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rhizomes.20 summer 2010

The Friend as Conceptual Persona in Deleuze and Guattari!

Mathias Schönher

Translated by Luisa Banki and David Quigley

Friendship is a matter of perception.

— Gilles Deleuze, "F comme Fidélité", an episode in L'Abécédaire de
Gilles Deleuze

[1] Even if the friend is nowadays no longer thinkable according to his traditional
concept as a socio-political category, we still have, as I shall argue in the following
paper, a friend in thought. I will mainly refer to What Is Philosophy? and the
correspondence between Deleuze and Dionys Mascolo from 1988. I will thus draw
upon the same texts as Gregg Lambert did in his essay "Deleuze and the Political
Ontology of the Friend," which I will use to contrast my own interpretation.
[2] While Mascolo admits his perplexity in the face of Deleuze's articulations and
Deleuze clearly differentiates his own questions from Mascolo's, Lambert tries to
bring their claims in accordance with each other by affirming Mascolo's analysis of
the contemporary situation and using it as a foundation for his own argument that
in Deleuze and Guattari the Other as socio-political identity can no longer be
thought as the friend. As long as Lambert examines the concept of the friend and the
division of thought between myself and another self, his interpretation adds to that
of Deleuze and Guattari, as I understand it. However, as soon as he moves from the
concept to the conceptual character in order to support his argument, the two
approaches, as I will argue, become incompatible. [1] As Lambert's genealogical
investigation of the concept of the friend comes to the conclusion that we no longer
possess a concept allowing us to conceive of thought divided between friends, he
concludes that "'the friend' no longer constitutes thinking's internal presupposition".
[2] His argument thus leads to the conviction that in thought we no longer have the
friend and that the conceptual character has to be thought as the Other.
[3] I will argue that for Deleuze and Guattari the conceptual character is always a
friend; it is the internal condition of all philosophical thought, and it is the friend of
the concept. The conceptual character is the friend in the literal sense, as it shares the
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sensations with the concept; it has the perceptions and affections of the concepts that
turn it into the singular friend of these concepts. This is why Deleuze's questions, as
he articulates them for Mascolo, do not turn towards historical or socio-political
conditions and their connection with the concept of the friend. His question, aiming
towards the transcendental experience of the friend in thought, goes to the heart "of
what we call and experience as philosophy", namely, "How can a friend, without
losing his or her singularity, be inscribed as a condition of thought?" [3] What
Deleuze finds in Mascolo is the attempt to think the friend of the concept itself as
friend, to take seriously again the philos of philosophy and trace back the other that
thinks in me, not, for example, as Plato does to Socrates but to the friend.

[4] In his genealogical investigation, Lambert follows the traces of everything that
characterizes Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the friend. He arrives at the
determination of the concept in its contemporary sense by means of exposing the
concrete connection between the changing historical and socio-political conditions
with the concept of the friend. The basis for this connection is what Lambert calls a
necessary "primary division of thought" between myself and an Other, that is,
another self, claiming that in a society determined by dialectics and communication
this is what allows for the division of thought that thereby gains its actuality. [4]
Thought has to differ from itself in order to be effective as an internal presupposition
of sociability. This division, and here Lambert corrects the text he draws upon, is
"rather [a division] of thought outside itself" within an Other and not a division of
thought within itself. [5]
[5] For the Greeks, this primary division of thought is accomplished amongst friends
facing each other as rivals, but not without thought being reunified through
dialectics and the rivals being reconciled through friendship as the art of mediation.
However, as Lambert maintains, already the Other as rival endangers this idea of
friendship as democratic consensus of friends, which finally fails when, in
modernity, the Other becomes the enemy. Thus, when friendship is confronted with
war and thereby undergoes a catastrophe, dialectics is converted into an antagonism
of identities, which can no longer be brought together under the "archaic concept of
friendship". [6] Lambert concludes, however, that since we do not yet possess a
"postwar concept of friendship", thought can no longer be conceived of as divided
between friends: "On the new ground we occupy, following the changed sense of
friendship that we have been evoking all along following Deleuze, 'the friend' no
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longer constitutes thinking's internal presupposition or fundamental power as a

'social faculty' ... [W]e must conclude that the actual category of friendship may no
longer have anything in common with philosophy from this point onward". [7]
According to Lambert, this situation requires us to trace back the friend to the
inappeasable Other, even where Deleuze and Guattari still speak of the friend. In his
genealogical investigation, Lambert thus arrives at the point where he identifies this
friend as Robert Antelme, that friend of Mascolo's who inhabits the latter's thought
as conceptual character and can, according to this mode of thinking, no longer be
reconciled by means of friendship. This is why Antelme remains hidden behind the
Other. Due to his experience of catastrophic violence, he returns from Dachau as an
Other, which brings Lambert to conclude that friendship has been exhausted by
physical violence from the outside.

