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The sheer volume and complexity of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus can be daunting. What is an assemblage? What is a rhizome? What is a war machine? What is a body without organs? What is becoming-animal? Brent Adkins demonstrates that all the questions raised by A Thousand Plateaus are in service to Deleuze and Guattari's radical reconstruction of the methods and aims of philosophy itself.

To achieve this he argues that the crucial term for understanding A Thousand Plateaus is 'assemblage.' An assemblage is Deleuze and Guattari's answer to the perennial philosophical question, "What is a thing?" and they assert that assemblages are always found on a continuum between stasis and change. Each plateau is therefore concerned with a particular type of assemblage (e.g. social, political, linguistic) and its tendencies toward both stasis and change.