RHIZOME

Carl .G. Jung:

"Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away - an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of an absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into the transitory one."

Ramona M. Uritescu:

“On the contrary, the true artist/writer attempts ultimately to carry over, or transmute into language the effect, in the guise of disruption and aporia, that her/his secret, which renders her/him different from everyone else, has on her/his inner forum, on her/his life. in other words, just as her/his perception of truth, her/his insight into the human condition is forged and re-forged, in a continual process of becorning, by and through that key encounter which repeats itself with certain variations throughout her/his life, in the same way language is disrupted, dragged "hors de ses sillons coutumiers" (Deleuze, Critique et clinique 9), is deterritorialized and disemboweled, in order to shape another "language," a "minor language" (to use yet another Deleuzian term) that grows rhizomatically in the cracks of the old language's ruins. [1] Hence the great importance of a writer' s style.”  [2]

[1 For a discussion of the "rhizome model" as opposed to the "tree model, see Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, “Introducton: Rhizome” 3 -25.

[2] Ramona M. Uritescu, The Magician’s Modem Avatars: A Study of the Artist Figure in the Works of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka, MA Thesis, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, August 1998, p.4

From:  Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987,  tr. Brian Massumi.