
ble but in a state of constant flux as they are modified or transformed in the
passage from one problem to the next. Thus, the concepts put forward in A
Thousand Plateaus are not restricted by the logic of exclusive disjunction, which
is supposed to govern concept formation in the sciences but undergo con-
tinuous variation in passing from one plateau to another. In What is Philosophy?
they define concepts as open-ended and potentially variable multiplicities.
On their view, concepts are not extensional but intentional multiplicities, the
components of which are further concepts or parts of concepts such as pred-
icates. Within a given concept, these components are arranged in zones of
neighbourhood or indiscernibility, which define the consistency of the con-
cept: “components remain distinct, but something passes from one to the
other, something that is undecidable between them.”13 In these terms, we
might say that it is precisely such a zone of undecidability between spoken
and written signs that defines the deconstructive concept of writing in general.
Conversely, we might say that the ‘zones of undecidability’, which render
concepts consistent also render them iterable in Derrida’s sense of the term.

Derrida and Affirmative Deconstruction

It will be objected that, above all in its affirmative phase, deconstruction does
not invent new concepts or provide new means of description. On the con-
trary, it is applied exclusively to existing concepts such as invention, justice,
democracy, friendship the gift, hospitality, forgiveness. This seems to indicate
a fundamental difference between deconstructive philosophy and Deleuze

Concept and Politics in Derrida and Deleuze • 161

and Guattari’s constructivism. While recognising that there are undeniable
differences in style and in method, I want to suggest two respects in which
a zone of undecidability arises between these different approaches: first, in
relation to the manner in which each relies on a certain usage of the
unconditioned; and second, in relation to a common pragmatic orientation
towards a future whose only defining feature is its potential difference from
the present. In this sense, they share a commitment to what Foucault referred
to as the “undefined work of freedom.”14 In order to spell out these affini-
ties, we need to examine more closely the kind of conceptual analysis under-
taken by affirmative deconstruction as well as the pragmatics of Deleuzian
conceptual invention.

The practice of ‘affirmative’ deconstruction relies upon several distinct stra-

tegies with regard to the analysis of concepts. These include, firstly, a gene-
alogical study of the history and interpretations of a given concept, the
interconnections it has to other concepts or philosophemes. Thus, the dis-
cussion of the concept of invention in Psyché included a discussion of the
ways in which invention has been recognised in different domains, legal, lit-
erary, intellectual, technological. The examination of law and justice in Force
of Law alluded to the need for an historical genealogy of different concepts
of law, right, justice and the manner in which these are bound up with other
concepts such as responsibility and the network of concepts related to this,
such as property, intentionality, will, freedom, conscience, consciousness and
so on. Politics of Friendship undertakes a detailed study of this kind in rela-
tion to the concept of friendship and the network of concepts surrounding
its relation to the political and to democracy: concepts of kin and family, mas-
culinity, love and the enemy.

A second form of deconstructive analysis, and the one on which I propose

to focus here, offers a redescription of existing concepts which reproduces in
each case a distinction between a contingent or conditioned form of the con-
cept and an absolute or unconditioned form. In each case, the pure or uncon-
ditional form of the concept is always paradoxical or impossible. Thus, the
aporetic analysis of invention in Psyché leads to a distinction between ordi-
nary invention, which is always the invention of the possible, and an extra-
ordinary or pure invention, which would involve the appearance of something
truly or radically other. This other is literally impossible, in the sense that it

162 • Paul Patton

implies the appearance of something beyond or outside the order of the pos-
sible. In other writings, Derrida offers parallel analyses of the gift, justice,
responsible decision, democracy, hospitality and a number of other such
phenomena. In each case, affirmative deconstruction invents or reinvents
the structure of the distinction between two poles or ways of understanding
the concept in question in order to argue two things: first, that the differ-
ence between these two poles is irreducible; and second, that the ever-
present possibility of invention, reconfiguration or transformation in our
existing, historically conditioned and contingent ways of understanding
the phenomenon in question is guaranteed by existence of the pure or abso-
lute form of the concept.

