The four domains of the plane of consistency

Abstract

First, let us briefly take you through a glossary to situate this neo-materialist project, starting with the three Cs. The first two – critical and clinical – are directly appropriated from Gilles Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical. Already in 1988 Deleuze revealed his long-standing plan to write a series of studies on writers as great symptomatologists under the overarching label ‘Critique et Clinique’. The collection of essays was published five years later. In his English translation from 1997, Daniel W. Smith offered a rare commentary on this aspect of Deleuze’s thought. It was only in 2010 that the journal Deleuze Studies devoted an issue to the topic of Deleuze and the Symptom, edited by Aidan Tynan, with the subtitle On the Practice and Paradox of Health. Please note the two new additions to our glossary, namely, the symptom and health. There is a certain divergence in Deleuze’s conception of the clinical, Tynan explains. If in the symptomatological register the symptom is diagnostic and relates to the creation of new clinical entities, in the schizoanalytical mode it is therapeutic with an injunction to produce. Schizoanalytical practice is attuned to desiring-production and as such repudiates the philosophical and psychoanalytic tie to a hidden meaning to interpret. In other words, health already implies practice, insofar as signs imply ways of living, forms of life. [...]