I come to praise contemporary French philosophy not to bury it. My aim is not to hail the appearance in France of a native brand of analytic philosophy—in itself an important event in the last decade—but to describe the indirect and selective importation of certain Anglo-Saxon concepts by French philosophers whose practice is far from analytic; and also to describe the resultant misunderstanding. In this paper I shall analyse the use of pragmatic concepts—and of the concept ‘pragmatics’— in the recent work by Deleuze and Guattari, Mille Plateaux, and I shall try to show that these concepts are the object of a creative misunderstanding, of a misprision.

Pragmatics: For historical reasons, the first analytic concepts were imported into France by linguists, in the early seventies. This is why the borrowing is selective: the texts made available to the French public were those which were of immediate interest to linguists. Performative utterances, illocutionary force, and, later, conversational implicature: Austin and the so-called Austinians rather than Davidson or the disciples of Wittgenstein. And this is also why it is indirect: the concepts were reappropriated by philosophers like Deleuze when they borrowed them back from linguistics. We can easily imagine that in such a situation the occasions for misunderstanding and betrayal would be multiplied. The reasons for this alliance, on the common ground of pragmatics, between Anglo-Saxon philosophy of language and post-structuralist philosophers, can be found in the history of linguistics in France in the last decade.