[6] Mascolo himself, whose analysis Lambert draws upon in his interpretation of
Deleuze and Guattari's thinking, admits his perplexity when it comes to Deleuze's
articulations. For him, friendship can only be retrieved starting from the
contemporary antagonism in a shared concern about the impossibility of unified
thought today. Deleuze, however, writes to him: "Friendship comes first for me.
Obviously friendship would not be a more or less favorable external circumstance,
but ... it would be an internal condition of thought as such. Not speaking with your
friend ... but on the contrary going through ordeals with that person ... that are
necessary for any thinking". [8] Where Deleuze's basis for the foundation of such a
friendship comes from, if no shared distrust of thought precedes it, remains
incomprehensible for Mascolo – unless Deleuze refers to "the all too easily obtained
and empty agreements" that we find in the Platonic dialogues, where Socrates lays
out the shared truth as the ground on which the harmless rivals compete. [9]
[7] That Mascolo does not understand Deleuze's question, that he does not consider
that the friend as internal condition of thought is not someone with whom one
speaks, and that Deleuze's question has nothing to do with dialectics or
communication, is, as can be argued with Deleuze and Guattari, because Mascolo
already fails to understand Plato in this respect. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and
Guattari write: "The idea of a ... democratic conversation between friends has never
produced a single concept". [10] This is why "Socrates constantly made all discussion
impossible ... He turned the friend into the friend of the ... concept, and the concept
into the pitiless monologue that eliminates the rivals one by one". [11] With the philos
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of philosophy, the friend of the concept, we have always been living through those
ordeals necessary for thinking, ordeals that the friend as subject of dialectics or
communication does not withstand.

[8] The friends being introduced into the heart of thought by philosophy "are hardly
Greek, arriving from elsewhere as if they had gone through a catastrophe, that
draws them towards new living relationships raised to the level of a priori
characteristics ... [and] converts friendship itself to thought of the concept". [12] This
friendship, in which philosophical thought brings all its concepts together, is always
"traversed by a fissure that leads them back to hatred or disperses them in the
coexisting chaos where it is necessary to take them up again, to seek them out, to
make a leap". [13] The leap into chaos is a catastrophe, an ordeal that is too powerful:
it deprives us of the power to say I and awakens in us the other, who is able to take
upon herself the violent movements of thought and to create concepts.
[9] In my interpretation, the catastrophe at issue in What Is Philosophy? is thus not, as
Lambert has claimed, the violence suffered from the outside that makes it impossible
to think the Other as friend, as another I with which thought can be partitioned, thus
making it impossible that "friendship has anything in common with philosophy".
Rather it is, as Deleuze and Guattari already wrote in A Thousand Plateaus prior to
the correspondence with Mascolo, that which lets chaos break in. [14] From the
chaos that lends thought its infinite movement, the other as subject of philosophical
thought always emerges as friend. According to this, it is the other as the one who
thinks in me and creates concepts. My interpretation posits the division of thought
as a division of thinking within itself and not as a division of thought outside itself.
The conceptual character transforms the thinker into a friend of the concept by
exposing him to a becoming in the violent movements of thought. The conceptual
character is nothing other than this friend of the concept, for with the concept that it
creates, it divides thought and stands out from thought as the real subject of
thinking: "The conceptual character is the becoming or the subject of a philosophy".
[15] In a Socratic manner Deleuze and Guattari ask: "Does this mean that the friend
is friend of his [or her] own creations? Or does the act of the concept refer to the
power of the friend in the unity of creator and his or her double?" [16] The power of
the friend refers to the thinking of the concept—Not speaking with your friend
Socrates! "So tell me", he asks in the Lysis, "when someone loves someone else, which
of the two becomes the friend of the other, the one who loves or the one who is
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loved? Or is there no difference?" [17] Socrates, with whom the friend turns into the
friend of the concept, carries on the monologue and constantly becomes another
through all of his concepts. As such, he has nothing in common with "an abstract
personification ... or an allegory" because he is the other that thinks inside of us. [18]
He is, as Plato shifts into Socrates and Socrates shifts into Plato, our own becoming.
And here it is, on the one hand, not necessary, where Deleuze and Guattari speak of
the friend, to trace this back to the Other as Lambert demands, because the friend of
the concept is always the other that thinks within us. But on the other hand, it is not
possible that Antelme remains hidden behind the conceptual character – as a friend
hidden behind the other, because, as Lambert claims, he cannot be reconciled with
friendship due to his experience of catastrophic violence and for this reason would
always remain the Other. Even if we do not yet have a postwar concept of the friend,
I conclude that the other who inhabits philosophical thought, who shares the
concept's sensations, is invariably the latter's friend.

