A Thousand Plateaus

A Thousand Plateaus (originally subtitled Capitalism and Schizophrenia) is a 1980 book by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. It is the second and final volume of their collaborative project Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The first volume, Anti-Oedipus (1972), was a critique of contemporary uses of psychoanalysis and Marxism; A Thousand Plateaus, by contrast, was conceived as an experimental and largely affirmative work of philosophy that covers a much wider range of subjects.

The title borrows the word "plateau" from Gregory Bateson's research on Balinese culture, where it designates a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities. Each chapter is a plateau, and each can be read starting anywhere and connected to any other. The authors describe the book itself as a rhizome, since the way it was written and produced follows the same logic of non-hierarchical connection. It consists of an introduction titled "Rhizome," thirteen chapters dated non-linearly, and a concluding chapter that brings together the book's main concepts.

Among the central ideas are the rhizome, the body without organs, the plane of immanence, abstract machines, becoming, lines of flight, and assemblages. The text discusses psychoanalysts, composers, painters, philosophers, historians and linguists, as well as novelists such as Kafka, Proust and Woolf. The chapter on faciality is among its most cited passages.

The book was widely received and debated. It is considered a major statement of post-structuralism and postmodernism. Some readers praised its originality, while others, notably Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, criticized its use of scientific terminology. Its influence extended to thinkers such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose Empire (2000) draws on it, and to Manuel DeLanda, who adopted its theory of assemblages in his work on society.