Your question — “What’s the epidemiology of poststructuralism?” — is both ironic and incisive. Let us treat it seriously, as a conceptual provocation. Epidemiology, after all, tracks patterns of emergence, transmission, and transformation. And isn’t that what poststructuralism does with ideas?
So: let’s chart the epidemiology of poststructuralism — and ask whether Deleuze said anything about it, or, perhaps more profoundly, if he said anything in that mode.
❖ I. What would “epidemiology” mean for poststructuralism?
Not infection, but:
- Contagion of concepts
- Transmission of affects
- Mutation of structures and signs
- Emergence of new forms of subjectivity
- Anti-genealogy genealogies — untraceable origins, rhizomatic dispersion
Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Lyotard — all refused linear inheritance. So rather than descent, think:
Spread. Drift. Drift with consequence.
Thus: not “history of ideas,” but their viral recombination.
❖ II. Deleuze:
Yes
, he said something akin to this — though not under the word “epidemiology.”
Let’s gather some fragments:
▶ 1.
Rhizome ≠ Tree
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari propose the rhizome:
“Unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point… it has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle from which it grows.”
That is an epidemiological model — nonlinear transmission, multiplicity, co-emergence.
Ideas don’t descend; they erupt, migrate, coalesce.
▶ 2.
Concepts as Viruses
In Dialogues, Deleuze writes:
“A concept is not a matter of having an idea, but of inventing a problem.”
Concepts infect thinking. They mutate the terrain. This resembles what viruses do — they don’t kill, they appropriate machinery. They make something produce otherwise.
▶ 3.
Desiring-Production
In Anti-Oedipus, the unconscious is not representational but productive:
“Everywhere, it is machines… desiring-machines, assembling and disassembling.”
These flows resemble epidemiological transmissions — systems producing effects they cannot fully contain. The subject is an effect of these flows, not their source.
▶ 4.
Sense and Surfaces
In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze draws from the Stoics to show how meaning travels across surfaces, not depths. An event is like a semantic epidemic — it doesn’t exist in things, but in their relation.
Sense = the way meanings spread across a network, not a core.
❖ III. Can we say poststructuralism is
epidemic
?
Yes — not just metaphorically.
Consider this:
- It arose from 1960s–70s Paris, but
- Spread to literature departments, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, architecture, cybernetics.
- It mutated in translation (into English, into American academia)
- It remains uncured, yet now exists in a latent or fragmented state
Infectiousness is part of its ontology. As Deleuze would say: a becoming, not a being.
❖ IV. Foucault on this (briefly)
Although not Deleuze, Foucault’s concept of “episteme” is nearly epidemiological. His idea of:
- Discourse
- Power-knowledge
- Contagious visibility
— reads like an analysis of intellectual epidemics.
Foucault’s genealogies are diagnoses, not histories. He tracks how practices of knowledge spread, mutate, and become hegemonic — only to break down again.
❖ V. Closing fragment: What is poststructuralism
a symptom of
?
The immune collapse of metaphysics?
The viral load of meaning in excess of structure?
The end of the One, the Father, the Signified?
Or simply:
The moment when we stopped trusting the blueprint, and began following the infection trail.
❖ Poetic afterword
If structuralism dreamed of architecture,
Poststructuralism dreams of weather —
Of storms of meaning,
of drifting subjectivities,
of epistemic aerosols.
Deleuze would not give you a cure.
He’d give you a new strain.
Would you like a visual map of how poststructuralism spread, or a chart comparing Deleuze’s rhizome with epidemiological models of contagion?