[10] In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari write: "[I]t is thought itself that
requires the thinker to be a friend so that thought is divided up within itself and can
be exercised". [19] It is first in the violent movements of thought, knowing neither
subject nor object, however, that the other emerges in us as friend, as Deleuze and
Guattari write, due to the "amorous striving toward the object of desire" as subject of
thinking. [20] As friend or lover of the concept, she is able to carry on the pitiless
monologue of the concept, raising it to the highest power of thought. The other
divides thinking ever anew in itself by letting the movements of thought revert
constantly to themselves, thereby staking out a plane, which the other always
applies as a whole to each and every concept.
[11] As Deleuze writes in the second book on cinema about time dividing itself in
every moment into the present and past into two movements (the first of which lets
the entire present pass, while the second preserves the entire past), so too the
concept in philosophical thought refers to a redistribution of the plane's entire
movements and the plane to the entirety of relations between concepts. And just as
Deleuze declares that the one who "sees the gushing of time" from its origin as
division, as separation to be the "visionary", the "seer", so too is the conceptual
character, dating back to the origin of the division of thought, the seer. [21]
[12] "[O]n the plane", it is said in A Thousand Plateaus, "desire directly invests the
field of perception, where the imperceptible appears as the perceived object of desire
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itself". [22] Due to her inner connectedness with her object of desire, the friend
becomes the seer of the imperceptible; she has the perceptions of the concept
together with its affections. Corresponding to the concept's peculiar mode of
perception and affection, that require performing the movements of the plane and
applying them to the concept, the friend establishes the correspondence between
concept and plane and serves as a "living category" of thinking. [23] Friendship is no
longer an external circumstance but rather the foundation of the friend's
transcendental experience. Her transcendental experience is an inner sensation; the
perception connected to it consists of symptoms of movements on the plane and
through the concept, which exposes her to a constant becoming. In this she remains
without a fixed identity as she constitutes herself at the same time as does her
concept; she passes through all concepts, as developed in the Anti-Oedipus, triumphs
over her rivals, exploits the others as her allies and exacts the bounty of her mutation
on every side. [24] This mutation itself, which she undergoes together with the
concept, distinguishes the friend amongst the claimants. As Deleuze and Guattari
write in What Is Philosophy?, it is already Plato who provides the model for the
concept: "a claim will be justified only through a neighborhood", through proximity
that one has had in the relation to the concept, "in the survey of an always
necessarily anterior time". [25] This means that the concept's inner sensation, always
mobilising the entire plane as the entire past, turns the true claimant into the friend
of the concept.

