Deleuze placed his hopes on the contingency of the encounter, by which thinking is forcibly drawn out. In fact, there is something irre-ducibly paradoxical about the encounter understood as contingency. Instinctively, the word ‘necessity’ brings with it an inexorable sense of universality, whereas the word ‘contingency’ basks in particularity. For this reason, a philosophy which privileges contingency would seem in the same stroke to be one which values the singular above all. After all, each contingent encounter can only take place in a singular and particular circumstance. And yet, the very conception itself, according to which the contingent encounter is what calls forth thinking, is one which can be applied anytime anywhere, irrespective of the specific circumstance. Whether this conception is universally valid or not, at the very least it is one which possesses a general sphere of applicability. And to that extent, it can be said to be abstract.

Through his collaboration with Guattari, Deleuze was to attain a theoretical perspective capable of analysing singular particulars via a critical interpretation of psychoanalysis. The fruit of this critical work was not a theory open to indiscriminate application without regard for circumstantial specifics, but rather a theory which enables us to shed light on these specifics themselves. No doubt such a perspective on its own is nothing especially remarkable. Nonetheless, what is remarkable is the fact that Deleuze-Guattari achieved such a perspective by choosing to focus on desire instead of power, and in doing so liberated psychoanalysis to cover the social field in its entirety. This theory founded on desire explains, with conviction, how it is that a certain form of rule comes to persist and endure. Setting out from the critical inheritance of psychoanalysis means that one cannot be satisfied with tracing out the broad orientations of the social, for it makes possible a gaze fine-tuned towards each of the singular components which come to constitute these very social orientations themselves – what in Deleuze-Guattari's lexicon would be termed the ‘molecular’.

So long as we persist in overviewing these ‘molecules’ of the social as molar orientations, we cannot penetrate to the reality of society. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze-Guattari refuse collective representations of the social such as those put forward by Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), instead embracing the work of Gabriel Tarde (1843– 1904), who conceived the social as built up from infinitesimally small particles.