Dan Smith - On the Nature of Concepts

A/V# 2010 Autumn In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy, famously, as an activity that consists in forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts. But this definition of philosophy implies a somewhat singular analytic of the concept, to borrow Kant’s phrase, and Deleuze’s concept of the concept, as it were, differs significantly from previous conceptions of the concept. One of the problems it poses is the fact that concepts, from a Deleuzian perspective, have no identity but only a becoming. There is a becoming of concepts not only within Deleuze’s corpus, but also in each book and in each concept, which is extended to and draws from the entire history of philosophy. This paper examines the nature of this becoming of concepts, which is the result of introduction temporality into the form of the true.