In each case, this aporetic analysis leads to a phenomenology of the ‘experi-

ence’ of the impossible act in question. In Psyché, for example, Derrida writes
that “the interest of deconstruction . . . is a certain experience of the impos-
sible.”15 If experience is understood as a passage toward a given destination,
then since an aporia is a non-road, a blocked passage, it is by definition not
something of which we can have experience. In Force of Law it is the distinc-
tion between law and justice which corresponds to the difference between a
conditional and an unconditional form of the concept: the law, which is essen-
tially deconstructible and therefore subject to modification or change, is con-
trasted with justice, which is that in the name of which the law is modified.
Justice is manifest both in particular applications of the law, and in particu-
lar improvements or modifications of the law, but none of these implies an
experience of justice as such. Justice as such, supposing there is such a thing,
is an impossible object of experience. In so far as deconstruction is concerned
with justice, it is concerned with the experience of that which we are not able
to experience or the experience of the impossible.16 Elsewhere, Derrida sug-
gests that the experience of the impossible should be understood as “an ordeal,
a test, a crucial moment through which we have to go.”17 In this context, ‘pos-
sible’ should not be understood simply in the negative sense of something
not actual but also as “something through which a possibility is given.”18 In
effect, any decision involves an experience of this kind. On the one hand, if
it is to be properly a decision and not simply a mechanical procedure it must
involve more than simply acting in accordance with a given rule. On the
other hand, a decision must have some relation to a rule and not be simply
capricious or unmotivated. In these terms, we might say that this form of

Concept and Politics in Derrida and Deleuze • 163

aporetic analysis provides new means of describing the decision that is always
implicit in occasions or situations of this kind.

Consider, as an example, the discussion of the concept and the politics of for-
giveness in “On Forgiveness.” 19 Derrida points out that the Christian or
Abrahamic tradition from which our use of the term ‘forgiveness’ derives is
torn between a concept of pure, unconditional forgiveness and a concept of
forgiveness which is possible only upon certain conditions, such as the repen-
tance of the perpetrator. Under this condition, the guilty party recognises the
crime and in so doing becomes transformed, so that it is no longer the guilty
as such who seeks forgiveness.20 Strictly speaking, Derrida argues, it is only
the existence of the unforgivable that gives force, or meaning, to the idea of
forgiveness: “Must one not maintain that an act of forgiveness worthy of its
name, if ever there is such a thing, must forgive the unforgivable and with-
out condition?”21 If one forgave only that which is forgivable, then the con-
cept of forgiveness would lose its force, just as the concept of a gift would
lose its force if it meant that one gave only that which one was able to give,
or the concept of justice would lose its force if it were reduced to the idea of
procedural justice in accordance with law. It follows from this analysis that
the concept of true forgiveness is strictly speaking impossible and therefore
paradoxical or mad: how can one forgive the unforgivable? Derrida points
out that we could never ‘in the ordinary sense of the words,’ practise a pol-
itics or law of forgiveness in this unconditional sense.22 To say that the practice
of forgiveness relies upon this excess or this madness, however, is not to dis-
qualify it but to draw a line between the logic of forgiveness as such, for-
giveness proper if there is such a thing, and all forms of conditional forgiveness.

In “Of Hospitality,” Derrida identifies a parallel antinomic structure within

the law or the concept of hospitality. On the one hand, hospitality as it is
practised in particular contexts is always conditional. It is always offered to
certain determinate others, endowed with a particular social status and sub-
ject to certain reciprocal duties in relation to the rights of the host. On the
other hand, the conditional practice of hospitality derives its force and its
meaning from a concept of absolute or unconditional hospitality which would
welcome the other in the absence of any conditions such as knowledge of
name, status or provenance, and without any restrictions with regard to their
movements or behaviour while in the domain of the host:

164 • Paul Patton

 . . . absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give
not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social
status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous
other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them
arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either
reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. The law of absolute
hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice
as rights. 23

