Concept
Rhizome (philosophy)
Overview
A rhizome is a concept in post-structuralism describing an assemblage that allows connections between any of its constituent elements, regardless of any predefined ordering, structure, or entry point. It is a central concept in the work of French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who use the term frequently in their development of schizoanalysis.
Deleuze and Guattari use the terms "rhizome" and "rhizomatic" (from Ancient Greek ῥίζωμα (rhízōma) 'mass of roots') to describe a network that "connects any point to any other point". The term is first introduced in Deleuze and Guattari's 1975 book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature to suggest that Kafka's work is not bound by linear narrative structure, and can be entered into at any point to map out connections with other points.
The term is heavily expanded upon in Deleuze and Guattari's 1980 work A Thousand Plateaus, where it is used to refer to networks that establish "connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles."
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Rhizome (philosophy) is discussed.
Hooker. The leaves are entire, instead of being much divided, as in the foregoing aquatic species. They are elongated, about 1 1/2 inch in breadth, and furnished with a distinct footstalk. The plant produces numerous colourless rhizomes, as thin as threads, which bear minute bladders, and occasionally swell into tubers, as will [page 432] hereafter be described. These rhizomes appear exactly like roots, but…
Charles Darwin, Insectivorous Plants
names the idea; opens on it
Spinoza puts substance at the head of his system, and defines it to be the unity of thought and extension, without demonstrating how he gets to this distinction, or how he traces it back to the unity of substance. The further treatment of the subject proceeds in what is called the mathematical method. Definitions and axioms are first laid down: after them comes a series of theorems, which are proved by an analytical…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
states what it is
Thus, instead of an existential world that is "a network of relations whose intersections are called terms" (p. 622), I find more intelligible a qualitatively heterogeneous reality that can be variously partitioned into things, and that can he abstractly replaced by systems of terms and relations that are adequate to symbolize their effective nature in particular respects. There is a tendency for certain attributes…
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
states what it is
But a fixed law of connexion, making the sensations occur together, does not, say these philosophers, necessarily require what is called a substratum to support them. The conception of a substratum is but one of many possible forms in which that connexion presents itself to our imagination; a mode of, as it were, realizing the idea. If there be such a substratum, suppose it this instant miraculously annihilated, and…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
states what it is
Such was ancient hylozoism, a half-hearted and even contradictory hypothesis, which left matter its extensity although attributing to it real conscious states, and which spread the qualities of matter throughout extensity while treating these qualities as inner i.e. simple states. It was reserved for Leibniz to do away with this contradiction and to show that, if the succession of external qualities or phenomena is…
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
states what it is
Philosophers who discussed Rhizome (philosophy)
Related ideas
Place in the tradition
Part of Contextualism.