Deleuze and Guattari’s answer to the question “what is philosophy?” is well-known: philosophy is the creation of  concepts, along with its attendant plane of  immanence   (or image of thought) and the conceptual personae, from whose point of view the concept allows us to think. But what is largely absent from both What is Philosophy? and Deleuze’s work more generally are reflections on the character of philosophical practice for philosophers themselves. What is it like to be a philosopher, and what is the practice of creating concepts like?

The aim of this paper is to examine three moments in which the practice of philosophy appears on its own terms in Deleuze’s body of  work, found respectively in Difference  and Repetition, Logic of Sense, and (indeed) in What is Philosophy? I would like to argue that the picture he gives us is rather more negative than might be expected, and can be characterised by four key terms: dispossession, assembly, co-adaptation, and repetition.