Is it possible for a compatibility to exist between Althusser's well-known doctrine of the interpellation of the subject by the ideological apparatuses of the state and the theses regarding the assemblages of the state propounded by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus? Is there, more generally, a recognisable political subject whose ontological shape and character is limned in A Thousand Plateaus, even as it is ‘undone’ by Deleuze and Guattari? And is there a fundamental connection between this subject and the traditional metaphysical-epistemological subject that is also unravelled in A Thousand Plateaus? At first sight, the answers to these questions are probably going to be negative, though our ‘no’ will almost certainly have to be somewhat less emphatic where the second and third questions are concerned.

There are only a couple of references to Althusser in A Thousand Plateaus, but what is there indicates explicitly that Deleuze and Guattari consider Althusser's notion of the constitution of social individuals as subjects to be profoundly mistaken. To quote them: