A Thousand Plateaus

A Thousand Plateaus is the seminal collaborative project between Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, two of the most innovative and radical thinkers from modern France. It's hard for me to properly describe this book, because working with and through it is a personal labor of love. I have never encountered a nonfiction text, a work of philosophy (more or less) so wide-ranging, touching upon so many aspects of life, thought, experience and the world. Their goal you might say is to replace the model of organization we might say dominates structures in the West, a hierarchical structure based upon binary oppositions. They want to replace it with a model they call rhizomatic. A "rhizome" in their use is a manner of attachment, bridging heterogeneous things around a shared act of creation or construction.

They touch upon economics, politics, science, art, psychoanalysis, shamanism. They describe the world as existing in a state of becoming and try and discuss the meaning of this type of world.

See especially the chapters "Introduction: Rhizome", "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible...", and "Treatise on Nomadology-The War Machine."