Message to the Department of the Interior

I have decided to grow a second body. This may be of some
concern to you

-Lara Glenum*

Twenty years ago, when I was finishing my PhD, many of my peers were “nomadologists”, philosophers (or anthropologists) of the “exteriority of thought”. Following Deleuze and Guattari,** they opposed a particular “image of thought”, the idea that thinking and feeling were things that happened, let’s say, “inside the body.” This image, they declared, was mainly a consequence of capitalist production, a fetishized commodity, an operation of “the State apparatus”, or, if you will, just another government program. I considered myself a fellow traveler. Soused in Wittgenstein, I rejected the notion of a private language, just as Deleuze and Guattari warned against valorizing “the private thinker.” We cannot find ourselves through introspection, I argued, “meaning is use.” Prone to melancholy, moreover, I sometimes resented the solitude of my own inwardness; I wanted to “go outside”. These days, I’m not so sure. With all the excitement out there, I worry about the future of our inner lives.

*The Hounds of No, p. 17.
**See Chapter 12, the “Treatise on Nomadology,” in A Thousand Plateaus, page 376-377.