[13] The proximity to the concept refers to the power of the friend. In order to relate
the selection of claimants to their power, one must, as Deleuze wrote in 1992 in
"Plato, the Greeks", follow Spinoza and turn Plato against himself. [26] In this sense
we can return to Spinoza in the Ethics considering his definition that virtue and
power are one and the same, and thus one could say that the virtue of the friend is
her power. [27] And finally she is the friend of the concept for the very reason that
she withstands the ordeals that are immanent to thought. "Are we not already on
another plane, for love is like the violence that compels thinking – 'Socrates the
lover'", Deleuze and Guattari ask, not only on the level upon which "friendship asks
only for a little goodwill?" [28] For Deleuze, it is Mascolo, I argue, who does not
leave the Greek terrain of the shared truth as the ground on which the rivals come to
"all too easily obtained and empty agreements". For Mascolo, the antagonists arrive
at a reconciliation of a shared virtue through dialectics. Corresponding to Aristotle
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who directly followed Plato and who gave the Greeks their Ethics, where friendship
is borne out of mutual good will based on the recognition of one's own virtue in
another, Mascolo writes in a letter to Deleuze that, for him, friendship can be found
through "an emergence of confidence ... on the basis of the same distrust" .[29] But
when Deleuze asks, "How can a friend, without losing his or her singularity, be
inscribed as a condition of thought?", he suggests to Mascolo – whose book he is
engaged with in an "interior monologue" – that he is not invoking a shared quality
such as the shared distrust. [30] With the friend as condition of thought, "friendship
itself" is transformed into the "thought of the concept". And the friend maintains her
singularity as friend through distinguishing herself in thought as that who shares
the concept's sensations, as the true friend amongst the claimants.
[14] In an interview from 1985, Deleuze said: "When I work with Guattari ... each of
us understands in his own way concepts put forward by the other." [31] And along
the lines of my own argumentation, every thinker is exposed to a constant
becoming-other as friend of the concepts that she creates. And following this it
seems, here thinking about Deleuze's own words, that a friendship is possible that
brings two thinkers together as singular subjects in thought. This friendship will
without a doubt always remain "traversed by a fissure" because it is not based on a
shared quality. But perhaps this is precisely "the question of what we call and
experience as philosophy" today.

General Remarks

This paper is an expanded version of a presentation given at the Second

International Deleuze Studies Conference at the University of Cologne (2009). The
argumentation presented here is part of my forthcoming doctoral thesis on the
conceptual character in Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy?

Notes

[1] I translate "personnage conceptuel" with "conceptual character". I left the more
widely used "conceptual persona" in the title and my biographical notes but changed
the translation to "conceptual character" in the quotations from What Is Philosophy?
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and throughout the rest of my paper. For the justification of the choice made by the
translators Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 2-3. And for my
justification see note 18.

[2] Gregg Lambert, "Deleuze and the Political Ontology of 'The Friend' (philos)," in
Deleuze and Politics, eds. Ian Buchanan, Nicholas Thoburn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
UP, 2008), 50.

[3] Gilles Deleuze, "Correspondence with Dionys Mascolo," in Two Regimes of

Madness. Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 (New York: Semiotext(s), 2006), 332.

[4] Lambert, "Political Ontology of 'The Friend,'" 50.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 46.

[7] Ibid., 49, 50.

[8] Deleuze, "Correspondence with Dionys Mascolo," 329. The English translation
reads: "Friendship comes first for you", which follows the French: "Ce qui serait
premier pour vous, ce serait l'amitié." Gilles Deleuze, Deus régimes de fous. Textes et
entretiens 1975-1995 (Paris: Minuit, 2003), 307. Following the German translation:
"Für mich käme die Freundschaft an erster Stelle." Gilles Deleuze, Schizophrenie und
Gesellschaft. Texte und Gespräche von 1975-1995 (Frankfurt a. Main: Suhrkamp, 2005),
312. I have replaced the "you" with "me". Deleuze sums up Mascolo's position as
claiming that shared concern, "if found in another person, is the basis for friendship",
and then asks: "Couldn't we reverse the order?" In other words, couldn't we go so far
as to say that through distrust of a friend with friendship a concern is brought into
thinking? And to this Mascolo replies: "You suggest ... making friendship come
first." Deleuze, "Correspondence with Dionys Mascolo," 329, 331. In addition, I have
replaced "trials" with "ordeals", in accordance with the translation of What is
Philosophy?.

[9] Deleuze, "Correspondence with Dionys Mascolo," 331.

[10] Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 6.

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[11] Ibid., 29.

[12] Ibid., 5.

[13] Ibid., 203.

[14] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (London, New York: Continuum, 2004), 343.

[15] Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 64.

[16] Ibid., 5. I have changed the original English translation which reads: "Or is the
actuality of the concept due to the potential of the friend, in the unity of creator and
his double?", while the French text reads: "Ou bien est-ce l'acte du concept qui
renvoie à la puissance de l'ami, dans l'unité du créateur et de son double?" Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 2005), 10.

[17] Plato, "Lysis 212a-b," in Plato on Love. Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, Alcibiades, and
Selections from Republic and Laws, ed. C. D. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006).

