Blackwell Reference Online

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French philosopher and French psychoanalyst respectively. Much of modern European thought, especially in France since the 1939–45 war, has actively been in search of a means to bring philosophy and psychoanalysis – particularly M arx and F reud – into fruitful contact with each other. The extraordinary partnership of Deleuze and Guattari had been more successful than any other such attempt to achieve this contact. In the final book they wrote together – What is Philosophy? (1991) – they arrived at an elegant summary of their common project, which had been previously launched in The Anti-Oedipus (1972). The question asked in the title of their last book is promptly answered. Philosophy, they say, is “the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1991 ( 1994) , p. 2). Realizing, however, the incompleteness of this answer, they proceed to supply an agent who forms, invents, and fabricates. Philosophy requires “conceptual personae” who are friends. Here the gap that Aristotle opened up between himself and Plato, the divide he marked between truth and friendship, is brought to closure. “With the creation of philosophy, the Greeks violently force the friend into a relationship that is no longer a relationship with an other but one with an Entity” (p. 3). Although they do not name this an Aristotelian violence, Deleuze and Guattari quickly move ... log in or subscribe to read full text