Conditions, ecologies, and plateaus: unmade by books

Abstract

ABSTRACT The invitation to reflect on the ‘books that made me’ indulges in a necessary albeit seductive fiction, namely, that reading unfolds causally, that intellectual life can be traced through a stable sequence of influences, and that books play into the creation of coherent subjects. This essay proceeds from a somewhat different proposition. Working through and alighting from four texts, namely, Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England, Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies, Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, I consider reading as a practice of interruption and of undoing. Rather than recounting a genealogy of intellectual formation, the essay explores how books participate in a processual deterritorialisation of thought and in a concomitant unsettling of geographical sensibilities. What emerges is less a narrative of influence than an indeterminate cartography of encounters, misreadings, and affects through which theory becomes immanent to life.