PREFACE

It is perhaps a testimony to their influence and notoriety that Deleuze and Guattari can be located at a number of stations along the continuum between parody and homage. I want to briefly consider three seemingly distant stations, each with its own humorous elements, but deployed to different ends. These prefatory considerations will open onto questions and demonstrations of how to characterize Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborations, that is, how they, and others, posed and answered such questions, and what these tell us about their joint work. The emphasis in this contribution is less on the content of the books they wrote together than on characterizations of their process and how these characterizations have been deployed and redeployed to different ends.

The late French cartoonist and illustrator Gérard Lauzier (1930–2008) was known, among other things, for his parodies of intellectuals and the Left, including Deleuze and Guattari. Lauzier collapsed Deleuze and Guattari into a third figure of “Gilles Guatareuze” (one “t” only), described tentatively by François Dosse in terms of the rather neutral “coalescence.” Dosse provides some dialogue from a single panel – the final one – of Lauzier’s illustrations of 1978, and quotes François Fourquet, somewhat tangentially, in order to explain how an already fragile Guattari was deeply wounded by such cruel commentary: