2 - Of the Rise and Progress of Philosophical Concepts: Deleuze's Humean Historiography

Summary

In Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, historical facts, dates and examples run throughout the text. From the use of dates as subtitles to each chapter, to the extensive use of historical examples, A Thousand Plateaus is brimming with history. And yet, as Deleuze and Guattari make clear, history is much more than an effort to represent the past as it actually happened. It is not just a matter of studying how one event causes another, how one actuality gives rise to another, but rather it ought also to entail a return to the conditions for the actualisation of the actual itself – conditions Deleuze will most frequently call the virtual. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in What is Philosophy?, to do such a history:

It would be necessary to go back up the path that science descends, and at the very end of which logic sets up its camp (the same goes for History, where we would have to arrive at the unhistorical vapour that goes beyond the actual factors to the advantage of a creation of something new). (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 140, emphasis added)

A Deleuzo-Guattarian history, therefore, entails two readings. There is first the effort to read history as accurately as possible, and thus Deleuze and Guattari will frequently rely upon the works of highly respected historians such as Fernand Braudel. The second reading is what we will call problematising history.