Deleuze's Non-Ontology?
OK so here’s the case for a non-ontological Deleuze - a Deleuze against ontology and for: ethology. The best book ever written on Deleuze? Yes. The first point is simply textual: “establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology…” - these are the lines that close out the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus , where a logic of the “AND” is elevated over and against any logic of the “IS”. This is the first sense in which Deleuze is not an ontological thinker: he not only makes no effort to think ‘what is’, but works to displace the question of ‘what is?’ entirely. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the profusion of Deleuzian concepts - event, becoming, multiplicity, rhizome, etc - are all so many ways to think otherwise than ‘what is’. Of the event, for example, Deleuze wrote: “I’ve tried to discover the nature of events; it’s a philosophical concept, the only one capable of ousting the verb ‘to be’ and attributes.” (If anyone's interested, I wrote more about the logic