AND is of course diversity, multiplicity, the destruction of identities. It’s not the same factory gate when I go in, and when I come out, and then when I go past unemployed. A convicted man’s wife isn’t the same before and after the conviction. But diversity and multiplicity have nothing to do with aesthetic wholes (in the sense of ‘one more,’ ‘one more woman’. . . ) or dialectical schemas (in the sense of ‘one produces two, which then produces three’). Because in those cases it’s still Unity, and thus being, that’s primary, and that supposedly becomes multiple.
When Godard says everything has two parts, that in a day there’s morning and evening, he’s not saying it’s one or the other, or that one becomes the other, becomes two. Because multiplicity is never in the terms, however many, nor in all the terms together, the whole. Multiplicity is precisely in the ‘and’ which is different in nature from elementary components and collections of them.
Neither a component nor a collection, what is this AND? I think Godard’s force lies in living and thinking and presenting this AND in a very novel way, and in making it work actively. AND is neither one thing nor the other, it’s always in-between, between two things; it’s the borderline, there’s always a border, a line of flight or flow, only we don’t see it, because it’s the least perceptible of things. And yet it’s along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape.
Excerpt from an interview with Gilles Deleuze on the television broadcast of Jean Luc Godard’s “Six fois deux”; Originally published as “Trois questions sur Six fois deux” in Cahiers du cinĂ©ma no. 271. (Nov. 1976). English translation in Gilles Deleuze: Negotiations 1972-1990 (Columbia University Press, 1995), translated by Martin Joughin.