The first consequence that Derrida draws from this aporetic analysis is that
there remains an irreducible gap between the conditional and the uncondi-
tional form of the concept. In the case of law and justice, Derrida argues that
“deconstruction takes place in the interval that separates the undeconstructibility
of justice from the deconstructibility of droit (authority, legitimacy and so
on).”24 In the case of forgiveness, “it is between these two poles, irreconcilable
but indissociable, that decisions and responsibilities are to be taken.”25 Forgive-
ness proper remains heterogeneous to the order of political or juridical thought
as this operates in geopolitical scenes of forgiveness or reconciliation. Similarly,
absolute hospitality remains irreducible to ordinary, conditional hospitality,
“as strangely heterogeneous to it as justice is heterogeneous to the law to
which it is yet so close, from which in truth it is indissociable.”26

The second consequence that Derrida draws with respect to each of the dif-
ferent versions of this distinction between the unconditioned and conditioned
forms of the concept is that the unconditioned is necessary in order to inflect
politics or bring about change. The fact that the two heterogeneous poles of
the concept are indissociable from one another guarantees that the question
of the conditions under which justice or forgiveness or hospitality can occur
remains open. Just as it is by appealing to justice that the law can be modi-
fied or improved, so it is by reference to the paradoxical idea of the unfor-
givable that we can ‘orient’ an evolution of the law or ‘inspire’ new forms of
responsibility.27 In similar fashion, the idea of unconditional hospitality under-
pins the possibility of improvement or progress in the existing conditional
forms of welcome extended to foreigners:

It is a question of knowing how to transform and improve the law, and of

knowing if this improvement is possible within an historical space which

Concept and Politics in Derrida and Deleuze • 165

 takes place between the Law of an unconditional hospitality, offered a
priori to every other, to all newcomers, whoever they may be, and the con-
ditional laws of a right to hospitality, without which The unconditional law
of hospitality would be in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible
desire, without form and without potency, and of even being perverted at
any moment.28

In his discussion of forgiveness, Derrida suggests that the distinction be-

tween the indissociable but heterogeneous orders of the conditional and
unconditional is a reason to think that we are not ‘defined’ by statutory forms
of our belonging to a Nation-State, by citizenship, or by the existing prac-
tices which determine our political being: “Must we not accept that, in heart
or in reason, above all when it is a question of forgiveness, something arrives
which exceeds all institution, all power, all juridico-political authority?”29 It
is this ‘something beyond,’ which interests Derrida throughout his aporetic
analyses. In the analysis of invention, for example, it takes the form of an
absolute or truly other: an invention properly so called would involve the
coming about of something which does not belong to the existing order of
possibilities. Another way to describe the achievement of this form of con-
ceptual analysis would be to say that it invents, in a variety of specific vocab-
ularies tailored to fit the needs of a particular occasion, a series of descriptions
of this ‘beyond.’

The shorthand description of the absolute form of the concept as an uncon-

ditioned suggests a possible correspondence with Kant’s transcendental Ideas
that Derrida is often careful to disavow. Justice in itself or democracy to come
have the structure of a promise rather than that of a regulative Idea, espe-
cially where this is understood in a sense not strictly Kantian to imply a deter-
minate and in principle realisable form. For Derrida, the unconditioned in
all its manifestations must be understood to be impossible in the sense that
all aporetic experience involves an experience of the impossible. It is not an
ideal form against which particular acts may be measured or towards which
our present social arrangements might be said to progress. For this reason,
the deconstructive concept of justice “has no horizon of expectation (regula-
tive or messianic). But for this very reason it may have an avenir, a ‘to-come’
which I rigorously distinguish from the future that can always reproduce the
present.”30 The phrase ‘to-come’ here functions as a name for the future under-

166 • Paul Patton

stood in such a way that it is not to be identified with any future present but
rather with something that remains in the future, a structural future which
will never be actualised in any present even though it remains capable of act-
ing in or upon the present. In other words, it stands for a perpetually open,
yet to be determined future, a ‘to come’ understood as “the space opened in
order for there to be an event, the to-come, so that the coming be that of the
other.”31 It is this constant orientation towards the other, or towards the open
future, which is named by the phrase ‘to-come’, that underwrites the prag-
matic function of this form of deconstructive analysis. It is precisely because
justice always remains ‘to come’ that “justice, insofar as it is not only a juridi-
cal or political concept, opens up for l’avenir the transformation, the recast-
ing or refounding of law and politics.”32