[18] The following sentence is missing from the English translation: "Le personnage
conceptuel n'a rien à voir avec une personnification abstraite, un symbole ou une
allégorie, car il vit, il insiste", and should be placed between the following two
sentences: "I am no longer myself but thought's aptitude for finding itself and
spreading across a plane that passes through me at several places. The philosopher
is the idiosyncrasy of his conceptual personae". Deleuze and Guattari, What Is
Philosophy?, 64. Compare the French: "Je ne suis plus moi, mais une aptitude de la
pensée à se voir et se développer à travers un plan qui me traverse en plusieurs
endroits. Le personnage conceptuel n'a rien à voir avec une personnification
abstraite, un symbole ou une allégorie, car il vit, il insiste. Le philosophe est
l'idiosyncrasie de ses personnages conceptuels." Deleuze and Guattari, Qu'est-ce que
la philosophie?, 62. That the sentence is missing where Deleuze and Guattari explicitly
state the conceptual character has "nothing to do with an abstract personification" is
symptomatic for the English translation because the translators not only chose
"conceptual persona" for "personnage conceptuel" but also equate the conceptual
persona with a mask, through an incorrect translation: "Mais les noms propres
auxquels se rattache ainsi l'énonciation ont beau être historiques, et attestés comme
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tels, ce sont des masques pour d'autres devenirs, ils servent seulement de
pseudonymes à des entités singulières plus secrètes. Dans le cas des propositions, il
s'agit des observateurs partiels extrinsèques, scientifiquement définissables par
rapport à tel ou tels axes de référence, tandis que, pour les concepts, ce sont des
personnages conceptuels intrinsèques qui hantent tel ou tel plan de consistance." Ibid.,
29. The English translation: "But however much the use of proper names clarifies
and confirms the historical nature of their link to these enunciations, these proper
names are masks for other becomings and serve only as pseudonyms for more secret
singular entities. In the case of propositions, proper names designate extrinsic partial
observers that are scientifically definable in relation to a particular axis of reference;
whereas for concepts, proper names are intrinsic conceptual personae who haunt a
particular plane of consistency." Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 24. While
in the original the antecedent in the second sentence is left open with "il s'agit" and
"ce sont" the English translation uses "proper names" in both cases making the
reference seem unambiguous: in the case of the propositions, the proper names refer
to the partial observers, while in the case of the concepts, the proper names refer to
the conceptual characters. But following my interpretation and French usage, the
partial observers or the conceptual characters are the "entités singulières", the "more
secret singular entities", that remain concealed by the masks, by the proper names:
"[T]he philosopher is only the envelope of his ... conceptual character". Ibid., 64. The
conceptual character is the singular process of becoming in thinking but in no case a
mask that hides these processes. For this reason I do not use the translation
"persona," which could be understood as "the aspect of a person's character that they
show to other people, especially when their real character is different". Oxford
Advanced Learner's Dictionary, 7th Edition (New York: Oxford UP, 2005.), s.vv.
"persona." In my opinion it is not exactly correct to write: "The conceptual persona is
the becoming or the subject of a philosophy, on a par with the philosopher", but
rather following the original – "Le personnage conceptuel est le devenir ou le sujet
d'une philosophie, qui vaut pour le philosophe"– one should write: "The conceptual
character is the becoming or the subject of a philosophy, that is valid for the
philosopher". Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 64; Deleuze and Guattari,
Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?, 63. The translators of What Is Philosophy? can easily
support their interpretation with passages from Deleuze's work before he started to
work with Guattari. In Difference and Repetition, for example, we read: "The mask is
the true subject of repetition", but such a reference seems to neglect the singularity
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and move away from the intentions of Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?. Gilles Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition (New York: Continuum, 2004), 20.

[19] Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 69.

[20] Ibid., 4.

[21] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image (New York: Continuum, 2005), 79.

[22] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 313.

[23] Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 3.

[24] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(New York: Continuum, 2004), 97.

[25] Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 30.

[26] Gilles Deleuze, "Plato, the Greeks," in Essays Critical and Clinical (New York:
Verso, 1998), 137.

[27] Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, Definition 8 of Part IV.

[28] Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 71.

[29] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapter 3, 1155b-1156a; Deleuze,

"Correspondence with Dionys Mascolo," 331.

[30] Ibid., 329.

[31] Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia UP, 1995), 126. I
have replaced "notions" with "concepts", in accordance with the translation of What
Is Philosophy?.