Following publication of Anti-Oedipus 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, A Thousand Plateaus. Given the title that Deleuze provided for this seminar, ‘War and the State’, the seminar’s focus is clearly on material developed in plateau 12, ‘Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine’.
Only one recording has surfaced as yet for the 1977-78 seminar, and documentation from the Paris 8 archives (specifically, the 1977-78 philosophy department course list) indicates that Deleuze offered an additional seminar in the “second semester”, on Spinoza, to which the lecture on ‘continuous variation’ may very well belong, a topic that also appears frequently in A Thousand Plateaus. The lecture of 24 January 1978 is an important example, as Deleuze notes, of his return to the history of philosophy by considering continuous variation in light of Spinoza’s philosophy, but this return continues in the other separate seminar to which Deleuze devoted four sessions in the spring, a seminar on Kant, developed here in a separate dossier.
Under this seminar heading, we also include the talk that Deleuze presented on a panel at IRCAM with Pierre Boulez, Roland Barthes and other artists and writers, 23 February 1978.
