In a 1990 interview, Deleuze addresses the question of the relationship of politics to art via a reflection on the modern problem of the ‘creation of a people’. The artists Deleuze admires (he names here Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Klee, Berg, Huillet and Straub) have a deep need of a people, but the collectivity they invoke does not yet exist – ‘the people are missing [le peuple manque]’ (Deleuze 1990: 235/174). Artists cannot themselves create a people, and the people in their struggles cannot concern themselves directly with art, but when a people begins to take form, an interactive process emerges that connects art and the people:

Deleuze nowhere elaborates at length on the idea of fabulation, but it forms part of a rich complex of concepts central to his approach to the ethics and politics of art. It is also a rather elusive concept, which is Bergsonian only in a special sense that deserves some investigation.