Derrida’s concept of the unconditional bears a certain resemblance to Rorty’s

concept of the cautionary use of the word ‘true.’ This is “the use we make
of the word when we contrast justification with truth and say that a belief
may be justified but not true.”33 Since Rorty accepts the historical character
of justification, and rejects any transcendent concept of truth, he takes this
cautionary use of ‘true’ to serve only to mark the ever-present possibility that
what we now consider justified may not be so before different audiences in
the future. Similarly for Derrida, the irreducible gap between the conditional
and unconditional forms of the concept, combined with the inevitable refer-
ence to the unconditional, remind us of both the possibility and the impor-
tance of departing from existing forms of thought or practice. Whenever the
question of the purpose or the politics of deconstruction is raised, Derrida
points to the undesirability of having a ‘good conscience’ about established
ways of acting and thinking. In other words, he points to the desirability of
being willing to question and challenge what is currently accepted as self-
evident in our ways of thinking and acting. It is this critical impulse at the
heart of deconstruction which opens up a connection with the pragmatics of
Deleuze and Guattari’s constructivism.

Deleuze and Guattari: Constructivism and Critical Pragmatism

Deleuze and Guattari also distinguish between conditioned and uncondi-

tioned forms of the concept. In What is Philosophy? this is apparent in their
definition of the objects of philosophical concepts as pure events. Philosophical

Concept and Politics in Derrida and Deleuze • 167

concepts, they say, express pure events. While pure events are expressed or
incarnated in bodies and states of affairs in the course of everyday or
historical events, the pure event in itself exists independently of these im-
pure incarnations: “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.” 34 So,
for example, the political philosophical concept of a social contract might
be supposed to express the pure event of incorporation of a political and
legal system with certain features — rights to freedom, to property, to equal
treatment before the law and so on. This pure event is expressed in different
concepts of the nature of the social contract, and more or less imperfectly
actualised in societies founded upon a rule of law, but it remains irreducible
to this series of expressions and actualisations. In Specters of Marx, Derrida
speaks of the concept of democracy in similar terms, namely as the concept
of a promise that can never be fully realised in any actual society, however
democratic. Where he prefers to speak of a perpetually inaccessible ‘democ-
racy to come,’ Deleuze and Guattari might equally refer to the pure event of
democracy.35

Deleuze and Guattari do not dwell on the paradoxical character of pure events
or the concepts in which these are expressed, other than to point out that
these events are in themselves unrealisable or ‘unliveable.’ 36 However, in his
earlier work, Deleuze did point to the paradoxical character of the objects of
specifically philosophical thought. For example, in Difference and Repetition,
he drew on Kant’s suggestion that the transcendental ideas which are the
objects of reason are like problems which have no solution in order to describe
the objects of philosophical thought as transcendental ideas or problems. Just
as pure events are supposed to be independent of their actualisations so tran-
scendental problems were considered to be irreducible to the particular solu-
tions in which they are incarnated. The clearest cases of irresolvable problems
are of course paradoxes and at one point Deleuze refers to the transcenden-
tal object of the faculty of sociability as “the paradox of society.”37 In The Logic
of Sense, he introduced the concept of pure events via a discussion of the
Stoics and the paradoxes that they identified in relation to the temporal iden-
tity of events. In his discussion of Lewis Carroll in the opening paragraph,
Deleuze points to the paradoxical nature of events from the perspective of
ordinary time. When we say that Alice grew (she became taller) this implies

168 • Paul Patton

that she became taller than she was before. By the same token, however, she
also became shorter than she is now (assuming that she continued to grow).
The realm of becoming thus admits contradictory predicates (becoming taller,
becoming shorter) in a manner inconceivable within linear time. Although
she is not taller and shorter at the same time, she becomes taller and shorter
at the same time: “this is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteris-
tic is to elude the present.”38 Pure events are coextensive with such ‘becom-
ings.’ Further on, Deleuze appeals to the peculiar temporality of events in
order to argue for a distinction between ordinary historical time (Chronos)
and the time of pure events (Aion). Consider a time before the event and a
time after: the infinite divisibility of the series of moments implies that there
are two converging series on either side of the event, but no point in time at
which these series meet. Thus, from the perspective of ordinary historical
time, the event is “eternally that which has just happened or that which is
about to happen.”39

