Deterritorializing "Deterritorialization": From the "Anti-Oedipus" to "A Thousand Plateaus"

EIGHT YEARS AFTER THE ANTI-OEDIPUS, the long-awaited second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia appeared under the title A Thousand Plateaus.? It hardly seemed to belong with the earlier volume, in one respect: the points of departure in Marx and Freud made capitalism and schizophrenia a fitting rubric for the Anti-Oedipus all but disappear in A Thousand Plateaus, or rather become submerged in a far vaster field of references ranging from cell biology to botany and zoology to geology and beyond. It is nevertheless some of the connections between the two volumes I want to explore here, by focusing on the evolution of a term crucial to them both: territorialization. One way of understanding the relation of A Thousand Plateaus to the Anti-Oedipus is to imagine Deleuze and Guattari setting out to deconstruct in the second volume any binary oppositions left standing at the end of the first. Not Deleuze and Guattari are beholden to Derrida in respect: schizoanalytic deconstruction (if it can be called that) derives from the unconscious logic of non-global connection and inclusive disjunction, as specified in the Anti-Oedipus.2 The connective synthesis produces not the closed binary couple, this and that but rather an open-ended series this and then