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If Gilles Deleuze's philosophy makes no concessions to abstraction, that certainly does not mean it must be accessible to everyone. The concept takes place in silence, in that twilight moment [entre chien et loup] when we are no longer sure what it was we were supposed to understand, when communication is blocked and reflection comes up against its own stupidity [betise]-a moment when we don't really know what to think, a moment of difficulty for thought. It is in this sense that Deleuze often said the concept needs an idiot in order to be realized.
It has to encounter the difficulties that idiots experience as the fascinating singularity of a thing or an event. To have difficulty, or rather to be in difficulty, is the position of philosophy mired up to its neck in the detail of the concrete.
For Deleuze, the concrete is the condition of possibility for philosophy and thus for the concepts philosophy is led to create. And if the concrete arouses the idiot in us, it is because its multiplicity overwhelms us, at every step, before our amazed eyes. The concrete is a multiplicity of concretions. It is compact and thick, a condensation that, like its Latin root concretio, expresses an assemblage. The concrete is thick, thickened by anything capable of growth as an ensemble: an aggregation of forces or, as in Spinoza, a composition that increases the power of that agglomerate. The concrete is anything that comprises itself, anything that, in this composition of forces, will grow in ensemble [va croitre ensemble], not without increasing in dimension.
Such a composition, such an assemblage of concrete forces, is called a concrescence. In botany, for example, concrescence refers to the grafting of two plants that have sprouted together, side by side. Sometimes even two plants of different kinds will become a concrescence, with a branch of one grafting to a branch of the other. But then something remarkable happens: These two engage in a common becoming, a marriage against nature that produces seedless fruit the idiot cannot plant and whose ripening he cannot understand.
We are talking about a composition, a botanical concretion, a rhizome of forces, a thicket of singularities that, acting like plants, do not so much filiate as...