The concepts created in Deleuze and Guattari’s major work, A Thousand

Plateaus, may be read as the expression of pure events of incorporeal trans-
formation, deterritorialisation, becoming, capture and so on. However, in
their application to particular historical phenomena, these concepts always
describe contingent and conditioned versions of such events: this form of
capture, this process of deterritorialisation, this particular expression of the
order-word function of language. Consider the concept of becoming which
they define as “the action by which something or someone continues to
become other (while continuing to be what it is).”40 In its pure form, Deleuze
and Guattari’s ‘becoming’ amounts to something very similar to what Derrida
calls an iteration. In A Thousand Plateaus, they proceed to describe a series of
more specific ways in which something or someone becomes other, for exam-
ple by becoming-animal, becoming-child, becoming-woman and becoming-
imperceptible. These different becomings are all related to their concept of
minority or becoming-minor, which refers to the manner in which elements
of a given majority deviate from the standard or norm. They may be ordered
in various ways: for example, they argue that in relation to the masculine
standard of European cultural and political normality, “all becomings begin
with and pass through becoming-woman.”41 In another series, one form of
becoming stands apart as the pure form or ‘immanent end’ of all becomings.
Deleuze and Guattari refer to this as ‘becoming-imperceptible’ or becoming-

Concept and Politics in Derrida and Deleuze • 169

world. This is a becoming in which an individual is reduced to an abstract
line that can connect or conjugate with other lines thereby making “a world
that can overlay the first one, like a transparency.”42 This is a paradoxical
form of becoming in which everything changes while appearing to remain
the same, a becoming in which the movement is infinite and therefore imper-
ceptible. It is, in effect, an absolute becoming.

Finally, consider the concept of deterritorialisation that lies at the heart of the
political ethic elaborated in Deleuze and Guattari’s mature work. In the con-
cluding statement of rules governing certain key concepts, deterritorialisa-
tion is defined as the complex movement or process by which something
escapes or departs from a given territory.43 A territory can be a system of any
kind — conceptual, linguistic, social or affective — and on their account such
systems are always inhabited by ‘vectors of deterritorialisation.’ In addition,
deterritorialisation is always “inseparable from correlative reterritorialisa-
tions.”44 Reterritorialisation does not mean returning to the original territory,
but rather refers to the ways in which deterritorialised elements recombine
and enter into new relations in the constitution of a new assemblage or the
modification of the old. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between absolute
and relative deterritorialisation such that relative deterritorialisation concerns
only movements within the actual, as opposed to the virtual, order of things.
Relative deterritorialisation is negative when the deterritorialised element is
immediately subjected to forms of reterritorialisation, which enclose or obstruct
its line of flight. It is positive when the line of flight prevails over secondary
reterritorialisations, even though it may still fail to connect with other deter-
ritorialised elements or enter into a new assemblage. By contrast, absolute
deterritorialisation refers to a pure event, which takes place in the virtual, as
opposed to the actual, order of things. As a pure event, it remains an unre-
alisable or impossible figure, manifest only in and through relative deterri-
torialisation. It is nevertheless the condition of all forms of actual or relative
deterritorialisation: “There is a perpetual immanence of absolute deterritori-
alisation within relative deterritorialisation.”45

At this point we can see how Deleuze and Guattari’s practice of philosophy
shares a common political orientation with that of Derrida. I suggested ear-
lier that what motivates deconstruction in its aporetic analysis of concepts is

