Deleuze and Guattari's Historiophilosophy: Philosophical Thought and its Historical Milieu

Abstract

This paper will examine the relation between philosophical thought and the various milieus in which such thought takes place using the late work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It will argue that Deleuze and Guattari's assessment of this relation involves a rearticulation of philosophy as an historiophilosophy. To claim that Deleuze and Guattari promote such a form of philosophy is contentious, as their work is often noted for implementing an ontological distinction between becoming and history, whereby the former is associated with the act of creation and the latter with retrospective representations of this creative process. Furthermore, when elaborating on the creative nature of philosophical thought, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly refer to philosophy as a geophilosophy that is in contrast to history. Nevertheless, this paper will demonstrate that far from abandoning the category of history, Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the relations between philosophical thought and relative milieus suggests to us an historical ontology and methodology that is a critical part of philosophy's nature.