SOURCE: “A Thousand Trails to Work with Deleuze,” in SubStance, Vol. XX, No. 3, 1991, pp. 10-23.

In the following review, Colombat traces the critical reaction to A Thousand Plateaus and regards the book as a continuation of Deleuze's earlier work.

Gilles Deleuze, like Michel Foucault, has often described theory as a “tool box,” the tools being the concepts a philosophy creates and makes available to others in different fields of research. Despite the many new concepts it develops, A Thousand Plateaus comprises a rather unwieldy tool box, since both Deleuze and Guattari refuse to offer their readers a closed system or “recipe” to work from.

As soon as it was published in 1980, A Thousand Plateaus appeared to be just as unclassifiable as the Anti-Oedipus had been eight years earlier. It was seen by Anquetil and Deligeorges as an “Unidentified Theoretical Object.”¹ After a first reading, many critics remained “flabbergasted...