170 • Paul Patton

the relation which emerges in each case to something beyond. For Deleuze
and Guattari, too, there is a sense in which their ethic of deterritorialisation
is oriented towards the permanent possibility of something other, towards a
perpetually open future or ‘to-come.’ This is apparent in the role played by
the concept of absolute deterritorialisation in the ontology of assemblages
outlined in A Thousand Plateaus: absolute deterritorialisation is the underly-
ing principle, which ensures that the future will be different from the past.
At one point, Deleuze and Guattari describe it as “the deeper move-
ment . . . identical to the earth itself.”46 It is like a reserve of freedom or move-
ment in reality that is activated whenever relative deterritorialisation takes
place. In other words, even though in itself it is an impossible or ‘unliveable’
state, absolute deterritorialisation is the condition of possibility of real change
or transformation within a given territory or system. For this reason, they
insist that it is the combination of absolute with relative deterritorialisation
that “carries the movements of relative deterritorialisation to infinity, pushes
them to the absolute, by transforming them.”47

In their redescription of the nature and task of philosophy in What is Philosophy?

Deleuze and Guattari transpose this commitment to an open future onto phi-
losophy itself. Philosophy, they argue, is a vector of deterritorialisation to the
extent that it creates concepts that break with established or self-evident forms
of understanding and description. Herein lies the utopian vocation of phi-
losophy, which they redefine even as they admit this is not a good concept,
as the manner in which philosophy engages with the present. They call the
process of inventing concepts which extract new events from existing states
of affairs the ‘counter-effectuation’ of those concepts: “the event is actualised
or effectuated whenever it is inserted, willy-nilly, into a state of affairs; but
it is counter-effectuated whenever it is abstracted from states of affairs so as
to isolate its concept.”48 To think philosophically about the present is to diag-
nose the processes whose outcome is not yet determined. It is to counter-
effectuate the pure events that animate the everyday events and processes
unfolding around us. In counter-effectuating the event, we attain and express
the sense of what is happening, thereby dissociating the pure event from the
particular determinate form in which it has been actualised and pointing to
the possibility of other determinate actualisations. To describe current events
in terms of such philosophical concepts is to relate them back to the pure
event or problem of which they appear only as one particular determination

Concept and Politics in Derrida and Deleuze • 171

or solution. For this reason, when Deleuze and Guattari suggest that ‘the
concept is the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to
come,’ what they mean is that the practice of creating concepts serves the
overriding aim of opening up the possibility of transforming existing forms
of thought and practice.49 Concepts such as becoming, capture and deterrri-
torialisation are not meant as substitutes for existing concepts of justice, rights,
democracy or freedom, but they only serve the pragmatic goal of philoso-
phy to the extent that they assist in bringing about another justice, new rights
or novel forms of democracy and freedom.

* Professor Paul Patton, School of Philosophy, The University of New South Wales,
Sydney, 2052, Australia

Notes
1
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans., Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell, London & New York, Verso, 1994, p. 5.
2
Ibid., p. 34.
3
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, London, Penguin 1999, p. 27. Rorty’s
definition of pragmatism in this series of lectures entitled “Hope in Place of
Knowledge: A Version of Pragmatism” (ibid., pp. 23-92) does not include all of
the themes associated with pragmatism.
4
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 108.
5
For further comment on this difference, see Paul Patton, “Redescriptive Philosophy:
Deleuze and Guattari’s Critical Pragmatism” in Patricia Pisters ed., Micropolitics
of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, Amsterdam, Amsterdam
University Press, 2001, pp. 29-42.
6
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 82.
7
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1988, p. 78.
8
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophre-
nia, trans., Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987,
pp. 22-25.
9
Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Drucilla
Cornell et al., eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, London and New
York, Routledge, 1992, pp. 8-9.
10
Paul Patton and Terry Smith, eds., Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction Engaged — The

