Geophilosophy

Rodolphe Gasché’s commentary on Deleuze and Guattari’s last book, What Is Philosophy?, homes in on what the two thinkers define as philosophy in distinction from the sciences and the arts and what it is that they understand themselves to have done while doing philosophy. Gasché is concerned with the authors’ claim not only that philosophy is a Greek invention but also that it is, for fundamental reasons, geophilosophical in nature.

Gasché also intimates that, rather than a marginal issue of their conception of philosophy, geocentrism is a central dimension of their thinking. Indeed, Gasché argues, if all the principal traits that constitute philosophy according to What is Philosophy?—autochthony, philia, and doxa—imply in an essential manner a concern with Earth, it follows that what Deleuze and Guattari have been doing while engaging in philosophy has been marked by this concern from the start.

RODOLPHE GASCHÉ is Distinguished Professor and Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York University at Buffalo.