Abstract

This paper asks why Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Rhizome omits Porphyrius’s Arbor Porphyriana from its polemical targets, although the text seems precisely to criticise it (§1). The thesis is that critics usually associate the two Rhizome and Isagoge because of a retroactive reading of Umberto Eco’s Anti-Porphyry (§2). After reporting Eco’s reading of Rhizome (§2.1), the contribution advances a cross-comparison between Eco’s encyclopaedia and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome (§2.2). After demonstrating that the encyclopaedia is not a rhizome in schizoanalytic terms (§2.3), the contribution studies Deleuze’s reading of Porphyry’s Isagoge (§3), through his sources (Jules Tricot, Jascques Brunschwig, §3.1-2). Surveying Deleuze’s conception of Aristotle (§3.3), it is shown that the French philosopher, although he criticises Porphyry as an Aristotelian, praises him for his use of specific difference (§3.4). This is the reason why Rhizome is not directed against the Arbor porphyriana