ABSTRACT
To move from Deleuze’s ‘Bergsonism’ and thinking of difference and repetition to the rhizomatics of A Thousand Plateaus (abbreviated henceforth to ATP) is to travel some distance. This is not to say, however, that there are not important continuities in Deleuze’s thinking. The seeds of Deleuze’s attempt to map out the field of nonorganic life with Guattari in terms of rhizomatic becomings can be seen to already exist in a dormant state in the work of the late 1960s, as the above citation from Difference and Repetition shows. Deleuze remains preoccupied with the ‘transformation of substances’ and the ‘dissolution of forms’ in which there is ‘a passage to the limit’ in favour of forces that are fluid and at the site of which there is witnessed ‘the incorporeal power of that intense matter’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980:138; 1988:109). This is a matter that finds itself enveloped in continuous variation and caught up in an absolute deterritorialization, where the ‘absolute’ indicates neither perfection nor undifferentiation. Differences ‘infinitely small’ now come to matter.