172 • Paul Patton

 Sydney Seminars, Sydney, Power Publications, 2001, p. 100. Similar sentiments are
expressed in “Force of Law” at p. 28 where Derrida affirms that “Nothing seems
to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal.”
11
Jacques Derrida, “Psyché: Invention of the Other” in Derek Attridge, ed., Acts of
Literature, London and New York, Routledge, 1992, pp. 335-336 and p. 337.
12
Jacques Derrida, “Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion” in Limited Inc.,
Evanston, Il, Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 119.
13
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 19-20.
14
Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in P. Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader,
New York, Pantheon, 1984, p. 46.
15
Derrida, “Psyché: Invention of the Other,” p. 328.
16
Derrida, “Force of Law,” p. 16.
17
Patton and Smith, Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction Engaged — The Sydney Seminars,
p. 63.
18
Ibid., p. 64.
19
Jacques Derrida, “On Forgiveness,” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans.,
Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes, with a preface by Simon Critchley and Richard
Kearney, London and New York, Routledge, 2001, pp. 27-60.
20
Derrida also argues, in accordance with Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the
nature of concepts and his own logic of iterability, that forgiveness is a complex
and open-ended concept. It is uncertain whether it applies first to acts or to per-
sons. It is unclear whether is it only the wronged party who can offer forgiveness
or whether it can or must involve a third party which intervenes between victim
and perpetrator. See Derrida, “On Forgiveness,” pp. 42-49.
21
Derrida, “On Forgiveness,” p. 39.
22
Ibid. In practice, it is never a question of pure forgiveness since there is always
some kind of ‘transaction’ or exchange involved. In the case of the Australian rec-
onciliation process, the exchange proposed was that of the legitimacy of a nation-
state which aspires to be post-colonial in return for some land and perhaps some
special rights on the part of the indigenous inhabitants. “It is always the same
concern: to see to it that the nation survives its discords, that the traumatisms
give way to the work of mourning, and that the Nation-State not be overcome by
paralysis.” See Derrida, “On Forgiveness,” p. 41.
23
Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida
to Respond, trans., Rachel Bowlby, Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, 2000,
p. 25.
24
Derrida, “Force of Law” p. 15.
25
Derrida, “On Forgiveness,” p. 45.
26
Ibid., p. 26.

Concept and Politics in Derrida and Deleuze • 173

27
Ibid., p. 53.
28
Jacques Derrida, “On Cosmopolitanism” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness,
trans., Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes, with a preface by Simon Critchley and
Richard Kearney, London and New York, Routledge, 2001, pp. 22-3. See also
Derrida, Of Hospitality, pp. 147-148.
29
Derrida, “On Forgiveness,” p. 54.
30
Derrida, “Force of Law,” p. 27.
31
Jacques Derrida, ‘Politics and Friendship: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’ in
E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker, eds., The Althusserian Legacy, London, Verso,
1989, p. 216.
32
Derrida, “Force of Law,” p. 27.
33
Richard Rorty, “Universality and Truth” in Robert Brandom, ed., Rorty and His
Critics, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000, p. 4.
34
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 110.
35
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. P. Kamuf, London and N.Y., Routledge,
1994, pp. 64-65. A concept of the pure event does appear in Derrida’s early work:
for example, he explains the ‘enigmatic originality’ of every signature by refer-
ence to ‘the pure reproducibility of the pure event.’ See Derrida, “Signature Event
Context” in Limited Inc., Evanston, Il., Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 20.
In effect, all of the deconstructive a-conceptual concepts might be supposed to
refer to pure events, or to variations upon the one pure event of sense or mean-
ing as given by the structure of iteration: writing, the trace, différance, dissemina-
tion, metaphoricity and so on.
36
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 156.
37
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London, Athlone 1994,
p. 208.
38
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans., Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed.,
C.V. Boundas, New York, Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 1.
39
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 8. For further discussion of Deleuze’s twofold con-
cept of time and its relation to Derrida’s concept of time, see Tamsin Lorraine,
“Living a Time Out of Joint” in Paul Patton and John Protevi, eds., Between Deleuze
and Derrida, London, Continuum, 2003, pp. 30-45.
40
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 177 translation modified.
41
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 277.
42
Ibid., p. 280.
43
Ibid., p. 508.
44
Ibid., p. 509.
45
Ibid., p. 56.
46
Ibid., p. 143.

174 • Paul Patton

47
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 90.
48
Ibid., p. 159.
49
Ibid., pp. 32-33.

Concept and Politics in Derrida and Deleuze • 175