A Thousand Plateaus I, RAI-3 Recordings, Lecture 1, 18 November 1975

<p><em>The Deleuze Seminars</em> is a collection of audio recordings, transcriptions, and English translations of, and supplemental materials from, the lectures French philosopher Gilles Deleuze gave during his career at the University of Paris 8.</p>

<p>Following the publication of <em>Anti-Oedipus</em> in 1972, Deleuze continues to develop the proliferation of concepts that his collaboration with Guattari had yielded. Throughout the 1970s, Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in expanding these concepts continues, eventually producing the sequel, <em>A Thousand Plateaus</em>.</p>

<p>The 1975-1976 seminar sessions were filmed by one of his students, Marielle Burkhalter, as part of her masters project, “Filming Philosophy as it Happens.” Enrico Ghezzi acquired the videos for broadcast on the RAI-3 cinema program “Fuori Orario,” after inviting Burkhalter to screen them at a festival he co-curated. Marielle Burkhalter, along with Stavroula Bellos, would eventually become the director of the L’Association Siècle Deleuzien and oversaw the French transcriptions of Deleuze’s seminars at the Paris 8 “Voix de Gilles Deleuze” website (http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/).</p>

<p>In this group of lectures, Deleuze offers the multi-faceted focus of the semester’s work, mainly to distinguish forms of faciality, encompassing black-holes/white-walls, faces and landscapes, facial power-relations, redundancy, molecular multiplicity, the rhizome, the refrain, and courtly love. As none of the films was marked chronologically, the order of the successive seminars was determined based on the content provided in the videos, notably Deleuze’s course organization that followed successive chapters from <em>A Thousand Plateaus. </em></p>

<p>Besides the content as one guidepost as well as the physical disposition of classroom details, the chronologically first video was the one titled “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM2IAFRhe54&list=PLj9WhetvQU6HQDlWBnlH6KEdrzLreeqDA&index=7">Deleuze su molteplicità molare e molteplicità molecolare</a>” followed by the two successive four-hour segments, titled “Il Senso in meno”. Furthermore, despite no precise dates provided, a sequence of dates was extrapolated before and after session 7 based on comments by an Iranian student announcing during that session that a demonstration would occur later that day, 3 February 1976.</p>

<p>In session 1, the 18 November 1975 session (date approximate), the film unfolds in three parts. Part I is remarkable for providing visual evidence of the extraordinarily cramped space in which Deleuze worked at Vincennes, where he acknowledges Guattari’s presence who does not intervene in the recording. After reviewing previous topics discussed, Deleuze introduces variables of molecular multiplicities that Deleuze lists: bridges; a network; the borderline (bordure); threshold or door; fiber; and the plane of consistency or rhizosphere. Deleuze then focuses on the molecular multiplicities defined through their dimensions, specifically their maximal dimension that is the borderline, with reference to work by René Thom and examples from Melville, Virginia Woolfe, Henry Miller, and Lovecraft. As the recording shifts, Deleuze develops the importance of gangs in terms of the molar aggregate organization, with a centralized leader, but also points to molecular aspects of the gang organize that shift back into the molar aggregate, on one hand, the phenomena of the borderline or flight, on the other, a shift back to a centralized leadership and organizing function. A third, very brief fragment commences in mid-quotation from Lovecraft (located in <em>A Thousand Plateaus</em>, p. 251) with Deleuze discussing the possibility of numerous dimensions possessed by molecular multiplicities, with reference to Woolfe’s <em>The Waves</em> and Kafka “Josephine the Singer”.</p>

<p>For the first lecture, the approximate dates covered in this initial recording correspond to segment I, on November 18, 1975, segment II continuing on November 25, and a brief segment III concluding on December 2. These segments correspond to the time stamps: Part I, 0:00, to 1:14:59; Part II, 1:15:00, to 1:31:09; Part III, 1:31:10, to 1:40:51, of the YouTube recording, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM2IAFRhe54&t=24s.</p>

<p>The French transcription and subsequent English translation were developed for the Deleuze Seminars directly from the RAI-3 recording, located at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM2IAFRhe54&t=24s]. This dataset includes two files: a revised French transcription and new English translation in odt format.</p>

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<p>Les Séminaires de Deleuze sont une collection d'enregistrements audio, de transcriptions et de traductions en anglais et de documents complémentaires des conférences que le philosophe français Gilles Deleuze a donné lors de sa carrière à l'Université de Paris 8.</p>

<p>Dans la séance 1, le 18 novembre 1975 (date approximative), avec l’aide des participants et avec Félix Guattari dans l’assistance, Deleuze introduit des concepts différents produits avec Guattari dans leur travail qui résultera, en 1980, à la publication de <em>Mille plateaux, </em>par exemple, la territorialité, l’animalité, les devenirs, et le rhizome.</p>